Colonialism and Racism Theme Analysis

In Ti-Jean and His Brothers, Derek Walcott tells a fable about three young men challenged to defeat the Devil. The Devil makes a bet with the three brothers: they are to try to make him angry. If they succeed, the Devil will grant them wealth and property. If they fail, the Devil will eat them. The play is set in an unspecified place in the Caribbean, and Ti-Jean and his brothers seem to be of black, Caribbean descent. Throughout the play, Walcott characterizes the Devil as a racist (presumably white) colonizer, and the brothers as the victims of his racist oppression. In this way, he emphasizes the evils of colonialism and highlights the danger that living under and accepting these systems poses to colonized and formerly colonized peoples.

One of the Devil’s disguises is as the Planter, the owner of a large cotton and sugar cane plantation in the Caribbean, where colonial slave owners were notorious for their violence and brutality. When Ti-Jean’s brother Gros Jean goes to work for the Planter, the Planter mistreats him in ways that have both racist and colonial undertones. Gros Jean describes the plantation where he works, saying that it is “estate-like […] sugar, tobacco, and a hell of a big white house where they say the Devil lives.” Here, Walcott paints the stereotypical image of a slavery plantation. Sugar and tobacco were the most common goods to be farmed at slave plantations, and the allusion to the “big white house” or master’s house implies that the Devil is a slave master—and that Gros Jean is a slave rather than an employee. Gros Jean decides to take a smoke break, and the Devil, unhappy that Gros Jean is not being productive, manipulatively tries to get him to continue working. During this conversation, the Devil confuses Gros Jean’s name several times, calling him Charley, Hubert, and, most notably “Gros Chien.” Consistently mistaking someone’s name is, at best, a clear sign of disrespect. In this context, the Devil’s inability to distinguish Gros Jean from the other works is likely also racist, as all of the workers on the plantation are black. Finally, chien is the French word for “dog,” and so in calling Gros Jean by this name, the Devil implies that he does not fully recognize Gros Jean’s humanity. By drawing readers’ attention to the Devil’s racism, Walcott highlights the evils of the colonial system that allows white plantation owners to disregard the humanity of their black slaves.

Similarly, when Mi-Jean speaks with the Devil—who at that point is disguised as the Old Man—the Old Man frustrates Mi-Jean by comparing him to an animal. Mi-Jean gets into a debate with the Old Man about whether animals and humans are equal in intellect or not. Mi-Jean passionately defends the superiority of human beings, while the Old Man suggests that humans and animals are equally lacking in intellectual capacity. When he notices Mi-Jean is getting upset, the Old Man says, “Descendant of the ape, how eloquent you have become! How assured in logic! How marvelous in invention! And yet, poor shaving monkey, the animal in you is still in evidence…” Here, Walcott’s choice to have the Old Man refer to Mi-Jean as a monkey is an intentional reference to racist ideologies that compare black people to apes and suggest that black people have not reached the same stage of evolution as white people. Like the Planter’s interactions with Gros Jean, the way that the Old Man treats Mi-Jean has clear echoes of racist stereotypes. By painting the Devil in his various disguises as a quintessential racist—and making it clear that, under colonialism, the brothers have no way to escape his degrading treatment—Walcott indicates that racism and colonialism are every bit as evil as the Devil himself.

For both Mi-Jean and Gros Jean, the Devil’s racism is what leads to their deaths: Mi-Jean becomes upset that the Old Man implies that he is equal to an ape, and, in getting angry, loses the bet with the Devil. Similarly, Gros Jean becomes upset with the Planter for various reasons, one of which is the fact that the Planter’s racism prevents him from remembering Gros Jean’s name. Through the brothers’ fates, Walcott casts racism and colonialism as systems that literally endanger the lives of black Caribbean peoples. By drawing readers’ attention to the Devil’s racism, and by positioning the Devil as a colonizer in the Caribbean, Walcott emphasizes the evils of racism and colonialism.