Quote by Derek Walcott: “The sea is history.”

For Caribbean people, the ocean is not a backdrop — it is the site of the Middle Passage, of arrival, of everything that came before written records. Walcott declares that the history of a people exists in the world itself, not only in books and archives.

Walcott published 'The Sea Is History' in 1979, during a period when Caribbean scholars and artists were actively constructing new frameworks for understanding their region's past outside European historiography. The poem invokes the ocean as an archive of the unnamed dead of the Middle Passage.

Saint Lucian poet and playwright who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. His work explored Caribbean identity, the colonial legacy, and the relationship between European and African cultures, with his epic poem Omeros considered his masterpiece.