Repossessing Home

A Postcolonial Study of The Schooner Flight by Derek Walcott

Abstract

This study examines the African Diaspora as lived and
experienced in the West Indies in Derek Walcott’s poem The Schooner
Flight. This research paper investigates the protagonist’s feelings of
exile within home by comparing it with African nationhood as expressed
in African Literature in the theoretical framework of postcolonialism.
The problems regarding home and belonging faced by the generations of
the Africans in the Caribbean resulting in an attitude of escape and
rejection, disillusionment and defiance, frustration and hopelessness,
also of revisions and revivals as portrayed in their literature have been
scrutinized. The causes of the Afro- Caribbeans’ sense of self- alienation,
self- doubt and an unavoidable state of self- exile in the poem under
discussion have been analyzed. This paper focuses on the possibilities of
acceptance, a coming to terms with, reconciliation and a repossession of
their life and rightful place in the world. The paper concludes by
highlighting the persona’s achievement (in Walcott’s poem) of a
profound sense of home and belonging not just in the Caribbean but in
the vast universe mainly through poetic language and a creative
understanding of his sufferings