The Schooner Flight

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1979

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Identity & Liminality

The speaker and central character of “The Schooner Flight,” Shabine is continually displaced from any kind of normative identity. Despite how he “lov[es] these islands” (Line 28), he also finds “they had started to poison [his] soul” (Line 30) with their corruption and racism. Even Shabine’s name is a “nickname […], the patois for / any red n*****” (Lines 37-38) of his racially diverse background. That the character is only referred to by this racial epithet suggests the process by which he constructs an identity out of a variety of cultural backgrounds. Instead of bucking the nickname, Shabine reaffirms it and claims it as his own name, mirroring his combination of cultures: “I have Dutch, n*****, and English in me” (Line 42). This variety leads him to claim, “either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation” (Line 43), pointing to both his multiplicity and his exclusion from any singular identity.

Shabine’s socio-cultural standing is characterized by liminality, a state of in-betweenness. The sailor makes this explicit, writing that people of color “said I wasn’t black enough for their pride” (Line 155), while white people “chain my hands and apologize, ‘History’” (Line 154). Even when he “met History once, […] he ain’t recognize me” (Line 160). This interaction is made more poignant by virtue of how “History” (Line 160) refers both to the abstract concept and to Shabine’s “parchment Creole” (Line 161) white grandfather. Shabine is rejected from every ethnic and political group within which he tries to find a home. Instead, he decides that the only thing “all them bastards have left us [is] words” (Line 169), and uses words to construct a unique identity from the ingredients of his own liminality.

Although this goal alone does not account for Shabine’s passion for his poetry, it is an important element. When he recalls “talking to the wind” in a bout of dream-induced mania, Shabine asserts that the natural elements of his island home are “standing by […] / waiting for Shabine to take over these islands” (Lines 363-364). He anticipates doing this with “no weapon but poetry” (Line 369), or with no tool other than words. Shabine thus uses the power of his own “imagination” (Line 151)—aside from which he “had no nation now” (Line 151)—and language to create a singular identity out of his own cultural liminality.

Loneliness & Longing

“The Schooner Flight” is suffused with loneliness and Shabine’s sharp desire for his wife, family, belonging, and an ideal place, “an island that heals with its harbor / and guiltless horizon” (Lines 456-457). However, this “flight to a target whose aim we’ll never know” (Line 455) is a “vain search” (Line 456). Even when Shabine first appears in the opening stanza, he sees a mirror image of himself “weeping / for the houses, the street, that whole fucking island” (Lines 23-24). This weeping double could express Shabine’s discontent with his home life and longing for elsewhere, since the figure remains at Shabine’s old home, or it could signify the opposite: Shabine’s longing for his family and his island, even as he leaves in the night.

Shabine continually reasserts his longing is for actual, concrete things, even as it constantly slips into ideal territory. For example, he claims that he does not miss an abstract version of his wife “dressed in the sexless light of a seraph” (Line 58); he instead wants the embodied her, with “claws that tickled my back on sweating / Sunday afternoons” (Lines 61-62). Along with the poem’s concluding stanza claiming that Shabine’s desires were always a “vain search” (Line 456) for some idealized nonexistent, the fact that the “beauty” of the ocean “cleav[es] [him] from [his] children, flesh of [his] flesh” (Line 129) suggests that his desires are a manifestation of an underlying longing for something that can never be attained. This longing leads him to loneliness because it prevents him from finding satisfaction elsewhere, as when he “tried other women” (Line 144) but “couldn’t dive” into them (Line 146).

Instead of pining for lost, unattainable singular ideals, Shabine finally decides to celebrate the multiplicity of concrete actuals at the poem’s conclusion. In the final section, he “bless[es] every town” (Line 450), celebrating that there are islands as numerous “as the stars at night / like falling fruit around the schooner” (Lines 459-460). He may not be able to ever satisfy the lonely and singular longings of his heart, and he may have to “try to forget what happiness was” (Line 468), but Shabine can at least find celebratory peace in the beauty of variety.

Colonialism & History

Both underlying Shabine’s crises of identity and the very landscapes (and seascapes) of the poem are the powerful repercussions of violent colonial history. The Caribbean islands from which Shabine hales have seen their share of Western colonialism, and the systemic oppression, violence, classism, and racism that attend it. As Shabine tells his fellow sailor Vince, “They [colonizers] kill them [Caribs] by millions, some in war, / some by forced labor dying in the mines” (Lines 306-307). It is on the backs of these oppressed peoples that the colonizers achieved their “Progress” (Line 301), which Shabine remarks is only “history’s dirty joke” (Line 311).

In the middle of the poem, Walcott devotes space to the power of colonial language. As Shabine remarks, “[W]e live like our names and you would have / to be colonial to know the difference, / to know the pain of history words contain” (Lines 251-253). To call the native casuarinas trees cypresses—a colonial name for a colonial tree—would be to “love those trees with an inferior love” (Line 254). Even something as seemingly simple as a botanical name is laden with the violence of colonial history, for Shabine and his home. When he dives under the island he finds “dead men” (Line 120) from its bloody history, “powdery sand was their bones / ground white from Senegal to San Salvador” (Lines 121-122). The very land itself is built on the bones of the oppressed.