Midsummer XXVII

“Midsummer XXVII” explores the effects of colonization on the Caribbean Islands’ culture and on the speaker personally. Presumably, the speaker is an avatar for Derek Walcott himself, who found himself between worlds and cultures. Walcott had grandparents of both European and African descent. He was raised on St. Lucia but went to school in English-speaking institutions where he studied Shakespeare and British literature. He taught in Boston and made his career and home in the Northern Hemisphere half of the time but returned to Trinidad and the islands in the summers. As in many of Walcott’s poems, the speaker of “Midsummer XXVII” feels ill-at-ease among these shifting cultural identities.

The poem is set on St. Thomas, an island that has a long history of colonization. Originally inhabited by the Ciboney, and then by the Carib and Arawak, all Indigenous peoples, the island was colonized by Europeans in the 1500s. British, French, and Dutch interests took control of all of the islands in the region. On St. Lucia, where Walcott was born and raised, the French and British continued to fight for control. On St. Thomas, the Dutch and British had competing influences. European powers used their strongholds in the islands to build sugar plantations and import enslaved people from Africa.

Today, the islands’ populations are approximately 70% African descendants. Though slavery ended, the legacy of colonization, enforced slavery, and racial segregation lives on. In 1917, the Dutch still controlled St. Thomas, but the United States saw the island as a strategic location for their planes and military outposts during World War I. During the war, the United States bought St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John from the Dutch for $25 million dollars, forming the US Virgin Islands. In 1940, during World War II, the United States would go on to build airfields on the islands of Great Exuma, Trinidad, Antigua, and St. Lucia. Given that St. Lucia was Walcott’s home island, this occupation is likely the “Occupation in the last war” that Walcott references in his description of the hangar in Lines 10-11, which would’ve occurred when he was a child.

“Midsummer XXVII” explores the ways in which American culture and values are subtly influencing the island of St. Thomas by bringing to it greater industrialization, as well as class divisions. When America bought the island, the main industrial activity of the island was distilling rum. After America purchased the island, it became petroleum refining. The speaker depicts the shifting attention to industrialization and mining of natural resources when he states that the ocean is being “soldered by the sun’s steady acetylene” (Line 21). Under American rule, industries were encouraged to start businesses on the island, sometimes taking advantage of the island’s natural resources and cheaper labor. Though Walcott doesn’t list those industries by name, he alludes to the greater emphasis on industrialization by noting the bulldozer doing its work, which others must “suffer” (Line 19), and that the ocean looks like “sheets of zinc” (Line 20).