Derek Walcott Quote

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,in that gray vault. The sea. The seahas locked them up. The sea is History.First, there was the heaving oil,heavy as chaos;then, likea light at the end of a tunnel,the lantern of a caravel,and that was Genesis.Then there were the packed cries,the shit, the moaning:Exodus.Bone soldered by coral to bone,mosaicsmantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,that was the Ark of the Covenant.Then came from the plucked wiresof sunlight on the sea floorthe plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage,as the white cowries clustered like manacleson the drowned women,and those were the ivory braceletsof the Song of Solomon,but the ocean kept turning blank pageslooking for History.Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchorswho sank without tombs,brigands who barbecued cattle,leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,then the foaming, rabid mawof the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,and that was Jonah,but where is your Renaissance?Sir, it is locked in them sea sandsout there past the reef's moiling shelf,where the men-o'-war floated down;strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.It's all subtle and submarine,through colonnades of coral,past the gothic windows of sea fansto where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;and these groined caves with barnaclespitted like stoneare our cathedrals,and the furnace before the hurricanes:Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmillsinto marl and cornmeal,and that was Lamentations - that was just Lamentations,it was not History; then came, like scum on the river's drying lip,the brown reeds of villagesmantling and congealing into towns,and at evening, the midges' choirs, and above them, the spireslancing the side of Godas His son set, and that was the New Testament.Then came the white sisters clappingto the waves' progress,and that was Emancipation - jubilation, O jubilation - vanishing swiftlyas the sea's lace dries in the sun,but that was not History,that was only faith,and then each rock broke into its own nation;then came the synod of flies,then came the secretarial heron,then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,fireflies with bright ideasand bats like jetting ambassadorsand the mantis, like khaki police,and the furred caterpillars of judgesexamining each case closely,and then in the dark ears of fernsand in the salt chuckle of rockswith their sea pools, there was the soundlike a rumour without any echoof History, really beginning.