'We going change round the carnival': Decolonial Narratives and Partnership Encounters in Derek Walcott’s Drums and Colours

To celebrate the short experience of the Federal government of the West Indies in April 1958, the Caribbean writer Derek Walcott was commissioned to work on a play that would capture the shared values and cultural unity of his multifaceted community. This “massive undertaking” led to the production of Drums and Colours, an epic pageant covering four hundred and fifty years of Caribbean history through the depiction of four emblematic characters linked to the Antillean archipelago: Christopher Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh, Toussaint L’Ouverture and George William Gordon. Walcott wanted to decolonise the narratives of the Western literary “canon” in re-writing these characters according to a new perspective. At the same time, he presented original “unknown heroes” and “dispossessed voices” and their unpredictable encounters shaping the “open” hybridity and schizophrenic reality of the Caribbean. I will study how Walcott reverses the carnivalesque West Indian performance in a destabilising theatre within theatre. I will show how paintings, dances, and songs articulate the colourful rhythms of tribal drums in a creative form that unbridles conventional artistic practices, thus enriching our “ecosophical” perception of reality.