Repossessing Home: A Postcolonial Study of The Schooner Flight by Derek Walcott

This study examines the African Diaspora as lived and experienced in the West Indies in Derek Walcott’s poem The Schooner Flight. This research paper investigates the protagonist’s feelings of exile within home by comparing it with African nationhood as expressed in African Literature in the theoretical framework of postcolonialism. The problems regarding home and belonging faced by the generations of the Africans in the Caribbean resulting in an attitude of escape and rejection, disillusionment and defiance, frustration and hopelessness, also of revisions and revivals as portrayed in their literature have been scrutinized. The causes of the Afro- Caribbeans’ sense of self- alienation, self- doubt and an unavoidable state of self- exile in the poem under discussion have been analyzed. This paper focuses on the possibilities of acceptance, a coming to terms with, reconciliation and a repossession of their life and rightful place in the world. The paper concludes by highlighting the persona’s achievement (in Walcott’s poem) of a profound sense of home and belonging not just in the Caribbean but in the vast universe mainly through poetic language and a creative understanding of his sufferings.