The Almond Trees

W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and fellow Nobelists Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky, whose influence Derek Walcott often acknowledged, counseled their generation of post-war poets not to diminish the reach of poetry by confining it to tacky public confessions of the joys, agonies, and ironies of a poet’s private life. The public function of a poet, these poets argued, was not to be a citizen of one but rather the voice of many.

Everything about “The Almond Trees” sets up the all-too-familiar confessional poem, an autobiographical reminiscence on Walcott’s childhood. After all, Choc Bay, a scant few miles from where Walcott grew up, was an integral plot-point in his childhood, growing up in poverty with a heroic single mother, a schoolteacher to the poorest residents of Saint Lucia, and a twin brother and a younger sister—a wealth of experiences that could easily be translated by the alchemy of a poet into a confessional poem.

But Walcott upcycles the stuff of his personal experience to create a statement not about his own identity but rather to explore the implications of Caribbean identity. In juxtaposing the sunbathers and the ancient sea-almond trees thriving along the edges of the beach, Walcott investigates how Caribbean identity, after centuries of occupation by a variety of predatory European countries, must confront the reality of that history, make its peace with the impact of their perception of themselves, and ultimately use that sense of a hybrid cultural identity as the sole way to move forward.

This is a poem, then, about the coming of age not of the poet but rather of the West Indies themselves (Saint Lucia, Walcott’s home, only achieved its complete independence from the United Kingdom in 1979). How does a culture, an entire people, handle emerging from a long history of brutal occupation that had centuries ago rendered West Indian identity seemingly irrelevant?

Walcott refuses to give in to the easy strategies of adjustment: on the one hand, anger and bitterness, railing against the centuries of oppression, the confiscation of property, the introduction of slavery into the West Indian world, the ruthless exploitation of the islands’ abundant resources, and the imposition of squalor and humiliation on the proud indigenous peoples to the point that their culture, their religion, their history, their sense of community had been all but lost; and on the other hand happy assimilation, acknowledging that the considerable European presence brought the Caribbean into the modern era, gifted the islands with efficient agriculture and mining industries, modern systems of transportation and communication, an organized network of public schools, and the wealth that European interest brought with it. Nor can the newly independent communities of the West Indies simply pretend that colonization never happened, that four centuries of cultural interplay never occurred, and simply start being Caribbean again as if that were as simple as donning native clothes, playing native music, and cooking native cuisine. After four centuries, the anything-but-rhetorical question hangs about Walcott’s poem: what does it mean to be a West Indian?

Walcott juxtaposes the weathered almond trees, surviving centuries of the Caribbean’s difficult climate, and the sunburned bathers to suggest that neither anger nor gratitude nor fantasy expresses an authentic avenue for Caribbean postcolonial identity. Only in the delicate fusion of the two influences—European and Caribbean—can the West Indies establish a reliable and authentic cultural identity. It is time for the Caribbean culture to embrace its past, both its own past and its past as part of Europe’s vanished colonial empire.

The sea-almond trees show the effects of history; they are indigenous to the Caribbean and, given that they grow only in the tropics, were one of the major natural resources exploited by centuries of European entrepreneurs. Despite the irony that as the poet surveys the beach nothing appears to hint at the history of islands (the speaker repeats the phrase “no visible history), the beach tableau is frighted with the implications of Caribbean history. The stand of trees has weathered the most difficult and brutal conditions but has survived, the canopy of rich, “twisted” (Line 7), copper-splashed foliage testifying to their irrepressible spirit and their indominable will to survive. The trees represent the native people themselves: tested, they endure; tasked by brutal conditions, they thrive, marked and scarred, of course, (the poet cannot wish away the impact of centuries of harsh conditions) but living, thriving, gorgeously, defiantly there.

Rather than scorn the cultural oppression of the Europeans and the damage they brought to the islands, here the poet uses the figures of the sunbathers, eager to enjoy the native sun to the point where they are burned by its heat, suggesting their greed and their hunger for a luxurious escape. But rather than mock these so-clearly-out-of-place professional tourists in the islands, the poet focuses on a single bather, a woman, in a European cut bikini and tourist-costume sunglasses and a scarf, whose “pale skin” (Line 27) is beginning to feel the sun, wisely seeks the shade of the sea-almond grove.

The poem then closes with a complex image of fusion: the ancient sea-almond trees seem to embrace the sunburned foreigner. The image the poet offers speaks of the hybrid nature of his perception: “aged trees and oiled limbs” (Line 33). Yes, the trees have a history of enduring bleak and brutal conditions (if they could sing, the poet says, their lamentations would “howl seaward” [Line 47]). Rather than focus on the suffering of the trees or the preoccupied isolation of the sunbather, the poet brings the two elements together in the closing stanza, emphasizing the paradoxical symbiosis between the tourist and the native trees; a single sunburned woman reclining in the welcoming embrace of the sea-almond trees in a quiet gesture that suggests “parental love” (Line 52).