Daily Inspiration Quote by Derek Walcott

Walcott is quietly detonating the idea that English comes with a deed and a gatekeeper. From a Caribbean playwright who built a career inside the language of empire, the line isn’t an abstract defense of “sharing.” It’s a refusal of linguistic landlordism: the notion that the British (or any prestige center) get to police what counts as “proper” English, and by extension, whose stories deserve the biggest stage.

The pivot is the sly escalation: “nobody’s special property” becomes “the property of the imagination,” then finally “the property of the language itself.” That progression moves authority away from nation and class and toward creative use. Walcott’s subtext is that English survives by being stolen, bent, mispronounced, hybridized. The language doesn’t degrade when it migrates; it proves its fitness. His claim also flips the colonial script. If the colonized were told they spoke a borrowed tongue, Walcott answers that the tongue is the borrower, living off the imaginations that keep renewing it.

Context matters: postcolonial writers often face a double bind - criticized for writing in English, then scrutinized for not writing it “well.” Walcott turns that bind into leverage. By treating English as self-owning, he reframes legitimacy: not awarded by Oxford or the BBC, but earned in the act of making. The sentence is a passport stamped by poetry, arguing that the truest citizenship in a language is creative possession, not ancestral entitlement.