Postcolonial Odysseys : Derek Walcott’s Voyages of Homecoming [1 ed.] 9781443830133, 9781443828420

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Postcolonial Odysseys

Postcolonial Odysseys: Derek Walcott’s Voyages of Homecoming

By

Maeve Tynan

Postcolonial Odysseys: Derek Walcott’s Voyages of Homecoming, by Maeve Tynan This book first published 2011 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2011 by Maeve Tynan All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-2842-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2842-0

To my parents, Maeve and Greg, for getting me this far. And to my husband David for the voyages to come.

In maps the Caribbean dreams of the Aegean, and the Aegean of reversible seas —Derek Walcott

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... xi Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii Part I: The Craft Chapter One................................................................................................. 3 The Siren Song of History Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 29 The Mythopoiec Craft Part II: The Voyage Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 61 Postcolonial Modernisms Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 89 Encircling Reversible Worlds Part III: The Return Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 117 Rites of Passage Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 145 Voyages of Homecoming Conclusion............................................................................................... 167 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 171 Index........................................................................................................ 181

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is with deep gratitude that I acknowledge the unwavering support of the Mary Immaculate College Head of Department, Eugene O’Brien. In his capacity as supervisor and colleague, his enthusiasm and constructive counsel have proved invaluable over the years. I also wish to express thanks to Mary Immaculate College for the research backing that made this and other research projects possible. Finally, special thanks are due to Maria Cristina Fumagalli for her insightful commentary on the project.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover Illustration: Romare Bearden The Return of Odysseus: Homage to Pintoricchio and Benin1 Figure 3-1: Front cover of Derek Walcott’s The Star-Apple Kingdom Figure 3-2: Romare Bearden Battle with Cicones Figure 3-3: Romare Bearden The Return of Odysseus: Homage to Pinturicchio and Benin Figure 3-4: Pinturicchio Penelope with the Suitors

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Bernardino di Betto (1454-1513) was an Italian Renaissance painter commonly known as Pintoricchio or Pinturicchio.

INTRODUCTION

One of the first things we notice about Romare Bearden’s collage The Return of Odysseus, which provides the cover illustration, is the flat plane of turquoise water that melts without distinction into the sky, only to reappear on the clothing of Penelope and her Suitors, as well as on a scarf around the neck of the returning Odysseus, standing in the doorway. The effect of this pure, clear luxury of colour leaves a trace on the mind after the eye has wandered from the object in question, namely an immersion in sea blue. The role of the sea in the Caribbean imagination cannot be overstated. Existence in the archipelago seems to be at all times defined by the perpetual ebb and flow of tides, lived to the rhythm of its crashing breakers. Theorists such as Antonio Benítez-Rojo describe a Caribbean culture that is “not terrestrial but aquatic” being a “realm of marine currents, of waves, of folds and double-folds, of fluidity and sinuosity” (Benítez-Rojo, 1996, 11); for J. Michael Dash the Caribbean Sea provides a metaphor for the region’s transformative nature, representing an “unstable medium beyond the fixing power of any discourse” (Dash, 1998, 29). Poet Frank Collymore expresses the oceanic imperative by which he “must always be remembering the sea, / Being always cognizant of her presence […] Always, always the encircling sea” (Collymore, 2005, 10). Dwarfing the achievements of man, the passing of empires and epochs, the boundless waves are a constant reminder of human insignificance in the wake of the unceasing elemental. It is perhaps unsurprising that in writing his acclaimed narrative poem Omeros (which adheres to the genre of epic in that it is concerned with the fate of a nation or race), Walcott would eschew political and geographical boundaries for a regional perspective achieved through the unifying medium of the blue Caribbean basin, “I sang our country, the wide Caribbean sea” (Walcott, 1990, 320). The trope of the sea in Walcott’s poetics operates as a polyvalent figure. He reads the sea as a repository of the past, the swash and backwash of recurrent tides bearing witness to the continual inscription and erasure of time and thus possessive of atemporality; it is a palimpsestic record in which successive ages are contained. A blank canvas on which everything or nothing can be read, the sea for Walcott is a shifting narrative that resists the fixing impetus of North Atlantic historiography, a concept reaching fullest realization in the poem “The Sea

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is History.” For the writer living on a small island this continual sea presence can promote a feeling of provincialism, of being “castaway” on “islands [that] have drifted from anchorage,” far from the metropolitan centres of publishing houses and readerships (Walcott, 1964, 12). Walcott enlists his own awareness of marginality to point to the paradoxical provincialism of the centre, invoking the natural world to highlight the limitations and transience of human civilizations; in “Ruins of a Great House,” the crumbling plantation house becomes a metaphor for the transience of colonial conquest, which is just another layer in the strata of the archipelago’s past. Radical shifts in scale perception balance the poet’s conception of his own native St. Lucia, situated on the island bridge between North and South America, as being but one of “[a]s many islands as the stars at night” with the attendant appreciation of “this earth [a]s one/ island in archipelagoes of stars” (Walcott, 1979a, 19/20). The inhabitants of the Caribbean archipelago are a diaspora population, displaced by colonialism; musings on sea-crossings therefore highlight the multiple vectors of Caribbean identity, which conjoins several horizons. The virtual eradication of the indigenous Amerindian peoples as a corollary of European colonisation, coupled with the enforced migration of African slaves and indentured servants from Asia, led to the creation of a population of displaced individuals where everybody came from somewhere else. Writers of the region express how the sea operates as a point of connection and separation, a medium by which to retrace diasporic routes and a line of severance whose hyphenating function results in the creation of the divided selfhood of Jean Rhys’ Creole, Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s Afro-Caribbean, and V.S. Naipaul’s EastIndian West-Indian, among others. Walcott’s writings, like much postcolonial literature, proliferate with voyages, both real and imagined, by which the colonial subject rehearses the trauma of arrival, the loss of a culture of origin and explores the (im)possibility of reconnection. The poet’s expresses a view of division or inbetweeness as providing the paradigm of Caribbean identitarian construction; his own mixed racial heritage links him to Africa, England and Holland, routes that significantly, are all retraced by characters in the long narrative poem Omeros. Though instructive, these outward voyages refute the possibility of return to pre-colonial roots and result in a further grounding or “rooting” of characters in the new homeland. Thus, the outbound journey in Walcott’s poetics traces a circular route that is simultaneously a form of homecoming. Advocating a strategic amnesia of the past, Walcott conceives of the Caribbean subject as a “castaway” figure, shipwrecked in the after-

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shock of the imperial venture, who must learn to rebuild a satisfying cultural home out of the debris of the past, washed up on alien shores. Yet homecoming can never be a straightforward concept due to the transformative nature of the voyage; the figure who returns is never quite the same as the one that set out. The homeland too is prone to alteration in the interim, a fact of which Walcott is only too aware; the strain of absence creating a gulf between the writer and the archipelago he seeks to celebrate in his art. Walcott’s conception of a Caribbean identity is thus unfixed, existing in a state of perpetual motion and transformation. The evolution of his engagement with the figure of the wanderer, both for the poet-persona that inhabits much of Walcott’s verse, and the characters that populate the poems addressed in this thesis, marks a growing acceptance of this drifting subjectivity. In his poetry Walcott moves from a stylized exilic condition of being “Ulysses without shipmates” (Walcott, 1949, 41) to a “fortunate traveller” (Walcott, 1980a, 11) who could recognize that “[t]he sea was my privilege” (Walcott, 1990, 295). Acclimatizing to a settlement in unsettlement, the poet seeks out of the natural world creatures of a common migratory nature. The wandering Odysseus in Walcott’s s stage adaptation of Homer’s epic poem is repeatedly compared to a sea-turtle and a crab for instance, sea creatures that carry their homes on their backs. The sea-voyager finds its complement in the sky traveller, Walcott exploiting the semantic capability of the word “flight” to denote both passage and escape, as evidenced in his combination of both voyage and flight in the name of the vessel the “Schooner Flight”. Similarly the seaswift in Omeros acts as a transatlantic guide overseeing all other odysseys in the poem. Representing an exemplary hybrid, the swift ties together the disparate strands of the region’s cultural identity in her circular migration across east-west meridians. Walcott’s rich allusiveness draws migratory characters from literary texts to supplement his motley crew, ranging from Odysseus and Robinson Crusoe to Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Significantly the autobiographical impulse of his own work, which sees the frequent deployment of the poet-persona within his verse, render him just as likely to cast the creators of these fictive characters as characters in his longer poems; thus Homer makes an appearance in Omeros as a creolized wanderer, and Joyce in the same poem is spotted in a pub by the Liffey. As the poet-persona could sing along with Omeros in praise of his island, “[b]ut I could not before him,” so Joyce sings to the piano accompaniment of Maud Plunkett, one of Walcott’s own creations, the point being that if Walcott does at times take his cue from others, he reserves the right to

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change the tune (Walcott, 1990, 286). It is perhaps unsurprising then, given Walcott’s preoccupation with voyaging and homecoming, supplemented by his highly intertextual poetic mode, that the figure of Odysseus, the archetypal seafarer and master of disguise who divides his time between seeking adventure in distant lands and a yearning for nostos, has spanned almost five decades of his career. This study provides an investigation of Walcott’s engagements with the Ithacan king in his recognizable and submerged permutations from his early poems right up to his stage adaptation of The Odyssey. Walcott’s engagement with Greek myth is multifaceted, evolving over time and reaching its apogee with the publication of Omeros in 1990, a poem which re-instated the epic poet with his name in modern Greek: “Omeros,” a strategy that simultaneously attested to the cultural specificity of Homer and his continuing relevance in the modern world. A brief glance at the titles of Homer’s The Odyssey, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Walcott’s Omeros shows a shifting focus from the first as an adventure tale, to the second as an account of a man, to the third as an examination of the writer and writing, an observation supported by Walcott’s insertion of the poet-persona as a prominent character within the text. Walcott’s verse drama adaptation of The Odyssey, while remaining largely true to the original epic narrative, also deviates on a few minor points. One of the more significant is Homer’s account of Menelaus wrestling the Old Man of the Sea, Proteus; another is his casting doubt as to the veracity of Odysseus’ tales, “[m]onsters […] We make them ourselves” (Walcott, 1993, 159/160). Walcott’s version substitutes Menelaus with Odysseus wrestling the shape-shifting God, thus highlighting the centrality of the trope of transformation in the narrative; his undermining of Odysseus’ heroic status through the introduction of doubt shifts the focus of Homeric verse from glorious deeds and battles to the theme of storytelling in general. Yet these themes were always themselves present in Homeric verse; in this regard, what Walcott’s adaptations and appropriations highlight is the reciprocal nature of literary inheritance. Repudiating the Bloomian paradigm of an Oedipal struggle between the writer and his literary predecessor, Walcott’s allusions dismantle dominant theories of influence and originality. His poetics attest to the fluidity and contingency of the original oral narrative through newly imagined reversible odysseys, “[i]n maps the Caribbean dreams/ of the Aegean, and the Aegean of reversible seas” (Walcott, 1997a, 62). Walcott’s appropriations, therefore are non-adversarial in contradistinction to many postcolonial rewritings, adopting instead an à la carte approach to cultural borrowings.

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The rupture of the Middle Passage crossing severed links to Old World traditions for the colonial subject, leading to an enforced engagement with the culture of the coloniser. A culture created from the fragments of others, cultural production in the archipelago is frequently read as a form of mimicry. Walcott’s penchant for assimilation would be problematic for the colonial writer, leading as it did to many critical assumptions that he was at heart a Eurocentric writer. Employing the trope of the meridian as a central figure of his poetics, Walcott dismantles assumed binaries of Old World originality and New World imitation to encourage a more dialogic interaction on a non-hierarchical plane. Acknowledging New World mimicry, he does not concede Old World originality and it is this reservation which justifies his poetic appropriations. In the Caribbean the lack of a single cultural tradition to draw upon legitimizes the poet’s claim to all the cultures of the region. In his assimilations, the poet’s preferences for other well-known European borrowers, such as Shakespeare, Eliot and Joyce itself provides a critique of the notion of European originality. However, although openly acknowledging Caribbean non-originality, he maintains that as a writer, “you build according to the topography of where you live” (Walcott, 1974a, 56). That is, though allusive his work is distinctly Caribbean. These appropriations from European culture are not free of colonial anxiety: in the poem “Greece,” the poet hurls the burdensome body of Greek literature off a cliff and stabs the “old Greek bull” (Walcott, 1980b, 36) with an indigenous plant, while in Omeros the poet-persona systematically dismantles all the Greek parallels painstakingly erected in the first two-thirds of the narrative, dismissing them as “[a]ll that Greek manure under the green bananas” (Walcott, 1990, 271). Yet the Mediterranean is also an enabling resource, symbolizing a productive meeting point of various cultures. Reimagining Homer as a “poet of the Seven Seas” rather than a sacred literary primogenitor, he reinvents the Greek bard as Omeros, a creolized wanderer ripe for transformation (Bruckner, 1997, 396). The fluidity of Omeros is attested to in his conflation with the Caribbean character Seven Seas, who memorably metamorphosise back and forth into one other. That Walcott reads Omeros as a mirror to his created character Odysseus, both being cast as storyteller-wanderers, emphasizes Walcott’s own investment in both figures. To the extent that Walcott replaces the storyteller wanderer with the migrant writer through the stratagem of making them interchangeable, the implication is that the poet-persona also becomes an Odysseus. So much ink has already been devoted to the explication of Walcott’s poetics that it becomes a daunting task to justify a new addition to the

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growing canon. Through single author and single work studies, comparative analyses, essay collections, alongside collections of interviews with the writer and the publication of his own critical essays, the ground traversed is certainly well covered. It is necessary therefore to place this book in context of what has gone before. Early publications tended to rely heavily on identitarian modes of reading Walcott’s writing. Two main approaches emerged: one side emphasised the poet’s self-conception as a figure “divided to the vein” between Europe and Africa, the other asserted that his mixed heritage led to a composite identity, wide enough to house the various strands of the poet’s identity (Walcott, 1962a, 18). The former reading is inevitable, given that the theme of division resounds heavily through Walcott’s work, encouraging this emphasis on internal bifurcation; in the critical essay “What the Twilight Says” Walcott conceives of himself as a “neither proud nor ashamed bastard, this hybrid, this West Indian” (Walcott, 1970a, 9). Moreover the allusiveness of Walcott’s writing has lead to it being read against that of Edward Kamau Brathwaite on the assumption that Walcott’s assimilation of European culture lends itself to Eurocentrism, while the centrality of Africa to Brathwaite’s construction of Caribbean identity articulates an Afrocentric perspective; on a crude level the choice between Walcott and Brathwaite has been cast as a choice between Europe and Africa. More recent publications have eschewed such simplistic readings; Ismond (1997), Bobb (1998), and Pollard (2004) forwarding instead the complementarity of their writing agendas, despite differing focal points. Bobb, for instance, reads the “task of each poet becomes the rewriting of history, a kind of cultural mythmaking” (Bobb, 1998, 11). In this reading, a ruptured past leads to attempts to construct an integrated Caribbean identity. Efforts to resist external definitions for the West Indian poet emphasise his commitment to expressing the Caribbean in his art. Ismond’s Abandoning Dead Metaphors: the Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott’s Poetry criticises the underrepresentation of the Caribbean context in Walcott’s work. Refuting Eurocentric readings of Walcott, Ismond interprets his allusiveness instead as a subversive counter-discourse to the European tradition. For her the Caribbean of Walcott’s early work is “the place where he pursues the revolutionary effort native to his purpose as a writer of colonial origins, to arrive at the maturity of definitions of self and identity” (Ismond, 2001, 2). Other publications prefer to present the poet as a unified Caribbean figure, the fault lines of his identity being a natural off-shoot of colonialism in the region that lead to a layering of perspectives rather than a fragmentation of identity. Thieme’s Derek Walcott and Breslin’s Nobody or a Nation: Reading Derek Walcott

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advance the view that Walcott promoted a “cross-cultural – as opposed to Afrocentric or Eurocentric – reading of Caribbean” (Thieme, 1999, 1), with the “evasion of defined identity [representing] a deliberate strategy” (Breslin, 2001, 1). Such readings are worthwhile in their recognition that either/or identitarian construction paradigms are overly simplistic in a Caribbean context. Another trend in Walcott scholarship focuses on the assimilative nature of his writing, independent of questions of identity construction. Commenting on the broad allusiveness of Walcott’s work, Terada’s reading of Walcott Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry examines Walcott’s poetry through the lens of postmodern theory. Terada suggests that “[i]f Walcott did not exist, theorists of influence would have to invent him” noting that his poetry reveals the “limitations of popular assumptions about influence” (Terada, 1992, 42/3). Terada’s insight is useful in that it highlights that Walcott does not merely incorporate various cultural resources in his work, but that his poetry, as well as his critical work, represents a direct challenge to outmoded models of literary influence. Attempts to place Walcott’s work in relation to that of his contemporaries have also fruitfully placed his allusiveness within a broader perspective; indeed, some of the more productive studies of Walcott in the last number of years have examined issues of influence in a comparative context. Maria Cristina Fumagalli’s The Flight of the Vernaular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and the Impress of Dante and Charles W. Pollard’s New World Modernisms: T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite explore the dialogue that two contemporary poets enter into with their literary predecessors. Such studies are instructive in that they suggest that the assimilation of colonial culture is inevitable, rather than exceptional, in a postcolonial context. Pollard’s study is additionally valuable in placing Caribbean creolization within the context of European modernism, suggesting that the issue is not a case of colonial culture being dependent on metropolitan frames of reference, but that the dependence on external cultural resources is common to both. In this sense Walcott exemplifies the ideal artist of T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in that he has the “historical sense” that compels him to write as if the “whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence” (Eliot, 1972, 72). Walcott’s well-documented quarrel with official History can best be understood as a rejection of the concept of linear time in preference for an atemporal universe, a simultaneity of experience that renders tags of “originality” and “mimicry” spurious, thus “Joyce is a contemporary of Homer (which

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Joyce knew)” (Walcott, 1997b, 241). Walcott’s insistence on the reciprocal nature of literary inheritance further echoes Eliot’s views that: what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them (Eliot, 1972, 72).

Reading Walcott in terms of European modernism therefore effectively collapses the prejudicial opposition between Old World originality and New World mimicry propagated by colonial discourses. Many studies of Walcott’s poetry have pointed to the importance of Homer’s The Odyssey in Walcott’s writing, yet surprisingly, no full length study of this topic exists; the analysis provided in these pages seeks to fill that critical lacuna. This book examines the trope of voyaging in Derek Walcott’s poetics, particularly as it pertains to the poet’s engagement with classical verse. Focusing specifically on the poet’s engagement with Homeric myth, and The Odyssey in particular, it articulates the manner in which Walcott’s postcolonial reconfigurations of epic verse both highlight the endurance of the classics as well as demonstrating how cultural practices can remake and transform ancient texts. Concomitant with the poet’s presentation of self as divided, this study traces opposing forces in operation within this trope: a centrifugal force that corresponds to the outward journey away from his island home in search of greater publishing opportunities and broader readerships, and a centripetal force corresponding to the return journey, or homecoming. If the outward journey represents an anxiety of betrayal or infidelity to the island home, the return is rendered equally problematic. The journeys represented in Walcott’s verse, though frequently incomplete, are circular in nature. For Walcott, the voyage trope belies the possibility of stasis, the person returning never being fully identical with the person who set out; the voyage therefore represents a process of continual transformation, with the final destination being the point of embarkation. The enabling potential of Greek myth is marked by a similar to-ing and fro-ing in Walcott’s verse as he repeatedly engages with, and simultaneously disavows, Homeric configurations. Although betraying the anxiety of adopting the literature and culture of the coloniser, Walcott insists on the reciprocal nature of poetic appropriation, the act of rewriting also signalling new ways of rereading, thus effectively altering the reception of the source text; looking to Walcott’s verse prepares us to read Homer anew. Readers of Walcott can thus identify The Odyssey as a key text upon

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which to consider the Caribbean writer’s preoccupation with issues of identity formation, originality and colonial history. Further depth is provided by the mediating influence of James Joyce, whose engagement with Homeric verse also registered the anxieties of the colonial writer, and manifested a commitment to the quotidian. Romare Bearden’s collection The Odysseus Series further reinforced the poet’s belief that in addressing the particular an artist is provided with a means to articulate the universal. Given that these case studies transgress generic and artistic boundaries, this study is interdisciplinary and inter-artistic in nature. As such, it interrogates the perceived exclusivity of poetry and prose, and of literary and artistic disciplines. Highlighting the permeability of such boundaries, it investigates the journey of Odysseus, as prototypical wanderer, through time and space, from oral to print culture, from word to image. Chapter One examines Walcott’s hostility towards North Atlantic historiography, as expressed in his poetry and in his critical essays. Exploring the paralysing effects of historical rupture in a colonial context allows for a greater understanding of Walcott’s evolving relationship to his African cultural heritage and to his complex feelings towards his European linguistic and literary inheritance. From the early stages of his career, Walcott’s assimilation of European cultural resources and his insistence that the umbilical link to Africa had been severed by the Middle Passage, fed the critical assumption that he favoured one aspect of his mixed heritage over the other. Yet the Manichean logic of these readings fails to appreciate the more nuanced relationship the poet maintains with both strands of his ancestral bequest. If Walcott’s African inheritance is characterised in terms of traumatic loss, it is also read in terms of a surviving communal consciousness; his European ancestry is read in similarly ambivalent terms in references to “ancestral murderers and poets” (Walcott, 1962a, 19). Refusing to be defined by historical rupture, Walcott advocates a palimpsestic reading of the Caribbean as a blue basin in which the pebbles of islands are constantly washed clean, a continuous process of erasure and re-inscription. As a writer who staunchly abrogates the importance of historical discourse, yet constructs his poetics as an ongoing and developing response to it, Walcott’s quarrel with history represents one of the generative knots of tension around which the disparate threads of his critical and imaginative writing gathers. The second chapter develops this reading of Walcott’s response towards cultural inheritance through an analysis of his views on mimicry. Developing a concept of mimicry that closely aligns it to current theories of creolization allows the poet to vigorously respond to detrimental colonial discourses which maintain that New World cultures are

