Fatal Attractors: Adam, Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, Walcott, and Re-Righting the Caribbean

Empathetically hinging on postcoloniality and postmodernism, Walcott’s poetry raises theoretical issues such as why, generally, postcolonial and, in particular, Caribbean writers like Walcott, choose not to “look in [their] hearts and write” and, instead, write back, rewrite and, in so doing, re-right. I here address this question, which Walcott’s oeuvre elusively toys with, with particular reference to Adam, Ulysses, Crusoe, while singling out Crusoe as the ‘fatal attractor’ that forces Walcott to wrestle with a “multiplicity of Crusoes” (involving a complex father-son relationship) and makes him veer away from those legendary ‘fatal attractors’ that are women. In so doing, Walcott’s oeuvre moves us away from the “rhizome” theory to a “state of exception.”