18 pages • 36 minutes read
The Almond Trees
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Themes
The Impact of the Colonial Era
Using the vehicle of the stand of sea-almond trees, one of the tropic’s most enduring and lucrative cash crops, the poem suggests, at least metaphorically, the dramatic impact of colonialism on the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. Beginning with the arrival of Columbus and the first wave of Spanish explorers in the early 16th century, all intent on claiming so-called uninhabited resource-rich lands for their governments, the Caribbean islands endured centuries of routine occupation by cultures often openly hostile to the traditions and customs of the Caribbean people. In addition to imposing their culture, their customs, their religions, and their political and economic institutions on the native people, these foreign governments enslaved the indigenous peoples and, in turn, introduced African cultures through the institution of slavery itself. Despite the fact that by Walcott’s generation the actual presence of European colonizers had long since diminished, the poem suggests that the impact is enduring. The poet intones that despite outward appearances and a tranquil beach scene, history and its legacy are nevertheless always present, if one is perceptive enough.
The poem uses the image of the ever-present blistering sun and the island’s vulnerability to tropical storms to suggest how the impact of European colonization has registered in the Caribbean culture, which the poet, understanding the implications of colonialism, calls “this further shore of Africa” (Line 16). The trees testify to that impact and to the resilience of the indigenous people. The trees’ barks are skinned, weathered, and colored to a burnished rust, their leaves seared by the combination of sun and salt, and their branches twisted and gnarled from accommodating those harsh conditions. If these trees could speak, Walcott suggests, they would howl. Walcott then refuses to ignore the impress of colonization on his people. That the sea-almond trees are still there, bent, certainly, but defiantly alive, growing, and thriving suggests that colonization of the Walcott’s culture did not write that culture’s obituary. The trees and their heroic survival are the focus of the poem, hence its title.
The Resilience of the European Identity
Within the turbulent post-World War Two environment in the Caribbean during which, one after another, the islands achieved independence from the Commonwealth of the United Kingdom, that independence was sometimes greeted with gestures of anger and resentment and indignation over how long that occupation took end. With the achievement of political independence, the islands embraced a kind of fervent nationalism that saw in the centuries of European occupation an element of the Caribbean that can, at long last, be exorcised.
That is not the poem’s perception. In the sunbathers, the poem introduces the imagery of European (specifically Greek) mythology, the fashion styles of Italy, and the rhetorical flourishes typical of British Romantic poetry to suggest the vitality of that European presence. The lines themselves fuse elements of both Caribbean traditions and European traditions; the subject is the tropical beach, but its depiction is rendered distinctly in the elevated rhetorical style of conventional European poetics. Through this poetic fusion, the poem argues that the reality of the European identity is there—no more can you wish that away than you might blink away the tourists.
Thus, the poem focuses on recognizing rather than lambasting the European presence in the Caribbean culture. Like the omnipresent tourists, the legacy of the European presence is an indelible element of the Caribbean culture. Deny it, and you deny reality; hang on to it, and you embrace bitterness, anger, and resentment. In introducing naiads (water sprites) and hamadryads (tree spirits) as well as goddesses and friezes and other Greek and Roman touches, the poem refuses to demonize the European element of Caribbean culture. It is, the poem says, a part of who we are and who we will always be.
The Dynamic of Fusion Culture
Within the sociology of cultural diversity, the word “assimilation” is a buzz-word fraught with connotative implications. Too much assimilation implies the loss of something integral, something essential to a culture’s identity, a sacrificing of critical cultural signature elements under the oppressive influence of some outside invasive culture. Too little assimilation points a culture inevitably toward a showdown, a clash of cultures intended to reintroduce borders and boundaries as one culture attempts to divorce itself from the other. Loss of cultural identity or border wars: for Walcott, these alternatives are akin to committing cultural suicide in self-defense.
In the closing image of the sunburned tourist seeking the sheltering cool of the sea-almond trees, the poem suggests a third alternative: coexistence, mutual respect and mutual support, the European identity and the Caribbean identity fusing to create a cultural identity that is at once new and ancient. Only through such hybrid identity, the poem argues, can the Caribbean culture hope to sustain itself. Without ignoring the brutality of their colonial occupation, without diminishing the impact of that painful collective memory, the poem suggests Caribbean nations cannot simply pretend that cross-cultural fusion never happened. The considerable and legitimate griefs of the past are an element of, but not the end of, Afro-Caribbean identity. That history is over, but the memory is not. Sustaining a future depends on change, recognizing that Caribbean identity will be forever impacted by centuries of European presence.
In this, the poem becomes a powerful but quiet argument for multiculturalism, an endorsement (not a celebration) of how cultures shape and reshape, define and redefine each other within an ever-changing organic global community. It is too late for cultural integrity; too early to surrender cultural identity. Using the grateful sunburned tourist and the enveloping shade of the sea-almonds, the poem offers a stirring vision of the integrity possible in embracing the reality of multiculturalism.
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By Derek Walcott
