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The titles of Phillips’s and Walcott’s collections at once immerse the reader in the spirit of Caribbean thought. Indeed, both volumes are subtitled “Essays”:

A New World Order: Selected Essays and What the Twilight Says: Essays. In

both cases, the subtitle is linked to the title on the level of the signified. Wal- cott is a poet, and the euphony of his long title sets the tone by stressing the sweetness and swiftness of the Antillean twilight. As the term “what” em- braces the chiaroscuro colour of the twilight, the phrase “what the twilight says” reveals the tenor of Walcott’s main thesis and suggests that no argument is perfectly clear-cut. In fact, what we discover in Walcott’s book is the very meaning of the word ‘essay’: his articles and the conceptions they develop are only ‘attempts’. For a colonial writer, to ‘attempt’ means to find his own voice between the beats of the Empire’s grammatical rhythm and those of his own environmental rhythm. The repetition of “says” in “Essays” is striking, and might be evocative of Walcott’s artistic doubt, in that it reflects the ten- sion between stating and trying. In other words, writing becomes the site of a struggle for self-definition. In articulating his personal quest along with that of other West Indians writers, Walcott gives the reader a vantage point from which to observe a Caribbean mind in action.

A New World Order is made up of four major sections, “The United States,” “Africa,” “The Caribbean,” and “Britain.” The subtitle “Essays” re- inforces the idea that no place is a final destination and that each site is just an attempt to become rooted. This endless quest for a home is the central theme of the introduction to the book. Each paragraph of this opening section lays emphasis on a particular time and place central to Phillips’s life. And so he describes his journeys in different parts of the world: Phillips is in West Africa, he is in New York, he is in St Kitts, he is in England. He is thirty-two, he is twenty, he is twenty-two, he is seven. And each paragraph of each jour- ney ends with the line: “I recognise the place, I feel at home here, but I don’t belong. I am of, and not of, this place” (NWO, 1, 2, 3, 4). This absence of an

immutable place perhaps embodies the exilic condition of writing: all of the countries described and all of the writers discussed constitute ‘essays’ for the writer, part of what Patrick Chamoiseau calls a ‘Sentimenthèque’ or library of feelings.3 _{This is in line with Walcott’s statement that in the West Indies}

“there is no history, only the history of emotion” (WTS, 5).

One immediately associates Phillips’s sentimental library with the emo- tional falsetto of Curtis Mayfield’s New World Order.4 Interestingly, in this civil-rights icon’s album, there is a song entitled “Here but I’m Gone” in which the chorus says “Where do I belong / And where in the world did I ever go wrong / [...] I still feel as if I’m here but I’m gone.” These lyrics are a comment on the African-American condition in the USA, while being also a source of inspiration for the writer:

Their [Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye’s] ability to transform pain into art, and to create incisive narratives that spoke to both blacks and whites with clarity and passion, excited the young writer in me. (N W O, 36) The lexical resemblance between Mayfield’s chorus and Phillips’s introduc- tion is based on two different situations, but in both cases the artist feels un- comfortable in one single place. We can imagine that it is this uneasiness that Phillips relates to in Curtis Mayfield’s song. At the same time, however, Phil- lips’s paradox – feeling at home and at the same time not belonging – can be interpreted as the freedom to move away from a given place, while being moved by it. At the conclusion of A New World Order, Phillips explains that this capacity for movement is linked to the story of his own life:

Most people live secure lives in a place that they recognise as their own. [...] But then most people did not grow up in Leeds in the sixties and seventies having to endure a daily chorus of ‘Why don’t you fuck off back to where you come from?’ (N W O, 309)

Like Phillips’s connection with Curtis Mayfield, Walcott’s metaphor of twilight heralding the end of the Empire testifies to the worldly commitment of his essays. The combination of “Says” and “Essays” in his title echoes the Caribbean word say-say, which means ‘gossip’ and reminds one of the lyrics of Bob Marley’s song, “Rat Race”: “Don’t involve Rasta in your say-say /

3 _{Patrick Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). The word Senti-}

menthèque is used throughout the book-length essay.

Rasta no work for no C.I.A.”5 Like the Jamaican singer, Walcott constantly tries to sing the archipelago without the expected lyrical tone:

What is the earthly paradise for our visitors? Two weeks without rain and a mahogany tan, and, at sunset, local troubadours in straw hats and floral shirts beating ‘Yellow Bird’ and ‘Banana Boat Song’ to death. (W T S, 81–82)

In sum, Walcott’s and Phillips’s essays explore the Caribbean philosophy of writing in relation to their emotional and environmental background.