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necessarily derivative. A reading of Walcott’s “castaway poems” documents the early stages of the odyssean wanderer figure in his work. If early formulations read the West Indian writer as shipwrecked by history and castaway on foreign shores, the development of this figure will see the castaway gathering the necessary materials to build a raft. Gradually, the figure of Crusoe cedes to Odysseus in terms of a frequency of allusions. The mutability of the Crusoe/Odysseus figurations point to the broader project of the poet’s writings on mimicry, which is to free poetic allusiveness from the taint of colonial theft; Walcott’s mimicry repudiates notions of cultural trespass in order to claim the diverse cultures of the Caribbean as a natural legacy. No longer bound to terrestrial coordinates, the poet cultivates a dynamic relationship between roots/ routes, voyaging/ homecoming and migration/settlement in his work. Advancing a view that it is only through disciplined endeavour that the apprentice becomes a master, Walcott strategically defies a position of servitude in relation to the English literary canon. Armed with the necessary skills to combat his shipwrecked condition, the craftsman castaway is able to launch his metapoetic craft and steer his vessel through unknown waters. Chapter Three examines the postcolonial afterlife of European modernism. Although modernism and postcolonialism are commonly read as opposing discourses, this chapter puts forward the argument that many postcolonial artists find in the cross-cultural poetics of modernism an enabling precedent for cultural creolization. Though, as postcolonial critics are quick to assert, modernist primitivism and exoticism are, as objectifying discourses, fundamentally opposed to liberatory agendas, many postcolonial artists are content to adapt modernist strategies to their own specific circumstances. This has led to a gradual recognition of nonadversarial connections between modernist and postcolonial artists in current critical circles. Ramazani, for one, finds the roots of postcolonial poetic devices such as translocalism, mythical syncretism and heteroglossia in Euro-modernist bricolage (Ramazani, 2007, 294). Moreover, the assimilative methodologies of modernist art provide Walcott with another counter-argument to the indictment of New World non-originality. To the charge that colonial culture is necessarily secondary or derivative, Walcott raises up a mirror to Western culture in order to expose successive genealogies of imitation. Furthermore, the recourse to mythology that was central to modernist art complements Walcott’s own strategic deployment of myth; T.S. Eliot’s writings on modernism’s preoccupation with myth as a means for organising history being an obvious example. Like the modernist artists who had preceded him, Walcott would “reject the idea of history as time for its original concept as myth” (Walcott, 1974a, 37). This

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area is, however, under-theorized; as such, much work still needs to be done in this area. This book presents two separate case studies of modernists – James Joyce and Romare Bearden – who, in a manner similar to Walcott, incorporated Homeric appropriations in their work. In doing so, this section allows for productive discussion on the resonance of the Odysseus myth for the postcolonial artist. Chapters Four and Five focus exclusively on Walcott’s Omeros as the apex of the poet’s Homeric appropriations. Both explore the circular journeys that are propagated throughout the poem, leading to the gradual realisation that the outward journey in Walcott’s verse is always a form of return. Chapter Four explores the viability of a postcolonial epic, given the genre’s implicit correlation with militarism and narrative teleology. If, to use Hamner’s formulation, an “epic of the dispossessed” is indeed viable, then it will clearly need to be drafted along alternative lines to classical prescriptions (Hamner, 1997, 3). The marginalisation of the epic hero is notable and complements the poetic project to celebrate the ordinary inhabitants of the archipelago, rather than to elevate them to mythical proportions. Walcott presentation of a reversible world presents a reciprocal rather than a genealogical model in influence, offering new ways of reading Homer. Reading Greece in terms of the Caribbean, and not the other way around, affords Walcott a means to creolize Homer and epic, thus igniting the verse with renewed vitality. The figure of the swift as transatlantic migrant inaugurates all of the journeys undertaken throughout the poem, guiding the outbound crossing and enabling an eventual homecoming. As representative of a natural world that Walcott repeatedly privileges over the ruins of civilizations past, the swift’s crisscrossing of east-west meridians offers the potential for communal integration in the present, in the wake of the historical rupture instigated by the colonial mission. Chapter Five looks to Walcott’s extensive treatment of the wound trope in Omeros. Though wounding in postcolonial literature is a common figure to articulate colonial trauma, it is a trope that Walcott has expressed extreme discomfort with in earlier works. Therefore, it can reasonably be assumed that Walcott’s deployment of the wound will deviate from that of resistance literature. Incorporating the disparate heritages of the polycultural Caribbean, the wound affects all levels of society, coloniser and colonised alike. A polysemic metaphor for the common bond of suffering, it collapses the binarisms of colonial discourses, allowing for an integrative healing to assuage the pain of colonial rupture. It also provides a means for Walcott to align his experience with that of his fellow St. Lucian’s; the writer’s struggle with an imposed language being akin to

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Philoctete’s suffering under the yoke of an imposed name. This section highlights how the projects undertaken to immortalise St. Lucia through recourse to history and myth are deemed failures; the poet realises they are unnecessary and endeavours to move beyond metaphorical logic in order to celebrate his island for its own inherent worth, without the aid of mythic inflation. Dismantling the Homeric scaffolding erected by his inherently analogous mind, Walcott revels in the astonishing ordinariness of Caribbean realities, marking a provisional anchoring of his metapoetic vessel. Homecoming for the poet, as with his odyssean wanderers is a benediction and a burden, something that is not given but must be earned. Signalling the beginning of the end of Walcott’s poetic appropriations of Homeric verse, the publication of Omeros marks a decisive turning point in his career. The final chapter examines Walcott’s verse drama adaptation of The Odyssey, commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Transposing epic verse to dramatic form involved a radical rewriting of the poem; the result is a clipped, dynamic and distinctly Caribbean Odyssey that yet maintains a remarkable fidelity to the original poem. Walcott’s Odysseus is drafted along the same fault lines as the odyssean wanderers that roam the pages of his verse. Divided between a love of adventure and responsibility, voyaging and homecoming, Walcott’s Odysseus is clearly torn between conflicting allegiances. A shell-shocked veteran lost at sea, he is a figure that threatens total disintegration. Refusing to award superhuman status to this “sacker of cities” serves a postcolonial agenda but also has the effect of greatly increasing the dramatic tension in a story that might have grown weary through repetition. As a trickster storyteller, who may have invented his great deeds, this Odysseus seems ill-equipped to face the challenges lying in wait, thus increasing the suspense for audiences during decisive scenes in the narrative. This section highlights the way in which Walcott’s adaptation of epic incorporates a postcolonial agenda in order to challenge the epic genre’s perceived unsuitability for the postcolonial writer. Above all other allusions in his writing career, the Homeric appropriations have the most lasting a deepest resonance. The epic scaffolding provided the poet with a useful foothold, a new perspective from which to consider the nature of his craft. However, the function of scaffolding is to provide temporary support, and not to be a permanent fixture. Thus classical analogy is invoked with a view to its own supersession, its built in obsolescence. Walcott’s dramatic adaptation of The Odyssey marks therefore the end of his large scale Homeric appropriations. The engagement with this extrinsic culture can be

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understood therefore as strategic rather than subservient. By the midnineties, Walcott is ready to turn his gaze from Greece and steer his craft towards other shores.

PART I: THE CRAFT

CHAPTER ONE THE SIREN SONG OF HISTORY

Whoever draws too close, off guard, and catches the Sirens’ voices in the airno sailing home for him, no wife rising to meet him, no happy children beaming up at their father’s face. The high thrilling song of the Sirens will transfix him —Odyssey, Book 121 The sigh of History meant nothing here. —Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”

In Book XII of Homer’s The Odyssey, the hero Odysseus faces yet another obstacle to his homecoming in the form of the Sirens. With their bewitching music, these seductive bird women entice sailors to their doom, for none can hear their melodious singing without falling prey to their enchantment. As evidence of their destructive capabilities, their flowering meadow is piled high with the mouldering bones of men who have stopped too long and listened, thus losing all thoughts of duty and home. Forewarned by the witch Circe, Odysseus instructs his crew to plug their ears with beeswax and to tie him to the ship’s mast, that he alone might hear how the nymphs sing of “all the pains that the Greeks and Trojans once endured/ on the spreading plain of Troy” (Od. 12. 205/6). While he screams to be released, that he might wallow in their thrall, his deafened crew sail on by treacherous waters. Classicists have observed that the song of the Sirens is very similar to that of the Iliadic Muses, who also enchant their listeners with tales of the Trojan War2. Thus an intertextual narrative competition is established within the poem between The Iliad, an epic of warfare and conquest, and The Odyssey, a wandering epic, whereby the narrative of past conflicts



1 Throughout this book I have used the version of The Odyssey translated by Robert Fagles and published in 2006 by Penguin Classics. 2 Carol Dougherty’s The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey provides an insightful exegesis of this episode (Dougherty, 2001, 71-3).

4

Chapter One

threaten the poetic success of Odysseus’ future voyaging and storytelling. Within this schema, the song of the past is one of stagnancy and immobility, whereas the song of the future is linked to mobility and innovation. Should Odysseus stop to listen to the Iliadic past – a tempting prospect given that his own personal history is inextricably woven into this story – he will forsake his destiny and homecoming to wither and rot on the Siren’s shores. It is only by resisting this temptation that he can continue his own journey and craft his own song. This episode provides a telling analogue for Walcott’s views on the West Indian writers’ relationship to history, most explicitly outlined in his 1974 essay “The Muse of History.” Interestingly, he chooses another mythical figure of devastating power when he writes that history is the “Medusa of the New World” (Walcott, 1974a, 36). As in the case of the Sirens, the Gorgon represents the threat of immobilisation and a premature end to voyaging and storytelling. Walcott’s well-documented rejection of history reaches its apogee here as he categorically “refuses to recognize it as a creative or culpable force” (Walcott, 1974a, 37). His poetics attempt to circumvent the discourse by claiming that “amnesia is the true history of the New World” (Walcott, 1974a, 37-39). Concomitant with this denunciation of history is a refusal to engage with the degradations of a colonial past on a creative level. In another statement essay published in the same year he declares: “[t]he degradations have already been endured; they have been endured to the point of irrelevancy” (Walcott, 1974b, 53). In the Caribbean, traumatic regional stereotypes born of the area’s downtrodden past, such as Trinidadian writer V.S. Naipaul’s assertion that “[h]istory is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies” (Naipaul, 1962, 20), or Victorian traveller James Anthony Froude’s damning verdict that, “[t]here are no people there in the true sense of the word” (qtd. in Walcott, 1969a, 36), are combated not by the production of a counter-catalogue of local achievement but the unceremonious dumping of the yardstick. Walcott’s repudiation of imperial historiography, with its emphasis on military achievement and conquest, is a refusal to engage with the degradations of a colonial past in his imaginative writing. Despite his polemic language and repeated disavowal of the general term “history”, Walcott’s writing subtly distinguishes between different types of history, most obviously between a Western Imperial History and a cultural inheritance that endures the process of colonisation and geographical displacement. As Rei Terada perceptively notes, he disparages history as a “linear record” but respects it as a “communal consciousness suffusing perception” (Terada, 1992, 170). It is the former that consistently evokes

The Siren Song of History

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his ire, and distinguishing between these definitions is necessary to appreciate the complexity (rather than seeming contradictions) of his arguments. Walcott’s “The Muse of History” differentiates between revolutionary writers and New World classicists. In a passage that recalls Frantz Fanon’s three phases of decolonisation3 – assimilation, nationalism, liberation4 – Walcott defines the “revolutionary writers” along the lineaments of the second nationalist phase. While recognising the wish to recuperate the degraded ancestor, Walcott insists that by “openly fighting tradition we perpetuate it, that revolutionary literature is a filial impulse” (Walcott, 1974a, 36). Thus, servitude to the Muse of History reduces their language to the “groan of suffering, the curse of revenge”, and is only capable of generating incoherence and nostalgia (Walcott, 1974a, 39). Adopting the mythical analogy once more, these writers become the lost souls on the Siren shore, mired in the stagnant song of the past. The temptation to succumb to this fate is evidenced in the desperate struggle of Odysseus not to resist, but to capitulate. This leads to an analysis of the third phase in the Fanonian schema: liberation. Walcott proposes an alternative approach to nationalism, one that will more effectively dilute the potency of imperial historiography (Walcott, 1974a, 36). Praising the ironic stance of New World classicists who see the past as a “timeless, yet habitable moment” and freely adapt from available cultural resources, he writes: [t]hese writers reject the idea of history as time for its original concept as myth, the partial recall of the race. For them history is fiction, subject to a fitful muse, memory. (Walcott, 1974a, 37)

By juxtaposing the concept of “history as time” with “history as myth”, Walcott refutes the tiered bias of linear, time-bound historiography which typically reads the New World as belated and derivative; such accounts he designates a “kind of literature without morality” (Walcott, 1974a, 37). An

 3

From Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, a title Walcott quotes directly in his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, thus demonstrating a certain familiarity with the text. 4 Fanon’s own wording is less precise, describing a “period of unqualified assimilation” in the first phase; the “borrowed aestheticism” of the second; and a third “fighting phase”. However, pace Kiberd, I have decided to adopt the terms “assimilation, nationalism, liberation” as the shorthand that most closely articulates the processes described. Furthermore, though Fanon uses the term “revolutionary” in his rather vague description of this third phase of decolonisation, Walcott’s own use of this term more closely resembles this second stage, as is reflected in the passage above.

6

Chapter One

understanding of the discourse of imperial history as a self-serving fiction controlled by its writers, invites the recipients of a degraded colonial history to take part in the storytelling process, utilizing whatever imaginative stratagems are available to articulate their place in the world. Rejecting a position of subservience to the Muse of History entitles the writer to access a broader literary inheritance. What is interesting here, and what differentiates Walcott’s formula from the model provided by Fanon is that the literature of liberation is also a literature of assimilation. Walcott writes that “maturity is the assimilation of the features of the ancestor” (Walcott, 1974a, 36). This contention is significant in that it espouses a positive view of cultural creolization or, to use Walcott’s terms “mimicry,” an idea that will be explored more fully in the next chapter. Suffice to say, rejection of the Gorgon of history does not preclude an acceptance of the language and culture of the colonial power. Combining strategic appropriation with individual expression, the past becomes a creative resource for the writer, rather than a burden inhibiting expression. Sailing past the island of the Sirens, the peripatetic artist is able to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of the song without falling prey to its debilitating curse. This chapter will analyse the evolution of Walcott’s relationship to “history as myth.” Three poems will form the bedrock of this analysis, “Origins”, “The Sea is History” and “The Schooner Flight,”, though others will be referred to as is relevant. In each we recognise hostility to imperial history alongside attempts to generate creative alternatives that repeatedly exploit a mythical scaffolding in their construction. The first two poems supplant the contours of North Atlantic historiography through an alternative cosmogenesis narrative whereby, to use Walcott’s formula, “The Sea is History.” The poet registers the enormity of the colonial moment in drafting the blueprints for Caribbean paradigms of cultural expression. However, he refuses to let this moment be the definitive one. Figuring the sea as a point of origin effectively disarms the canonical status of colonial historiography; it allows for a reading of the colonial era as one more layer in the archipelago’s palimpsestic narrative, a story “where every line was erased// yet freshly written in sheets of exploding surf” (Walcott, 1990, 296). In all three poems, the liquid composition of ocean space acts as a nourishing environment, a site of transformation and a route towards independent subjecthood. Perhaps unsurprisingly, voyaging is also a recurring motif throughout. In “Origins,” the diasporic population of the Caribbean is formed as a result of successive sea crossings and cultural cross-pollination. Mythical syncretism produces the figures of the Afro-Greek sibyl along with one of

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Walcott’s earliest Odyssean figures, the shadowy wayfarer who dissolves the past in a liquid libation. “The Sea is History” rehearses the traumatic Middle Passage in an effort to challenge the canonicity of North Atlantic historiography. Here again, the image of Darwinian rock pools at the poem’s closure indicate that colonial trauma is not itself the end, but instead marks a new beginning. Finally, Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight” presents the memorable figure of Shabine, both sailor and storyteller. Though resonating with Homer’s epic protagonist, this Odyssean incarnation is irrefutably a Caribbean creation, a hybrid by-product of colonialism who embodies Walcott’s metaphor of the poet as a wanderer and life as a voyage.

Origins In “Origins,” Walcott’s identification of a “mythopoeic coast” requires the aid of mythological analogy and imagination to fill in the gaps of memory (Walcott, 1964, 14). In the figure of the coral polyp, the postcolonial poet finds the metaphor for local, self-authorizing creation that conjoins the twin desire for settlement and transoceanic migration, for roots and routes. The poem posits an opportunity for creative re-membering, a practice of reconstructing memory by rewriting history. Aquatic metaphors provide Walcott with the vocabulary to express his conception of the Caribbean subject’s shipwrecked position in the wake of colonialism; hence, the recurrence of the “polyp”, or “sea anemone”, in his poetry. The figure of the polyp is chosen due to its ability to reproduce itself non-sexually by the method of budding. When Walcott writes “[t]he mind, among seawrack, sees its mythopoeic coast, / Seeks like a polyp, to take root in itself” he is referring to a method of indigenous creation from the detritus/ “sea-wrack” of previous civilizations (Walcott, 1964, 14). The polyp’s self-propagation connotes the creativity and self-reliance required to build a culture and identity distinct from Old World coordinates, whilst simultaneously drawing on the past. It is a process that occurs significantly in the waters between Old World and New, indicating once again a movement that is both local and transoceanic. The opening lines of this early poem “Origins” establishes many of the central themes that will recur throughout Walcott’s writing. The poet writes: [t]he flowering breaker detonates its surf. White bees hiss in the coral skull. Nameless I came among olives of algae, Foetus of plankton, I remember nothing. (Walcott, 1964, 11)

8

Chapter One

The choice of nouns warrants close consideration here, particularly given Walcott’s predilection for fashioning metaphors from the natural world. Those born of plankton would be natural wanderers, given that the etymological root of the word derives from the Greek planktos, which means “wandering”. The choice of algae as a form of organic swaddling clothes for the diasporised subject is equally appropriate, accepting that algae is distinguishable from other plants due to the fact that it lacks true stems or roots. Both words suitably evoke the displaced condition of the new arrivals and evoke the “castaway” metaphor used extensively by Walcott in later poems from that decade such as “The Castaway”, “Crusoe’s Island” and “Crusoe’s Journal.” Walcott’s intercultural poetics imagines the Caribbean subject as shipwrecked by colonialism, castaway on foreign shores. The castaway can be understood in many ways as a West Indian Fisher King5 attempting to create a culture from the detritus of civilisations. The “olives of algae” in the opening lines pre-empt the mythical syncretism that is characteristic of his writing. This sense of rootlessness is continued in the imagery of moving islands, which are compared to fishing boats that have broken free of their moorings and sailed out to sea: “These islands have drifted from anchorage/ Like gommiers loosened from Guinea, / Far from the childhood of rivers” (Walcott, 1986, 12). The idea of the moving islands undermines the image of the untouched or isolated island territories. If these islands are adrift, vessels that have lost sight of their homeland, then this is directly due to their involvement in major historical events. In this poem, Walcott describes the arrival of the Afro-Caribbean population to the New World. Though predating “The Muse of History” by some ten years, we see the poet already expressing a view that passages to the Caribbean trace umbilical cords of genealogical displacement from Old World to New. Walcott’s trope of “forgetting” brought about by enforced migration to the New World is also clearly mapped out in the line “[m]emory in cerecloth uncoils its odour in rivers” (Walcott, 1964, 14). Identity and tribal memory have apparently already been erased; the subject emerging from the water is “[n]ameless” and “remember[s] nothing” (Walcott, 1964, 11). In this regard, Walcott’s trope of amnesia is strategic. Though referring to the systematic erasure of the slave culture by

 5

For the most extensive analysis to date of Walcott’s relationship to T. S. Eliot’s modernism, see Pollard, Charles W. 2004. New World Modernisms: T.S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

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the machinery of colonialism,6 it also represents a refusal to recognise a discourse that confines the colonial subject to the footnotes of history: I learnt your annals of ocean, Of Hector, bridler of horses, Achilles, Aeneas, Ulysses, But “Of that fine race of people which came off the mainland To greet Christobal as he rounded Icacos,” Blank pages turn in the wind. (Walcott, 1964, 11)

In this stanza Walcott reflects on the manner in which his colonial education taught him about Caribbean history from a European perspective, which positions Columbus as an inaugurating figure, and about classical mythology; however, when it came to the aboriginal Amerindian tribes of the Caribbean, who were virtually annihilated by Western Imperialism, he finds that their story represents a “gap in history” that has not been told (Walcott, 1964b, 12). The Amerindian culture has been decimated, the cultures of the diaspora population systematically erased – a new culture must be created from whatever materials available to the transplanted inhabitants of the archipelago. This assumed amnesia then, could be understood as part of a broader project of “provincializing Europe,” to borrow Chakrabarty’s formulation7. Reading the sea as a point of origin undermines the European conquest as a defining historical moment and thus operates as a counter-myth to that of Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World. However, and this is something that has rendered Walcott’s writing problematic in certain critical circles, it is not only the European heritage that is consciously shed here. Africa is also lost in the crossing. Walcott

 6

The authors of The Empire Writes Back describe a policy of isolating slaves from their “common language group” and selling them in “mixed lots” as a means to “limiting the possibilities of rebellion” (Ashcroft et al, 1989, 144). The result of this policy, which was continued in the country of arrival, was that within two or three generations the European language became the only option available for the Africans to communicate with each other or the master. 7 Dipesh Chakrabarty has written that “insofar as the academic discourse of history […] is concerned, ‘Europe’ remains the sovereign theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call ‘Indian,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘Kenyan,’ and so on” (Chakrabarty, 1995, 383). He articulates a view that the “repressive strategies and practices” of the narrative of European history actively suppress colonial accounts of the world, acting as an instrument of control over subject peoples, thus highlighting to need for a “project of provincializing Europe” (Chakrabarty, 1995, 383).

10

Chapter One

has long purported a view of himself as internally bifurcated, caught between “this Africa and the English tongue I love” (Walcott, 1962, 18). Previous attempts to justify his engagement with European culture and disengagement with African cultural resources, on the grounds of entitlement to the former, and the claim that the umbilical link to the latter was severed by the trauma of the Middle Passage, have led to accusations of theft from Western purists and treason by anti-colonials. Though his later work marks a more conscious effort to incorporate elements of African culture, his early insistence on the loss of Africa resulted in much of his writing being read reductively as a “yearning to be adopted” by Europe (Walcott, 1970a, 27). As I will argue throughout this book, such readings ignore the complexity of Walcott’s response to the vexed question of origins. In the poem “Origins” Walcott’s mixed heritage is highlighted in the “twin soul, spirit of river, spirit of sea,” whereby the river spirit embodies an African inheritance and the sea spirit represents the migration to the New World due to European colonialism (Walcott, 1964, 15). In the poem, the lost African heritage or tribal memory is represented as a brown river that shrinks to a delirious vision of snakes writhing in the sky, and finally to a single drop. Like a repressed childhood memory, this submerged consciousness manifests only as an “odour of rivers in unopened cupboards” (Walcott, 1964, 13). The rivers of Africa flow into and are diffused by the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. The transformative imagery of river, sea and water propels the poem, gathering various stages together on this voyage. All arrivals to islands before the twentieth century travelled by water; the text of Caribbean history is therefore a narrative of successive transoceanic crossings. These crossings transformed terrestrial and aquatic space into transnational contact zones. For simplicity’s sake, I will divide these crossings into three distinct phases. Phase One marks the initial island colonisation by European colonialists; this landfall led to the decimation of the indigenous population. The need for a new labour force in the wake of this genocide led to Phase Two, the arrival of African slaves across the notorious “Middle Passage.” The coral skulls in the poem’s opening lines provide a submerged reference to the lost souls thrown overboard in the transatlantic crossing. Following the abolition of slavery, Phase Three saw the passage of contracted servants from India and China; their crossing of “kala pani” or “dark waters” brought them to plantation indenture. These passages formed the modern Caribbean archipelago.

