The Haitian Trilogy: Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours, and The Haitian Earth

by Derek Walcott

Overview

Three plays by the Nobel-laureate Derek Walcott, brought together for the first time in The Haitian Trilogy

In the history plays that comprise The Haitian Trilogy--Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours and The Haytian Earth--Derek Walcott, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, uses verse to tell the story of his native West Indies as a four-hundred-year cycle of war, conquest and rebellion.

In Henri Christophe and The Haytian Earth, Walcott re-casts the legacy of Haiti's violent revolutionaries--led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe--whose rebellion established the first black state in the Americas, but whose cruelty becomes a parable of racial pride and corruption. Drums and Colours, commissioned in 1958 to celebrate the first parliament in Trinidad, is a grand pageant linking the lives of complex, ambiguous heroes: Columbus and Raleigh; Toussaint; and George William Gordon, a martyr of the constitutional era.

From Henri Christophe's high style to the bracing vernacular of The Haytian Earth, to the epic scale and scope of Drums and Colours, in these plays Walcott, one of our most celebrated poets, carved a place in the modern theater for the history of the West Indies, and a sounding room for his own maturing voice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466880368
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/09/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
File size:	327 KB

About the Author

Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was born in St. Lucia, the West Indies, in 1930. His Collected Poems: 1948-1984 was published in 1986, and his subsequent works include a book-length poem, Omeros (1990); a collection of verse, The Bounty (1997); and, in an edition illustrated with his own paintings, the long poem Tiepolo's Hound (2000). His numerous plays include The Haitian Trilogy (2001) and Walker and The Ghost Dance (2002). Walcott received the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.

Editorial Reviews

These three early theater experiments by Nobel prize-winning poet and playwright Walcott (Omeros) center around three historical characters: Christoff, Dessaline, and Toussaint L'Ouverture. Moving freely through the history of the West Indies, these verse plays are the work of a powerful imagination struggling to find a language to realize its vision on stage. The first play, "Henri Christophe," is a Shakespearean meditation on the corrupting influence of power, while the second, "Drums and Colours," is a pageant of history from the age of discovery with Columbus to 1833 with Toussaint L'Ouverture. "The Haytian Earth" is a long historical drama of the slavery, rebellion, murder, greed, and power struggles that have fertilized the Haitian earth with blood. Unfortunately, while occasionally brilliant, these plays are too often clumsy and unsure. Stuffed with historical characters, they are too large in scope and too unwieldy in structure to fit on the stage, and the language is more argumentative than dramatic. Recommended for specialists. Thomas E. Luddy, Salem State Coll., MA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

"Filled with passages of startling poetry…Throughout the trilogy, Walcott's ear for dialect is remarkable." —Booklist

From the Publisher