“Joining by Division”. A Portrait of Antillean Art in Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound

Abstract

A fresco starring famous painters’ lives and the journeys they undertake to follow their call, Derek Walcott’s partly autobiographical narrative poem Tiepolo’s Hound depicts the unpredictable migratory nature of art fulfilling its mission across distance, separation, and loss, while making us wonder about the place of home, origins, and tradition.
Mainly recounting the artistic growth of Caribbean-born artists Camille Pissarro and Derek Walcott, the poem is also an overall reflection on the nature and dynamics of Antillean culture and its aesthetic expression. We see its perspective grow in lines that recurrently refer to the poem-fresco in progress, springing from the submerged memory of ancestral exiles, taking shape from uncertain distant beginnings, and fulfilling itself through a radiating openness to the multifarious and contradictory turns composing its cultural spectrum, not least of all its own European legacy. Within this Creole continuum, its prismatic perspective, its iridescent language, the poem responds to a central mythical question: what happens if in a place disfigured by centuries of colonial history, at the turning-point when its culture is rebuilding itself anew, right then, young Camille Pissarro cannot see why he should stay, the opportunity offered by the still unpainted landscapes and everyday life, and decides to leave and transplant his talent in Europe?
Though unique and gigantic, Pissarro’s life-story and art loom large in the poem exemplifying a trend, a pattern, of Caribbean culture, in which departing and loss, are not antithetical to being rooted, to staying, as if the transcontinental voyage were a remembrance of the diasporic origins of this civilization. The poem brings home Pissarro’s Caribbean vision to his own paintings (his St. Thomas in the colours of French landscapes, in the chatter of his poplars, the glaring simplicity), a spectacular display of imaginative memory at work, principal engine of Antillean art.