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For the diasporised population of the Caribbean then, the sea represents a route, either a return passage into the past of pre-colonial origins or an outbound journey into a future of imperial centres predicated on social and economic betterment, a process commonly referred to as “reverse colonization.” As Elizabeth DeLoughrey contends, the “shared history of transoceanic migration to the islands” is generative in that it supplies an “inexhaustible spatial imaginary for reflections on origins” (DeLoughrey, 2007, 23). This is the crux of imaginative representations of the sea as an archive of submerged histories, erased cultures and memory sinking into amnesia. On the one hand, the sea appears to offer an alternative narrative to imperial history; on the other hand, the fluidity and transformative nature of the sea means that its narrative resists narration. How then do West Indian writers approach this impasse? A strategy adopted by many writers to counter the diasporic crisis of “historylessness” is a resort to mythical or imaginative origins in order to fill in the gaps created by colonialism. Writer Wilson Harris identifies a “philosophy of history” lying “buried in the arts of the imagination” which may indicate “epic stratagems available to Caribbean man in the dilemmas of history which surround him” (Harris, 1995, 378). Like Harris, Walcott also provides a counter-discourse to the officially sanctioned European discourse of history by providing an alternative, “imaginative history,” steeped in myth. In “Origins,” the poet dramatises how Old World inheritances can be reshaped for creolized societies in the wake of slavery and indenture. If the sea that both connects and separates the Caribbean subject from Old World origins is responsible for the initial estrangement from inherited culture and history, then it is also the site of the rebirth of the new arrivals, who arise, like Aphrodite, from the foam. The syncretic impulse in Walcott’s verse is evident in his tendency to twin Greek myths with local equivalents. Accordingly the “constrictor round the mangrove” becomes the “[c]aduceus of Hermes” while the arch of the Caribbean’s scattered islands recalls a leaping “Dorade, their golden, mythological dolphin” (Walcott, 1964, 12). The translocalism that ties Greece to the Caribbean is furthered in the ocean crossings that are imagined as a metaphorical thread basting continents together8. Thus the “retching hulks of caravels stitching two worlds,” whereby the ship is a needle threading the horizon, finds an echo in the “whirr of my mother’s machine” (Walcott, 1964, 14). This in turn anticipates the epic stratagem adopted by Odysseus’ wife Penelope to provisionally ward off the

 8

This image will later recur in Walcott’s Another Life, Omeros and his dramatic adaptation of The Odyssey.

12

Chapter One

usurpers of her house, which once again is linked to transatlantic seacrossings, “The sea waits for him, like Penelope’s spindle, / Ravelling, unravelling its foam” (Walcott, 1964, 15). Walcott’s writing frequently revisits this idea of ocean as a palimpsestic record of historico-mythical crossings. This translocalism is perhaps unsurprising in a Caribbean context, given the propensity of writers and travellers to construct the region as a “New World Mediterranean” (Dash, 1998, 100). The tendency to read of the Caribbean Sea as an originary space finds a correlative in readings of the Mediterranean region as the headwaters of European culture. Hailing from St. Lucia, Walcott would have been taught in school that his island home was given the sobriquet “Helen of the West Indies” because it changed hands between British and French control so frequently. Colonial explorer James Anthony Froude, who passed through the region in the late 1880’s, records in his travelogue a desire to recreate in writing the heroism of England’s epic past. The West Indies were in his view ripe for the creation of such an epic: [i]f ever the navel exploits of this country are done into an epic poem- and since the Iliad there has been no subject better fitted for such treatment or better deserving it – the West Indies will be the scene of the most brilliant cantos. (qtd. in Döring, 2002, 175)

While Froude would not have foreseen that this West Indian epic could in fact be written by a West Indian, it is clear that this climate of comparison would have impacted on Walcott as a young writer, finding his poetic voice. His biographer Bruce King has recorded that as early as 1948 the young Walcott had read an article in Life and Letters predicting a “new Ulysses emerging from the Caribbean” and “was certain it meant him” (King, 2000, 52).9 An early collection In a Green Night contains a poem entitled “Roots,” which echoes this belief saying that the chronicle of St. Lucia would remain merely a “naturalist’s handbook” until “our Homer with truer perception erect it” (Walcott, 1962c, 60). In his later narrative epic Omeros Walcott dramatises the moment when the poet-persona’s gains this enhanced perspicacity following a journey into a Dantean Hades with his own creolized Homer.



9 It is difficult to account for Walcott’s self-belief as an adolescent writer without an awareness that the canon of West-Indian literature was at this point, in its infancy. King records “his subject-matter was new; no one had written about it before[...]Walcott was moving in a world where his elders were expecting great poetry from him. The West Indies wanted a poet” (King, 2000, 45).

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That both the Mediterranean and the Caribbean are island archipelagos suggests further correlation. Gordon K. Lewis in an extensive comparison of the two regions identifies a “geographical determinism that has shaped the history of both regions” (Lewis, 2004, 16) and consequently constitutes both as an intercultural crossroads, an idea that Walcott returns to again and again in his writing: I think that an archipelago, whether Greek or West Indian, is bound to be a fertile area, particularly if it is a bridge between continents, and a variety of people settle there. (Walcott, 1970a, 49)

If content to draw from the well of European literary tradition, Walcott explicitly insists on his dual Old World heritage. Thus his Caribbean/Greek analogues find further correspondences with African myth (Walcott, 1964b, 12). In the wake of historical rupture, the mixed race colonial subject finds himself “[b]etween the Greek and African pantheon, / Lost animist, I rechristened trees” (Walcott, 1964b, 12). A scion of both Africa and Europe, he learns to navigate the New World with tools provided by both Greek and African mythologies. These lines encapsulate a central aspect of Walcott’s writing technique. Though freely adapting from other traditions, having no uninterrupted tradition of his own, he maintains that as a writer, inspiration ultimately derives from the natural world surrounding the individual, “you build according to the topography of where you live” (Walcott, 1974b, 56). These disparate influences are therefore creolized, that is, inheriting Old World traditions he makes himself at home by reconfiguring these influences, “I rechristened trees” (Walcott, 1964b, 12). This cuts to the quick of creolization, which denotes a mode of liminality, or form of passage, “by which something is created in the colonies that is neither indigenous to the region nor identical with its counterpart in the culture of origin” (Pollard, 2004, 5). The syncretic impulse that appropriates and combines old myths also reanimates them to evoke surprising new meanings. Walcott’s mythical syncretism introduces two key figures, the “twin soul” of the river spirit and sea spirit that together can encompass the Janus-faced vision of the colonial subject. The first, the black sibyl, is predominantly associated with the river spirit of an African past that is diffused in the Atlantic crossing. Walcott writes that the “sybil I honour”10 is of African origin and:

 10

This figure will reappear throughout Walcott’s work, most obviously in the figure of Ma Kilman in Omeros, a local obeah woman and part time church goer,

14

Chapter One

Bears in her black hand a white frangipani, with berries of blood, She gibbers with the cries Of the Guinean odyssey. (Walcott, 1964, 12)

An Afro-Greek hybrid, this creolized sybil carries a tropical flower, native to the Americas. The fruit of this flower is blood, recalling metonymically the draw of bountiful islands to the European imagination and the genocide that ensued following cultural contact. A “mother of memory” the sibyl is witness to the suffering of the world, the word “[b]ears” emphasizing her burden of the past (Walcott, 1964, 12). The sybil, as guardian of a fading memory, emphasises a cultural continuity that counterbalances the historical breach from Africa. The second figure is male, a shadowy Odysseus,11 and is associated primarily with Greece, though creolized through wandering; his “eyes bring the rain from far countries, the salt rain/ That hazes horizons and races” (Walcott, 1964, 15). Joining the assembly by the campfire he requests water and offering propitiation “extinguishes Troy in a hissing of ashes, / In a rising of cloud” (Walcott, 1964, 15). Though the tribal memory has been lost in the passage, an inexpressible record has been handed down though the generations in “a rising of cloud” (Walcott, 1964, 15). The offering, which conjoins seascape with landscape and skyscape in the transmutation of water, ash and cloud, continues the cyclical pattern of death and resurrection already evident in the poem’s earlier transformations “[d]eath of the old gods in the river snakes dried from the ceiling, / Jahveh and Zeus rise from the foam’s beard at daybreak” (Walcott,1964, 14). The snuffing out of the Trojan War by this liquid libation offers the possibility of combating colonial trauma in like fashion, easing the wound of history in salt water. Dissolved in water, turned to ash or evaporated in cloud, the poem enacts a ritual whereby the legacy of history is engulfed in the natural world. This does not entail a denial of colonial history or the limited agency of its participants; the slaves workers on Caribbean plantations “[w]hose sweat, touching earth, multiplies in crystals of sugar” are subjugated but can still draw on the wellspring of cultural inheritance

 who cures Philoctete’s wound by performing ancestral rituals and using a plant brought over from Africa.  11 The figure of Odysseus will appear in many guises throughout Walcott’s work, notably in Epitaph for the Young, Another Life, Omeros and The Odyssey. Like Odysseus, they are masters of disguise, Protean characters representing both the poet and the figures he creates. That these figures are frequently cast in shadow and mystery highlights the poet’s unwillingness to elevate his Greek appropriations over his Caribbean creations.

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“[h]arvest[ing] ancestral voices from its surf” (Walcott, 1964, 16). Rather the “single raindrop that irrigates the tongue” can contain both spirit of river and sea, sibyl and wanderer, past and future for “[t]hose who conceive the birth of white cities in a raindrop / And the annihilation of races in the prism of the dew” (Walcott, 1964, 15/6). The past becomes a resource to slake the thirst and enable expression; conquest does not debar the future construction of a sustaining cultural homeland.

The Sea is History Walcott’s poem “The Sea is History” which first appeared in The StarApple Kingdom, reiterates this refusal to become embroiled in traditional historical discourse. The poem is structured around a simple question and answer scheme, whereby the questioner as colonialist interrogates the colonial subject as to the viability of his history, “[w]here are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?”(Walcott, 1979b, 364). The catalogue of monuments, battles, martyrs reveal an assumption as to what constitutes a legitimate history. The practice of analysing historical data primarily in terms of military achievement and the political prominence of a nation highlights the capacity of North Atlantic historiography to silence or obscure the history of the colonised country, which, adhering to this paradigm, exists only in relation to Europe as a variant of the master narrative. The poem continues with requests for evidence of a distinct cultural history in the Caribbean, “but where is your Renaissance?” (Walcott, 1979b, 364). Over the course of the poem, the questioner presses the colonial subject for evidence of military conquests, a mythology, cultural production, and an account of life after political independence. Though the colonial subject is seemingly subservient, addressing his interrogators respectfully as “Sirs,” the content of these answers abrogate the categories of the colonial culture, rendering them defunct. Initially then, the poem serves as a counter-discourse to a traditional historical paradigm. In a reading of “The Sea is History” at York University in 1989, Walcott expanded on what history meant to him as a colonial subject: [w]hen somebody asks you where is your history or where is your culture, or what you have done, the question comes from a presumption of people who believe that history represents achievement […] So if someone asks me, as a Caribbean person: “Where is your history?” I would say: “It is out there, in that cloud, that sky, the water moving.” And if the questioner says: “There’s nothing there,” I would say: “Well, that’s what I think history is. There’s nothing there.” The sea is history. (Walcott, 1989, 24)

16

Chapter One

Walcott counters the assumptions of Western historiography by propounding an alternative definition. This is achieved initially through the paralleling of various stages of Western civilization with a corresponding event of the Caribbean past. In response to the initial question as to “where” Caribbean history can be located, the answer provided is, in “[t]he sea. The sea/ has locked them up. The sea is History” (Walcott, 1979b, 364). As in the previous poem, the Caribbean Sea is characterised as a repository of the past and as a cosmogenesis narrative. Attempts to inscribe the sea as a point of origin for the Caribbean region represent both an attempt at provisional historiography and an enduring feature of island literature. This concept is not a new idea; the identification of the sea as point of origin is central to several religious cosmogonies. Sacred texts of the Christian, Muslim and Hindu faiths all describe the emergence of life from the nothingness of water. However, these representations construct the sea as a void, chaos or non-civilization out of which life, order and civilization emerge. Similarly, a common construction of European thought places a charted historicized reading of landscape in opposition to an atemporal, “ahistorical” sea. The repetitive cycle of seawater is read as incompatible with time, culture or memory. This view is encapsulated in Roland Barthes’ well-documented designation of the sea as a “non-signifying field” which “bears no message” (Barthes, 1972, 112). In his Mythologies Barthes contrasts the tabula rasa of seascape with the semiological profusion on shore.12 Barthes is not alone in reading the sea as bereft of any communicable message. For Gaston Bachelard, the sea amounts to a “substantive nothingness”; W. H. Auden describes the ocean as a “primal undifferentiated flux”; Freud too ascribes an “oceanic feeling” to that which is perceived as eternal and limitless (qtd. in Messier and Batra, 2007, 2-4). Though each differs in their individual understanding of the sea, it is clear that all these readings of the ocean see the region as incompatible with notions of temporality or civilization. If place is, as Paul

 12

Barthes writes “[i]n a single day, how many really non-signifying fields do we cross? Very few, sometimes none. Here I am, before the sea; it is true that it bears no message. But on the beach, what material for semiology! Flags, slogans, signals, sign-boards, clothes, suntan even, which are so many messages to me’ (Barthes, 1972, 112). It is a curious distinction which doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny. For example, surely the suntan of the swimmer maintains the same capacity to signify as the suntan of the sunbather. Ships, waves, sailors, oil rigs, buoys, shark fins and so forth would appear to provide material just as rich for semiological analysis as the scattered messages on the strand. The comment is useful however in highlighting assumed distinctions between terra firma and aqua nullius.

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Carter contends, “space with a history” than these representations don’t allow for a diachronic reading of ocean place (Carter, 1995, 377). Such distinctions serve to consolidate the dualistic and hierarchical structure of Western thought, putting land and sea in a tiered, oppositional relationship. Thus the ocean’s accretion of meaning through representation unerringly rests on the less privileged side of the dichotomy. The privileging of terrestrial – which frequently amounts to national – historical paradigms, is fundamentally incompatible with Caribbean historiography. As Stuart Hall reminds us the “Caribbean is the first, the original and the purest diaspora”; therefore “everybody there comes from somewhere else” (Hall, 2001, 283/4). Bearing the deepest impact of international migration of any part of the world, the impact of colonialism on the region set in place patterns of movement that define the experience of the Caribbean subject. The original complexity of ethnic origins and the ongoing creation and evolution of polycultural identities points to the inadequacy of paradigms of history read along national lines. If national ties are frequently asserted by an association of a people with soil or land, then the association of a people with the sea as a supranational zone offers an alternative for diasporised or polycultural groups. Recent interventions, particularly in the field of postcolonial studies, have done much to challenge this assumed terrestrial bias. Klein and Mackenthun for example, take issue with what they call the “cultural myth” that the sea is “outside or beyond history” (Klein and Mackenthun, 2004, 2). Their collection of essays is predicated on the belief that the sea requires analysis as a “deeply historical location whose transformative power is not merely psychological or metaphorical […] but material and very real” (Klein and Mackenthun, 2004, 2). One of the most important contributions in this field, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, conceives of the Atlantic Ocean as an area of study capable of providing a counterculture to modernity. Gilroy recognizes the significance of the Atlantic seascape as an “intercultural and transnational formation” which can respond to the inadequacies of nationalist or monocultural paradigms of cultural history (Gilroy, 1993, ix). Elizabeth DeLoughrey (2007) draws on Kamau Brathwaite’s model of “tidalectics” to foreground the dynamic and mutually constitutive dialogue between roots and routes in the cultures of the Caribbean and Pacific Island regions. Examining how a region’s geography and oceanography can shape its history, DeLoughrey skilfully establishes a dialogue between indigenous and diaspora studies. These interventions undermine the Manichean dynamic between land and sea by paying closer attention to the seascape as a viable unit of historical and cultural analysis.

18

Chapter One

Rather than reading the sea as the nothing out of which life began, cosmogenesis narratives of Caribbean writers, by contrast, tend to locate the sea as a site of collective rebirth. For instance, Grace Nichols’ poem “One Continent/ To Another” reads the Caribbean landfall as an emergence from the “Middle Passage womb” (Nichols, 1983, 6). In Walcott’s Omeros, the poet reiterates this concept by averring that “mer was/ both mother and sea in our Antillean patois” (Walcott, 1990, 14). It is clear however, that while the aforementioned religious cosmogonies read the sea as a site of nothingness prior to the emergence of human life, Caribbean constructions by contrast read the ocean space as the location for the wound of history. If the links to the past have been severed, if aspects of culture and knowledge of genealogical roots are damaged, then this results from the violence and process of deliberate cultural erasure instigated by the machinery of colonialism. It is perhaps unsurprising that in writing his acclaimed narrative poem Omeros, Walcott would eschew political and geographical boundaries for a regional perspective achieved through the unifying medium of the blue Caribbean basin, “I sang our country, the wide Caribbean sea” (Walcott, 1990, 320). In contrast to a European conception of history validated by the “visible presence of ruins”, Walcott offers a conception imagined by the fresh newness and beauty of the organic world, a view of history as natural history (Walcott, 1979b, 44). These vying histories might be understood as a dispute between a traditionally accepted North Atlantic historical record “chronicled successively by epochs as a record of achievement” and an “imaginative” historical record that seeks a fusion with place and imagination (Walcott, 1989, 24). The sea is indifferent to the cataloguing of military conquest, the erecting of monuments, the vanity of rulers. As historical record it is “an epic where every line was erased// yet freshly written in sheets of exploding surf” (Walcott, 1990, 296). In interview the impermanence of human achievements, Walcott has stressed: [n]othing can be put down in the sea. You can’t plant on it, you can’t live on it, you can’t walk on it […] The sea does not have anything on it that is a memento of man. (White, 1990, 158/9)

Walcott’s Caribbean history sets out by outlining the progress of Western civilization. Dipping into the spiritual history of the West, the poet pairs scenes from the Bible with corresponding moments of the African diaspora. Despite the horror and trauma of the Middle Passage, the history of the black diaspora demonstrates a corresponding narrative of equal validity. Thus Genesis for the Afro-Caribbean population was “the lantern of a caravel,” which signified the beginning of the slave trade; “Exodus”

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is the enforced transatlantic voyage into slavery described by the “packed cries, the shit, the moaning”; the sacred relics that compete in equivalence to the “Ark of the Covenant” are provided by the souls lost in transit – “[b]one soldered by coral to bone,/ mosaics/ mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow” (Walcott, 1979b, 364). Here, as in other works, the natural world is imbued with the ability to provide spiritual blessing. The parallels continue, “the plucked wires/ of sunlight on the sea floor” equates the “harp of the Babylonian bondage”; the “white cowries clustered like manacles/ on the drowned women” are the “ivory bracelets of the Song of Solomon” (Walcott, 1979b, 364/5). From religious analogues Walcott moves to mythological allusions. In his account of the “brigands who barbecued cattle” (Walcott, 1979n, 365) we find a subtle reference to Odysseus’s ill-fated crew who signed their death warrants by eating the cattle of the sun-god, Hyperion. In a similar fashion the myth of Jonah is paired with the “tidal wave swallowing Port Royal”; still the interrogator insists “but where is your Renaissance?” (Walcott, 1979b, 365). The cultural history of the Caribbean is evidently also recorded in the sea, in the “gothic windows of sea fans”; the trace of ruins provided by “these groined caves with barnacles/ pitted like stone” which “are our cathedrals” (Walcott, 1979b, 365/6). Emancipation follows, the birth of independence heralded when “each rock broke into its own nation” (Walcott, 1979b, 367). In Walcott’s ironic configurations, the official duties of state are carried out by the animal kingdom, a “state of nature.” Thus he announces a “synod of flies,” “bats like jetting ambassadors,” “the mantis, like khaki police” and so forth (Walcott, 1979b, 367). Walcott is clearly enjoying himself here in substituting revered, government officials with a staff composed almost entirely of insects and reptiles. However, there is a sense that the history of Walcott’s providing is somehow insufficient or deficient. For each response there is a doubt as to whether the replies can be entered into an official historical record. Having provided Caribbean equivalents to the Judaeo-Christian narrative at the core of Western civilization, the poet writes, “but the ocean kept tuning blank pages// looking for History” (Walcott, 1979b, 364). Later the testimony of “Bones ground by windmills/into marl and cornmeal” are said to be “not History”, “just Lamentations” (Walcott, 1979b, 366). Likewise the conversion of the African diaspora to Christianity was “not History/ that was only faith” (Walcott, 1979b, 367). The insistent qualifications and classifications denote the capacity of the official European historical narrative to silence or obscure the history of the colonised country.

20

Chapter One

To reiterate, in Walcott’s formula, the “grey vault” of the sea has “locked up” the past. The concept is clearly meaningful to the African diaspora.13 The idea of history being “locked up” in the poem however, may also suggest that the past is inaccessible, supporting Walcott’s contention that the legacy of colonialism was the inflicted “amnesia” that shaped Caribbean culture. The Amerindian peoples of the Caribbean region have been decimated; its new inhabitants have all arrived from overseas. The history of the region has thus been marked by a rupture, a break, a violent erasure. Therefore it is only the natural world that has remained present to survey all that has gone before. It is appropriate therefore that Walcott designates this natural world as the site of a new narrative, a starting point of an as yet unwritten history: in the dark ears of ferns and in the salt chuckle of rocks with their sea pools, there was the sound like a rumour without any echo of History, really beginning. (Walcott, 1979b, 367)

What is heard is a “rumour without any echo,” that is an independent sound which requires no exterior point of reference, no distortion in repetition. It is the sound of “History, really beginning” (367). If this is history “really beginning,” it follows that what came before must have been a false start, a “degradation [...] endured to the point of irrelevancy” (Walcott, 1974b, 53). It is implied by the genesis of this history in the natural world that it is here that the true story of the archipelago lies, in this second postlapsarian Eden.14 Drawing on imaginative resources allows the colonial subject to become a creator, rather than a victim, of his/her own history. Proposing the sea as a point of origin abrogates the privileged position afforded to historical discourse, offering instead a natural world of continuing regeneration. Using aquatic models and metaphors, writers of the region examine the trauma of displacement from the culture[s] of origin that gradually cedes to an exploration of the potential for creative interaction with all the cultures available in the region. Combating the construction of the sea as void, the antithesis of

 13

In a gesture to honour those who perished on the transatlantic crossing, the Middle Passage Monument Project in 1999 significantly lowered a memorial monument onto the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, 427 kilometres due east (facing Africa) off New York's harbour. The monument, an arch constructed in two parts, signifies the conjoining of past and future.  14 In the poem “Crusoe’s Island,” Walcott identifies the region as “Eden”; his castaway as a “second Adam since the fall” (Walcott, 1965c, 69)

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history, culture and memory, regional paradigms allow for a more dynamic interaction between landscape and seascape that offers a means to rewrite the past through the creative engagement with the here and now.

