An Evening with Derek Walcott
Nduka Otiono
It is not often that one finds a locale that provides a perfect setting for a poetry reading. Framed by woods and hills, the scenic forty-eight acre Walnut Hill campus located in Natick, a suburban town of some 35,000 people seventeen miles west of Boston, is one such setting. It was inside The Jane Oxford Keiter Performing Arts Centre at the 114-year old Walnut Hill, the oldest secondary arts school in the United States of America, that I first met Derek Walcott, the West Indian-born, Boston-based Nobel laureate for Literature on the evening of Thursday, April 26, 2007. And there couldn’t be a better personality to introduce us than Askold Melnyckuz, a suave, unassuming Ukrainian-American writer and professor at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Boston where I have been a Fellow at the William Joiner Center for War and Social Consequences. Although he is in his middle age, there is something at once ancient and modern about Askold that speaks of an eclectic mind so vast in cultural history you wouldn’t know when you had begun to depend on him as a treasured guide. More so in Boston, perhaps America’s intellectual capital, where as a student thirty years ago, he founded AGNI, an acclaimed literary journal, and has been an official of PEN International Boston chapter as well as cultivating a vast network of literary contacts and uncanny familiarity with the most important cultural spots.
We arrived at Natick some one and half hours to the reading partly because we needed time to locate Walnut Hill, being first time visitors. Besides, Askold wanted us to meet Walcott, his old teacher and friend at Boston University, in the saner moments before guests swarmed the hall and had the better of the 76-year old writer. We were a threesome; the other writer being Etnairis Rivera, award-winning Puerto Rican author of ten books of poetry and professor at the University of Puerto Rico. She was visiting Boston as a facilitator of a writing workshop organized as part of the annual Hispanic Writers’ Week, and also to launch Return to the Sea, her first collection of poetry translated into English by Erica Mena and published by Arrowsmith Press -- championed by Askold.
It was not long after we got into the Keiter theatre, Walcott arrived, escorted by Daniel Bosch, Director of the Writing Studio at Walnut Hill and also a former student of Walcott’s who had invited Askold. Their faces lit up on sighting Askold. “Hey…” Walcott’s voice floated across the hall as we rose from the front row of seats to meet him stepping carefully down the stairs. Tall and wearing a rather bohemian blue jeans trousers, a dark blazer over a white shirt and tie, and a pair of brown shoes, perhaps the most remarkable thing about him was his graying thick-set signature moustache. There was an air of casualness about him that seemed to advertise “the ordinariness of life” which has become a recurrent trope in his writing.
“Hi Derek,” said Askold as we caught up with the Guest Writer of the evening who had been promoted as coming to read from and signing Selected Poems, his latest volume of poems from Farrar Straus and Giroux.
“I haven’t seen you in a long while,” he said to Askold as they exchanged pleasantries.
“This is Nduka Otiono; he is a very fine writer from Nigeria and a visiting Fellow at the Joiner Centre at UMass…”