Summary
Becune Point is a cape on the island of St. Lucia, where Walcott lived and wrote. This first section of the poem begins by describing that place as it is on a hot summer morning. The speaker watches the cows hiding among the acacia trees, a butterfly flapping irregularly through the air, and small horses dosing in the sun. The agaves—a type of spiny succulent—look like daggers lined up along the coast. A mongoose (a small, carnivorous mammal) runs across the speaker’s field of vision and quickly disappears again, while dust rises from the dry land.
In line 9, this scene gives way to the speaker’s memory of other places. The dust reminds him of the Harmattan—a dry and dusty wind that blows over West Africa between December and February. In the haze of memory, he sees cloaked riders moving over the West African desert.
In line 13, Walcott establishes that this African memory is only the first of two associations. The other is between Santa Lucia and the European artistic tradition, first referenced as “Impressionist light.” Europeans depicted the places they colonized in poetry and art; there is not only North Africa as a place, but also North Africa as it was painted by the French artist Delacroix. In this context, the colonized speaker must return to the place of Becune Point itself, rather than its memories, in an attempt to claim it as his own, and by extension, he must return to all of the places entangled with his ancestry—not only Africa, but India and Asia.
In the second section, Walcott continues to reckon with the distinction between the physical location of Becune Point, and the long history of symbolic associations built up by the colonial artistic tradition. The beauty of the high blue sky immediately reminds him of a great vaulted roof—an image of majestic ruin usually associated with Greece and Rome, and rarely with Africa.
Even as a 67-year-old man trying to be in the place where he is, the speaker continues to hear the echoes of these Western associations. He compares this artistic lens to “a corridor in the Vatican that led” only to paintings of heaven, rather than the real thing. This excess of ideas and art exhausted his faith in God, especially because the religious images rendered Jesus and the Virgin Mary too perfect and self-assured to feel real. Having identified this problem with art, Walcott’s speaker can return to the blue of the sky over Becune Point. In the last two stanzas of the poem, he celebrates that this blue can be empty of “tributes and the repetitions of power”—of colonial history and images. Without these associations, the sky can lead him back to the earth, which, unlike the paintings in the Vatican, deepens his belief in God.
Analysis
“Becune Point” narrates a colonized speaker’s work to extricate the land he loves from the many historical associations that surround it. The speaker finds himself intertwined with Africa and Asia through his ancestors, who were brought to Santa Lucia from dispersed parts of the world through colonial violence. At the same time, the beauty of the island itself is filtered through European depictions of beauty in art and writing. Walcott describes Becune Point in vivid detail. This description of a place, in turn, is itself a poetic form inextricably in conversation with European tradition.
English Romantic poets often wrote extended meditations on beautiful places with rich personal and historical associations, as in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” “Becune Point” parallels this poetic tradition, and given Walcott’s invocation of canonical European artistic and literary figures (not only in this poem, but across his literary work—see “Ruins of a Great House” in this guide), that parallel is almost certainly intentional.
However, Walcott disrupts the generic conventions of Romantic poetry by describing Becune Point through the lens of colonial inheritance and violence. Even before these topics take center stage, the poem implicitly gestures at violence through its imagery. The “stunned heat of noon” suggests that noon has been somehow attacked. The speaker describes the butterfly as “staggering,” an image of its flight which calls up associations with injury, while the “daggers of agave bristle in primordial defense.” It as though the island’s nature is under attack.
This attack isn’t literal, or even in the present—instead, the problem, as Walcott details in the rest of the first part of the poem, is that he cannot see this natural world without its complicated historical baggage. Although the speaker distinguishes “two worlds of associations”—his own ancestry, and European colonial artistic tradition—it is often difficult to separate them. When he remembers West African “riders in swirling burnooses,” that image might come from his own internal knowledge of his origin, but it might also derive from “Delacroix’s North Africa”—a French painter’s depiction of the land and people France colonized.
In this, “Becune Point” is in conversation with Edward Said’s concept of “orientalism”—the historical process in which Europeans invented a fantasy of the “East” and asserted themselves as the sole source of knowledge about colonized lands and peoples. Walcott, as a Black citizen of Santa Lucia, has to reckon with orientalism, because it has violently destroyed knowledge of his past and ancestry with European renderings of them. Rather than being able to switch between ancestral and colonized associations, for the speaker of “Becune Point,” it is impossible to fully extricate the former from the latter. His search for “heroic ancestors” is “desperate,” because European colonizers created an image of African people in which heroism was impossible.
Although “Becune Point” understands the impact of colonialism as irreversible, it is not a defeatist poem. The end of the first part of the poem stresses both that colonialism renders formerly colonized people an “afterthought” by erasing their history, and also that it is nevertheless possible for the people of Santa Lucia to discover their origins. However, this is not where the poem ends. Instead, it returns to the place of “Becune Point,” where the speaker now looks up at the sky, rather than around at the defensive natural world he saw in the opening lines. Implicit in this section is the archetypal Christian phrase, “the vault of heaven.” This phrase imagines the sky as a “vault,” or high roof. For Walcott’s speaker, that implicit association makes it difficult to see the blue sky without also seeing the ghosts of “towers, banners and domes,” an assortment of images inextricably associated with the “West.”
However, that Western vision of heaven doesn’t really work for Walcott. The speaker remembers a visit to the Vatican, where, rather than access to heaven, he was met only with a string of images. These ideas endlessly forestalled divinity, in favor of an excess of depictions too concerned with greatness to depict, for example, “the mess of motherhood.” That absence means that, although these paintings are beautiful, they cannot get at the profound mystery of the human and the divine brought together which is the basis of the speaker’s faith.
Far from having a monopoly on religion, the Western obsession with representation actually disrupted Walcott’s belief. In that context, the ability to stop seeing the blue sky as a vault, and to come back to it as emptiness, as a “naive ceiling without domes and spires,” becomes a form of blessing. Its beauty allows him to return to the earth, to feel rooted in belief just like the acacia trees of Santa Lucia are rooted in the ground. This realization is not only religious, but also in dialogue with the previous section, where Western artistic tradition seemed more inescapable. By the end of “Becune Point,” the speaker has identified the weakness of images of the past, and is able to be rooted instead in the present of a formerly colonized place.
