Wrenched by Two Styles:A Lacanian Reading of Trauma in Derek Walcott’s “A Far Cry from Africa” and “Codicil”

Derek Walcott is one of the leading figures in Postcolonial literature, the dominant themes of whose poetry include identity politics and the lost history of the Caribbean and Africa. The traumatic experience of the postcolonial subject and its psychosocial aftermath are linked in his works to the colonizer’s and the colonized languages, among other elements, in such a way that after (de)colonization a new language or discourse offers a new subjectivity for the latter group. The present study deals with this problem in two of his oft-anthologized poems, namely “A Far Cry from Africa’’ and “Codicil,” from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, which explores the effects of the Symbolic Order on the subject’s psyche. The basic argument of this qualitative library research, thus, is that the duality of the postcolonial subject’s former identity and the new one leads to a trauma of double consciousness. In these poems, the speakers try to retrieve their lost identities as they are caught in the new Symbolic Order. According to the findings of the study, just as a fragmented infant enters into the Symbolic Order and acquires language after the Imaginary Order, just so the colonized subject loses their former subjectivity and becomes psychically split as soon as he is placed under the colonizer’s authority and enters into the latter’s discourse as the new Symbolic Order.