Shabine’s Odyssey Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight”15 offers another exploration of the Odyssean theme. Reflecting the poet’s ambivalent relationship with Greek myth, connections with Homer’s The Odyssey are apparent, though incorporated in a submerged or reluctant fashion. The protagonist of this long, narrative poem, Shabine, bears many similarities to the Greek hero: he too is primarily identified as a sailor and storyteller; he is a quickwitted strategist who lives by his wits and adapts freely to his environment; and he is a natural born wanderer who loves the sea as much as he yearns for home. For John Thieme, Shabine is Walcott’s “most developed Ulysses figure” and an “obvious forerunner of the Odysseus of his 1992 play” (Thieme, 1999, 162). Tellingly though, Shabine is never explicitly identified as Odysseus. The reasons for this are apparent in light of Walcott’s work as a whole. Examining the repeated use of Odyssean figures through his writing highlights his deep affinity with the ancient Greek figure. However, the identification of Odysseus as ptoliporthos, or “sacker of cities,” renders this affiliation problematic. There are therefore, no conquering heroes in Walcott’s poetry. Heroism, according to Walcott’s formula, is a matter of survival. Odysseus is a hero, not because of his military achievement, or his impressive acquisition of the spoils of warfare, but because of his ability to survive against the odds. Such a reading is consistent with the epic poem of Homer whose protagonist is repeatedly awarded the epithets “long-suffering” and “resourceful”; it also has the effect of democratising heroism, making it obtainable to ordinary or oppressed peoples, rather than being the solitary preserve of powerful rulers or military leaders. If the winners write the history books, than Walcott’s alternative mythical narrative foregrounds the perspective of those with a history of subjugation and dispossession.

 15

Walcott frequently likens voyaging to flying, a collocation replicated in the name of the schooner Flight. There are numerous reasons for this association of which I think two are most relevant. Firstly, the twentieth century witnessed the growing pre-eminence of aircraft over sea vessel as the main mode of transoceanic transport. Shading voyages into flights allows Walcott to include more contemporary journeys into the broad semantic scope of his voyaging metaphors. Secondly, the figurative possibilities of “flights of fancy” naturally complement his use of the voyage trope as a metaphor for the poetic process.

22

Chapter One

Walcott reads Odysseus as a fundamentally conflicted figure, torn between his desire for homecoming and the migratory spirit of adventure that courses through his veins. As with all of the poet’s Odyssean incarnations, Shabine replicates this inner turmoil, Walcott reading this wanderlust as constitutive of Caribbeanness, “[t]he migratory West Indian feels rootless on his own earth, chafing at its beaches” (Walcott, 1970a, 19). In his devotion to his wife and children, his ardour for his mistress Maria Concepcion and his mania for seafaring, Shabine bears the burden of his warring passions. The poem begins with Shabine leaving Trinidad to embark on the schooner Flight as a sailor. Shabine, whose name is the “patois for/ any red nigger” is a recognisably Caribbean creation: I’m just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation. (Walcott, 1979a, 346)

His internal conflict is augmented by cultural fragmentation, as reflected by his mixed heritage. However, it is this schizophrenic aspect to Shabine’s genetic make-up (which significantly mirrors that of Walcott’s own), that entitles him to act as representative for a broader Caribbean experience. As the line “nobody or a nation” testifies, what begins in division can result in multiplication, as the traumatic fragmentation of self, caused by colonialism allows for broader representative capabilities. It is a corollary of Shabine being a “nobody” or “any red nigger” that qualifies him to be a “nation” (Walcott, 1979a, 4). Furthermore, as Fumagalli notes, the pseudonym “nobody” adopted by Shabine also refers to the “imaginative stratagem that allows Odysseus to save his life,” indicating another transposition of the Aegean onto the Caribbean, as well as highlighting the resourcefulness required to cope with a degraded colonial past (Fumagalli, 2001, 113). Shabine, like Odysseus, is polytropus.16 He too is a protean figure or master of disguise, an individual capable of being whosoever the given moment requires. In the course of the poem he is characterised alternatively as a sailor, poet, lover, smuggler, salvage diver, madman, revolutionary and fighter, recalling the flexibility of Odysseus who could switch from king to warrior to sailor, strategist, storyteller and beggar at will. Such is Shabine’s protean capability that he threatens at times to dissolve entirely; this fear of dissolution instigates the sailor’s plaintive cry, where is “the window I can

 16

Polytropus, deriving from the Greek root, signifies “turning many ways”, “versatile” and/or “much travelled.”

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look from that frames my life?” (Walcott, 1979a, 350). Walcott dramatizes Shabine’s sense of division throughout a poem that is replete with character pairings, doppelgćngers, and a reflective ocean. In the first section, Shabine’s surreptitious departure from his lover’s bed is marked by the separation of his character into two distinct personalities, presented as distinct figures: the Shabine in the route taxi and his counterpart, “a man/ exactly like me,” in the taxi’s rearview mirror, “and the man was weeping/for the houses, the streets, that whole fucking island” (Walcott, 1979a, 3/4). Confronting this reflected self as other allows Shabine an ironic distance from which to bemoan the abandonment of his lover and island home even as he welcomes his new adventure. The biographical convergences between Shabine and his creator Derek Walcott have not gone unnoticed by critics either. For one, Shabine’s mixed heritage closely mirrors Walcott’s own. Furthermore, in the reference to childhood visits to the “Methodist chapel/ in Chisel Street, Castries,” Walcott refers specifically to his own upbringing. Such details disclose Walcott’s investment in the character as he incorporates scenes from his youth, familiar to readers of Another Life, in the biographical details of his fictitious creation - Shabine. Shabine, in this reading, is a mask worn by Walcott in order to explore his representations of local sailors and tradesman from within, rather than without. Shabine operates as a halfway point for Walcott in his attempts to connect with his community through poetry. Like Walcott, Shabine is also a poet and thus bridges the gap between the estranged artist and the folk consciousness.17 While Shabine’s “sound colonial education” explains his proficiency with the acrolect in loftier moments throughout the poem, his voice is firmly grounded in the basilect. Furthermore, his personal aesthetic reflects Walcott’s own. Shabine’s attempts in his narrative quest to capture the voice of the elements echoes Walcott’s poetic commitment to honour in poetry his island and its people:18

 17

In poems such as “Homecoming: Anse la Raye,” Walcott explores his sense of distance from local life in St. Lucia. Despite his avowed decision to celebrate his island in art, he is forced to acknowledge that his time abroad has made him seem like another tourist. Unlike Walcott, Shabine, who never left the islands, still belongs. 18 For instance, Walcott in an earlier poem “Prelude” would “seek [...] to write/ Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight,/ Cold as the curled wave, ordinary/ As a tumbler of island water”, outlining a poetic manifesto of celebrating the glorious quotidian (Walcott, 1962, 52).

24

Chapter One You ever look up from some lonely beach and see a far schooner? Well, when I write this poem, every phrase go be soaked in salt; I go draw and knot every line so tight as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech my common language go be the wind, my pages the sails of the schooner Flight. (Walcott, 1979a, 347)

Shabine claims for his poetry the freshness of the wind and the salty distinctiveness of the sea. If he promises to adhere to “simple speech,” he also commits himself to syntactical and metrical precision, “I go draw and knot every line as tight/ as ropes in this rigging” (Walcott, 1979a, 347). Here again, the writing of poetry is compared to the launching of a metapoetic craft, the homonym “craft” referring to both a transport vessel and a level of poetic skill arrived at through humble apprenticeship.19 The fact that the “common speech go be the wind” suggests a means of transcending arguments over the political implications of using Received Standard English and patois. As in much of Walcott’s body of work, here again he looks to the imperishable elements to provide a detached perspective on ephemeral human concerns; throughout the cycles of time the wind will blow such transient positions away, land will bury men and empires, the sea will act as a solvent dissolving historical strife. Shabine’s poetic odyssey significantly bridges another gap for Walcott; being both an Odyssean wanderer and a poet, Shabine furthers the correspondence with Odysseus on the one hand and Walcott on the other. In other words, Shabine propagates the Homeric allusions used by Walcott to bind the tropes of storytelling and sailing. Walcott’s own self-styling as a Homeric wanderer justifies his need to leave the Caribbean in search of greater readerships and publishing opportunities. The internal division that propels his homesick wanderers dramatises his own fear of betrayal or infidelity to the island home. In his essay “What the Twilight Says” Walcott alludes to the “pardonable desertions” that are the “inevitable problem of all island artists” (Walcott, 1970a, 35). The dilemma is structured as a “choice of home or exile, self-realization or spiritual

 19

This exploration of the broad semantic scope of the word “craft” recurs throughout Walcott’s work, notably in his critical essays, “castaway poems”, Another Life, Omeros and his verse drama adaptation of The Odyssey. Though serving various functions, it is a useful trope for exploring an identity torn between migration (launching the craft) and settlement (the craftsman/castaway who builds a satisfying home). The resonance with the figure of Odysseus whose success in his storytelling craft(iness) is dependent on his ability to build a raft/ craft is evident here also. 

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betrayal of one’s country” and acknowledges the danger inherent in departures, “[t]ravelling widens this breach” (Walcott, 1970a, 35). The vibrancy of this persona poem lies in Walcott’s keen appreciation of demotic rhythms and his proficiency in switching registers and dialects. Shabine is a vibrant and distinctive narrator, traversing the boundaries of high and low culture in his exuberant speech patterns and the immediacy of his narration, which captures the zest of Caribbean speech rhythms and tones. The oral tradition in the Caribbean has had considerable impact on Anglophone Caribbean poetry, marking the transition towards the “language of speech becoming the language of narration and action” (Brown et al, 2005, xviii). This technique whereby the “literary poem pretend[s] to be the ‘told tale’” has a broad cultural resonance in the region, and accounts for the brio and immediacy of “The Schooner Flight” (Brown et al, 2005, xviii). The intimacy of address afforded by this “told tale” draws the reader into Shabine’s world, inverting the traditional relation of centre and periphery. If the elevated tone of some of Walcott’s earlier poetry had the effect of distancing him from local Caribbean communities, Shabine’s narrative is clearly pitched at the common man, “khaki-pants red niggers like you and me,” this time leaving Walcott’s international audience outside of the circle (Walcott, 1979a, 348). Continuing his hostility to imposed, external interpretations of the Caribbean for failing to recognize the archipelago on its own terms, Walcott conveys how ordinary people like Shabine are neglected by the discourse of history: I met History once, but he ain’t recognize me [...] I confront him and shout, “Sir, is Shabine!” They say I’se your grandson. You remember Grandma, your black cook, at all?” The bitch hawk and spat. A spit like that worth any number of words. But that’s all them bastards have left us: words. (Walcott, 1979a, 350)

Shabine is a “nobody” from an archipelago that is adjudged “historyless”; this personification of “History” therefore not only fails to acknowledge him but spits on him in contempt. However, if History won’t recognize Shabine, he likewise gives short shrift to the discourse, being cognizant that the archipelago is “not marinated in the past” (Walcott, 1974a, 54). Here, as in “The Sea is History,” the sea is a reservoir of the past, a palimpsestic record continually inscribed and washed clean by the vicissitudes of time.

26

Chapter One

While salvage diving in the Caribbean Sea, Shabine, sees in the coral the remains of those lost souls whose bodies have been committed to the deep “this Caribbean so choke with the dead [...] I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea-fans, / dead-men’s-fingers, and then, the dead men” (Walcott, 1979a, 349). The horror is compounded by Shabine’s sexual guilt at his betrayal of his family with his mistress, “her beauty had fallen on me like a sword/ cleaving me from my children” (Walcott, 1979a, 349). His gothic nightmare is tempered by a divine visitation “In the rapturous deep [...] I saw God/ like a harpooned grouper bleeding” (Walcott, 1979a, 349). The pelagic deity offers Shabine the “morning star” or “maris stella,” if he agrees to leave his mistress, Maria Concepcion.20 These visions induce panic and after a near drowning experience, Shabine begins to plan his departure. Betrayed by history, and unable due to his mixed heritage to side with white or black, “The first chain my hands and apologize, ‘History’; / the next said I wasn’t black enough for their pride” Shabine decides to leave the Trinidadian Republic and abandon militant radicalism “I no longer believed in the Revolution” (Walcott, 1979a, 351). Boarding the schooner Flight he rejects specious divisions for a utopia of infinite possibility, “I had no nation now but the imagination” (Walcott, 1979a, 350). If Shabine has been left nothing by empire but “words,” then he will take his inherited language, temper it to his environment, and fashion it to serve his own purposes, “I have no weapon but poetry and/ the lances of palms and the sea’s shining shield!” (Walcott, 1979a, 358). Postcolonial literatures propagate voyages, both real and imagined, which attempt to lessen the sense of displacement experienced by colonial subjects in response to their history. In coming to terms with the past, the contemporary sea journey undertaken by Shabine shades into the historical crossings in the region, such as the Middle Passage. Shabine watches with horror and awe as the ghost fleet sails through the Flight before dissolving into the misty horizon. Successive waves of historical voyages rehearse their crossing, “every ship pouring like a wooden bucket/dredged from the deep” the “men with rusty eyeholes like cannons [...] great admirals, / Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse, I heard the hoarse orders/ they gave those



20 The “morning star” or “maris stella” is another name for the Virgin Mary, the star to which sailors pray to guide them home. In contrasting the somewhat ironically named Maria Concepcion, Shabine’s mistress, with the “maris stella,” Walcott provides us with another character pair, Maria/Mary as mistress/virgin. This parallel is further cemented through the repeated association of Maria Concepcion with the sea, “I couldn’t shake the sea noise out of my head, / the shell of my ears sang Maria Concepcion” (Walcott, 1979b, 734).

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Shabines” on deck (Walcott, 1979a, 352). This encounter also marks a potential turning point in the poem as Shabine is offered the opportunity to make a symbolic return to Africa through identification with the captured slaves below deck: [n]ext we pass slave ships. Flags of all nations, our fathers below deck too deep, I suppose, to hear us shouting. So we stop shouting. Who knows who his grandfather is, much less his name? (Walcott, 1979a, 353)

This choice is rejected as Shabine, who like Walcott, concludes that this horrific episode in history has been lost, shrouded in amnesia. On encountering the slave ships crossing the Middle Passage, the narrative does not give way to recrimination, as might be expected. Shabine is aware that while he can perceive the admirals and other “Shabines” on deck, his African ancestors are invisible, being confined to the notorious slave holds. Theirs is a story that has been actively suppressed, one that for Walcott, cannot be easily recovered. The initial reaction to invoke the suffering ancestor dissipates as Shabine refuses to allow the degradations of the past to define his present condition, “we stop shouting. Who knows/ who his grandfather is, much less his name?” (Walcott, 1979a, 11). Shabine’s thoughts on this encounter reflect Walcott’s designation of the “truly tough aesthetic of the New World” which “neither explains nor forgives history” (Walcott, 1974a, 37). The strength of this position lies in its refusal to be shaped by an imposed and degrading discourse. Further identifications with victims of the region’s colonial history occur in the poem. In the section entitled “Maria Concepcion & the Book of Dreams,” Shabine dreams he is a Carib on the island of Dominica running to his death as he is pursued by armed soldiers. Here, as with other identifications with lost ancestors, the event is carefully contained within the context of a dreaming delirium.21 Significantly, repeated references to Shabine’s fears of madness throughout the poem provide a similar framing device for his Middle Passage encounter. The device of the “unreliable narrator” is exploited to its full potential here to add ambiguity to events whose reality is called into question but whose healing virtues are not disputed.



21 This device will be used again in Omeros where Achille’s return to an African past is brought on by sunstroke. This incident is also accompanied by an encounter with a creolized God who grants Achille permission to embark on a reverse journey through time and space, “[a]nd God said to Achille, “Look, I giving you permission/ to come home” (Walcott, 1990, 134).

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When Shabine declares at the beginning of the poem “I taking a seabath, I gone down the road,” this statement is open to several readings (Walcott, 1979a, 346). His immersion in salt water bears the protagonist on a voyage into the past, brings him to the brink of madness, and leads him to experience death and rebirth. In fact, by the end of final section of the poem, which traces the advent of a terrible storm that ravages the Flight, we realise that our narrator may have been relating his tale from beyond the grave. The poem concludes ambiguously, the suggestive use of the past tense in the final line leading the reader to wonder if Shabine has fulfilled the prophecy to become the “drowned sailor” that had haunted his dreams (Walcott, 1979a, 17): the deck turn white and the moon open a cloud like a door, and the light over me is a road in white moonlight taking me home. Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea. (Walcott, 1979a, 20)

“The Schooner Flight”, like the poems “Origins” and “The Sea is History,” examines the diasporic crisis of “historylessness.” Answering claims that cultures which have experienced historical rupture are therefore bereft of their own equally valid history, Walcott counters this assumption from various perspectives. Recognising the discourse of history as an agenda-driven fiction invites the colonial subject to take part in this mythmaking process. Walcott’s poetry presents examples of these alternative historical narratives. He conveys a counter-discourse to North Atlantic historiography in his imaginative histories, steeped in myth. Providing a cosmogenesis narrative whereby the “sea is history” provides a means of diluting colonial trauma and healing the wound of history with recourse to the natural world. Finally, he reverses the terms of the charge, whereby being unburdened by the weight of history is a blessing and not a burden, the “child without history” is like a “man that the waves can never wash overboard” (Walcott, 1973, 143). Shipwrecked by colonialism, the unencumbered colonial can construct an independent craft and sail beyond the Siren shore, never fearing the monsters of the deep.



CHAPTER TWO THE MYTHOPOEIC CRAFT

Odysseus, the great teller of tales, launched out on his story —Odyssey, Book 5 and the blind giant’s boulder heaved the trough from whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the conclusions of exhausted surf. —Walcott, “Sea Grapes”

One of the most enduring figures in Walcott’s work is his use of the voyage trope as a metaphor for poetic creation. The appeal of the Homeric paradigm is evident here as the Greek hero, Odysseus, is a sailor and storyteller par excellence. That the majority of Odysseus’ adventures are related by the protagonist using the technique of retrospective narration, through Books 9 to 12, highlights the centrality of the storytelling trope in the poem. Odysseus’ desire for kleos, or renown, takes him to distant lands where he will tell his story in many cities and ensure his reputation. The ongoing tension between the desire for kleos and the yearning for nostos animates this poem; to spread his fame, Odysseus must travel from home. Yet on our first encounter with him in Book 5, he is shipwrecked on an island, held captive by the enchanting goddess Calypso, who offers him the gift of immortality. This eight year sojourn on Ogygia represents the most significant threat to the success of Odysseus’ voyage and homecoming. If he accepts the goddess’ gift of divine immortality he will forego the poetic immortality he could achieve independently as a mortal man. Instead he begins to build his raft. In this regard, the raft can be understood as a metapoetic craft, a vessel that enables voyaging and poetic celebration. As Carol Doughterty contends “the construction of the raft not only enables but also prefigures the composition of the tales he sings at Alcinous’ court” (Dougherty, 2001, 37). The association of journeying with artistic composition might seem to suggest that the poem establishes an opposition between migration/poetic expression and settlement/artistic torpor. However, the poem elaborates a more dynamic relationship between migration and settlement, routes and

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roots, whereby each is inextricably bound up with the other. An epic, after all, is a record of a people, or a rooted settlement. It is the poem’s ability to travel, its migratory routes, that ensures the survival of this record across time and space. The opening line of Derek Walcott’s Omeros reveals an understanding of this mutually constitutive relationship. When Philoctete relates to the assembled tourists “‘[t]his is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes,’” he illustrates how the static laurier-cannelles trees can become a mobile canoe, how roots can indeed become routes. Yet this relationship is already established in Homer’s The Odyssey. On his descent to Hades, Odysseus is instructed by Tiresias that to complete his homecoming he must take an oar so far inland that he reaches a people who know nothing of the sea and would believe the oar to be a winnowing fan.1 At this point, he is to plant his oar in the ground, rooting his voyaging forever. Before the castaway becomes a voyager, however, he must first become a carpenter, using his skill and inspiration to construct his craft. There were two main types of ship building in Ancient Greece, the mortise and tenon system, and the sewn boat construction.2 The former is associated with carpentry, the latter with weaving. Like the voyage trope, both methods of vessel construction provide common metaphors for the art of poetic composition. Using his carpentry skills, Homer’s Odysseus constructs his raft, “he bored through all his planks and wedged them snugly, / knocking them home together, locked with pegs and joints” (Od. 5. 272/3). The vessel, like the poem, is fitted together from separate elements, and depends upon good materials and sound construction to keep it afloat. Carpentry has long been associated with poetic composition by Derek Walcott, who views poetry as a craft to which the writer must humbly apprentice himself before achieving any mastery.3 This equation of physical craft with poetic craft suggests humility in the labour, designating his work a craft rather than an art.4 In this association of

 1

An ancient agricultural tool used to separate grain from chaff. For a detailed explication of both methods, see Dougherty, Carol 2001. The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3 One of the most sustained explorations of this trope is in the poem “Cul de Sac Valley” where the simple box-shaped quatrains are deliberately crafted to resemble a carpenter’s wooden frame for a window, the metrical arrangement of the line made subservient to the appearance of visual regularity. 4 In Another Life, Walcott transforms the carpenter into a sailor, a figure who for Walcott is also a storyteller, and the wood into a boat. Describing the work of “Gregorias” he writes “I watched the vowels curl from the tongue of the 2



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poetry with a trade, Walcott seeks to bridge a distance between himself and the inhabitants of his island that has been created by differences in education, fame and wealth. For the poet therefore, as for Odysseus, carpentry is a way both of exploring the distant realms of the imagination and of reconnecting to his homeland. The construction of the sewn boat also has a figurative logic in the context of poetic creation. In Ancient Greece, a skilled singer who specialized in epics was called rhapsodos, a “singer of woven words” (Dalby, 2006, ix). Identifying Homer as a rhapsode involves then, etymologically speaking, attesting to his skill at stitching together poetic themes. Shipbuilding, like poetry therefore, depends on the skilful assembly and arrangement of materials, which must be well-fitted or sewn together. Weaving aids voyaging as it is integral to the creation of a ship’s sails. Yet, weaving also has significance within The Odyssey as a way of defending settlements. It is, after all, the primary strategy used by Odysseus’ wife Penelope to defend her marriage and homestead from outside invasion. Like her husband, she too is “crafty” and with the device of the shroud, is able to weave a web of deceit to keep the unwelcome suitors at bay.5 Thus shipbuilding – whether by carpentry or weaving – has figurative connections to poetic composition and connects the movement of the outward voyage to the putting down of roots on returning home. This chapter is divided into three sections, each of which examines the tension between migration and settlement in Walcott’s Caribbean poetry. The first section, “Castaway and Craftsman,” explores the poet’s conception of the diasporised Caribbean subject as shipwrecked by colonialism, washed up on alien shores. Faced with the dilemma of shipwreck, the castaway must become a craftsman in order both to build a raft and to construct a sustaining domestic sphere. Focusing on his “castaway poetry” and critical writing of the 1960s, this section will explore the importance of the Crusoe mask for Walcott in this period and analyse why the figure

 carpenter’s plane [...] the back crouched, / the vine-muscled wrist, /like a man rowing, / sweat-fleck of blond cedar,” thus combining in one passage the tropes of carpentry and sailing to signify artistic composition and storytelling (Walcott, 1973, 74). 5 Furthermore, as Dougherty points out: “This intersection of weaving and sailing is a particularly rich one in the Odyssey and is structurally reinforced by the very architecture of ship and loom; one word designates both the mast from which a ship’s sails hang and the upright of a woman’s loom” (Dougherty, 2001, 31/2). Thus, we can consider the Sirens episode in a new light. Odysseus escapes temptation here because he is tied to the mast/loom, which itself is an emblem of his unity to Penelope.



