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Greetings, The Griot yet again bears sad tidings. Below I forward the news of the 'Passing over to the Ancestors' of our great Nobel Laureate, Dederek Walcott. As you know I recently buried my eldest sister, Monica Richards and it was poignant that I heard about Derek's passing on my way to the obsequies of another friend and community champion, Clarence Rawlins. Mr Clarence has he was popularly known was the father of my schoolmates Clinton Haynes and his younger brother Raphael. Clinton and I were founder members of the Corpus Christi/Allardyce Youth Club in the 1960s and so this was a signal for the gathering of a number of the founders of this august and pioneering institution in the Brixton commmunity. We mainly attended Tulse Hill Comprehensive School but the youth club welcomed everyone in the neighbourhood and so those who attended Kennington, Stockwell Manor, Dick Shepard, William Penn and many others all attended our club back in those far off times! Clinton and his family lived at 37 Morval Road, just up the road from me and round the corner in Josephine Avenue there was another cluster of school and clubfriends such as Clovis Reid, Albert and Baron Walker, the Cartys, the Morrisons, the Raymonds, Clinton's best friend Teddy Tatham and many more in Leander Road and those leading to Tulse Hill School on Elm Park, Ostade Road among others. It was heartwarming to see Maureen Kotolawela, nee' O'Connell, in the chapel in Norwod Crematorium, who was also a founder member of the 'Allardyce' and who lived in Dalberg Road in those days, across the road from the Knight family and around the corner from the Bailey family who lived next to the Buchanans on Mervan Road. I quote all these family and street names to remind you of the density and closeness of our community back in the 1950s-70s. Maureen sadly informed me of the passing of another key figure from those days, Father Charles Walker, a senior father in the brotherhood who ran Corpus Christi and who lived in the 'Priest House' opposite the church on Trent Road. He and other members of the Brotherhood such as Father Walsh, who taught RE at Tulse Hill School, supported and worked with us to establish the Allardyce Youth Club and helped us to sustain it over many years, despite the fact that very few of us attended Corpus Christi Church. They helped us to grow up from being adolescents into mature adults, attended our rites of passage and lived a long and productive life. Father Walker was a particularly admirable person as he derived from a very different background to ours, he got on with and was respected by all. He only had one arm but was avery good carpenter who helped us construct the first sound system that we built in Allardyce Hall, along with Father Walsh, to entertain ourselves on 'Disco Nights' and provide our first enterprise opportunity, playing out at each other's birthday parties in our houses, thereafter. We organised Bank Holiday Excursions to places such as Box Hill and Father Walker would be the first to the top, traversing promontories that even those of us who were young and fit couldn't manage. He later wrote in his autobiography that he'd learnt as much from us as we'd learnt from him. Mr Clarence and Father Walker were the unsung heroes of our community and times, who apart from our parents, took time to guide us and show us how to navigate our way through treacherous waters. Unlike Derek Walcott, their work hasn't been recognised or recorded by any international or even local institution but they played as an important role in their own way, as he has. Just as I was completing this piece it was announced on the radio that Chuck Berry had passed over to the Ancestors at 90 years of age. May they all rest in the their divine care. Ajomase' Devon C. Thomas-The Griot ____________________________________________________________ ___________________________________ The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. Goodbye Derek https://allpoetry.com/Love-After-Loveself. CaribDirect.com - The Caribbean at Your Fingertips <http://www.caribdirect.com> ------------------------------ Derek Walcott, Poet and Nobel Laureate, Dies At 87 <http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Caribdirectcom-TheCaribbeanAtYourFingertips/~3/HnTe5EphCc8/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email> Posted: 17 Mar 2017 08:39 AM PDT [image: Derek Walcott master] <http://www.caribdirect.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Derek-Walcott-master1.jpg> *Walcott, who died in Saint Lucia, was famous for his monumental body of work that wove in Caribbean history, particularly his epic Omeros is pictured here in 2012.