Derek Walcott’s Another Life: from Death to Celebration

When he writes in Another Life that “a man lives half of life, / the second half is memory” (243), Derek Walcott seems to be acutely aware that all autobiographies are, to some extent, written from “that bourne from which no man returns,” imposing that “auto-thanatographic perspective” which Ghyslain Lévy (80) considers as another name for writing. The “lived” part of Walcott’s life may itself have been little else than death in disguise from the very outset, if we are to believe the poet’s f...