Pastiche

A Far Cry From Religion

The breeze is ruffling the dark flag

Of this broken glory. The mountains and river

Churn with sweat and blood,

The paradise is red,

Only carrions are heard, and vultures abound,5

“No compassion here, No compassion here”

And now are sticks and numbers on a full sheet,

The starters of the Crusades,

What is it to the pious who died,

Were they expendable or just fanatics?10

Defence

I chose to imitate a poem titled “A far cry from Africa” written by Derek Walcott where he sets out the essential conflict between two cultures: the lived Caribbean heritage with its roots in faraway Africa and the English linguistic and literary inheritance that provided him the medium to express himself forcefully about the injustices of British rule. He characterizes himself as “the mulatto of style (Baugh, pp.96-105),” and Walcott's distinctive combination of literary English and West Indian dialect encouraged me to write on vastly different topic, the Crusades and more specifically the Battle of the Hattin, which also told of a period of war, conflict and great bloodshed (Smith, pp 108-111).

Although I chose to deviate from Walcott's main topic and not theme, I decided to use his verbal resourcefulness and lyrical complexity to reflect a war which started a religious divide impacting even the twenty first century. Deft in his use of the armory of literary techniques available in English, Walcott seems to be particularly fond of puns, which I have imitated. The pun in the “far cry” of the title of both his and my work, for example, embodies the dichotomy in a colloquial expression that harkens back to an oral culture (distance being measured by how far a voice can carry), while also suggesting the pain historical in my case and both historical and personal in his. While Walcott talks about the black man's removal from his cultural identity in Africa (with many tears shed along the way), echoing “brutish necessity” with “British rule,” or “colonel of carrion” with “colonial policy,” he evokes not only the double meanings in his own identity but also the hegemony of ideas hidden in language, just as the politics of colonialism has been justified by supposedly innocent natural metaphors. He also incorporates the Afrikaans word “veldt” and references to the Kikuyu, an East African tribe who fought as Mau Maus in the eight-year terrorist campaign against British settlers in Kenya, thus embodying the lexical and the historical in a rich ...