The Ties Between Faith and Distorted History

Derek Walcott’s poem, “The Sea is History”, questions and challenges our understanding of human history. Walcott often alludes to the slave trade and biblical subjects such as the city of Gomorrah, while comparing the slave trade to the biblical books of the Old and New Testaments. In-depth, Walcott uses these texts to imply that the slave trade has ‘drowned’ the cultures and traditions of Caribbean slaves. Specifically, Walcott writes the following:

“Exodus. / Bone soldered by coral to bone, / mosaics / mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow, // that was the Ark of the Covenant.” (Lines 12-16).

Exodus is a metaphor for the expulsion of slaves when they were boarded onto ships by Western colonists. This is followed by the ‘soldering of bones onto coral’, symbolizing the death of unnamed slaves on these ships, until the poem refers to “the Ark of the Covenant”. The covenant in the poem signifies importance as it contained the stone tablets inscribing the Ten Commandments, which is essential to Christianity. As such, Walcott uses the covenant to symbolize the importance of the dead, unnamed slaves to those that survived, thus something important was lost to nothingness. In other words, these deaths were not given recognition nor validated in history but generalized to give more light to the actions of Western colonists, thus distorting our perception of historical events to be unknowingly biased.

WORKS CITED

• Walcott, Derek. “The Sea Is History.” Selected Poems, edited by Edward Baugh, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2003, pp. 127-9.