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Black history month: author spotlights Jessica Donaldson and Ellen Olley discuss the impact of Roxane Gay and Derek Walcott
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here is a wonderful (and supremely unflattering!) photo of me from my holiday this year; wrapped in my towel, I am lying in a position similar to a corpse on Brighton Beach. Beside me? Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay. The essay collection had accompanied me over the entirety of the 5 day trip — on the train, on the bus and now on the beach. I had even cracked it open whilst watching England’s defeat at the Euros… this book had been through a lot. I had come across Gay many times before, online or in an article, usually receiving copious amounts of praise and attention. Always meaning to pick up one of her works, it wasn’t until this summer that I finally settled in to read ‘Bad Feminist’. ‘Time’ had called the novel ‘a manual on how to be human’. Gay is “the gift that keeps on giving”. With such praise in mind and little idea of what the novel was actually about, I began it with high expectations. The ability to make the mundane exciting is, for me, part of what makes Gay so special as an essayist. She doesn’t need to discuss ‘big’ or ‘powerful’ topics to draw you in. On the contrary, she shines on a smaller level. A manifesto on How to Be Friends with Another Woman is another one of my favourite essays and provides feminist advice on a human level. Telling us to “abandon the cultur-
W of us struggle to shake off. Gay takes the seemingly mundane and gives it a voice, and manages to stand out as a prominent essayist and voice in feminist literature, despite being a self-confessed ‘bad feminist’. I couldn’t help but wonder, prior to reading the text, why this was. Yet, having reached the final page, I got it. For one, throughout all of her discussions, she never preaches or condescends. Even when she does discuss ‘big’ topics, such as racism in the essay The Last Day of a Young Black Man, she doesn’t utilise academic or complex language. Instead, it is understandable, empathetic, and emotional. Secondly, she also achieves a level of relatability that feminists text often fail to reach. She is honest about her past experiences, no matter how painful. She does not sanitise her experiences, no matter how messy. In not trying to be relatable, Gay
Her feminism is messy and realistic al myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive”, Gay speaks to stereotypes and judgement that even the best
becomes even more so. Gay says herself that she embraces being a so-called “bad feminist” because she isn’t trying to be an example.
hen one reads the poetry of Derek Walcott, one cannot help but be transported. Like many other great artists before him, Walcott’s poetic process was instinctive. A segment would come to him, a couple of lines perhaps, and the journey would begin of the authentic construction of verse around this vignette. Much of his poetry captures this feeling of journey and development and it is this balance of the dynamic and the delicate which underlies the mastery of his work. His talent is best demonstrated in Omeros, the epic which would seal his Nobel Prize, awarded in 1992. Walcott takes the European Homeric epic form but sets it amongst the Caribbean islands of his youth. He takes a complex cast of characters and uses their individual journeys, both literal and emotional, to elegantly tease out the themes which haunt all of his poetry, conceptions of home, History, and the self, in a post-colonial world, as well as confronting his own poetic journey. His themes are often placed in conflict in Walcott’s dramatic early work. He explores the conflict between “Africa and the English tongue I love” in The Schooner Flight - his African heritage and the European oeuvre he so admires. He was heavily influenced by Milton, Shakespeare and Yeats, amongst others. However, he knows many of the European poets were “ancestral murderers” too (Ruins of a Great House). Much of his work references this conflict in the oblique. It was this treatment of heritage which brought significant criticism against Walcott in the middle of his career. This was the
Image credit (from left): Roxane Gay, Bert Nienhuis via Wikimedia Commons
time of Black Power, and many of Walcott’s contemporaries sought to create a stark divide between the colonial and post-colonial world, rejecting European influence. Walcott’s response to this, as he explored in The Schooner Flight, was that to reject the colonial aspects of Caribbean history was tantamount to the rejection of African history by the colonists: “The first chain my hands and apologize, “History”; / the next said I wasn’t black enough for their pride.” He may have been “absolutely a Caribbean writer”, as he once said, but he was one that stood noticeably apart from his contemporaries.
His poetry captures a journey...The balance of the dynamic and the delicate underlies the mastery of his work Walcott’s legacy is yet to be decided. His memory is coloured by unorthodox views and misconduct allegations. However, it is clear that his poetry will live on as an example of his prodigal talent in capturing the effervescence of his Antillean home.
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