{"id":39039,"date":"2014-12-21T22:44:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-21T22:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=39039"},"modified":"2014-12-24T20:03:36","modified_gmt":"2014-12-24T20:03:36","slug":"vincent-van-gogh-and-barack-obama-in-a-poem-by-derek-walcott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=39039","title":{"rendered":"Vincent van Gogh and Barack Obama in a poem by Derek Walcott"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vincent van Gogh and Barack Obama in a poem by Derek Walcott<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Literature & Aesthetics<\/a>
\nVolume 20, Number 2<\/a> (December 2010)
\npages 181-192<\/p>\n

Thijs Weststeijn<\/strong><\/a>
\nDepartment of Art, Religion, and Cultural Sciences
\nUniversity of Amsterdam<\/em><\/p>\n

Remember Vincent, saint
\nof all sunstroke…!
\nThe sun explodes into irises,
\nthe shadows are crossing like crows,
\nthey settle, clawing the hair,
\nyellow is screaming.
\nDear Theo, I shall go mad.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nJean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet – The Gleaners (1857)<\/em><\/a><\/small><\/p>\n

Speaking here is a young Antillean artist, in a poem by Derek Walcott<\/a> (1930),\u00a0a writer from the island of Saint Lucia<\/a>. The wish to identify with Van Gogh<\/a> is\u00a0a theme from Walcott\u2019s own past: originally he wanted to be a painter.\u00a0Together with a friend he decided to depict every corner of their windswept\u00a0island. This ambition explains why Walcott\u2019s vision of poetry is so often\u00a0characterized as \u201cpainterly.\u201d\u00a0He calls his writings \u201cfrescoes of the New\u00a0World,\u201d\u00a0and declares: \u201cI still smell linseed oil in the wild views \/ Of villages\u00a0and the tang of turpentine\u2026 Salt wind encouraged us, and the surf\u2019s white\u00a0noise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walcott\u2019s artistic role models were the nineteenth-century masters.\u00a0Recently he dedicated an epic poem, Tiepolo\u2019s Hound<\/em><\/a> (2000), to the\u00a0impressionist Camille Pissarro<\/a>. The hybrid origins of Pissarro, born in the\u00a0Danish<\/a> colony on the Leeward Island<\/a> of Saint Thomas<\/a>, son of a mother from\u00a0the Dominican Republic<\/a> and a Portuguese<\/a>-Jewish father, meant he connected\u00a0well with Walcott\u2019s work. Here the Antillean<\/a> melting pot of different cultures\u00a0is an important theme. Before this, Gauguin<\/a> had already been one of the poet\u2019s\u00a0heroes: his journey to Martinique supposedly turned him into a \u201cCreole\u00a0painter.\u201d Moreover, Walcott was strongly attracted to social themes. He\u00a0describes the continued impression made by a reproduction of Millet\u2019s<\/a> The\u00a0Gleaners<\/em><\/a> in his childhood home.<\/p>\n

So it should come as no surprise that, in his younger years in particular,\u00a0Walcott was inspired by Vincent van Gogh. The Dutch master played a role in Walcott\u2019s descriptions of sun-drenched landscapes: he sought after a creative\u00a0intoxication \u201cas Van Gogh\u2019s shadow rippling on a cornfield.\u201d\u00a0In this way Walcott\u2019s poetry opens an Antillean perspective on the shadow of Van Gogh\u00a0and how it shifts over issues of birth ground and origins.<\/p>\n

Although Walcott\u2019s more recent poems have paid less attention to Van\u00a0Gogh, a political revolution returned him to the love of his younger years: the\u00a0election of Barack Obama<\/a> as president of the United States. This event\u00a0confronted him once more with themes such as racial and national identity\u00a0which had already played a major role in his early work. Walcott wrote some\u00a0lines in response to the election results. Here, he uses Van Gogh\u2019s imagery to\u00a0give poetic form to the history and future expectations of black people in the\u00a0New World.<\/p>\n

Walcott\u2019s poem, which features both Van Gogh and Obama, combines\u00a0artistic imagination with historical and social themes and political reality. This\u00a0means it can be interpreted in a number of ways. The following interpretation\u00a0takes a specific viewpoint, namely that from the person the poem is dedicated\u00a0to: the 44th American president. After all, Obama himself has written\u00a0extensively about the themes that determined the course of his life. The\u00a0president and the poet have each at some time labeled themselves as\u00a0\u201cmongrel,\u201d referring to their mixed European-African origins.\u00a0As it will\u00a0become clear, they agree on yet more things, such as their idea that poetical\u00a0imagery can improve the world.<\/p>\n

Shortly after the elections in November 2008, Obama was photographed\u00a0carrying a book under his arm: Walcott\u2019s collected works<\/a>. What was the\u00a0significance of this photograph?…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vincent van Gogh and Barack Obama in a poem by Derek Walcott Literature & Aesthetics Volume 20, Number 2 (December 2010) pages 181-192 Thijs Weststeijn Department of Art, Religion, and Cultural Sciences University of Amsterdam Remember Vincent, saint of all sunstroke…! The sun explodes into irises, the shadows are crossing like crows, they settle, clawing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,1196,8],"tags":[3445,18843,18842,18841],"class_list":["post-39039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","tag-derek-walcott","tag-literature-aesthetics","tag-thijs-weststeijn","tag-vincent-van-gogh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39039\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}