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of Crusoe would gradually cede to that of Odysseus. It will also be argued that these appropriations do not signal subservience to an inherited Western literary tradition, but instead abrogate a critical tradition that attempts to superimpose limiting political boundaries on artworks. The next section deepens the argument in defence of literary appropriation by dealing with Walcott’s theories on mimicry and creolization. Acknowledging the inevitability that New World artists will draw on the cultural resources of their various Old World heritages, he argues for the legitimacy of assimilation in a colonial context. According to the poet, it is only through assimilation that mastery can be achieved. Key to Walcott’s championing of mimicry is his belief that all young writers must “apprentice” themselves to the literary predecessors before they can find their own voice. Mimicry, rather than being derivative, is thus a creative process. The stigma of colonial mimicry is thus defused, as it becomes understood as a necessary pre-condition for all literary production of worth. Finally, this chapter discusses the poet’s relationship to Greece, and more specifically Homeric verse in his early work. The Mediterranean supplies the poet with an enabling resource for his work. The short poems discussed here witness the transformation of the castaway Crusoe figure into an Odyssean wanderer; they would eventually culminate in Walcott’s most sustained engagement with Homeric myth in his writing of Omeros and The Odyssey in the early 1990s. The Mediterranean basin provides him with a geographical counterpart for the island archipelago, an analogue with which to meditate on the nature of Caribbean life. Yet his poetic allusions to classical texts are not free from anxiety. Concerned that his Caribbean/Greek analogues might inadvertently confer a secondary status on Caribbean “copies” in comparison to European “originals,” Walcott’s relationship to the classical world is complex, at certain times reverential, at others combatative. This two-pronged approach of acceptance and refusal will characterise his approach to literary inheritance throughout his career.

Castaway Walcott’s collection The Castaway and Other Poems was published by in 1965 and marks his engagement with the metaphor of the Caribbean artist as being shipwrecked by colonialism, a “castaway.” This figure provides Walcott with a ductile trope which survives many permutations – from feelings of desolation and stagnation, through elation and commitment to the “New World.” The “castaway” identity also marks a series of



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engagements with archetypal figures from literary, mythical and biblical traditions. The Protean nature of the castaway/ poet figure has thrown up a variety of migratory characters to populate his verse, from prodigal sons to exiles, Homeric wanderers and fortunate travellers. It was in 1965 also that Walcott published his critical essay “The Figure of Crusoe,” which discusses his use of Robinson Crusoe as a literary emblem. In Walcott’s writing, Crusoe becomes the ultimate symbol of survival and self-mastery, who perseveres in reduced circumstances. Walcott imagines the castaway as a lonely hermit on a beach gathering materials to make a bonfire. In this image he finds a parallel to the poet writing that the “metaphor of the bonfire, in the case of the West Indian poet, may be the metaphor of tradition and the colonial talent” (Walcott, 1965a, 34).6 The fuel used is the “dead bush of tradition [...] fragments of memory [...] borne from England, from India, or from Africa,” and the firelight is the divine light of inspiration (Walcott, 1965a, 34-6). The labour of the castaway, or colonial artist, therefore, is to use of the detritus washed up on his shore to his own ends, to fashion inherited fragments into the shapes he need to construct a sustaining cultural environment. However, the deployment of the Crusoe figure is potentially problematic in a postcolonial context, especially for critics who see in the Crusoe/Friday relationship a repetition of the master/slave power dynamic. Elizabeth DeLoughrey contends that the vogue for “robinsonnades” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has made the “accidental” colonisation of the desert island a “powerful and repeated trope of empire building” (DeLoughrey, 2007, 13). Unlike other postcolonial rewritings which feel compelled to rescue the dispossessed “other” from the jaws of Western canonical fictions, Walcott significantly aligns the colonial poet with Crusoe rather than Friday. It can be argued that through identifying himself with Crusoe (the master), rather than Friday (the servant), he is appropriating a position of self-determination and autonomy over one of dispossession. While J.M. Coetzee’s Foe highlights Friday’s plight, reproving Crusoe (and his creator Danel Defoe) in the process, and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea rescues the animalistic madwoman from Rochester’s attic, Walcott argues his entitlement to use Crusoe for his own purposes. He rejects what he refers to as the “fashionable Marxist-evolved method of analysing figures from literature as if they were guilty” and looks to Defoe’s text not for the “conscience of empire” but for its

 6

The phrase here marks another oblique reference to T.S. Eliot’s critical essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”



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exploration of “isolation and survival” (Walcott, 1965a, 36). In this way he moves beyond the simple, inverse reconfigurations of Western canonical characters typically employed in postcolonial narratives. Furthermore, critics of Walcott’s Crusoe appropriations, seeing them as little more than fawning imitation, pay scant attention to the complexity of its figurative deployment. As Walcott demonstrates: [i]t is not the Crusoe you recognize. I have compared him to Proteus [...] My Crusoe, then, is Adam. Christopher Columbus, God, a missionary, a beachcomber, and his interpreter, Daniel Defoe.7 (Walcott, 1965a, 35)

Clearly then, Walcott sees Friday and Crusoe not as diametrically opposed figures but as part of a larger composite identity representing the diverse ancestry of the Caribbean diaspora.8 Rather than repeating the binary oppositions of master/slave, Crusoe/Friday, white/black, centre/periphery, and so on, he eschews exclusive political platforms for a broader representative base. 9 Three of Walcott’s “castaway poems” will be analysed here. The first, titled simply “The Castaway” explores the sense of shipwreck and abandonment of the diasporised colonial subject whose link to Old World cultural resources has been ruptured. “Crusoe’s Island” forwards this sense of isolation felt by the castaway artist who attempts through his work to ground himself in his new environment and to learn the benediction of home. Finally, “Crusoe’s Journal” delineates the origins of literary

 7

Walcott expands the point, “He is Adam because he is the first inhabitant of a second paradise. He is Columbus because he has discovered this new world, by accident, by fatality. He is God because he teaches himself to control his creation, he rules the world he has made, and also, because he is to Friday, a white concept of Godhead. He is a missionary because he instructs Friday in the uses of religion; he has a passion for conversion. He is a beachcomber because I have imagined him as one of those figures of adolescent literature, some derelict out of Conrad or Stevenson, or Marryat. In the poem he also becomes, in one line, Ben Gunn, the half-crazy pirate who guards Treasure Island, and finally, he is also Daniel Defoe, because the journal of Crusoe, which is written in prose, not in poetry” (Walcott, 1965a, 35/6). 8 In the poem “Crusoe’s Journal” for example, the use of the pronoun “we” indicates the poet’s decision to align himself with the “good Fridays” on the island. The Crusoe/Friday identifications are not therefore mutually exclusive but rather form aspects of a complex hybrid identity for the mixed race population of the archipelago. 9 Walcott writes “my position which is that of Crusoe or Friday, or more truly, a mixture of their imagined progeny, has been made defensive when it is in fact logical” (Walcott, 1965a, 39).



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endeavour in the Caribbean. The literature of the New World is, according to Walcott, crafted from necessity, at once unpolished and raw, hewn from nature. Walcott’s trope of the “castaway” thus continues his vision of the Caribbean as signifying a beginning rather than an end of history. “The Castaway” presents the plight of the diasporised colonial artist as an extreme experience of isolation. The poem’s central figure moves through paranoia and delusion, his “starved eye” devouring the horizon “for a morsel/ Of a sail” (Walcott, 1965b, 16). The hunger for companionship induces a state of near hysteria, which manifests as a form of paralysis, “[a]ction breeds frenzy. I lie” (Walcott, 1965b, 16). Lacking the scale of companionship in providing perspective renders his actions divine; when the castaway figure kills an insect, his action suggests the wrath of Zeus, splitting thunder with his lightning bolts, “[c]racking a sea-louse, I make thunder split” (Walcott, 1965b, 16). In a hallucinatory sequence, the landscape echoes the monotony of inactivity: [b]lowing sand, thin as smoke, Bored, shifts its dunes. The surf tires of its castles like a child. The salt green vine with yellow trumpet-flower, A net, inches across nothing. Nothing: the rage with which the sandfly’s head is filled. (Walcott, 1965b, 16)

The natural world is experienced here as a void, signified by the repetition of the word “nothing” in the poem. The motions of sand and sea are incessant and meaningless, the vine/net catches “nothing”, the “rage” which fills the “sandfly’s head” is “[n]othing”. At this point, Walcott would appear to be replicating the pejorative readings of Caribbean life forwarded by Froude and Naipaul, who profess to find “nothing” in the archipelago. However, this sense of the nothingness of landscape is merely the beginning of something; it is the void out of which creation emerges. A contemplative mood emerges where the castaway considers the nature of existence in relation to his own bowel movements. The poem moves from this most earthbound image of the functioning body to a transcendental meditation on creation, ushering in a series of biblical and mythical devices, “we end in earth, from earth began. / In our own entrails, genesis” (Walcott, 1965b, 16). This image functions to show how life originates from the humblest beginnings.



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Frustrated at how his naturally analogous mind continues to import borrowed themes and tropes, the castaway artist opts to “abandon/ Dead metaphors” (Walcott, 1965b, 17). Yet, significantly, rather than forsaking metaphor, the ensuing verses produce a catalogue of figuration derived from Christian iconography and classical mythology. The poet, as a creation of his historical circumstances, is susceptible to all the cultural influences of his ancestry and environment. The poem highlights therefore his inability to avoid this colonial inheritance. In later works, Walcott expresses the possibilities represented in creating anew from the eclectic fusion of the fragments of the past. However at the time of writing “The Castaway,” Walcott had yet to achieve such a stance of acceptance and celebration in the face of harsh realities. The poem ends on a despondent note; the castaway artist’s attempts at creation form a “hideous progeny.” The rotting brain hatches a “babel of sea-lice, sandfly and maggot”; the wine bottle, traditional symbol of the castaway’s means of communication with the outside world, has its “gospel choked with sand” (Walcott, 1965b, 17). The biblical hope of redemption, introduced by the word “genesis,” is renounced here. An image of Christ is evoked in the driftwood that is “nailed and white as a man’s hand,” yet it is a despairing image of a mutilated redeemer whose message is “choked,” transubstantiation aborted (Walcott, 1965b, 17). The poem therefore dramatises the poet’s sense of artistic isolation and growing religious scepticism. Highlighting the problem of the colonial artist’s engagement with the Western literary tradition, Walcott suggests a desire, and inability, to break with this cultural bequest. “Crusoe’s Island” once again rehearses the idea of the writer as an exilic figure living on the fringes of society, a condition exacerbated in a colonial situation. Though the mood continues on to be despondent, the castaway gradually shifts his position from being shipwrecked to planting roots on his adopted shores. The castaway becomes the craftsman and begins to construct his home/raft. Presenting art and organised religion as competing faiths that vie for his allegiance, the poet-persona dramatises his crisis of faith as an inability to return to the unquestioning belief of his youth and a fear that his artistic skill is insufficient: “I have lost sight of hell / Of heaven, of human will, / My skill / Is not enough” (Walcott, 1965c, 71). Both intensify his sense of exile: his Methodist upbringing creating a distance between him and the predominantly Catholic population of the island, his dedication to writing inducing a sense of artistic isolation. Religious belief and artistic creation enact a series of correspondences with each other throughout the poem, at times appearing complementary,



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while at other times seeming in competition. The artistic vision is linked for Walcott to a kind of pantheistic faith, “pagan and profane,” in which the “blue, perfect sky” becomes a “[d]ome of our hedonist philosophy” (Walcott, 1965c, 68-71).10 The natural world surveyed by the poet is a promised land “Bethel and Canaan’s heart” which “opens up like a psalm” (Walcott, 1965b, 68). In the glory of the natural world, Walcott’s “bearded hermit” builds “[h]is Eden,” a belated vision of paradise “since the fall” (Walcott, 1965c, 69). This “second Adam” is not naïve;11 he may inhabit an earthly paradise but it is an Eden arrived at through the violence of the Atlantic slave trade, here referred to as “the fall” (Walcott, 1965c, 69). The island imagery is complex in this poem. While identifying it as an “Eden,” Walcott’s imagery also suggests a hellish landscape, a dearth of opportunity for the descendants of slaves slowly roasting under steaming iron roofs: .

[r]ed, corrugated-iron Roofs roar in the sun. The wiry, ribbed air Above earth’s open kiln Writhes like a child’s vision Of hell, but nearer, nearer. (Walcott, 1965c, 68)

These images, which will recur in Another Life and Omeros, might appear contradictory if we did not recall Walcott’s penchant for intertwining biblical and mythological metaphors in his island topography; the specific detail of the roofs coexists with the associative connotations of mythical figurations. Thus God is associated with the blacksmith Hephaestus/ Vulcan of classical mythology. Vulcan is the God of Fire, which is frequently associated with the spark of inspiration in Walcott’s writings. As mentioned previously, Walcott’s essay “The Figure of Crusoe” refers to inspiration as the “divine spark” and uses the image of the hermit piling

 10

At fourteen Walcott had his first poem published. The poem’s seemingly innocuous subject of worshipping nature as evidence of divine creation was famously attacked (in verse) by a local Catholic priest. Fr. Jesse accused the young poet of blasphemy, stating the correct place to find God was in the church (King 2000, 37/8). Despite such controversy Walcott has maintained a belief in the spiritual rejuvenation of nature The sea-swift in Omeros, for example, is invested with the power of bestowing blessings, its cruciform shape in flight bestowing benediction on those who encounter it. 11 Walcott’s “The Muse of History” also advocates an “Adamic” vision of the world while also recognising that “the apples of its second Eden have the tartness of experience” (Walcott, 1974a, 41).



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combustible matter onto a bonfire as a symbol for literary creation (Walcott, 1965a, 34). Walcott’s poetic writing seeks transcendence in the fire of pure inspiration: [f]anned by the furnace blast Of heaven, may the mind Catch fire till it cleaves Its mould of clay at last. (Walcott, 1965c, 71)

Vulcan therefore, like the fire and the artist, functions to transform that which he comes in contact with. Moreover, Vulcan is a practical god, recalling Walcott’s craftsman trope, hammering away at his creations in his workshop, “God’s anvil/ Hammers ocean to a blinding shield” (Walcott, 1965c, 68). The naming of “ocean” here as opposed to “the ocean” lends the sea an anthropomorphic quality, which complements the pantheistic vision. Like Vulcan, the poet as envisioned by Walcott is also a craftsman, his creations bring him beyond the earthly realm, making him, in a phrase that again links mythological, literary and biblical structures, a “[c]raftsman and castaway, / All heaven in his head” (Walcott, 1965b, 69). However, the nagging feeling of artistic isolation haunts his efforts. The religious faith which had inspired his poetic vision is now being forced to stand aside for that vision, “the gift/ Of poetry, had fed/ With a rat’s thrift on faith” (Walcott, 1965c, 70). Art in turn is found to be inadequate insofar as it isolates him from his own people “his own brain rotting from the guilt/ Of heaven without his kind” (Walcott, 1965c, 69). Walcott faces here a dilemma that recurs throughout his work; he will not be able to honour his people in art by separating himself from them, yet the creation of art requires separation, impels him to become a “castaway.” In “The Figure of Crusoe” Walcott explores the idea of Crusoe as a foundational figure of West Indian literature who “publishes every day the newspaper of himself” (Walcott, 1965a, 38). The mutability of Walcott’s Crusoe –“our ocean’s Proteus” (Walcott, 1970b, 93) - is evident here as “[t]he craftsman, the artisan, has become the writer” (Walcott, 1965a, 38): from shipwreck, hewing a prose as odorous as raw wood to the adze; out of such timbers came our first book, our profane Genesis (Walcott, 1970b, 92)

The prose is hewn with “plain iron tools” from “raw wood”; the result it is suggested may be rough and unpolished (Walcott, 1970b, 92). However the odour of this new literature will be one of newness, of fresh sap



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spilled, elemental and indigenous. Charles Pollard suggests that this “first book” is in fact Robinson Crusoe and that the “racial and colonial myths perpetuated by Defoe’s book” (Pollard, 2004, 64) serve to explicate why Walcott designates it a “profane Genesis” (Walcott, 1970b, 92/3). However the poem’s title would argue otherwise; it is not the European representation of life on the island penned by Defoe that is evoked, it is the craft that the castaway himself undertakes that is suggested. The difference is noteworthy in that it localizes the literary endeavour; this is not simply a transposition of Defoe’s Crusoe, instead Crusoe is here a symbol of the survival and creativity of the diasporised New World population. The “profane Genesis” is their violent beginning on the islands; their “Adam” must find new ways of naming, creating indigenous words hewn from the timbers of the local landscape. What Walcott has attempted to convey in his Crusoe configurations is that “poets and prose writers who are West Indian, despite the contaminations around us, are in the position of Crusoe, the namer” (Walcott, 1965a, 36). His Crusoe is protean, an iconic figure of shipwreck that is yet malleable enough to be shaped for the poet’s own use, melting from one figure to another, from Crusoe to Adam to Columbus (and later to Odysseus): like Christofer he bears in speech mnemonic as a missionary’s the Word to savages, its shape an earthen, water-bearing vessel’s whose sprinkling alters us into good Friday’s who recite His praise, parroting our master’s style and voice, we make his language ours, converted cannibals we learn with him to eat the flesh of Christ. (Walcott, 1970b, 93)

This passage depicts the violent baptism by which the colonised population were converted to the language and religion of the colonising power. The tone and content is satirical and laden with doubling signifiers; the “vessel” which “alters us” puns on the sea vessels which brought about the enforced migration to the region whilst suggesting a transformative baptism at the “alter”/altar. Furthermore, he suggests the subversive potential of acquiescence; by accepting the language of the master “we make his language ours” (Walcott, 1970b, 93). Here also, we see Walcott introducing the controversial idea that “[m]imicry is an act of imagination,” that imitation and appropriation can lead to creative invention (Walcott, 1974b, 55). The poet also inverts the myth of Caribbean cannibalism to



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suggest the practice a legacy of the Western imagination, the Christian Eucharist rendered here as a form of ritualistic cannibalism. Protean by nature, the ambivalence of the Crusoe figure is emphasized in this poem. He is a “craftsman and castaway,” thus representative of survival and endeavour in the New World (Walcott, 1965c, 69). However he also assumes control of Friday, converting him to his own language and religion. He is Columbus and therefore a discoverer, but he is also a conqueror bringing death and destruction. This darker exploration of the castaway trope highlights the inescapable legacy of colonialism in the Caribbean. It is also significant that Walcott, as discussed previously, places some distance here between himself and this Crusoe figure which was not in evidence in either “The Castaway” or in “Crusoe’s Island.” However, in order to move beyond the position of shipwreck and victimhood, this colonial legacy must be acknowledged, accepted and rendered irrelevant. The craftsman must pragmatically pick up his tools until Crusoe’s “journals/ assume a household use; / we learn to shape from them, where nothing was/ the language of a race” (Walcott, 1970a, 94). Walcott’s Crusoe appropriation is a difficult one for many postcolonial scholars to accept. The figure of Crusoe is for many too inhabited by negative associations, by assumptions of racial and spiritual superiority for instance, to be useful in a decolonising context. However, as argued here, Walcott’s appropriation moves beyond mere transposition to a more deeply sustained engagement with the literary figure as a metaphorical figure for a more general condition of displacement. Crusoe thus represents local concerns, morphing effortlessly into alternative figurations as the poet’s needs demand. Rewriting Crusoe, he is claiming the inherited language and cultural tradition for his own use.

Mimicry This section examines Walcott’s views on the relationship between mimicry and art, with particular emphasis as to how this dynamic operates in a colonial context. Key works to be examined in this regard are Walcott’s programmatic essay “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” (1974) and his poem “Names,” published two years later in the collection Sea Grapes. What Walcott calls mimicry, has in similar circumstances been afforded the less disparaging appellation “creolization,” to denote the practice of assimilating and reconfiguring ideas and forms gleaned from diverse traditions. It is interesting then that Walcott should choose the term that Terada rightly states carries “pejorative, if contradictory, connotations of imitation, servility and mockery” (Terada, 1992, 1). Yet,



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this is hardly unusual given the poet’s predilection for appropriating a term of opprobrium in order to challenge the shakiness of its foundations and, in the process, realign the boundaries of its signification.12 The mimic man, whom Homi Bhabha dubs the “effect of a flawed colonial mimesis” (Bhabha, 1994, 89), represents a compromised being whose slavish impersonations characterise in turn either a justification of the civilizing process or a figure whose disturbing resemblance threatens fixed notions of cultural identity. Mimicry confers a sense of belatedness to the cultures that adopt it, elevating a fully formed Western self at the expense of the “half-made” other. West Indian writer V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men illustrates the experience of the self as a “partial presence” through the novel’s protagonist Ralph Singh. Singh, a failed West Indian politician living in London, cannot reconcile his own sense of unreality with the city’s perceived authenticity, confessing “[w]e pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World” (Naipaul, 1967, 175). Naipaul’s mimicry is a state of existence where action cannot exist independent of metropolitan reference. Walcott examines the crippling indictment contained in Naipaul’s conception of mimicry in his own essay “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?”: [n]o gesture, according to this philosophy, is authentic, every sentence is a quotation, every movement either ambitious or pathetic, and because it is mimicry, uncreative […] Once the meridian of European civilization has been crossed, according to the theory, we have entered a matter where there can only be simulations of self-discovery. (Walcott, 1974b, 53)

Since the 1970’s, Walcott has espoused a theory of mimicry that is enabling rather than inhibiting in its scope. Unlike Naipaul’s mimicry as slavish imitation, or Bhabha’s mimicry as “a form of mockery,” Walcott’s mimicry stresses inheritance and entitlement (Huddart, 2006, 57). Although it bears in common with Bhabha a conception of mimicry as “repetition with difference” it views mimicry more as a craftsman’s tool than a method of subversion (Huddart, 2006, 57). Mimicry is employed, but the end result moves far beyond mere imitation. As Walcott writes,

 12

This is a typical Walcottian strategy. In “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” he counters the negative accusation of mimicry by highlighting the term’s enabling potential; in “The Muse of History” he counters the negative charge of historylessness by proclaiming history to be a burden that must be thrown off; in “What the Twilight Says” he counters allegations of the mulatto’s ruptured cultural tradition by saying that it is his mixed heritage that makes him the legitimate heir of all the cultures of the Caribbean. 



