SOURCE: Walcott, Derek, and Marina Benjamin. “The Commonwealth: Pedestal or Pyre?” New Statesman & Society 8, no. 362 (21 July 1995): 30–31.

In the following interview, Walcott discusses his views on the cultural legacy of the British Commonwealth and defends its continuing importance as a source of shared identity and political ideals.

[Benjamin:] Having grown up in a Commonwealth state, how would your life have differed from that of a citizen of a non-Commonwealth Antilles?

[Walcott:] Initially, the experience of being brought up in St Lucia was colonial. A parity of status, an equilibrium, an equality of expression between Empire and protectorates, happened much later. Compared to the experiences of other colonies simultaneous to our growth and adolescence, if one goes by the literature or the history one read, the experience was a benign one; there was no sense of being politically persecuted or repressed—though that may have been there subliminally or obliquely...