Asian Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Studies

This paper examines Derek Walcott’s historical consciousness as articulated in selected poems from In a Green Night, The Castaway and Other Poems, The Star-Apple Kingdom, and Omeros. Caribbean literature has been profoundly shaped by the region’s traumatic history of slavery, colonialism, racial hybridity, and cultural fragmentation. Within this historical matrix, Walcott emerges as a poet deeply engaged with questions of origin, memory, exile, and identity. Drawing on library-based research and established critical scholarship, this study interrogates Walcott’s complex negotiation of his dual heritage—African and European—and his poetic response to the burdens of historical inheritance. The paper argues that Walcott neither denies history nor remains imprisoned by it. Rather, he proposes a creative reconciliation rooted in what he terms the “Adamic” potential of the New World. Through poems such as “A Far Cry from Africa,” “The Sea is History,” and Omeros, Walcott dramatizes the tension between ancestral memory and historical amnesia, ultimately advocating cultural renewal over racial fixation. His poetry resists both separatist racial politics and colonial mimicry, envisioning instead a unified Caribbean identity forged from shared trauma and imaginative reconstruction. The study concludes that Walcott’s historical vision is fundamentally humanist: he transforms historical fragmentation into poetic synthesis. By reconciling Africa and Europe within the Caribbean landscape, Walcott redefines history not as a chain of wounds but as a foundation for creative rebirth. His work thus affirms the Caribbean as a site of origin rather than exile and positions imagination as the primary instrument of cultural self-realization.