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“[t]he river, stilled, may reflect, mirror, mimic other images, but that is not its depth” (Walcott, 1974b, 53). Employing the trope of the meridian as a central figure of his poetics, Walcott dismantles assumed binaries of Old World originality and New World imitation to encourage a more dialogic interaction on a non-hierarchical plane. Acknowledging New World mimicry he does not concede Old World originality, and it is this reservation which justifies his poetic appropriations. The subjects of his allusions furthermore, indicate a predilection for prodigious literary borrowers; thus in alluding to Shakespeare for example, he not only declares the legitimacy of New World literary inheritance but also highlights the allusiveness of Old World “originals.”13 However, although openly acknowledging influence, he maintains that as a writer, “you build according to the topography of where you live” (Walcott, 1974b, 56). That is, though allusive his work is distinctly Caribbean. I have said that Walcott’s conception of mimicry is akin to creolization; this statement requires some clarification. Firstly, it is necessary to briefly outline the contours of creolization. In their edited collection on the topic, Balutansky et al define creolization as a: syncretic process of diverse dynamics that endlessly reworks and transforms the cultural patterns of varied social and historical experiences and identities. (Balutansky et al, 1998, 3)

Furthermore, they maintain that the cross-pollination that such a project entails undercuts “any academic or political aspiration for unitary origins or authenticity” (Balutansky et al, 1998, 3). Problematically however, such definitions set up an opposition between creolized and non-creolized societies, implicitly inferring the “existence of pure forms prior to creolization” and ignoring the possibility of cultural decreolization (Eriksen, 2007, 171). This problem has been countered by attempts to read creolization as a global phenomenon: Edouard Glissant defines creolization as a “cross-cultural process” from which “no people have been spared” (Glissant, 1989, 140) while James Clifford asserts that “we are all Caribbeans now in our urban archipelagos” (Clifford, 1988, 173). As none can claim to being spared the creolization process, no one can avow “purity” of origins as a justification for domination. These broad definitions however, are in danger of expanding the term beyond its

 13

As Sanders points out “[w]hatever the ideological stance[s] of his adaptors, one inescapable fact is that Shakespeare was himself an active adaptor and imitator, an appropriator of myth, fairy tale, and folklore, as well as of the works of specific writers as varied as Ovid, Plutarch, and Hollinshed” (Sanders, 2006, 46).



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relevant historical circumstances to the point where it retains little conceptual merit. For these reasons, I find Eriksen’s definition of creolization expedient in accounting for the historical specificity, as well as the potential for movement and stability that this process suggests. Eriksen defines creolization as the: cultural phenomena that result from displacement and the ensuing social encounter and mutual influence between/ among two or several groups, creating an ongoing dynamic interchange of symbols and practices, eventually leading to new forms with varying degrees of stability. (Eriksen, 2007, 172/3)

Walcott’s creolization of literary influences has been noted by critics: for Dash, the poet’s vision of a “New World Mediterranean” points to his “translational” and “intertextual” aesthetics that creatively juxtapose the “creole and the universal” (Dash, 1998, 100/5); Hamner describes Walcott’s verse-drama adaptation of The Odyssey as “[c]reolizing Homer for the stage” (Hamner, 2001, 374); Breslin maintains that “Walcott’s merger of Adam and Robinson Crusoe is [...] a classic instance of creolization” (Breslin, 2001, 104). Walcott’s creolization accords with Eriksen’s definition in that it is a result of displacement; transoceanic migration to the Caribbean created this mixed heritage scion of both Europe and Africa. These circumstances resulted in the exchange and recombination of symbols and practices among diverse cultural groups, enabling the poet to read Crusoe as a figure for the shipwrecked West Indian artist and Homer as a creolized itinerant. However, this situation would lead to the creation of cultural productions of relative stability, as well as a condition of creative flux. In the poem “Crusoe’s Journal” Walcott writes how these scraps of inherited cultures began to “assume a household use,” “we learn to shape from them, where nothing was / the language of a race” (Walcott, 1970b, 94). It is from the creative recombination and treatment of varied cultural resources that new forms emerge, for example, Walcott’s aesthetic of a “New World Mediterranean” (Dash, 1998, 100). As Walcott would write many years later in The Prodigal, “if our work is piebald mimicry / then virtue lies in its variety” (Walcott, 2004a, 70). Another force is in operation here in these creative appropriations. In “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” Walcott expresses the creative potential of cultural inheritance, stating unambiguously that “[m]imicry is an act of imagination” (Walcott, 1974b, 55). However, when posing the question as to where culture originates, he provides his own response: from the “force of natural surroundings” (Walcott, 1974b, 56). In “Homage



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to Edward Thomas” he reiterates this belief, proclaiming “a country’s cast/ topography delineates its verse” (Walcott, 1969a, 25). Similarly, “Origins” speaks of a “new song” for castaways who “[w]ith hard teeth breaking the bitter almonds of consonants, / shap[e] new labials to the curl of a wave” (Walcott, 1964, 14). Thus imported cultural resources are indigenized and in the process transformed, the geographical specificity of landscape decisively shaping cultural production. Thus, what began in mimicry becomes unique to place. Significantly, Walcott’s granting of New World mimicry is not an acknowledgement of Old World originality. In fact his attitudes to originality are typically disparaging. In interviews he castigates the twentieth century preoccupation with the “idiosyncratic genius” and with “having your own style” (Montenegro, 1996, 148), declaring the need for originality to be the “obsession of ambitious talent” that is “[c]ontemptible from early on and insufferable in the young” (SjƂberg, 1996, 83). In its stead, he recommends a “fierce, devoted apprenticeship” to the craft before any attempt of achieving mastery (SjƂberg, 1996, 83). He rejects Harold Bloom’s theory of an “anxiety of influence” as an “ambitious, careerist phrase” (Brown et al, 1990, 186), explaining “I have a medieval mind – I’m really part of a guild” (Montenegro, 1996, 148). These comments are interesting as they recast the stigma of non-originality as a necessary stage of learning, required to achieve any proficiency in the writing craft. Walcott here has expanded the parameters of mimicry from an inexorable colonial condition to an artistic imperative. The point is extended as he repeatedly draws attention to the non-originality of the great writers that crop up in his own highly allusive work, from Homer and Virgil to Shakespeare, from Dante to Eliot, Pound, Joyce and so on. In other words, Walcott does not mimic his literary predecessors in order to slavishly emulate a great tradition of original artists; through mimicry he legitimately extends a literary line of active imitators and thieves. “Names” is another poem in the Walcott canon that tackles issues of origins (or lack thereof) and originality (or its non-existence). As with much of his earlier work discussed here, it propounds the impossibility of engaging with severed Old World roots, rejecting essentialist unitary conceptions of culture, viewing cultural production instead as an ongoing process, something to be made and remade in changing circumstances. The dedication at the beginning to Edward Kamau Brathwaite, is not so much a homage as a literary riposte. Both Thieme and Pollard14 identify it



14 See Thieme, John 1999. Derek Walcott. Manchester: Manchester University Press (p. 97), and Pollard, Charles W. 2004. New World Modernisms: T.S. Eliot,



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as a response to Brathwaite’s Afro-Caribbean project of “nation language” poetry, a folk poetry that emerges from oral speech which presents an alternative to the coloniser’s language. Brathwaite contends that: [n]ation language is the language which is influenced very strongly by the African model, the African aspect of our New World/ Caribbean heritage. English it may be in terms of some of its lexical features. But in its contours, its rhythm and timbre, its sound explosions, it is not English. (Brathwaite, 1984, 311)

Brathwaite’s strategic essentialism posits “nation language” (Brathwaite, 1984, 311) as a means of resisting the supremacy of the English language and a way to recover a submerged African culture. Walcott, by contrast, views his African cultural inheritance as diminished by the Middle Passage crossing, a half-forgotten memory that cannot be easily accessed. For Walcott then, the language of the coloniser can be adapted and mastered, made to serve indigenous needs. Accepting the English language would be for Walcott, like many other colonial writers a difficult choice. He is aware of the racial typologies that would read the choice as subservience. “Crusoe’s Journal” addresses the stereotype of “good Fridays […] parroting our master’s/ style and voice”; however, Walcott holds that through assimilation and mastery “we make [Crusoe’s] language ours” (Walcott, 1970b, 93). Acknowledging that the spread of the coloniser’s language was coterminous with the spread of colonialism, he nevertheless refuses to blur the distinction between the two, “[i]t is the language which is the empire, and great poets are not its vassals but its princes” (Walcott, 1974a, 51). “Names” highlights Walcott’s willingness to engage with the language and culture of the coloniser. Writing of the English language in his essay “The Muse of History,” he contends “I could no more take it back than they could claim it” (Walcott, 1974a, 63). The enforced conversion of the Afro-Caribbean population to the language and religion of the coloniser is not seen as defeat therefore; rather it denotes a pragmatic acquiescence: The slave converted himself, he changed weapons, spiritual weapons, and as he adapted to his master’s religion, he also adapted his language, and it is here that what we can look at as our poetic tradition begins. Now began the new naming of things. (Walcott, 1974a, 48)

 Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press (p.107).



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This acceptance of language and religion is neither passive nor servile. In the repetition of inherited words and phrases, the language becomes creolized, reflecting a fractured consciousness that looked not at one but at many horizons; as Walcott writes “[t]he African acquiesced/ repeated, and changed them” (Walcott, 1976a, 42). This understanding of creolization/mimicry as a two-part process of assimilation and mastery is clearly illustrated in the poem. “Names” is divided into two parts. Part I conflates the poet’s singular identity with that of the Caribbean peoples as a whole, here the poet speaks for ‘my race’ (Walcott, 1976a, 40). Part II moves to broader reflection on the relationship of language to colonialism, speaking about the islands and their inhabitants – moving from the pronouns “I”, “my” and “we” to “they” and “[t]he African” (Walcott, 1976a, 305-308). Furthermore, though Walcott speaks of “my race” in the singular, he clearly speaks for a composite race with elements from Africa, Asia and Europe. He utilizes the singular to describe the many that make up the one, in the same fashion as the word hybrid designates a multi-faceted singular. Thus the race he speaks for includes the “goldsmith from Benares, / the stonecutter from Canton, the bronzesmith from Benin” (Walcott, 1976a, 305). It is for all of these transplanted identities that the poet asks rhetorically “[h]ave we melted into a mirror/ leaving our souls behind?” (Walcott, 1976a, 306). The poem begins by highlighting an absence of fixed points of identity; origins, language, culture, even astronomical positioning, all undergo displacement here: [m]y race began as the sea began, with no nouns, and with no horizon, with pebbles under my tongue, with a difference fix on the stars. (Walcott, 1976a, 305)

Castaways, adrift from their cultures of origin, they have lost their ancestral language and place in the universe. Interestingly, Walcott insists upon the “pebbles under my tongue,” suggesting that the initial adoption of the coloniser’s tongue poses the same difficulty for the contemporary Caribbean artist as it did for the original transplanted slave population who were forced to learn it (Walcott, 1976a, 305 my emphasis). The dispossession and vagueness of origin that Walcott identifies in this first stanza is undercut by a renewed sense of purpose in line five, “[b]ut now my race is here” (Walcott, 1976a, 305). Following on from observations made in “The Caribbean; Culture or Mimicry?”, Walcott explores the fallacy of what might be termed “Meridian logic.” The meridian for Walcott is an inherently political



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symbol, connoting more than cartographic positioning. These lines served to carve up the surface of the earth according to a Eurocentric perspective and to make global travel, and hence colonisation, easier and safer. Lines of longitude designate authority, providing a point of comparison against which all else will be measured. The hierarchy implied by the zero line of the arbitrary point of the prime meridian highlights the position of preeminence allotted to theories of points of origin and the processes that inaugurate them. This split recalls the violence of the colonial mission, described elsewhere by Walcott as ‘the monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice’ (Walcott, 1974a, 64). Walcott highlights the political constitution of these arbitrarily demarcated lines in his poem Omeros when the poet-persona asks “[w]ho decrees a great epoch?” answering “The meridian of Greenwich” (Walcott, 1990, 189). The meridian is therefore a productive poetological figure for Walcott symbolizing power and inequality. In this essay, the poet imagines a split between Old World and New as a meridian line, a mirror, a line strung across the horizon in the creation of such hyphenated identitarian paradigms as Afro-Caribbean, IndoCaribbean or British-Caribbean. Adopting a pan-American stance, he employs the trope of the meridian to extend the implications of Naipaul’s comments to the point of absurdity, implying an invisible line in the sea between Europe and the Americas which when traversed in that direction had the direct consequence of transforming all endeavour into imitation. He writes: [t]he civilized virtues on the other side of this mirror are the virtues of social order, a lineally clear hierarchy, direction, purpose, balance. With these things, so we are taught, some social justice and the exercise of racial memory which is tradition. Somehow, the cord is cut by that meridian. (Walcott, 1974b, 53)

In “Names” the poet writes, “I looked for that moment/ when the mind was halved by a horizon. // I have never found that moment” (Walcott, 1976a, 305). There is no distinct point of origin, no “moment” that can be identified as the end of the old race, the beginning of the new, the end of creativity, the onset of mere imitation. Clearly then “[t]here was no line in the sea which said, this is new, this is the frontier, the boundary of endeavour, and henceforth everything else can only be mimicry” (Walcott, 1974b, 54).



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The loss of cultural origins means that culture must be created out of the void, a culture pieced together from a fragmented inheritance but born to the new surroundings: [a] sea-eagle screams from the rock, and my race began like the osprey with that cry, that terrible vowel, that I! (Walcott, 1976a, 306)

The dawning of self-consciousness announces itself in an exclamation, a cry that resembles both a “birth cry” and a howl of suffering (Terada, 1992, 99). This cry acknowledges the pain and dispossession of colonialism and the loss of cultural origins while simultaneously claiming an identity, an “I”, that is as native to the new archipelago as a “sea-eagle” that “screams from the rock” (Walcott, 1976a, 306).15 Stranded on an alien shore, the castaway population are left: “with nothing in our hands // but this stick/ to trace our names on the sand/ which the sea erased again, to our indifference” (Walcott, 1976a, 41). The poem asserts the rights of a poor, disenfranchised population to create their own identity and culture out of the legacy of colonialism. The castaway population cannot survive until “they first presumed/ the right of everything to be a noun” (Walcott, 1976a, 307). In “Origins” the poet writes “Among these shallows I seek my own name and a man” (Walcott, 1964, 14). Part II of “Names” muses on the relationship of language to colonialism and prescribes a means to accept the language of the coloniser without being subservient to the colonialist, or as Walcott would put it, “[o]ne becomes a master, one doesn’t become a slave” (qtd. in Ciccarelli, 1977, 48). Analyzing the colonial project of renaming newly acquired territories he wonders “when they named these bays/ bays, / was it nostalgia or irony?” (Walcott, 1976a, 306). The colonisers try to recreate the world they left behind through the creation of a series of “belittling diminutives” (Walcott, 1976a, 307), unflattering superimpositions of language that distort local realities. Renaming colonial territories after metropolitan sites may be a species of nostalgia for the colonialist, trying to impose a level of familiarity on an alien landscape in which the coloniser is an exile. However the result might also be regarded as deliberately ironic; thus the “courts of Castille” and “Versailles’ colonnades” are “supplanted by

 15

Once again, in his choice of sea-eagle, Walcott combines tropes of voyaging and flight. The rocky perch hints to another meeting place of landscape, seascape and skyscape.



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cabbage palms” and “little Versailles /meant plans for a pigsty” (Walcott, 1976a, 307). The bitterness and jealousy felt by the exiled colonialist whose “memory turned acid” is evoked through the “sour apples” and “green grapes” may explain the potentially mocking designations (Walcott, 1976a, 307). However, the names stuck and in the process came to reflect a new reality, this new Valencia “glows/ with the lanterns of oranges” (Walcott, 1976a, 42). The names have been accepted and made to fit local realities, this acceptance of imposed circumstances being, for Walcott, a precondition for survival: “[t]he African acquiesced,/Repeated, and changed them” (Walcott, 1976a, 42). This process of acquiescence, repetition and change denotes Walcott’s prescription for creating an indigenous culture and identity out of a fractured past. Culture and identity are created from and imbued with the vision and realities of the local landscape, the “way the wind bends/ our natural inflections” (Walcott, 1976a, 307). This indigenous wellspring claims inheritance of the imported language, twisting it to local realities, tuning it to new meanings and signifiers. An alien language becomes localised and original through the process of repetition; the names are no longer merely derivative, for they no longer have the same meaning. Where previously the “uncombed forest” and “uncultivated grass” seemed to lack the elegance and grandeur of the imposed names, it is now this same landscape which denotes the worthiness and entitlement of a language (Walcott, 1976a, 308): [t]hese palms are greater than Versailles, for no man made them, their fallen columns greater than Castille, no man unmade them except the worm, who has no helmet, but was always the emperor. (Walcott, 1976a, 308)

Once again, the natural world rules over the world of men, expressing an enduring elemental force that diminishes the pride in fleeting human achievements. This realm that cannot be “made” or “unmade” by the work and hands of men attests to a power of regeneration that occurs beyond the realm of colonial rule and thus proves “greater” (Walcott, 1976a, 308). The worm is the new emperor; the decay of ruins drawing attention to an empire that was rotten at the core. Towards the end of the poem the poet shades into the persona of a schoolteacher. He instructs the children in the naming of local realities: “Listen, my children, say: / moubain: the hogplum, / cerise: the wild cherry. / baie-la: the bay” (Walcott, 1976a, 307). The English names are



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explained through reference to French Creole, the first language of the majority of St. Lucians. By having the teacher explain the names through reference to the demotic speech of St. Lucia, Walcott makes a deft move. Instead of having local realities referring consistently to colonial languages, here the colonial language of education (English) is explained through French Creole, making it subservient to the local reality. The teacher continues: and children, look at these stars over Valencia’s forest! Not Orion, not Betelegeuse, tell me, what do they look like? Answer, you damned little Arabs! Sir, fireflies caught in molasses. (Walcott, 1976a, 308)

Asked to name the constellations, the children in the class do not defer to classical configurations but create new metaphors from the perspective of the local. The image of the fireflies caught in molasses is arresting and imaginative, highlighting the process by which colonial culture can enrich and alter the colonialist’s language, demonstrating that assimilation is much more than mere imitation.

Building a Raft Walcott’s interest in Homeric verse is evident from his earliest collections. However, it was not until 1969, the year in which he published The Gulf that the Odyssean wanderer would become a central character in his verse. Here, the stasis of the Caribbean artist as shipwrecked castaway gives way to an emphasis on migration in a volume that, like its author, shuttles between the Caribbean, Europe and America.16 For King, the mid-sixties signalled the time that Walcott realised that as a “West Indian he was an American, and that his intellectual home was among the cosmopolitan Modernist culture of the New York intelligentsia” (King, 2000, 191). For Ismond, the year 1979 was decisive in signalling the end of Walcott’s “Caribbean phases” in that it marks the shift from the “period of residence

 16

From 1957, when he was awarded the Rockefeller fellowship to study theatre in New York, Walcott would be a regular visitor to the United States, teaching in many American universities, including Boston, Columbia, Harvard, Rutgers, and Yale.



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in the Caribbean” to what might be termed his “dual residency in the Caribbean and the United States” (Ismond, 2001, 1). Whatever moment we choose as the marker of change, it is clear that a transition did occur. In the verse of the period, mental departures on Walcott’s metapoetic craft start to coexist with their physical counterparts, and the poet begins to acclimatise himself to a condition of settlement in unsettlement. Thus in his poetics, the poet-persona that is Derek Walcott moves from a selfstylized exilic condition of being a “Ulysses without shipmates” (Walcott, 1949, 41), a “castaway” (Walcott, 1965a, 57), and a “single, circling, homeless satellite” (Walcott, 1980e, 11), to more positive associations of a “seafarer” (Walcott, 1979a, 14), and a “fortunate traveller” (Walcott, 1980a, 11) who could recognize that “[t]he sea was my privilege” (Walcott, 1990, 295). Walcott’s conception of a Caribbean subjectivity is thus unfixed, existing in a state of perpetual motion and transformation. His own life of shuttling back and forth from the Caribbean to the U.S., where he taught for one semester annually in Boston University until 2007, as well as the numerous writing tours he embarks on throughout Europe and the U.S., supplement this sense of the writer as an exilic figure. In his work he cultivates an image of the writer as dwelling on the fringes of society, promoting his sense of self as a wanderer and feeding a keen anxiety of infidelity to his native home. Describing this condition of errance as the “inevitable problem of all island artists: the choice of home or exile, selfrealization or spiritual betrayal of one’s country”, he acknowledges that “travelling widens this breach” (Walcott, 1970a, 35), but notes in his defence the necessity of travel for the cosmopolitan artist, arguing that “[t]o have loved one horizon is insularity; / it blindfolds vision” (Walcott, 1987a, 79). The colonial anxiety surrounding his acceptance of the language and culture of the coloniser, inculcated through a British-based colonial education system, nevertheless feeds internal misgivings of other betrayals, “[t]he discipline I preached/ made me a hypocrite; / their lithe black bodies, beached, / would die in dialect” (Walcott, 1987b, 23). The evolution of this engagement with the figure of the wanderer, both for the narrative “I,” and the fictional characters that populate the poems, marks a growing acceptance of this drifting subjectivity. Thus, Crusoe is gradually superseded by Odysseus. In “Homecoming: Anse La Raye” Walcott addresses the difficulty of return for the Odyssean wanderer: [w]hatever else we learned at school, like solemn Afro-Greeks eager for grades, of Helen and the shades



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This assertion requires a moment’s pause. Homer’s Odysseus must perform detailed rites on his return in order to fulfil the conditions of his homecoming.17 It is clear that Walcott refers to the period after Odysseus has come home, an area of much debate among classicists.18 Could the adventure loving wanderer really settle down to domestic life, even after “her looms fade” and the memory of “doom-/surge-haunted nights” is “drilled in the skull” (Walcott, 1969b, 127). Returning to St. Lucia, he realises that he is now a stranger in his home; the “spindly, sugar- headed children” run to him “because you clothes, / your posture / seem a tourist’s” (Walcott, 1969b, 127/8). It is a painful realisation for the poet who “had hoped it would mean something to declare / today, I am your poet, yours” to realise “[y]ou give them nothing” (Walcott, 1969b, 128). Here, as in “Crusoe’s Island” and “The Light of the World,” Walcott expresses a fear that his poetic tribute of celebrating the island archipelago in his art will not make up for his betrayal of leaving to pursue an illustrious literary career abroad. Lacking the sense of natural entitlement to home possessed by the locals, “fishermen move their draughts in shade, / crossing, eating their islands,” the poet-persona feels the environment grow alien and hostile “[t]he black cliffs scowl, / the ocean sucks its teeth” (Walcott, 1969b, 128/9). The poem offers little consolation for the Odyssean wanderer who must learn that there are “homecomings without home” (Walcott, 1969b, 128). The Odyssey is invoked again in the poem “Sea Grapes,” where, in typical fashion, Walcott spies a Caribbean sail and imagines it to be a Homeric vessel, that “schooner beating up the Caribbean // for home, could be Odysseus, / home-bound on the Aegean” (Walcott, 1976b, 297). The poem, which was originally titled “Sour Grapes,” here again expresses division and a disconsolate mood. The nature of the betrayal is

 17

On his descent into Hades, Tiresias provides clear instructions to Odysseus on the necessary rites he must perform to ensure he will return safely: “once you have killed the suitors in your halls [...] carry your well-planed oar until you come / to a race of people who know nothing of the sea [...] then plant your bladed, balanced oar in the earth / and sacrifice fine beasts to the lord god of the sea, / Poseidon” (Od., 11, 136-149). 18 For example, in his The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis tells the tales of Odysseus who having returned to Ithaca, becomes dissatisfied with his quiet family life and decides to take off on new adventures.



