Summary
Ti-Jean and His Brothers opens with a divided stage. On the left half of the stage, Mother sits in front of an empty bowl in a hut. On the right side of the stage, a cricket, frog, firefly, and bird are talking amongst themselves. The cricket looks up at the night sky and begins to tell the story of Ti-Jean, whose image appears on the surface of the moon.
The frog continues the story by describing the image of Ti-Jean. He is a man bent over under the weight of a bundle of wood he carries on his back, walking with a small dog. The frog explains that Ti-Jean was lifted up to the moon because he beat the Devil. As he continues to tell the story, the relevant characters begin appearing on stage. He describes Ti-Jean’s eldest brother Gros Jean, who was strong but stupid, as well as Mi-Jean, the middle brother who only cared about book-learning.
The three brothers shared a very poor mother. Their father was already dead, and their mother struggled to feed them and keep them warm. She happened to live near the Devil. When the frog reaches this part of the story, the Devil appears on stage, along with his demon minions. The most horrifying of these is the “Bolom,” a hideous creature that looks like a massive fetus.
While these devils dance outside, the Jean brothers are arguing. Gros Jean was unable to find dry wood for a fire, while Mi-Jean cannot figure out how to fish, as he is too caught up in intellectual riddles to get to work. Meanwhile, Ti-Jean has done nothing all day, and both of his older brothers jeer at him. Their mother tries to get them to stop fighting, and to trust that God will help them, but the brothers believe God has forgotten them.
Suddenly, they hear the sound of a child crying—the Bolom. The mother recognizes it as one of the Devil’s followers, and she asks it what it wants. The Bolom declares that she must send out her eldest son to speak with it, because he is the one who will die first. The Bolom describes itself as unborn, a creature who has never known mortality because it has never known life.
It speaks about its mother as a woman who hated it, suggesting that the fetus was aborted. To it, its mother and the mother of the three Jean brothers are the same person. Gros Jean wants to try to kill the Bolom with his strength, and Mi-Jean wants to out-reason it, but Mother knows both of these approaches are useless. Instead, she lets it into her house.
There, the Bolom tells her that its master the Devil “is dying to be human” and that he is therefore sending a challenge to her sons. The Devil declares that he will reward any one of her sons who is able to provoke “anger, rage, and human weakness” with wealth, power, and peace. However, if any of the sons fail, the Devil will eat them. After the Bolom has delivered his message, he leaves the house. The prologue ends with the devils singing a chilling song, “One, two, three little children!/Give the devil a child for dinner,/One,/two,/three . . .)” before the stage fades to black.
Analysis
In Ti-Jean and His Brothers, Derek Walcott is drawing on several traditions. The opening conversation between the animals immediately suggests folk storytelling. You might be most familiar with Aesop’s fables, but Walcott is probably also thinking about Caribbean and West African stories in which animals speak to one another. In Aesop’s fables, animals are anthropomorphized, or made to act like human beings. In Ti-Jean and His Brothers, the relationship between animals and humanity is more ambiguous.
The play opens with a frog and a cricket creaking and croaking, sounds associated with their identity as animals. However, the two species make the same strange sound, which muddles the boundary between them: Walcott depicts frog and cricket more as members of a universal animal category than as individual representatives of specific species. When the animals switch to English, their speech continues to challenge any attempt to confine them to one stable identity. On the one hand, the animals speak in non-standard English, as when the cricket begins his story by saying, “The moon always there even fighting the rain.” However, the animals are also portrayed as extremely learned, with the frog calling out “Aeschlyus me!” at the beginning of play, an exclamation that alludes to the Greek playwright often credited with the creation of tragedy. By combining non-standard English with classical allusion, Walcott challenges the idea that adhering to standard syntax is a mark of intelligence.
The non-standard syntax of the characters in Ti-Jean and His Brothers is an example of “patois,” or a regional dialect that varies from the standard form of a language. Often, patois is spoken by colonized people, while the standard form of a language is spoken by the colonizer. When Walcott introduces the play’s human characters, they speak in the same patois as the animals. By beginning with animals speaking in non-standard English, Walcott allows the audience to assume that this might be a trait unique to them. However, the play quickly establishes that this mode of speech is the default for the play, rather than an exceptional trait of some beings. This suggests a few different themes, First, it foreshadows the play's larger concern with intelligence as a quality that is important, but that cannot be easily assessed through someone’s immersion in standard Western metrics for knowledge, like books. Second, by having the animals and the Jean brothers speak the same patois, Walcott begins to challenge the absolute dichotomy between humans and animals.
Besides folktales, the other important context for Ti-Jean and His Brothers is medieval morality plays. In these plays from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, the main character is a generic human being whose journey represents the struggles and victories of all of mankind. Walcott emphasizes Ti-Jean’s status as an ordinary person by contrasting him against a stronger and a more clever brother, who would both be more stereotypical choices for a hero. The arrival of the Devil on stage further emphasizes this reference point, because medieval morality plays were highly Christian works in which the Devil often played an important role as an antagonist. However, the play deviates from this tradition because Ti-Jean is much more powerful than his medieval counterparts. The challenge the Devil offers is directed at the other human characters in the story, who are asked to rely on their own wits to guide them in their conflict. Rather than relying on Christ, Ti-Jean and His Brothers must rely on themselves to avoid death.
Death itself is another central theme introduced in the prologue. The Bolom is described as a fetus, an unborn creature that has never known mortality. It is contrasted against the Jean family, who live and will one day die. Walcott suggests that life and death are two sides of the same coin, and hence that all aspects of life, from love and laughter to anger and fear, are inextricable from the inevitability of death. Conversely, the Devil’s wish to feel something hinges on his identity as immortal: to laugh will destroy him, because to laugh is part of mortality, just like dying is.
