For so long, the world has viewed West Indian culture as semiliterate and backward, which it is not. In my work, I have tried to give that world an exposure so the world can better understand it.
Our artists and writers should not be forced like soldiers to die on foreign soil or to return wounded and crawl famously into a hole.
The poet complains or points out the discontent that lies at the heart of man, the individual man, and how can that be redeemed?
My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act.
My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race.
I don’t feel I’ve arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.
My body’s urge is to be in a pair of shorts, working and going down to the beach.
I’m from the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean in the Lesser Antilles, the lower part of the archipelago, which is a bilingual island – French, Creole, and English – but my education is in English.
My relationship to Britain is of no consequence.
The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
I go back to St. Lucia, and the exhilaration I feel is not simply the exhilaration of homecoming and of nostalgia. It is almost an irritation of feeling: ‘Well, you never got it right. Now you have another chance. Maybe you can try and look harder.’
I was writing from a very, very early age. My father used to write. He died early, and my mother was a schoolteacher, so my academic background from childhood is a strong one, a good one.
The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.
I don’t think there is any such thing as a black writer or a white writer. Ultimately, there is someone whom one reads.
I write plays and poetry at the same time, and I’m always refining, but I’m not obsessive about it. It’s what I like to do, what I’ve always wanted to do.
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
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