“Not walled facts, their essence”: Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound and Camille Pissarro

Abstract

Life-writinga genre which goes beyond traditional biography, includes both fact and faction, and is concerned with either entire lives or days-in-the-lives of individuals, communities, objects, or institutionshas always played an important role in Derek an individual immersed in a set of historical networks but also a figure at the centre of a web of imagined relations which illuminate the predicament of present and past artists in the Caribbean region and the ways in which they articulate their vision vis-à-vis the metropolitan centre, their relationship with their social and natural environment, and their individual and collective identity. Tiepolo's Hound is enriched by the inclusion of twenty-six of Walcott's own paintings which engage in conversation with the poet's words and add complexity to his meditation on the nature and purpose of (re)writing and (re)creating lives. Extending the catholicity of life-writing to animals, in this case dogs and, in particular, mongrels, Tiepolo's Hound also entails a careful, if counterintuitive, evaluation of anonymity.

Afterword: Writing lives, fictions, and the postcolonial

“…There are some limitations here, not least because of how biography, fiction, and life writing relate to postcolonial thinking within the prevailing imaginary. An example here is that in her essay Maria Cristina Fumagalli (2020) notes that Derek Walcott had to leave the Caribbean to be able to write outside its confines but retained many connections with the region (offering an interesting counterpoint to Coetzee leaving South Africa). Fumagalli also points out that apparently binary terms, like memory and imagination, past and present, reality and fiction, and so on, are actually blurred, not only in writing but also in visual representation.…”