* The poet and playwright Derek Walcott <https://www.theguardian.com/books/derek-walcott>, who moulded the language and forms of the western canon to his own purposes for more than half a century, has died aged 87. His monumental poetry, including 1973’s verse autobiography, Another Life, and his Caribbean reimagining of The Odyssey, 1990’s Omeros, secured him an international reputation which gained him the Nobel prize in 1992. But this was matched by a theatrical career conducted mostly in the islands of his birth as a director and writer with more than 80 plays to his credit. Born on Saint Lucia in 1930, Walcott’s ancestry wove together the major strands of Caribbean history, an inheritance he described famously in a poem from 1980’s The Star-Apple Kingdom as having “Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I’m nobody, or I’m a / nation”. Both of his grandmothers were said to have been descended from slaves, but his father, who died when Walcott was only a year old, was a painter, and his mother the headmistress of a methodist school – enough to ensure that Walcott received what he called in the same poem a “sound colonial education”. He published his first collection of poems – funded by his mother – at the age of 19. A year later, in 1950, he staged his first play and went to study English literature, French and Latin at the newly established University College of the West Indies in Jamaica. After graduating in 1953 he moved to Trinidad, an island recently vacated by VS Naipaul, a contemporary of Walcott’s whose career advanced in eerie synchronicity – from early dreams of a life in literature to Nobel success. Naipaul was first to find a London publisher, Walcott first to find favour with the Swedish Academy – but their contrasting approach to the legacy of empire soured their early friendship <https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/jun/05/wallcottofsilence>, igniting a feud which reached its apogee when Walcott read out an attack in verse at the 2008 Calabash festival in Jamaica <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/01/poetry.news>: “I have been bitten, I must avoid infection / Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.” Walcott continued his project to make the western canon his own, summoning up the spirits of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Yeats and Eliot in a series of collections which explored his position “between the Greek and African pantheon”. His decision to write mostly in standard English brought attacks from the Black Power movement in the 1970s, which Walcott answered in the voice of a mulatto sea-dog in The Star-Apple Kingdom: “I have no nation now but the imagination./ After the white man, the niggers didn’t want me/ when the power swing to their side./ The first chain my hands and apologize, ‘History’ / the next said I wasn’t black enough for their pride.” His 1990 epic, Omeros, tackled the ghost of Homer head on, relocating Achilles, Helen and Philoctetes among the island fishermen of the West Indies. [image: derek] <http://www.caribdirect.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/derek.jpg> *Derek Walcott receiving the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature from King Carl Gustav of Sweden.* His plays explored the problems of Caribbean identity against the backdrop of racial and political strife. In 1977’s Remembrance, a schoolmaster finds himself split between an older generation committed to tradition and a younger one playing at revolution. Pantomime, first performed in 1978, turns the colonial order on its head, casting a black servant as explorer and his white employer as native when the story of Robinson Crusoe is staged within the play. A 1981 MacArthur “genius” grant cemented Walcott’s links with the US, first forged during a Rockefeller fellowship begun in 1957. Teaching positions at Boston, Columbia, Rutgers and Yale followed. Walcott also won the TS Eliot prize in 2011 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/24/ts-eliot-prize-derek-walcott>, with his collection White Egrets. In 2012, he told the Guardian <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/03/derek-walcott-interview> that he felt that he was still defined as a black writer in the US and the UK. “It’s a little ridiculous. The division of black theatre and white theatre still goes on, and I don’t wish to be a part of any one of those definitions. I’m a Caribbean writer.” Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/17/nobel- laureate-poet-and-playwright-derek-walcott-dead-aged-87 We hope you enjoyed this post - Derek Walcott, Poet and Nobel Laureate, Dies At 87 <http://www.caribdirect.com/derek-walcott-poet-nobel-laureate-dies-87/> and continue to follow CaribDirect.com <http://www.caribdirect.com>. <http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Caribdirectcom-TheCaribbeanAtYourFingertips?a=HnTe5EphCc8:UGX7yhZTOjE:yIl2AUoC8zA> <http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Caribdirectcom-TheCaribbeanAtYourFingertips?a=HnTe5EphCc8:UGX7yhZTOjE:qj6IDK7rITs> <http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Caribdirectcom-TheCaribbeanAtYourFingertips?a=HnTe5EphCc8:UGX7yhZTOjE:gIN9vFwOqvQ> You are subscribed to email updates from CaribDirect.com <http://www.caribdirect.com>. 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