A Far Cry from Africa Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 44 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of A Far Cry from Africa.

A Far Cry from Africa Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 44 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of A Far Cry from Africa.
This section contains 1,634 words
(approx. 5 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the A Far Cry from Africa Study Guide

Paul Witcover is a novelist and editor in New York City with an M.A. in creative writing and literature from the City University of New York. In the following essay, he discusses the personal and the political in Derek Walcott's poem, "A Far Cry from Africa."

In his 1993 critical biography, Derek Walcott, Robert D. Hamner observes, "It is not a simple choice between cultures for Walcott, but a matter of laying claim to his mixed heritage." This "mixed heritage," which the Swedish Academy, in awarding Walcott the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, referred to as "the complexity of his own situation," takes a variety of often-paradoxical forms. For example, Walcott is of both English and African genetic ancestry. The blood of colonizers and colonized, oppressors and oppressed, flows in his veins. Culturally, too, he is a hybrid. As a native of St. Lucia, a small island...

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This section contains 1,634 words
(approx. 5 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the A Far Cry from Africa Study Guide
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