Son of both the Anglo-European and the Afro-Caribbean heritage, Derek Walcott has conducted a lifelong struggle to integrate

the divided self engendered by the duality of his legacy. Walcotts life is swinging between two lives. He is constantly torn between choice and disapproval. It is the identity crisis of a modern man who is reared up in a context where two cultures, histories religions, languages assimilate together and he cannot swallow one or leave out another. Postcolonial writers like Walcott have to engage themselves in search of identity and in the assimilation of varied cultures. The sense of being divided has sprung from several factors of his background and own experience. The four major factors that can be traced are-

1. Walcott is a mulatto. In What the Twilight Says, he refers to the Caribbean self as a mongrel of Africanness and Britishness, as he says-Mongrel as I am, neither proud nor ashamed bastard, this hybrid, this West Indian (10).This is problematic. There is always a confusion which side he belongs to. This is also a political problem for mulatto. Neither of the party accepts them.

2. He is black and comes from a poor family. The hierarchical social structure of colonial St. Lucia separated him from most of his peers because of his class and color. 3. He grew up with the clash of two religions. Most of the society he lived in was Catholic and he himself was Methodist. 4. Walcotts family used English as their everyday language whereas the common language of the society was Patwa-a French Creole. Walcott knows this language but it was not the language of his identity.