In section three of Derek Walcott 's poem "The Schooner Flight" titled "Shabine Leaves the Republic", the poet resists the attempt to appreciate or even forgive history. To him, history has been used to justify the mistreatment of the black race and he refuses to believe that there could be any reason that he would find good enough to warrant the suffering he went through. What is striking in the poem is the fact that Walcott distances himself from any of his ancestral roots, whether white or black. Of particular interest to Walcott is his desire to break away from a history that seeks to tie him down to a particular nation and live within the free world of his imagination. In the last stanza of section five, Walcott reveals the subjugation
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History broke the family unit and scattered them across the world and so his search for extended family yields no fruits. He begins from a point of no knowledge himself when he says, "They say I 'se your grandson" (3.16). It is evident that Walcott is operating on information he received from some other sources, which further points out the extent to which the family has disintegrated. Family members do know each other for the simple reason that they have had to live their lives away from each other. And even when he confronts the people he thinks are his blood relatives, the response he gets is shocking: "The bitch hawk and spat/A spit like that worth any number of words" (18/19). Walcott 's honest effort to establish a connection with the people that should be his relatives ends in him being insulted. If he had harbored any hopes of forgiving history, the spit convinced him otherwise. More importantly, Walcott shows how hard it is to begin the process of rebuilding the black nation under the same clans and units that existed before the period of slavery. The attempt has zero chances of success because the people do not know who they are or what they have become. From that premise, it is easy to understand Walcott when he says he has no filial love at all, and it is because he is a stranger in a land that does not recognize him, and he finds it hard to forgive a history that robbed him of his sense of
History broke the family unit and scattered them across the world and so his search for extended family yields no fruits. He begins from a point of no knowledge himself when he says, "They say I 'se your grandson" (3.16). It is evident that Walcott is operating on information he received from some other sources, which further points out the extent to which the family has disintegrated. Family members do know each other for the simple reason that they have had to live their lives away from each other. And even when he confronts the people he thinks are his blood relatives, the response he gets is shocking: "The bitch hawk and spat/A spit like that worth any number of words" (18/19). Walcott 's honest effort to establish a connection with the people that should be his relatives ends in him being insulted. If he had harbored any hopes of forgiving history, the spit convinced him otherwise. More importantly, Walcott shows how hard it is to begin the process of rebuilding the black nation under the same clans and units that existed before the period of slavery. The attempt has zero chances of success because the people do not know who they are or what they have become. From that premise, it is easy to understand Walcott when he says he has no filial love at all, and it is because he is a stranger in a land that does not recognize him, and he finds it hard to forgive a history that robbed him of his sense of