‘Behind the Church Door Stands the Devil’
Derek Walcott, the Caribbean Church, and the Island of Saint Lucia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v7i3.315Keywords:
Derek Walcott, Saint Lucia, Church, Methodism, Obeah, sacred spaceAbstract
Steadfastly aware of a complex history of colonization and indoctrination, Nobel Prize winning poet Derek Walcott had an uneasy relationship with the majority Catholic Church in Saint Lucia for much of his life and was especially wary of any moves to delineate between the sacred site of the church and the ‘profane’ realm of the Caribbean natural world. A turning point in this was the creation of a fresco at the Holy Family RC Church in Jacmel, Saint Lucia, which, through its depiction of the natural world, helped Walcott to reconcile and heal some of his differences with Europeanized Catholic ideologies through the removal of the church’s monopoly over sacred space. Finally in Omeros (1990), Walcott continued his discourse on the tensions between churches and their surrounding landscapes and, without fully resolving these tensions, reaf?rmed the natural world as the most appropriate sacred space in the Caribbean.
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Carchidi, Victoria. 2001. ‘ “Heaven Is a Green Place”: Varieties of Spiritual Landscapes in Caribbean Literature’, in Jamie S. Scott and Paul Simpson-Housley (eds.), Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures (Amsterdam: Rodopi): 179-98.
Chidester, David, and Edward T. Linenthal. 1995. American Sacred Space (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Denecke, Dietrich. 1992. ‘Ideology in the Planned Order upon the Land: The Example of Germany’, in Alan R.H. Baker and Gideon Giger (eds.), Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 303-29.
Eliade, Mircea. 1959. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (trans. Willard Trask; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).
Fernández Olmos, Margarite, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. 2011. Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo (New York: New York University Press).
Glazier, Stephen D. (ed.). 2001. Encyclopedia of African and African-American Religions (London: Routledge).
Hamner, Robert D. 1997. Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s Omeros (Columbia: University of Missouri Press).
Jáuregui, Carlos. 2009. ‘Cannibalism, the Eucharist, and Crillo Subjects’, in Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti (eds.), Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press): 61-100.
King, Bruce. 2000. Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Nelson, Louis P. (ed.). 2006. American Sanctuary: Understanding Sacred Spaces (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Newton, Richard. 2000. ‘Interview with Dunstan St Omer, “St Lucia: Michelangelo of the Caribbean”’, The Telegraph, 12 February. Online: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/centralamericaandcaribbean/saintlucia/722278/St-Lucia-Michelangelo-of-the-Caribbean.html.
Novak, Barbara. 1980. Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press).
Simpson, George E. 1978. Black Religions in the New World (New York: Columbia University Press).
Smith, Ryan K. 2006. Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti-Catholicism and American Church Designs in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).
St-Hilaire, Aonghas. 2011. Kwéyòl in Postcolonial Saint Lucia: Globalization, Language Planning, and National Development (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins).
Thieme, John. 1999. Derek Walcott (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press).
Walcott, Derek. 1962. In A Green Night (London: Jonathan Cape).
———. 1976. Sea Grapes (London: Jonathan Cape).
———. 1987. Collected Poems (London and New York: Faber & Faber).
———. 1990. Omeros (London and New York: Faber & Faber).
———. 1999. What The Twilight Says: Essays (London and New York: Faber & Faber).
———. [1949] 2002. ‘Epitaph for the Young: A Poem in 12 Cantos’, in Maria Cristina Fumagalli (ed.), Agenda 39.1-3: 3-50.
Published
2013-11-01
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Jefferson, B. T. (2013). ‘Behind the Church Door Stands the Devil’: Derek Walcott, the Caribbean Church, and the Island of Saint Lucia. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 7(3), 315-333. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v7i3.315
