Repeating Islands

The fishing village of Gros Islet-the principal setting for Derek Walcott’s Omeros-is sandwiched between the touristy excesses of the resort town of Rodney Bay to the south and three all-inclusive resorts to the north, built along the man-made causeway joining the main island of St. Lucia to the tiny Pigeon Island and its historic fort. It is a village that seems serenely frozen in time. Tied to its small cement jetty are small, brightly-colored fishing boats. Small wood houses, painted in vivid primary hues, line its streets. Stray dogs chase chickens or bark noisily at anyone going by. A small shack by the water makes delicious patties filled with dal (lentils and potatoes in curry sauce). Children ride bicycles or play catch while adults sit at bars and rum shops enjoying a Piton beer after work. Any of these bars could be Ma Kilman’s bar. Any of the passenger vans bringing workers from their jobs in Castries could be Hector’s. Any of the young fishermen coming in in the evening with his small catch could be Achille. Any old fisherman playing dominoes could be Philotecte. Anyone sauntering down Dauphin Street towards the water could be Seven Seas. In Gros Islet you can savor the cacophonous rhythms of traditional St. Lucian life. Ska, reggae, mock-quarrells in rapid Creole, a local man who uses a conch shell in lieu of a car horn.

Walcott not only wrote about Gros Islet in Omeros. He has also made the village the subject of many of his watercolors-some of them (like the two included here) used to illustrate his meditation on another Caribbean-born painter, Camille Pissarro, in Tiepolo’s Hound. The paintings capture the cultural richness of the village’s everydayness…like luminous snapshots of daily routines. Village life seems particularly suited to the quickness of watercolor as a medium.

Yet Gros Islet feels intensely vulnerable in its village tranquility. It sits on a beautiful beach within view of Pigeon Island-on prime territory for tourist development. Sitting on a bench facing the sea while a re-mix of Bob Marley songs comes out of the Seaview Bar, one wonders whether the village can withstand the pressures (and money offers) of development for long.

How long, one wonders, before it is absorbed by Rodney Bay or razed to build another resort? There used to be a mile of open beach between Gros Islet and the Sandals Resort on the causeway leading to Pigeon Island. Since our group visited two years ago, two new resorts have sprung up, reducing the buffer between the village and the tourists to the north to about 200 yards of open beach. One of the new resorts built a marina that cuts through the beach between the village and Pigeon Island. When some of us attempted the familiar walk between Pigeon Island and Gros Islet we found our walk interrupted by this new marina at a new hotel. The hotel now keeps a boatman at the spot to helpfully transfer walkers across the new canal in a new shiny boat. But for how long? 

In his Nobel Prize address, Walcott wrote of his belief in the sacredness bestowed on places by the power vested upon them by being the settings of classic texts of Caribbean literature. He wrote of the possibility of those places made significant by our literatures turning into the loci of Caribbean nationhood and identity:

“Our cities . . . dictate their own proportions, their own definitions in particular places and in a prose equal to that of their detractors, so that now it is not just  St. James but the streets and yards that Naipaul commemorates, its lanes as short and brilliant as his sentences; not just the noise and jostle of Tunapuna but the origins of C.L.R. James’s Beyond the Boundary, not just Felicity Village on the Caroni plain, but Selvon Country, and that is the way it goes up the islands now; the old Dominica of Jean Rhys still very much the way she wrote of it; and the Martinique of early Césaire; Perse’s Guadeloupe, even without the pith helmets and the mules . . . This is not a belligerent boast but a simple celebration of inevitability . . . .”

Gros Islet is such a space. It is-in and of itself-a beautiful place. Seen through the prism of Walcott’s poems and watercolors, it becomes a magical place. Walcott country. Long may it be preserved.