The Haitian Trilogy

Synopsis

<b>Plays by the Nobel-laureate, brought together for the first time</b>

In the history plays that comprise <i>The Haitian Trilogy</i>--<i>Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours</i> and <i>The Haytian Earth</i>--Derek Walcott, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, uses verse to tell the story of his native West Indies as a four-hundred-year cycle of war, conquest and rebellion.

In <i>Henri Christophe</i> and <i>The Haytian Earth,</i> Walcott re-casts the legacy of Haiti's violent revolutionaries--led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe--whose rebellion established the first black state in the Americas, but whose cruelty becomes a parable of racial pride and corruption.

<i>Drums and Colours,</i> commissioned in 1958 to celebrate the first parliament in Trinidad, is a grand pageant linking the lives of complex, ambiguous heroes: Columbus and Raleigh; Toussaint; and George William Gordon, a martyr of the constitutional era.

From<i> Henri Christophe's </i>high style to the bracing vernacular of <i>The Haytian Earth,</i> to the epic scale and scope of Drums and Colours, in these plays Walcott, one of our most celebrated poets, carved a place in the modern theater for the history of the West Indies, and a sounding room for his own maturing voice.