McDonald Dixon, one of the most prolific and multi-talented figures in the Caribbean artistic world, celebrated his 70th birthday last week in his birthplace of St Lucia. To mark a lifetime’s achievement, The Missing Slate’s poetry editor Jamie Osborn talked to McDonald Dixon about his inspirations, his connections with his home, his understanding of nature, and his vision for the future.
To start with what might be called your roots, your inspirations – a lot of your work draws on nature and the landscapes of the Caribbean, and even when your poems are set in the past in other countries, there is still an intense evocation of the physical environment (for example your poem “Ancestors” traces the journeys of your Irish, Indian and African ancestors through the clay “that was once my flesh”). How do you see your relation, and art’s relation, to nature? In your poem “Beloved Country”, you imply that nature itself speaks through poetry: “This conch will blare across the land in verse.” Is nature an artist itself?
My roots are diverse. First, my mother’s father was a Barbadian sign painter, and her mother was Saint Lucian. My father was born on the Balmain Estate at Couva in Trinidad, the son of an Indian mother, Ramdoularie (“Beloved of God”), and an Irish father, George Dixon. Already you can spot the complexities. Which do I choose? I am an amalgam. Genuine West Indian.
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