Superiority and Inferiority in "Crusoe's Journal"

out of such timbers

came our first book, our profane Genesis

whose Adam speaks that prose

which, blessing some sea-rock, startles itself

with poetry’s surprise,

in a green world, one without metaphors;

like Christofer he hears

in speech

mnemonic as a missionary’s

the World to savages,

its shape an earthen, water-bearing vessel’s

whose sprinkling alters us

into Good Fridays who recite His praise,

parroting our master’s

style and voice, we make his language ours,

converted cannibals

we learn to eat the flesh of Christ.

(Walcott 92 – 93)

            In this section of Derek Walcott’s poem Crusoe’s Journal, we can see Crusoe’s attempt at rebuilding a world he remembers, the British Empire, at the expense of the new world he shipwrecked upon. This section emphasizes the importance of the Empire’s primary religion to Crusoe, which he uses and compares himself to Adam in this new environment. This indicates a kind of arrogance when one calls himself a Biblical character while using it to claim or conquer new lands. His comparison to an important Biblical character can be seen as a reflection of the British Empire colonizing other nations with a superior attitude, as if they thought themselves better and wished to help those that appeared inferior. This goes further when he becomes like a missionary to the cannibals of his island. While the lines “whose sprinkling alters us / into Good Fridays who recite His praise, / parroting our master’s / style and voice, we make his language ours” can be read as a simple praise of God, it also indicates the gradual conversion of the natives to the religion of the British Empire, Christianity. Since Friday was the name given to a captured native by Crusoe, it brings the context of assimilation into play. The line reads “…alters us / into Good Fridays…” which indicates the binary that before this religion he was a bad, a kind of situation where the colonizer (Crusoe) attempts to implant the thoughts that he (Friday) is inferior and need Crusoe and his Empire in order to become “good” (Walcott 93). Therefore, we can see both the air of superiority and the implanting of feelings of inferiority in the natives in the poem about the life of Robinson Crusoe shipwrecked on his island.

Works Cited

Walcott, Derek. “Crusoe’s Journal.” Collected Poems: 1948 – 1984. New York: Farrar, Strans &

            Groux, 1999.