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different to that in “Homecoming: Anse La Raye,” being more personal, “that father and husband’s // longing” is said to be “like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name/ in every gull’s outcry” (Walcott, 1976b, 297).19 The dilemma seems insoluble, and the speaker parallels the temptations besetting the Greek hero with his own, “[t]he ancient war/ between obsession and responsibility/ will never finish and has been the same// for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore” (Walcott, 1976b, 297). Though the analogy offers some comfort, literature ultimately proves inadequate “[t]he classics can console. But not enough” (Walcott, 1976b, 297). Odyssean incarnations continue through the autobiographical work Another Life. In Book Six, the speaker remembers his next-door neighbours in his childhood Castries. He recalls a Captain Foquarde, who is deigned “[h]ereux qui comme Ulysses” with his beautiful “Martiniquan Penelope” (Walcott, 1973, 39). However, this Odyssean sailor seems particularly well-travelled, having reached the shores of Ireland from the Aegean before journeying onward to the Caribbean. We learn that the beauty of his wife attracted an array of suitors to the home of the absent Captain, so that “when he ulysseed, she bloomed again” (Walcott, 1973, 30/1). Earthier and livelier than her Greek equivalent, the indiscretions of this “Penelope” bear more in common with Joyce’s Molly Bloom than the patient and faithful Penelope of Homeric verse (Walcott, 1973, 39). Inspired perhaps by Joyce’s Ulysses, the poet here seems more partial to his flawed and local reconfigurations of mythical archetypes, than the Greek counterparts that inspire them. The town “derelicts” become for his youthful mind “the stars of my mythology” their lives and deeds humorously recalled in this “alphabet of the emaciated” from “Ajax to Zandoli” (Walcott, 1973, 22). The Greek Ajax now is reconfigured as a “lion-coloured stallion from Sealey’s stable” whose epic status is announced only through its thunderous neck and sensitivity to the “scent/ of battle” (Walcott, 1973, 16/7). The town’s transvestite, Gaga, is pronounced “most Greek of all” in his sexual orientation, “mincing” before “Ionic columns” (Walcott, 1973, 18/9). Cassandra is re-envisaged as a “Berthilia […] a crippled crone” who forms a “hump on her son’s back” (Walcott, 1973, 17). As in previous works, the mythological characters depicted here frequently carry Christian overtones and Berthilia’s offspring is admired as a “model son” for willingly bearing his “cross” (Walcott, 1973, 17). Midas is recast as “Monsieur Auguste Manoir” a respected businessman who exploits the local region, “rising to

 19

Bruce King reads the poem as an expression of guilt regarding marital infidelity (King, 2000, 333).



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watch the sunlight work for him/ gilding the wharf’s warehouses with his name” (Walcott, 1973, 20). Jason with his “golden fleece” becomes Joumard the poultry thief, who hides a “smoke-drugged guinea hen” in his “fluttering coat” (Walcott, 1973, 19). Philomène appears as “the birdbrained idiot girl, / eyes skittering […] since her rape” (Walcott, 1973, 19).20 Odysseus, master of disguise, appears here in the form Emmanuel Auguste a “tattooed ex-merchant sailor” who “rows alone/ through the rosebloom21 of dawn to chuckling oars/ measured, dip, pentametrical, reciting” (Walcott, 1973, 18). This seeming preference for his Caribbean characters drives home a point Walcott strives to make in his engagement with classical texts, namely that his deployment of mythical archetypes is mimetic of Caribbean realities as opposed to a subservient classicism. Chapter Seven begins with the poet excusing his elevating of ordinary St. Lucians: [p]rovincialism loves the pseudo-epic, so if these heroes have been given a stature disproportionate to their cramped lives, remember I beheld them at knee-height, and that their thunderous exchanges rumbled like gods about another life. (Walcott, 1973, 41)

Although this passage might initially be read as belittling, the words “[p]rovincialism,” “pseudo-epic” and “cramped” mocking the epic analogues, it is the very ordinariness of his island that, Walcott seeks to celebrate (Walcott, 1973, 41).22 Walcott’s epical vision is not a celebration of warfare or conquest, rather it aims to voice the lives of ordinary people, dispossessed by empire. The Fortunate Traveller (1981) continues to explore this New World Mediterranean in poems such as “Map of the New World,” “From This Far” and “Greece.” Whereas the former seems to reinforce the parallel, the latter two express unease about incorporating imported paradigms. Part I of “Map of the New World” is titled “Archipelagoes,” thus acknowledging the Greco-Caribbean parallel in the use of the plural. Beginning once more with a Caribbean “sail” as synecdoche for the vessel that shades the

 20

In Greek myth, Philomène was raped and mutilated by her brother-in-law before being turned into a nightingale. 21 Another covert allusion to another incarnation of the Homeric wanderer in Joyce’s Leopold Bloom 22 In his Nobel Prize speech Walcott describes St. Lucia as an “island blest by obscurity” (Walcott, 1992, 84).



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Caribbean archipelago into the Greek one, a series of dreamlike mutations occur in the blurring lines of the elements; “Helen’s hair” becomes “a gray cloud” and “Troy, a white ashpit” (Walcott, 1980d, 25). Moreover, it is the act of writing that seems to instigate the transformation, “[a]t the end of this sentence, rain will begin” (Walcott, 1980d, 25). “Archipelagoes” concludes with the arrival of another Homeric wanderer, “A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain/ And plucks the first line of the Odyssey”; the similarity between this figure and the mysterious traveller in “Origins” whose liquid libation quenches the fires of Troy is hard to miss (Walcott, 1980d, 25). Walcott has always stressed that his classical appropriations came to him naturally, and as a direct result of the geographic correlation between the two archipelagos. It is then, a matter of seeing the Caribbean in term of The Odyssey, but of seeing The Odyssey in terms of the Caribbean. 23 Moreover, the vibrancy of the fecund Caribbean in opposition to an over-industrialised Europe seems to further legitimise classical appropriation. Part III of the poem, entitled “Sea Cranes,” quotes Robert Graves insistence that “[o]nly in a world where there are cranes and horses [...] can poetry survive” (Walcott, 1980d, 27). 24 Classical epic for Walcott then, is understood in terms of domestic realities, making the non-heroic events of quotidian life a fit subject for poetry, “[e]pic/ follows the plough, metre the ring of the anvil” (Walcott, 1980d, 27). The realisation here is that it is the “ordinariness, not the astonishment, that is the miracle, that is worth recalling” (Walcott, 1997b, 233). Although Joyce is the Irish writer best known for his epic of the everyday, it is Patrick Kavanagh who sums the matter up most succinctly when he writes “I inclined/ To lose my faith

 23

In a talk given in Duke University in 1997 Walcott explained “I felt totally natural, without making it an academic exercise or a justification or an elevation of St. Lucians into Greeks, or some such nonsense, because of the harbours in the Caribbean, the work of the people in the Caribbean, the light in the Caribbean. I don’t know the Greek islands, but that sense of elation you get in the morning, of a possibility that is always there, and of the width of the ocean – that, to me, is Caribbean first of all (Walcott, 1997b, 235). 24 This opposition of the pristine natural world of the Tropics juxtaposed against the exhausted and decadent civilisation of Europe might seem to flirt dangerously with the exoticist and utopian discourses that read the Caribbean as an atavistic alternative to the modern, industrialised West. However, Walcott counters that reading Caribbean realities in terms of European ambition is a basic misunderstanding, an “othering” of place and people. Firing a shot across the bow at Claude Lévi-Strauss’ well-known travelogue he states, “[t]o be told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response. I am not your city or culture. There might be less Tristes Tropiques after that” (Walcott, 1992, 77).



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in Ballyrush and Gortin/ Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind./ He said : I made the Iliad from such /A local row. Gods make their own importance” (Kavanagh, 2000, 132). Indeed, Walcott’s own verse seems to reiterate this supposition. In “The Lost Empire” he writes “I’m content as Kavanagh with his few acres” (Walcott, 2010, 38). This recognition of the inherent value of the local inspires the poet-persona to tear his gaze from distant horizons and set on a course for home, “[g]enerous ocean, turn the wanderer/ from his salt sheets [...] Wrench his heart’s wheel and set his forehead here” (Walcott, 1980d, 27). In later poems in the volume, the poet begins to question his own need to twin the Greek and Caribbean archipelagos, though the continued evocation of Greece indicates the dilemma is not easily resolved. In “From This Far,” the vessel imagined is a “Greek tanker” which carries “in its hold, a cargo of marble heads” (Walcott, 1980a, 29). This cargo of mythological heroes and gods, transmitted through a colonial education system, “were shipped to us [...] dead on arrival” (Walcott, 1980a, 29). Europe with its veneration of statues and ruins, its reverence for history, cannot, it seems, compare to the vibrant present of the natural world, the static “white almonds of the statue” cannot compare to the swaying “almond branches wrestling off their shade” (Walcott, 1980a, 29). Walcott is suspicious of ruins, which he reads as the method by which the discourse of history creates its hierarchical catalogue, designating the cultures of the New World as bereft of achievement, the “sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over” (Walcott, 1993, 68). This instils in the colonial a sense of loss, of living in a vacuum, of marginality, which Walcott views as an “oceanic nostalgia for the older culture and a melancholy at the new” (Walcott, 1974a, 42). In Omeros he would conjecture on the metropolitan view of the Caribbean, “[f]or those to whom history is the presence/ of ruins, there is a green nothing” (Walcott, 1990,192). The internalizing of such damaging value-judgments promotes hopelessness and culminates in a “rejection of the untamed landscape, a yearning for ruins” (Walcott, 1974a, 42). At times this visible presence of the unseen past weighs heavily on the poet; the poem “Air” concludes with the line “there is too much nothing here” (Walcott, 1969a, 37). Growing older the poet is better equipped to reject such judgments that were simply not applicable in a New World context, the poet opting for the living present over the decaying past. Yet the mythical inheritance is undoubtedly generative, though the “trunks of warriors” that “roll and recede” in the wash are dead and “the man-god bleeds/ face down in the veins of the sea,” it is still “great lines”



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that have “heaved them this far” (Walcott, 1980a, 29). Although the “I” narrator may feel anxious lest his naturally analogous mind inadvertently privileges Greek figures over Caribbean realities, the comparisons, like “shades of friends,” keep coming (Walcott, 1980a, 30). After a time, the speaker feels himself transforming into a statue, “my eyes harden in a stone head” (Walcott, 1980a 30). This Greek inheritance seems to have staked a proprietary claim over the speaker’s imagination, “the sea has flown one flag: white-barred waves of unalterable blue” (Walcott, 1980a, 29). Again the Homeric wanderer appears, “I see the harpist with his eyes like clouds” (Walcott, 1980a, 32). Finally, the speaker rejects the veneration of Greece and the worship of its perished gods, preferring to celebrate a Caribbean archipelago, unencumbered by comparison, “I stayed with my own. I starved my hand of names” (Walcott, 1980a, 32). Though he may never achieve the immortality of Homer and have his visage carved onto a marble bust, he can be inspired by nature rather than stone, “those flashes of inward life, / from the head’s thunder-lit storms” (Walcott, 1980a, 32). The final poem of this selection, “Greece,” demonstrates the most decisive rejection of classical configurations up to this point. Here the poet-persona imagines himself arduously carrying a body up a high rock face. The landscape is Homeric in depiction, adorned with rocks like the “calcareous molars of a Cyclops” and the “rooted phalanxes of coconuts, / Trojan and Spartan” (Walcott, 1980b, 35). Lacking a sword, the poetpersona carries instead a “saw-toothed agave” (Walcott, 1980b, 35). Achieving the cliff-top, he casts this dead weight over the edge, only to find that: [t]he body that I had thrown down at my foot was not really a body but a great book still fluttering like chitons on a freize, till wind worked through the binding of its pages scattering Hector’s and Achilles’ rages to white, diminishing scraps, like gulls that ease past the gray sphinxes of the crouching islands. (Walcott, 1980a, 35/6)

Throwing off the dead weight of his European literary inheritance liberates the poet-persona to see the Caribbean world as it really is, without dependence upon canonical Greek points of comparison “I held air without language in my hands” (Walcott, 1980a, 36). Confronting the Minotaur at the “dead end of the classic labyrinth,” he enacts a violent rejection, “with this blade of agave, hacked down/ the old Greek bull [...] My head was scoured of other people’s monsters” (Walcott, 1980a, 36)”



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(Walcott, 1980a, 36). Utilizing a sword-shaped leaf of a plant native to the Americas, the poet-persona tears apart this mythical figure. The ongoing engagement with, and disavowal of, classical co-ordinates is built into the fabric of Walcott’s verse and is seen most forcibly in his epic poem Omeros. Unable to decide between accepting or rejecting the inherited literary tradition, he instead dramatises his dilemma in verse that repeatedly courts Homeric wanderers and slays Greek minotaurs in an effort to find worthy expression of his mythopoeic archipelago. Myth furnishes the poet with a way to begin. In this regard, Walcott’s use of classical reference can be compared to Odysseus’ building of his raft. Using the materials that are readily available to him, the castaway wanderer launches out on his metapoetic craft, in search of home.





PART II: THE VOYAGE



CHAPTER THREE POSTCOLONIAL MODERNISMS

No poet, no artist of any kind has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. —T.S. Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent” The new poet enters a flux and withdraws, as the weaver continues the pattern, hand to hand and mouth to mouth, as the rockpile convict passes the sledge. —Walcott “The Muse of History”

It is a commonplace of classical studies to iterate that the lessons Odysseus learnt on his travels were necessary for him to achieve his homecoming. For instance, it is through his disastrous encounter with the Cicones, where greed leads him to turn a decisive victory to heavy loss, that Odysseus learns the value of self-control. The importance of this lesson in the narrative as a whole is underscored by Tirersias’ prophecy in Hades “you and your crew may still reach home, / suffering all the way, if you only have the power/ to curb their wild desire and your own” (Od. 11. 117-119). It is this acquired restraint that enables Odysseus alone to abstain from feasting on the Oxen of the Sun, a banquet that proves fatal for the rest of his crew. It is this self-command that allows him to endure the taunts of the suitors who abuse him on his return to Ithaca disguised as a beggar, thus ensuring his triumph. Therefore, it is through his travels and experiences abroad, “[m]any cities of men he saw and learned their minds,” that Odysseus acquires the skills necessary to be a better king and better family man (Od. 1. 4). As a trickster figure, Odysseus is wily and adaptable, a master of disguise who is able to change to suit the occasion. The epithet polytropus which, deriving from the Greek root, signifies “turning many ways,” “versatile” and/or “much travelled” links this protean quality to Odysseus’ mobility. Without travelling, the sailor/storyteller would be unable to gather together the materials he needs to surmount the threats besieging his home. In this regard, the outbound journey to unfamiliar shores is also a form of homecoming. The epic poem however, is much more than the tale of an individual and the psychological limitations that he must overcome; epic deals with the concerns of a people. Odysseus, in this regard, is a vessel for Greek



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culture in general; his trials reflect the preoccupations of all. In an ethnographic reading of the Homeric poem, Dougherty’s The Raft of Odysseus argues persuasively that The Odyssey is directly a product of Greek culture in the eighth century BC, a time where improved shipbuilding techniques enabled the Greeks to travel across the Mediterranean, to engage in commercial relationships with peoples of the East, and to settle new territories in the West. Odysseus’ extensive travels abroad therefore represent a culture’s attempts to create a vocabulary for the threat and promise of cross-cultural encounter, and to successfully assimilate the lessons learnt abroad into the Greek world at home. However, Odysseus’ travels demonstrate troublingly that he is ptoliporthos, a “sacker of cities,” thus presenting a formidable obstacle for the postcolonial writer who invokes this figure. The promise of crosscultural encounter, represented by the enabling potential of classical myth for Walcott’s verse is as a result tainted by a history of cultural conflict, feeding an anxiety of complicity with a narrative of imperial conquest. The push and pull of the classical inheritance is evidenced by a similar to-ing and fro-ing in Walcott’s verse as he repeatedly engages with, and simultaneously disavows, Homeric configurations. As a later exploration of Walcott’s Omeros will demonstrate, Walcott utilises many strategies to counter this anxiety: denying the evocation, re-interpreting the myth, and replacing the dubious figure of the hero with the shadowy figure of his equally mythical creator.1 Having established in the last chapter Walcott’s justification for his assimilative poetics and use of Homeric configurations, this chapter will explore the legislative role of modernist art in furthering these mythical correspondences.

 1

Most classicists agree that The Iliad and The Odyssey, traditionally ascribed to Homer, were not written by any such individual. Alberto Manguel charts the shift in thinking about the authorship of the epics, “[f]or many centuries, the poor, blind singer begging his way through ancient Greece was generally regarded as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey; in time, he came to be replaced by a kind of inspired spirit, part fable and part allegory, the ghost of Poetry Past” (Manguel, 2007, 1 /2). For Andrew Dalby, the issue is a matter of differentiating between oral and written traditions. He writes “I am not alone in being convinced that the legendary poet Homer, forefather of the Greek oral tradition, must not be confused with the real poet who created the written Iliad and Odyssey. Why not? For two reasons: the modern evidence that Homer worked orally, without access to writing, and modern proof that oral epics are ever created anew and become fixed only when written down. If we accept both the early evidence and the modern research, we cannot go on believing that Homer was the creator of the written Iliad and Odyssey (Dalby, 2006, vii/viii).



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The evocation of epic, never a straightforward affair for the postcolonial poet, is somewhat mitigated by an awareness of artistic predecessors. Further depth to Walcott’s appropriations is provided by the mediating influence of Irish writer James Joyce, whose engagement with Homeric verse also registered the anxieties of the colonial artist. In turning to the Latin Ulysses rather than the Greek original, Joyce took his place in a tradition of re-invention. In replacing the elevated hero of Greek myth with the more modest but no less memorable Leopold Bloom, Joyce manifested a commitment to the quotidian. Walcott’s absorption of Joyce can therefore be fruitfully traced through a comparable negation of heroism and a willingness to integrate disparate cultural resources. This is not a simple matter of replacing one literary influence (Homer) for another (Joyce), but the recognition that inheritance is an inevitable aspect of the creative process and that allusiveness does not demand servility. The appearance of Joyce in Book V of Walcott’s Omeros underscores the significance of the relationship. Romare Bearden’s “Odysseus Series,” a cycle of collages and watercolours created in the late seventies and based on Homer’s epic poem, illuminate another significant thread in the tapestry. It is a correspondence that Walcott openly allows, “I’m not sure that it didn’t influence me when I undertook to do that long poem [Omeros]” (Walcott, 1997b, 229). Bearden’s adeptness as using black subjects while resisting the tag of protest art would prove instructive for Walcott. His ability to incorporate a broad range of literary and artistic subject matter, whilst still articulating specific places and people, held a similar appeal. Unlike Joyce, who died when Walcott was eleven, Bearden and Walcott were peers who collaborated on a number of projects together. Their relationship highlights the two-way flow of artistic creation, an antiphonal articulation of mutual inspiration. These artistic correspondences beg further questions however, with regard to the postcolonial afterlife of modernism. This chapter begins by probing the arguments that render the rarefied aesthetic movement of modernism as fundamentally incompatible with the brute historical realities of colonialism and the artistic creations emerging from such conditions. While critics may read modernism and postcolonialism as anathema, the fact remains that many postcolonial artists engage with modernism, not as an imperial antagonist, but as an appropriate medium to explore their cross-cultural experience. These arguments will be followed by an analysis of two modernist artists who, like Walcott, found a resonance in the Odysseus myth that they could channel in their own artistic creations.



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Modernism’s Postcolonial Afterlife The assumption that modernism and postcolonialism are fundamentally incompatible holds much sway in critical analyses of both. For some, modernism is unambiguously imperialist. Ashcroft et al hold that “[m]odernity and modernism are rooted in empire” (Ashcroft et al, 2000, 293) while Slemon maintains that colonialism is in fact the militant face of Euro-American modernism (Slemon, 1989, 3). This suggests an irreconcilable difference between a historically situated cultural movement of the metropolitan centre and the decolonising discourses taking place at the margins in subsequent decades. Such arguments may readily find affinities between postcolonialism and postmodernism, the common prefix postseeming to forward this uneasy parallel. Reading the critical discourses of postmodernism and postcolonialism as “constitut[ing] themselves specifically in opposition to this historical conjunction” Slemon calls upon postmodernism to join forces with postcolonialism in the necessary work of “decolonizing Western culture [...] from a residual modernism” (Slemon, 1989, 15). The potential for generative exchange between modernism and postcolonialism is thereby negated. One of the key issues at stake here is the tendency of modernist artists to appropriate cultural resources from non-Western sources in order to revitalise a civilisation that decadent artists proclaimed to be in decline. In the first half of the twentieth century, there was a growing perception that cultures brought into view by colonialism might have something to offer a society increasingly less convinced of its own truths. Paul Gauguin, the first modernist primitivist, moved to colonial Tahiti, seeking what he regarded as the honesty of savagery over the illusions of civilisation. Visual artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and AndrĠ Derain looked to the African masks and ceremonial artefacts that European museums had acquired as shaping influences in their art. In literature, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land would shore fragments of Eastern religions and rituals against the ruins of European civilisations; similarly D.H. Lawrence would turn to the vitality of “primitive” societies for a means to overcome modern bourgeois sterility. While certain primitivists saw their work as championing the cause of colonised peoples, they frequently failed to recognise the agency of the colonial subjects whose culture they drew from.2 This is in spite of the fact of the significant contribution of colonial

 2

Simon Gikandi’s “Picasso, Africa and the Schemata of Difference” describes a troubling meeting between Guyanese artist Aubrey Williams and Pablo Picasso in the mid-1950s. Williams describes the rather disappointing encounter “I did not like Picasso. He was just an ordinary past-middle-aged man. I remember the first



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writers and artists working in the metropolis – such as Jean Rhys, Claude McKay, AimĠ Cesaire, Mulk Raj Anand, Katherine Mansfield – to the modernist aesthetic. The modernist vocabulary of exile, displacement, alienation and the fragmentation of absolutes resonated with the colonial experience. Living in London and Paris, these colonial artists, among others, would have contributed to the cosmopolitan climate of the urban modernist avant-garde. We see therefore a two-way process in operation, from centre to periphery and periphery to centre, but it is not one of equal exchange. Mary Louise Pratt has demonstrated persuasively that the centrifugal geopolitical forces of colonial expansion are counterbalanced by the centripetal cultural practices that enshrine a European centre as the norm for the non-European periphery to aspire to. As Elleke Boehmer contends: [i]n modernism the colonial world was confirmed in its status as province to the Western city. There was the place that the artefacts came from. Here was where the definitions that counted were still made. (Boehmer, 1995, 130)

It seems clear that colonial artists could still remain peripheral to an aesthetic movement they had helped to produce. While traditional readings of Euro-American modernism find it hard to reconcile this rarefied aesthetic movement with the brute realities of colonialism, recent scholarship has argued that the body of discursive practices that constitute modernism is more diverse than such definitions allow. In a recent essay collection, editors Begam and Moses argue that the lack of comprehensive scholarship on the relationship between modernism and colonialism denotes a critical lacuna. They read the problem as twofold. Earlier formalist and humanist criticism tended to neglect existing links between modernist aesthetics and politics, “[f]or these critics, modernism bore little or no reference to colonialism” (Begam et al,, 2007, 6). On the other hand more recent accounts from the field of postcolonial or cultural studies have emphasised the opposite, reading modernism as thoroughly implicated in imperialism, “a structure of ideological oppression that aided and abetted empire” (Begam et al,, 2007, 6). Begam et all maintain that both accounts fail to appraise the cultural and historical realities of Euro-American modernism, which frequently

 comment he made when we met. He said that I had a very fine African head and he would like me to pose for him. I felt terrible. In spite of the fact that I was introduced to him as an artist, he did not think of me as another artist. He thought of me only as something he could use for his own work” (qtd. in Gikandi, 2003, 455).



