All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every

“All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.” Thus spoke Derek Walcott, the poet of the Caribbean, the bard of scattered islands and shattered histories. In these words, he reveals a truth both painful and transcendent — that identity, when born from the wreckage of exile and colonization, must be built anew through memory and imagination. He speaks not only for the Antilles, but for all peoples whose past has been fractured by conquest, whose gods have been silenced, whose languages have been torn apart — and yet who rise, again and again, to rebuild meaning from ruin.

To understand Walcott’s words is to understand the soul of the Caribbean, a land of fragmentation and rebirth. The Antilles — those scattered jewels of sea and sun — were once broken by the forces of empire. African, European, and indigenous blood mingled there, not in harmony, but in violence and survival. The memory of the people was severed: ancestral gods forgotten, mother tongues suppressed, lineages lost to the tides of slavery and the arrogance of conquest. What remains, as Walcott says, is a fog — an amnesia that blurs the past. And yet, within that fog gleams the light of sunlight and rainbows, symbols of renewal, reconciliation, and hope. Out of this amnesia arises imagination, the only tool left to restore what history has taken.

In this vision, imagination becomes not mere fancy, but the instrument of resurrection. The Antillean imagination, as Walcott calls it, labors to “rebuild its gods from bamboo frames.” These gods are not of marble or gold; they are humble, woven from the materials of the earth — bamboo, words, and memory. They represent the effort of a people to make the divine their own again, not by reclaiming the past exactly as it was, but by reimagining it in the present. Thus, through language — “phrase by phrase,” as Walcott says — the poet, the storyteller, and the artist become architects of spiritual survival. They rebuild not only their gods, but their selves.

Walcott himself was the living embodiment of this labor. Born in Saint Lucia, descended from both African slaves and European colonizers, he carried within his blood the contradiction of his homeland. His poetry — luminous, rhythmic, and fierce — sought to weave these contradictions into harmony. In works such as Omeros, he reimagined Homeric epic within the Caribbean world, giving the fishermen and villagers of his islands the dignity of ancient heroes. In doing so, he reclaimed the grandeur of the classical world for a people once denied it. He turned memory into song, amnesia into art, and imagination into the bridge between what was lost and what could yet be found.

Consider, too, the way memory works in all human history. After the fall of Troy, it was not soldiers or kings who preserved the story — it was Homer, the poet. After the ruins of Jerusalem, it was the prophets who gave voice to a displaced people’s faith. After the tragedy of slavery, it was the singers of the spirituals, the tellers of folktales, who kept the ember of identity alive. So it is in the Antilles: the effort of memory is not only to remember what was, but to create what should have been. The imagination, in this sense, becomes sacred labor — a form of cultural and spiritual redemption.

Walcott’s “pieces of sunlight through the fog” are the images of this redemption. Each story told, each poem written, each rhythm of calypso sung beneath the Caribbean sun — all are acts of restoration. They pierce the fog of forgetfulness with color and light. The rainbows, or “arcs-en-ciel,” he mentions, symbolize the reconciliation of opposites — black and white, African and European, old and new. Just as the rainbow binds heaven and earth, so does the Antillean imagination bind the fragments of history into a whole that is both wounded and beautiful.

And what lesson does this offer us, who live far from those islands yet carry our own fractures of heart and history? It is this: when the past is broken, do not despair. When memory is lost, imagination must rebuild. Every life, like every island, is an effort of memory — a struggle to piece together who we are from what remains. We must all, in our own ways, rebuild our gods from bamboo, our faith from fragments, our identity from ashes. This is the work of being human — the sacred labour of imagination, which transforms pain into meaning and forgetfulness into song.

So remember the wisdom of Derek Walcott: even amidst amnesia and fog, the spirit endures. The sunlight still breaks through, and the rainbows still appear. The act of remembering is not to restore the past exactly as it was, but to create anew — to weave from brokenness a vision of wholeness. Let each of us, then, take up that labor: to rebuild our gods, our stories, our truths, phrase by phrase — until even the smallest island of memory shines again with the full radiance of the human soul.