Names by Derek Walcott - Summary and analysis

 

Derek Walcott’s Names explores how colonization affected identity, memory, and language in the Caribbean. The act of naming of lands, people, and thingsis symbolic of power and domination. Walcott speaks from the position of the colonized, trying to retrieve the authentic voice of his ancestors while acknowledging the fragmentation of history and selfhood. Addressed to fellow Caribbean poet Edward Brathwaite, the poem is a tribute and a reflection on all the tragic consequences of colonialism.

 

"My race began as the sea began,
with no nouns, and with no horizon,
with pebbles under my tongue,
with a different fix on the stars."

Walcott begins with the metaphor of the sea, symbolizing origin, vastness, and fluid identity.

“No nouns” signifies a pre-colonial existence, when things were unnamed in the European sense, suggesting a primordial connection with nature, unmediated by imperial language.

“Pebbles under my tongue” evokes both the rawness of speech and the struggle to articulate an identity not yet colonized by language.“A different fix on the stars” hints at alternative systems of knowledge, indigenous and non-European.

"But now my race is here,
in the sad oil of Levantine eyes,
in the flags of Indian fields."

The present is marked by diaspora and dislocation, peoples from different parts of the world (Levant, region in Asia) brought through colonial trade, migration, and slavery. The sadness refers to the longing and displacement in these transplanted communities.

I began with no memory,

I began with no future,

but I looked for that moment

when the mind was halved by a horizon.

I have never found that moment

when the mind was halved by a horizon—

The poet emphasizes historical amnesia colonization has severed links to a known past or future. There's a void in collective memory, an erasure of ancestral lineage.

Walcott seeks the point of colonial rupture, where indigenous consciousness was split by the arrival of European colonizers the literal and symbolic horizon. Yet, he claims he has “never found that moment”, showing how colonial trauma is not localized, but diffused, continual  and buried.

"For the goldsmith from Benares,
the stone-cutter from Canton,..."

He invokes the skilled ancestral figures from India (Benares), China (Canton), and Africa (Benin), brought or displaced by colonial systems. These artisans symbolize a rich precolonial heritage, unrecognized in dominant colonial histories.

"...as a fishline sinks, the horizon
sinks in the memory."

Memory is like the horizon: constantly elusive (difficult to recapture).

Colonialism has submerged ancestral memory like a fishline lost at sea.

"Have we melted into a mirror,
leaving our souls behind?"

A powerful metaphor of mimicry and loss. The colonized have been taught to reflect the colonizer (the mirror), but in doing so, they've lost authenticity and selfhood.

"A sea-eagle screams from the rock,
and my race began like the osprey
with that cry,
that terrible vowel,
that I!"

The osprey’s cry is a primordial utterance the birth of speech, and self-awareness ("I").

The vowel "I" is symbolic of both individual identity and the first-person pronoun, a reclaiming of voice and agency.

"Behind us all the sky folded
as history folds over a fishline,
and the foam foreclosed
with nothing in our hands
but this stick
to trace our names on the sand
which the sea erased again, to our indifference."

History, like the sky, envelops and moves past them, indifferent to their erasure. The act of tracing names in the sand suggests fragile attempts at self-definition, easily wiped away by the forces of colonialism (the sea). Yet, there is a tragic resignation, a learned indifference after repeated historical silencing.

 

"And when they named these bays
bays,
was it nostalgia or irony?"

The colonizers’ naming is questioned. Naming itself becomes a political act, an imposition of control and identity.

"In the uncombed forest,
in uncultivated grass
where was there elegance
except in their mockery?"

Colonial powers saw these lands as wild and uncivilized.“Elegance” is defined only in European terms, which ridiculed or dismissed the native landscape.

"Where were the courts of Castille?
Versailles' colonnades
supplanted by cabbage palms
with Corinthian crests,"

The poet mocks the imperial idealism the attempt to recreate European grandeur (Castille, Spain – Versailles, France) in the tropics. Colonnades – A row of evenly placed roofs.

 Ironically, they planted European names over tropical realities, producing absurd juxtapositions.

"belittling diminutives,
then, little Versailles
meant plans for a pigsty,"

The so-called “Versailles” here is not a palace but a mockery, reduced to something crude and base (a pigsty, enclosed areas where pigs are kept). This exposes the failure of transplantation, the artificiality of colonial naming.

"...names for the sour apples
and green grapes
of their exile.
Their memory turned acid
but the names held;"

The colonizers named things to make them familiar, but the land refused their romanticism.Even if their experience was bitter ("sour apples"), their imposed names remained, signifying the endurance of colonial power.

 

"Valencia glows
with the lanterns of oranges,
Mayaro's
charred candelabra of coca."

Despite the foreign names, the land has its own vibrant reality.

Valencia, city in spain- Mayaro, place in trinidad

There is a tension between imposed names and natural life, between European illusions and Caribbean truths.

"Being men, they could not live
except they first presumed
the right of every thing to be a noun."

This is a fundamental postcolonial critique: the colonizer defined reality by naming it, assuming ownership. Language becomes a tool of possession to name something is to claim it.

"The African acquiesced,
repeated, and changed them."

Colonized peoples adapted and transformed these names, reclaiming them through oral traditions and local speech.

"Listen, my children say:
moubain: the hogplum,
cerise: the wild cherry,
baie-la: the bay,"

These names are examples of creolization—the blending of languages and cultural identities.

The children speak with a living, rooted vocabulary, unlike colonial abstractions.

"with the fresh green voices
they were once themselves
in the way the wind bends
our natural inflections."

The children embody a restoration of voice, their speech is both natural and ancestral. Language regrows and adapts like nature.

"These palms are greater than Versailles,
for no man made them,
their fallen columns greater than Castille,
no man unmade them"

The natural world surpasses imperial architecture in beauty and dignity.

Palms and columns are symbolic: nature’s majesty is untouched by human arrogance.

"except the worm, who has no helmet,
but was always the emperor,"

A powerful reversal: decay and nature rule ultimately, not the colonizer in armor.

The “worm” becomes a symbol of time, mortality, and true authority.

"and children, look at these stars
over Valencia's forest!
Not Orion,
not Betelgeuse,
tell me, what do they look like?
Answer, you damned little Arabs!
Sir, fireflies caught in molasses."

The speaker dismisses the colonial constellations, asking the children to see the stars through their own imagination. “Fireflies caught in molasses” is a realistic, local image, resisting imposed meanings. The line “you damned little Arabs” is ironic and affectionate, acknowledging mixed heritage while challenging imposed labels.

 

Walcott’s Names is a poetic act of decolonization. He exposes the violence of naming, the erasure of ancestral memory, and the loss of language, while celebrating the resilience of nature, imagination, and creole speech. The poem is not only a lament but also a reclamation of dignity and identity through poetic voice.