Miscegenation In Derek Walcott's 'Goats And Monkeys'

The term ‘miscegenation’ originates from the Latin miscere (meaning ‘mix’) and genus (meaning ‘race’); and stands for the marriage or cohabitation between two people of different racial groups. Fear of miscegenation then becomes an important issue in the context of the racial tensions and colonization process of the subalterns by the white Europeans. The themes of racial conflicts, cultural prejudice and political inequality pervade almost all postcolonial writings, of which Derek Walcott’s compositions form a substantial part. In the poem “Goats and Monkeys” Walcott unearths the underlying theme of miscegenation-fears in the story of Othello and Desdemona and also interweaves it with the context of the colonization of Africa by the Europeans.

The recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, Derek Walcott was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, the West Indies, on January 23, 1930. His first published poem, “1944” appeared in The Voice of St. Lucia when he was fourteen years old, and consisted of 44 lines of blank verse. By the age of nineteen, Walcott had self published two volumes, 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949). He later attended the University of the West Indies, having received a Colonial Development and Welfare scholarship, and in 1951 published the volume Poems.

In 1957, he was awarded a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study the American theater. Since then, he has published numerous collections of poetry, most recently The