GC Library Saint Lucia
The Patricia Ismond Collection focuses on the Caribbean phase of Sir Derek Walcott’s poetry and the poet’s artistic genius and contribution to the articulation of a Caribbean national culture and identity and the use of folk idiom in the nobel laureates works, in the post colonial independence scene in the Caribbean. Its research significance in Caribbean liberation, national culture, identity and self definition allows students, researchers, playwrights and cultural activists both locally and internationally to investigate and explore the extent to which Walcott’s plays and poetry present the post independence scene and its increasingly more pressing political and social contexts in the post independence period. The collection dives into Walcott’s reality of political individualism amongst the island nations and the literatures of the individual islands of the Caribbean as opposed to West Indian nationalism in its earliest beginnings. Dr. Ismond seeks to portray how Sir Derek’s Walcott and other Saint Lucian authors such as Garth St. Omer’s works emerges a graphic portrait of Saint Lucian society and its setting which is stamped with its own variety of the colonial condition. Her works also seek to show factors such as poverty and religion in the Saint Lucian and West Indian literature which to a large extent, determined and defined the reality of Saint Lucia in colonial times.
GC Library Saint Lucia
The Roderick Walcott Collection focuses on the development of literary and performing arts in Saint Lucia during the 1940’s and the inception of indigenous and modern Caribbean theatre in comparison to the colonial influences in the art form that had existed. This collection contains photographs of local productions, playbills, interviews with some of the cast of his productions, correspondence corroborating with various cast members of his productions, a scrapbook on the Saint Lucia Arts Guild as well as actual plays written by the author. Its research significance in arts and culture allows students, researchers, playwrights, musicians and cultural activists both locally and internationally to return time and again to investigate one of the earliest records of indigenous theatre directions in the Eastern Caribbean, including local flower festivals, such as Chanson Marianne (1974) and Romiel et Violette (1979). These plays featured the local flower festivals of La Rose and La Marguerite and classic local folk songs which feature in the authors works in collaboration with Charles Cadet.
