http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/keyword/derek-walcott Inquiries Journal provides undergraduate and graduate students around the world a platform for the wide dissemination of academic work over a range of core disciplines. en-us Sat, 13 Jun 2026 04:50:59 -0400 Sat, 13 Jun 2026 04:50:59 -0400 http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1141/cultural-tensions-and-hybrid-identities-in-derek-walcotts-poetry By Nidhi Mahajan - In his Nobel Lecture, Derek Walcott described the experience of watching a Ramleela performance in a village in Trinidad, remarking: "... Two different religions, two different continents, both filling the heart with the pain that is joy.” The pain that fills Walcott’s heart is the pain of a fragmented identity. This pain is also joy, the joy of a hybrid existence. Derek Walcott (b. 1930), a Caribbean poet and playwright who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, published his first collection of poetry at the age of fourteen, in which he described the beautiful and rich landscapes... Tue, 15 Sep 2015 07:48 EDT http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1141/cultural-tensions-and-hybrid-identities-in-derek-walcotts-poetry http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/56/derek-walcotts-a-far-cry-from-africa By Marion A. Davis - Derek Walcott’s “A Far Cry from Africa” expresses how Walcott is torn between “Africa and the English tongue [he] love[s]” (30). Several of Walcott’s poems – “The Schooner Flight” and Omeros – include some elements of French patois and West Indian English. The West Indies had “traded hands fourteen times in…wars between the British and French” (Norton 2770), and Walcott tied each of these languages together to convey to his readers the extremity of his “racially mixed ancestry” (Farrell 2) and the indeterminacy... Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:37 EST http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/56/derek-walcotts-a-far-cry-from-africa