As I read about the poet, Derek Walcott, I came to know that he is an African Poet. This information helped me to make some assumption about writing this poem and I read and understood in my way.
The very first stanza mainly talks about the problems that arose after the Africa was colonized by British. He starts the poem with the scenario how the disaster came like hurricane and destroyed everything as quick as possible. People were being killed and their dead bodies were scattered like cattle on the beautiful land of Africa. Also, he adds that the colonel of carrion, the worm, which symbolises the British, had no sympathy towards the dead people. Therefore, people were victimized by the colonizer and even killed when their purpose were not fulfilled.
Again in the same stanza, he talks about the nature of the colonizer and their traits. As line says, “Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break, In a white dust of ibises whose cries”, it means the British were the materials like who were composed out of complex machine and they possessed beast like quality.
From the second stanza, he talks more about the Diaspora sentiment, which means love for the nation and nationality. He tried to clarify that he only wanted to be an African but he loved the English tongue as well which he couldn’t disseminate from him. Then, he presented the British as a superman, most powerful country of that time and the African as a gorilla who is one of the most powerful animals, and even though, the African tried to fight with the British, their practice for their own existence went to vain.
Later on, he tells that things had been changed. The cultural transmission couldn’t be avoided. Even in him, there is an amalgamation of blood and culture which couldn’t be discarded. The lines, “I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?”, also tells he could leave neither his African nationality nor English tongue.
In the nutshell, the poet is in search of existence which I have described as Diaspora sentiment, and he also talks about the nature of the British people and how they transformed the British culture to those Africans. In a sentence, I say that the poet is in dilemma whether to accept him as the African or the transmission of British.
iamaadesh 