The Grave Levity of Derek Walcott

Scene: Boston, 1985. Labor Day weekend. I’m driving, my wife Mary Lynn in the passenger seat. We pull over outside Derek Walcott’s condo. He and his daughter Anna pile in the back. We take off for Harvard Square. Some polite conversation, then quiet for several moments.

Derek speaks: ‘Anna, I hope you have noticed that we are sitting in the back seat.’ Emphasis his.

He prods: ‘Do you want to know why we are in the back seat?’

‘Because,’ he savours the pause, ‘in the driver’s seat is a white racist pig from Chicago.’

After the initial shock, laughter burst all at once from all of us, Derek convulsing in a ‘full-body laugh’, as Sven Birkerts once described his laughter. He was the most playful – play-filled – man I’ve ever known. No wonder he wrote plays. Such was engrained in him and his twin and fellow playwright Roderick Walcott, who grew up together creating and acting out their own – what else? – plays. Wherever he was, even my Nissan’s backseat, was his theatre. The occasion was his creation.

Forty years later, that gut-punch still cracks me up. I was amused and humiliated by his levity loaded with the gravity of American racism. Should I laugh or cry? Or both?

The racial element in that punchline could have been reversed had he cast me as the white chauffeur in ‘Driving Mister Walcott’. It was the playwright’s choice, a playwright who creates characters and situations, then ...