Walcott's heroic attempt to capture Haitian history in verse Reviewed by Cynthia Haven   Sunday, May 19, 2002 Haitian Trilogy By Derek Walcott FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX; 451 PAGES; $15 PAPERBACK The three verse plays of Derek Walcott's "Haitian Trilogy" are far from perfect, but even in their imperfection lies a sort of grandeur, like a great, swollen baroque pearl. Certainly they put to shame so much of the pandering, TV-wannabe rubbish that treads the boards nowadays, with its banal formulae, shallow wittiness and trendy characters who are spiritual Pygmies. In "Henri Christophe" (1949), "Drums and Colours" (1958) and "The Haitian Earth" (1984), the Nobel poet laureate attempts to re-create West Indian history on a canvas as large and mythic as Shakespeare's War of the Roses. It's a heroic, monumental undertaking -- and not surprisingly, St. Lucia- born Walcott summons the ghost of Shakespeare in his epigraphs, echoes and metaphors. Walcott's lines weave in and out of blank verse as easily as an old man walks in and out of memory. Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe -- three names on a Black History Week checklist, for many of us -- become an unforgettable part of the human legacy. No mean feat, given the massacres and bloodbaths of the period, but they are graced by Walcott with greatness and immortal longings, and, in the case of Dessalines and Christophe, fatally cursed with longings for the elusive, ephemeral crown of Haiti. Take this, on Toussaint L'Ouverture, who died Napoleon's prisoner in France's Jura Mountains, betrayed by his own generals and "shrivelled as a marmoset": All the snows of the Jura didn't whiten him. His hair was the grey of soiled snow. Blizzards Whiten out memory, pines disappear, And men walking through clouds Are faint as angels . . . And, in a less high-falutin' epitaph, a peasant comments: Fold up your hopes to show them to your children. Because after him, now come The angry kings. God help us men. Nor will we forget the anguished Columbus' cameo appearance -- in chains, called back to Spain in disgrace ("I could not guess the web of destinations/ That I would weave within the minds of men." As the Spanish conquerors successively give way to the English, then the French, the disillusioned Iberians become the wise men ("I cannot warn you of the terrible expense/ When men or nations turn to beasts for gold," the Spanish governor of Trinidad impotently warns Raleigh); only an unnamed Jew, escaping the Inquisition and en route to the New World, becomes a noble one. These stories are hemmed in darkness. All need to be pruned, sometimes desperately. They cry out for some courageous director to say "no" to some of their excesses. A dopey, disjointed prologue and overworked scene-within-a-scene devices subvert the sweep and dignity of Walcott's characters. Much of the history is confusingly telescoped for the non-initiate. "Drums and Colors" is a bloated, three-hours-plus in performance. And some scenes are just ill-advised: In "The Haitian Earth," a noblesse oblige sex scenario includes sadism and orgasm. As any experienced theatergoer knows, these faits are unpersuasive in performance, turning the actors into sex workers and the audience into voyeurs. To pick on that particular scene for illustration: Walcott describes the woman, "Her eyes open, dry," but how on earth would the audience see that if she is, as Walcott also instructs, horizontal with Dessalines on top of her? In such a position, how would Dessalines be able to slap her repeatedly in his orgasmic frenzy; how would he support himself, without performing a distracting acrobatic feat? Despite Walcott's experience with his own Trinidad Theatre Workshop, among other companies, Walcott isn't seeing what he's writing. He also doesn't see that a score of his choppy scenes are too short for dramatic coherence and scene-change practicality. At times, Walcott seems to have had the movies in mind rather than the stage. Yet these plays are hardly cinematic. Despite demurrers, Walcott loves that old Shakespearean roll, which stands quite distinct from current cinematic trends for quick-cut images, the briefest slivers of dialogue and a vocabulary of 16 words and 11 grunts. Too often, theater walks down the same cul-de-sac. What's the point of being a poet, anyway, if you don't go for the high language at least some of the time? Commenting about his plays to the Caribbean Quarterly in 1968, Walcott said, "I hope that there is a moment, or there are moments, when the thing becomes a poetry on stage; and I would prefer to eventually write a play which would be a poem." If so, Walcott has hit the target. The "Haitian Trilogy" is like the great hull of a lost ship, its crushed timber shot through with starlight. And what lies at the bottom of the seas it once sailed is the inevitability of time, the inevitability of history to crush kings and the certitude of conquerors, the inevitability of remorse for things done and undone -- and, as always, the ability of gold to betray men. Cynthia Haven writes on poetry for Book Review.

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle