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David Dabydeen's 1994 poem "Turner," engages with a Caribbean precursor, Derek Walcott's lengthy 1990 poem Omeros. In its wide-ranging depiction of the inhabitants of a St. Lucian fishing community, Omeros creates a sense of Caribbean cultural identity that is fluid and hybrid, grounded not in history but in the "amnesiac Atlantic" (61), whose transformation of the slave bodies drowned in it metaphorically frees a space for "the new naming of things" (Walcott, "Muse" 428). In "Turner," Dabydeen likewise depicts a seascape as a site for identity formation. Yet "Turner" complicates Walcott's positive figuration of the sea by focusing more intently on the formation of individual subjectivity than on the construction of a shared cultural consciousness. In so doing, Dabydeen's much darker poem both illuminates the creative power of Walcott's vision and exposes it to questions about the fragmentation of all subjects.
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This page is a summary of: "I Have Become the Sea's Craft": Authorial Subjectivity in Derek Walcott's Omeros and David Dabydeen's "Turner", Contemporary Literature, January 2011, University of Wisconsin Press,
DOI: 10.1353/cli.2011.0036.
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