Derek Walcott’s ‘Forty Acres’: Arkansas Testament Part II”

Natalie King-Pedroso (Florida A & M University)

This paper engages Derek Walcott’s “Forty Acres,” a poem written on the occasion of Barack Hussein Obama’s inauguration as the first African American president of the United States and which may be read as a continuation of Walcott’s 1987 poem “Arkansas Testament.” The poem, while imbued with vestiges of Walcott’s sense of a Caribbean self, conveys an awareness of the complexities of race and identity in the United States. While Walcott lacks membership in the southern community, his observations reveal a keen awareness of race and “place” in the United States and specifically the South. Interpreting “Forty Acres” as the second part of “Arkansas Testament,” this paper will cast Walcott’s omniscient narrator as a griot whose recognition of the crimes of the past also acknowledges the possibilities for a type of reparation in the future as it revisits many of the symbols and metaphors presented in “Arkansas Testament.” And while acknowledging history’s ills, if not a turning of the page on race in the United States, “Forty Acres” acknowledges part of a long awaited payment of an overdue debt, not just for black Americans but for the global village.

Natalie King-Pedroso - Florida A & M University

Natalie King-Pedroso is an assistant professor of English at Florida A & M University in Tallahassee, Florida. She is generally interested in literature of the African diaspora. Specifically she is working on projects that include African American Women of the South (United States), Tananarive Due, Monifa Love, Toni Morrison, and Derek Walcott. She has recently published “P/plantation Politics in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby” in Jami Carlacio's The Fiction of Toni Morrison: Reading and Writing on Race, Culture, and Identity. She is currently working on “‘Knowledge Is a Curse’: Epistemology and the Supernatural in Tananarive Due’s ‘The Knowing’” and a book length project entitled “Derek Walcott’s Omeros: Soul Music of the Reluctant Shaman.”