The Validity of Hybridity in Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile

With A Branch of the Blue Nile (1983) Derek Walcott makes a strong statement for the validity of a hybrid West Indian culture. He portrays the relation between European, specifically English, as well as American and African culture as one that should not be marked by a hierarchy, placing the central culture and languages at the top and African ormixed cultures/languages at the bottom. Walcott’s strategy here is to show that the so–calledstandards, Shakespeare’s ‘classical’ plays and their language are already of a hybrid nature, and any attempt to characterise them as homogenous entities and preserve them as such mayultimately result in their inertness. What threatens a civilisation or culture, according to Walcott, is not some form of hybridity, but rather the closing off or preservation of artistic forms from other foreign influences because it makes these artistic forms incapable ofinteracting with the surrounding cultural environment. Through the act of staging his creolised Antony and Cleopatra, Walcott shows that even if a cultural form, an artisticexpression, was once shaped through its place of origin, it is legitimate to transport it to another culture and let it be influenced by this culture (in this case through its language) as it is the only way through which it will stay alive and have meaning. The purpose of this articleis to provide the readers with a quest for the formation of Caribbean identities, beyond dualism, through the vernacular.

کلیدواژه ها:

Caribbean Identities ، Creolisation ، Hybridity ، Trinidad ، Vernacular