“Crossing the white river”: otherness decolonized in derek walcott’s the fortunate traveller

Resumo

 The broad topic of this study is the deconstruction of image into poetry in Derek Walcott‟s poem “The Fortunate Traveller” (Selected Poems, 2007) taking into consideration its imagery as the promoter of a glimpse into post-colonized otherness. The poetic devices applied by the poet makes him a craftsman of the word, shaping the language to sophisticated levels of combination, yelping vowel after vowel to portray the scenario in which each theme cares to be a color in the imagery of his poems. That taken into account, Walcott‟s usage of images cannot be taken for granted whatsoever since their ambivalent plus meaningful features are symptomatic of his venture when endeavoring to problematize readers‟ preconceived portraits of Caribbean consciousness. As an attempt to show these representations under a postcolonial perspective of otherness, ambivalence, and decentralization as a compact oeuvre one must speaks about postcolonialism. The hegemonic lens offered as to (re)bring the seer closer to what he/she is eager to see only seems to increase the distance between the colonized and the colonizer, at the same time that it succeeds in promoting a diplomatic separateness of being.