The concept of Colonialism in Derek Walcott’s The Saddhu Of Couva
In the poem The Saddhu Of Couva by Derek Walcott, the presence of the concept of colonialism is evident through the extensive use of Indian words, words related to the Indian tradition and also Trinidadian creole. This is not at all strange since Couva is a town on the Caribbean island of Trinidad in which a kind of creole is spoken even though the official language of the country is English. Also, the speaker, who is afraid of his culture being lost, but also angry with the colonizers, tries to undermine their culture by changing their language, thus denying its privilege, and at the same time protecting his own culture and taking his “vengeance against” them.
The poem deals
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For instance, as it can be observed from the poems own title, he uses the word “Saddhu”, which in Sanskrit means “holy man” instead of the English word even though he writes his poem in English. This is an example of an untranslated word. He also uses the process of abrogation by changing the spelling of the word “neither” into “naither” in order to “remould” the language of the colonisers and thus, denying its privilege and, as a result, their power. Moreover, he again takes advantage of this process and does not use the present simple form of the word “vibrate”, namely “vibrates”, but he retains the word as it is. Furthermore, the poet uses the technique of interlanguage by saying “[. . .] I was always drowned” and using another tense instead of the proper one. In this particular case we have a creole voice coming in the poem. The poet also uses the strategy of syntactic fusion when, in the ultimate stanza, he says “Suppose all the gods too old, / Suppose they dead and they burning them,” (lines 57 – 58) leaving out the verb “are”, thus abusing the grammatical structure of English, namely subject-verb-object, and therefore “changing” the language of the colonizer. Immediately after, he again makes use of the same strategy when he uses the pronoun “some” instead of the suitable one “a” when he states “supposing when some cane cutter” (line 59), having the same effect with the previous verses. Taking everything into account, it is more than evident that the speaker in Derek Walcott’s poem The Saddhu Of Couva “reminisces” memories that he has not lived and deplores about having never been in his motherland and how the traditions of his roots are endangered by colonization and forgetfulness in the foreign lands. He also struggles to retain his cultural traditions by undermining the language of the colonizers and by extend their
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