“Like leaves against the sunlight”: Translucent Trans-Historicism in Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight ”

Abstract: In Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight ,” recurrent images of translucence—silks, ghosts, the shimmering sea, leaves, and canvas sails—invite readers to understand postcolonial poetry neither as offering clear vistas onto discernible histories nor as opaque linguistic surfaces refusing access to those histories, but instead as the glowing, warped loci of trans-historical insights that connect present-tense subjectivities with the traumas of the past. This approach to Walcott’s poetry builds on the sense of translucence in world poetry that Vidyan Ravinthiran espouses in his reading of Agha Shahid Ali’s “The Dacca Gauzes,” and it also engages contemporary theories of literary Impressionism, especially in their tendency to wrestle with the concept of perceptual mediation and their curiosity about the political affordances of this aesthetic mode. Walcott’s use of translucence makes him a true literary Impressionist but also an exceptional one—one whose embrace of mediated perception enables trans-historical epiphanies.