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challenged as well as reflected the social, economic and political status quo, “[i]f to be a modern meant thinking these issues anew, then to be a modern meant thinking empire anew” (Begam et al, 2007. 3). Furthermore, the critics who insist that the modernist movement has nothing to offer the postcolonial artist fail to take into account the postcolonial afterlife of modernism. There are a couple of obvious advantages to acknowledging the postcolonial legacy of modernism. On the one hand, it provides a way to better understand postcolonial texts. In a survey of postcolonial poetry Jahan Ramazani stresses that despite potential misgivings, modernist discourses provided non-Western poets after WWII with the tools to articulate cultural hybridity and their colonial experience. He cites Barbadian Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Indian A. K. Ramanujuan, Ugandan Okot p’Bitek, Nigerians Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka and St. Lucian Derek Walcott as writers who adopted and creatively adapted modernist techniques to express postcolonial experience. He also cautions critics that the insistence on modernism and postcolonialism as being natural antagonists in an effort to satisfy anti-Eurocentrism is to “condescend to imaginative writers who have wielded modernism in cultural decolonization” (Ramanzani, 2007, 292). He writes: [f]or many postcolonial poets, though on the receiving end of empire, more important than the modernist’s complicity in a waning imperialism and in Orientalist fantasy, or their imbrications in European literary tradition, was their creation of answering forms and vocabularies for the cross-cultural juxtapositions, interreligious layerings, and polyglot intermingling of cross-hemispheric experience. (Ramazani, 2007, 293)

For Ramanzani then, postcolonial hybridity is a reworking of modernist bricolage, a rebirthing of a poetic mode that was a pre-condition for its emergence. His study traces the evolution of the hybridizing literary strategies of translocalism, mythical syncretism, heteroglossia, and apocalyticism back to their roots in Euro-modernist bricolage. Positioning postcolonialism and modernism as antagonists would therefore only serve to obfuscate the mutually shaping relations between centre and periphery. Moreover, recognising the relationship between the postcolonial and modernism can also offer new insights into canonical modernist texts. One only has to look at the field of Joyce studies over the past couple of decades to see how readings of Joyce as a colonial writer who critically engaged with imperialism in his writing adds a necessary layer of complexity to the partial portrait of the artist as a deracinated “citizen of the world,” whose formal audacities in his art entailed a divorce from the



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material world. In their edited collection Semicolonial Joyce, for example, Howes and Attridge mark the 1990s as a paradigm shift in Joycean scholarship as Irish studies began to reconstitute itself in the light of postcolonial theory. This led to “increasing attention to the Irish dimension in Joyce’s work” and “a reconsideration of that dimension in the light of postcolonial theory” (Howes et al, 2000, 14). Moreover, Vincent Cheng’s Joyce, Race and Empire argues that Joyce’s works provide a “trenchant analysis and a potent critique of certain such ideological discourses (in the racialization and colonization of the Irish) and of the resultant colonial pathologies; these are Joycean critiques and positions which [...] were voiced consistently and insistently throughout his works” (Cheng, 1995, 9). These studies ably demonstrate that the modernist and the postcolonial need not be conceived as mutually exclusive categories. Forwarding a recognition of a mutually constitutive relationship between modernism and postcolonialism does not however, entail an equation of one with the other. The internationalism of Euro-American modernism was a choice facilitated by imperialism; ccolonial crossculturalism is by contrast an unavoidable off-shoot of European imperialism. This all-important difference has led to the creation of a unique vocabulary to account for the alterity of non-Western modernisms. Houston A. Baker Jnr.’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance envisages an oppositional modernism for African-American culture. For Baker, modernist anxiety in an Afro-American context does not derive from the concern of “replicating outmoded forms” or of ceding to “bourgeois formalisms” (Baker, 1987, 101). Modernist anxiety of influence is produced, according to Baker, by the “black spokesperson’s necessary task of employing audible extant forms in ways that move clearly up, masterfully and re-soundingly away from slavery (Baker, 1987, 101). He identifies two complementary strategies utilised by AfroAmerican artists at the beginning of the twentieth century to create a liberating black modernism: “the mastery of form” and “the deformation of mastery” (Baker, 1987, 15).3 Simon Gikandi’s Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature similarly maintains this opposition

 3

Interestingly, Houston A. Baker Jnr.’s account of the inaugural moment of AfroAmerican modernism predates Virginia Woolf’s ironic “on or about December 1910” designation for European modernism by some fifteen years. For Baker, Booker T. Washington’s opening address at the Negro exhibit at the Atlanta Cotton States and International exhibition on September 18, 1895 marked the “commencement of Afro-American modernism” (Baker, 1987, 15). This may be a deliberate strategy to assert that Afro-American modernism does not in fact derive from its European variant.



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between Euro-modernism and its Caribbean equivalent. He holds that as Caribbean modernity was experienced as dispossession, it must mean something different to modernity in Europe and Africa. He sees the work of Caribbean artists as “renouncing colonial modernism” in order to achieve a “narrative of liberation” and opines that “[o]nly by subverting colonial modernism could these writers become modernists” (Gikandi, 1992, 256). Modernism here again is something that is wrested from an oppressive Europe, a weapon to be turned against itself in an effort to speed decolonisation. Much as Ramanzani traces postcolonial hybridity to its roots in modernist bricolage, theorists have begun to forward a similar relationship between modernism and creolization. In a study of the writing of Kamau Brathwaite and T.S. Eliot, Neil ten Kortenaar posits that creolization might be seen as the form that modernist ambivalence takes in the Caribbean. He argues that if Eliot’s modernism may be understood as an aspect of his creolization, than the converse may indeed be true, that Braithwaite’s creolization may be understood as an expression of modernist ambivalence. The advantage to this position is clear. Modernism is recast, not as a source of Caribbean creolization, but as a shared feature of European and Caribbean art. Reading European and Caribbean art in terms of a shared modernism allows the theorist to “establish the limits of its European equivalent, which are not the limits of modernism itself” (ten Kortenaar, 1996, 19). Gikandi, similarly sees creolization as an expression of modernism, albeit a specifically Caribbean modernism framed by the colonial episteme and creole cultures. He states “creolization has come to represent a unique form of Caribbean modernism” but it is again a subversive modernism that opposes colonising structures and “reconcile[s] the values of European literacy with the long-repressed traditions of African orality” (Gikandi, 1992, 16). Charles W. Pollard’s New World Modernisms: T.S. Eliot, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite tries to establish the modernist roots of discrepant cosmopolitanism in order to delineate the contours of New World modernisms. Furthermore, in opposition to Baker and Gikandi, Pollard does not read Caribbean modernism as fundamentally opposed towards Euro-American modernism. Instead he asks the pertinent question: “[w]hy can the different expressions of modernism not qualify, extend, renew, or intensify other expressions of it?” (Pollard, 2004, 21). To account for New World modernism, then, requires a redrafting of narrow conceptions of Euro-American modernism. Pollard contends that as West Indian artists “have transformed the methods of modernism” that modernism has itself been transformed “becom[ing] a more discrepent



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cosmopolitan literary movement” (Pollard, 2004, 9). He demonstrates that both Walcott and Brathwaite have found in Eliot’s modernism a means to create a vision of cultural wholeness from fragmentation. He posits that while Eliot shores fragments of diverse cultures together as a form of provisional unity in the face of the ruin of European civilisation, Brathwaite creates an Afro-Caribbean folk tradition from the surviving remnants of Africa left to a slave population subjected to violent cultural erasure. Similarly, Walcott’s cosmopolitan castaway creates an ironic New World classicism from scraps of European, African and Asian cultural resources washed up on Caribbean shores. The point is persuasive if we consider the wording of Walcott’s Nobel Prize speech which articulates the logic of bricolage in a colonial context: [b]reak a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole [...] This gathering together of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent. (Walcott, 1992, 69)

The lines grant that Caribbean culture is forged from the broken pieces of ancestral cultures, that the assemblage contains the pain of conquest and the dislocation from culture of origin. Yet for Walcott, the re-making is somehow greater in this postlapsarian paradise which savours the labour of starting again, “the apples of its second Eden have the tartness of experience” (Walcott, 1974a, 41). The re-making may at times be rough and unpolished but it signals a move forward from subjugation to cultural independence. This chapter seeks to locate Walcott’s appropriation of Greek myth within a modernist framework. This is not to suggest that Walcott is exclusively a modernist writer, a classification which would be simplistic given his artistic range. Joseph Brodsky, poet and friend of Walcott has spoken against reductive attempts to locate the poet, stating that Walcott is “neither a traditionalist nor a modernist” and that “[h]e belongs to no school; there are not so many of them in the Caribbean, save those of the fish” (Brodsky, 1983, xvii). This study agrees to a certain extent with Brodsky that the critical vogue for neat taxonomies can obscure that which it attempts to reveal. As such, the analysis of Walcott’s postcolonial modernism has been limited to a chapter of this book, instead of being offered as an organising principle. Rather than defining Walcott’s modus operandi as a species of assimilative modernism, this study sees



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modernism as one of many tools used by the poet in order to generate certain effects. Walcott’s integrative modernism facilitates his assimilative poetics and provides him with literary and artistic predecessors who similarly appropriated Homeric myth as a means to explore the tension between exile and homecoming. Though his work abounds with references to other writers, he chooses his citations very carefully. Allusions to Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Eliot, Pound, Baudelaire and Joyce align his work in a tradition of imitation, a guild of outsiders, borrowers and/or colonials. To the charge that culture in the colonies is secondary or derivative, Walcott holds the mirror up to Western culture to expose successive genealogies of imitation. As such, the next two sections analyse Walcott’s Odyssean appropriations in the light of two of those other prominent and assimilative modernist artists: Irish writer James Joyce and Afro-American Romare Bearden.

James Joyce Walcott has repeatedly alluded to the inspirational example of literary predecessors around the time of the Irish Literary Renaissance in providing a historical precedent to other colonial artists. In an interview with Edward Hirsch he articulates his sense of “intimacy” with Irish writers due to his awareness that “they were also colonials with the same kind of problems that existed in the Caribbean” (qtd. in Hirsch, 1977, 59). He goes on to express his view that the Irish “were the niggers of Britain” and that it is this underdog positioning with relation to a greater power that he most identifies with: to have those astounding achievements of genius, whether by Joyce or Yeats or Beckett, illustrated that one could come out of a depressed, deprived, oppressed situation and still be defiant and creative at the same time. (qtd. in Hirsch, 1977, 59)

Though Ulysses in particular would provide a focal point for Walcott’s own appropriations of Homeric verse, the entire Joycean canon, as well as the Irish writer’s own exilic position, exemplifies the colonial condition of displacement, of being “condemned to wander” (Walcott, 1949, 30).4

 4

To underscore the biographical convergence between the two writers, which may help to explain the strong affinity Walcott felt with the Irish writer, Pollard poses this teaser: “[p]lease identify the twentieth-century author who was born on an island controlled by the Roman Catholic Church and the British Empire, twin forces that shaped his self-portrait of the artist as a young man. Educated by Irish



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Whether physically displaced through either a separation from the culture[s] of origin or the arrival of settler colonialism, or mentally displaced through the imposition of the language and culture of the coloniser, the “unhomeliness” of home instigated by the machinery of colonialism impacted on the colonial writer. It is the imbrication of the colonial reality with the theme of wandering that perhaps best explains the appeal of Joyce’s writing to Walcott. In interview Walcott has elaborated: [a]ll of Joyce, all his writing is about being a colonial really, you have a wandering Jew in there but basically the condition is an Irish colonial condition. Ulysses is a great novel and very individualistic but still has the same theme as we have for instance. (qtd. in Dabydeen, 1999, 156)

This study does not aspire to trace exhaustively all the Irish connections within Walcott’s poetry. Such a task could hardly avoid examining the connections with Synge, whose play Riders to the Sea was adapted by Walcott’s for The Sea at Dauphin5 and whose experiments with language would prove inspirational to Walcott’s own portside poetics. Walcott’s description of Synge’s linguistic achievement in Hiberno-English could certainly describe his own innovations along the creole continuum: “[h]e had taken a fishing-port kind of language and gotten beauty out of it, a beat, something lyrical” (Hirsch, 1977, 60). Yeats, too would prove a strong influence, one that would appear in several guises throughout his volumes of poetry. We could consider the poem “28” in The Bounty where Yeats appears as a “foam-haired man pacing around a square tower” and the metre of the detonating breakers echoes the “white wings at Coole, the beat of his clapping swans” (Walcott, 1997c, 61). This section will instead investigate Walcott’s sense of affinity with both Joyce the writer, as a colonial and in his Homeric engagements, and with the characters of his creation, Stephen Dedalus in particular.

 priests, he was drawn to the mystical ritual of the church but rebelled against its suffocating orthodoxy. Educated in the colonial system, he grew to resent English rule yet cherished the English language and literary tradition. People accused him of forsaking his indigenous language, but he aspired to use English to shape the consciousness of his race. He was haunted by the death of a parent, a death that he could not respond to adequately but that becomes emblematic of his vocation as a writer. It was this vocation that compelled him to flee the provincialism of his island home although he continued to focus on writing about that island” (Pollard, 2001, 197). There are of course two answers to this question – Joyce and Walcott. 5 Sandra Sprayberry’s article “Sea Changes: Post-colonialism in Synge and Walcott” provides a useful starting point in this regard.



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The fact that Joyce was a colonial writer who immersed his Ulysses in the quotidian provided a welcome precedent to a writer on the outskirts of empire. That Joyce would also be driven by a need to leave his native island while celebrating it in his art would cement the connection. Under the tutelage of the Irish Brothers of the Presentation, who ran Walcott’s school St Mary’s College from 1947, Walcott further deepened his association with Stephen Dedalus, who like him agonized over his faith: I found in their accents and in their recollections of Irish events and places, in their admiration for Synge and Yeats, for Pearse, and even for Joyce [...] an atmosphere that summoned that of my current hero, the blasphemous, arrogant Stephen Daedalus[sic] (Walcott, 1965d, 31)

Like Stephen, Walcott felt the culture he was contributing to was as yet “uncreated” (Joyce, 1916, 288). In Epitaph for the Young, an eighteen year old Walcott would supplement his Homeric identifications by declaring himself “I/ Stephen” feeling an affinity with the young artist who juggled an “armful of traditions in [his] fumble/ for a voice” (Walcott, 1949, 40). Like Stephen/Joyce, Walcott would choose to grapple with many literary and cultural traditions rather than attempt to recuperate a pre-colonial native tradition. The Stephen of Portrait would, on meeting his friend Davin, who happened to be carrying a hurley, declare that “the shortest way to Tara was via Holyhead,” indicating that the future of Ireland was not to be found through isolationist, Irish nationalism (of which the hurley stick serves as a potent symbol), but in a future of expanding horizons (Joyce, 1916, 285). Though Walcott’s early works focus on the poet’s empathy with the Stephen character,6 by the time he would write Another Life, Walcott would be engaging with the entire Joycean canon and with his own fictive creation based on Joyce himself. Walcott’s transposition of the Odyssean myth would be sharply divergent from Joyce’s – Joyce wrote prose, Walcott poetry, Joyce adapted the entire epic poem The Odyssey transposing it into a novel set in twentieth century Dublin; Walcott’s Homeric appropriations up to Omeros are less sustained and do not attempt structural parallels with the Homeric poems. However, there would be broad areas of convergence too. Both



6 In the autobiographical essay “Leaving School” (1965) Walcott elaborates on his affinity with Stephen Dedalus “Like Stephen, I had my nights of two shilling whores, of ‘tackling in the Alley’, and silently howling remorse. Like him, I was a knot of paradoxes: hating the Church and loving her rituals, learning to hate England as I worshipped her language, sanctifying A. the more I betrayed her, a Methodist-lecher, a near Catholic-ascetic, loving the island, and wishing [I] could get the hell out of it” (Walcott, 1965d, 32).



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would accept the language of the coloniser (Joyce at the expense of the Irish language, Walcott eschewing Creole as a primary language) and although they conveyed an awareness of the anxiety of their choice, both would in turn recreate that language to reflect the contours and experience of their race. In a lecture in Duke University, Walcott explained his decision to write Omeros in English, when it had previously been envisaged in French Creole (the demotic language of St. Lucia) with reference to Joyce: [a]t what point does this literary use of the vernacular become forced? Joyce, for one, had a funny attitude toward Gaelic, right? Joyce realized, I think, that the inevitable direction of the Irish language was going to be toward English. [...] there is a point at which this issue comes up in many different countries. It comes up in Ireland, it comes up in Wales, where the language is confronted by a political decision. (Walcott, 1997b, 245)

Resisting the pressure to adopt a defensive vernacular that might be a form of self-betrayal, “I do not think in dialect,” Walcott poses the question “[w]hy should I be false to my interior rhythm for the sake of any other country, politics or attitude to language?” (Walcott, 1997b, 245). In an inversion typical of the poet, Walcott turns the accusation that he is not being true to his island home into the defence that outsiders should not dictate the contents of his writing to him. Opting instead to be true to the tone of his native island, if not the dialect, Walcott could, like Joyce, invent within the English language a new mode of expression that was at once indigenous and international.7 In Joyce, Walcott would find the inspiration to truly celebrate his island and its inhabitants in his art, spurring him on in his belief that “it is the ordinariness, not the astonishment, that is the miracle, that is worth recalling” (Walcott, 1997b, 233). However, though Joyce’s allusive practice seemed to legitimise Walcott’s own, at times the shadow cast by the Irish writer proved rather long. We can fruitfully trace the evolution of these allusions through Walcott’s volumes of poetry to illuminate the poet’s increasing confidence in his entitlement to his literary inheritance. Though Epitaph for the Young



7 Walcott’s linguistic background is complex. As he relates in an interview “I have a three language background: French Creole, English Creole, and English” (Hirsch, 1977, 58). As St Lucian English Creole is an oral language that emerged from French Creole, it is largely unwritten. Walcott’s inscription of English Creole is deliberately inventive, combining elements from divergent English Creoles across the islands in the creation of a composite creolized English language that can be broadly comprehensible throughout the archipelago and abroad.



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boldly announces a debt to Joyce (Cantos IX and X see the poet-persona adopt the mask of archetypal son Stephen Dedalus) the allusions are clumsy and obtrusive, not sufficiently integrated into the work. As with Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Walcott felt keenly his “classic/ condition of servitude” with regard to the language and literature of the colonial power and was painfully aware that he “had entered the house of literature as a houseboy, / filched as the slum child stole” (Walcott, 1973, 59). Where Stephen in Ulysses would claim the “cracked looking glass of a servant” to be a “symbol of Irish art” (Joyce, 1922, 6), Walcott too would dread the reflection of the colonial in the mirror of the master. The Joycean influence is palpable in these lines: “[g]rotesque, unwashed before mirrors, false and real. / The mirror is cracked” (Walcott, 1949, 16/7). The allusions proliferate as the poet-persona’s voyage narrative becomes a quest for a father, both a biological father (Walcott’s dead father Warwick frequently appears as a ghost in his work) and a cultural father (to pass on a literary legacy in the wake of colonial dispossession). Utilising the character of Stephen Dedalus as a vessel allows Walcott a medium for the various literary analogues that forward this father/son dialogue in the poem: Odysseus /Telemachus; Daedalus /Icarus; old Hamlet/ Hamlet; Simon Dedalus /Stephen Dedalus; Warwick Walcott / Derek Walcott. However, there is a marked contrast between Walcott and the literary figure Stephen – whereas Stephen aspires to rid himself of a surfeit of father figures by fleeing an oppressive Irish state, Walcott desires reconnection due to a dearth of fathers, biological and cultural. Other writings testify to varying degrees of ambivalence with regard to the Joycean inheritance. The fact that Walcott has recognised “Epitaph” as a urtext for Another Life (1973) suggests that the original influences are still in operation albeit somewhat submerged. Edward Baugh’s research on the writing process of Another Life confirms this assertion, making it for him “Walcott’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (Baugh, 1978, 9). Apart from the obvious correlations – the poet-persona experiences epiphanies, castigates nationalist movements and eventually leaves his island home – early drafts of the poem cite the Joycean legacy in operation. In an entry to MS One,8 dated Sunday, March 6, 1966, Walcott writes:



8 The flood of childhood memories and recollection brought on by the writing of the essay “Leaving School” had already begun to take shape as an early draft of the poem (written between April 1965 and December 1966), still envisioned as prose, which will be referred to here as MS One. However as Baugh notes, an interesting thing happened, “on January 16 [1966], the memoir breaks into free verse” (Baugh



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Reading Joyce, you have, of course. Even Stephen. Son of a pastiche. Some article I read by whatshisnamenow, in a Life and Letters yes, predicting that someday a new Ulysses willcomeforth out of these emerald, ethnic isles, and sure then he had put his finger on me. Imitation, imitation, when will I be me? (qtd. in Baugh et al, 2004, 164)

Though highlighting Walcott’s affinities with the Irish situation in his own “emerald, ethnic isles,” the residual anxiety with regard to colonial mimicry clearly still remains. A year after the final poem was published Walcott would resolve the dilemma in his statement essay “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” by boldly proclaiming that “[m]imicry is an act of imagination” (Walcott, 1974b, 55). Though his writing continues to evoke and disavow the allusions in his work, this tension develops into a generative creative theme of the writing. In the poem “Volcano,” Walcott is clearly more at home with his integrative practice. Here he considers the achievement of two European modernist writers, Joyce and Conrad, whose fame lives on after their deaths, “[t]hese are legends, as much/ as the death of Joyce is a legend, / or the strong rumour that Conrad/ is dead” (Walcott, 1976c, 324). Picturing the “two glares from the miles-out-/at-sea derricks”9 he writes “[o]ne could abandon writing/ for the slow-burning signals/ of the great” (Walcott, 1976c, 324). Contemplating the denial of his own craft in order to become “their ideal reader” he reflects that “[a]t least it requires awe, / which has been lost in our time” (Walcott, 1976c, 324). Evidently, the literary inheritance does not weigh too heavily on the poet here. He concludes “I must read more carefully” (Walcott, 1976c, 325). However, Walcott’s “ideal reader” is more than merely admiring; he is selective, in taking only what he needs, and presumptuous, in using these materials strategically to his own ends (Walcott, 1976c, 324). This section has already examined Walcott’s affinity with Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. Yet the adoption of the Stephen-persona also serves to illuminate another aspect of the father/son relationship. For Stephen also operates for Walcott as a rebel, a protestant figure who disobeys the will of the father as a necessary step towards manhood. Stephen Dedalus’ rebellion is tied up with the motto which, according to the college priest, unites him to Lucifer, “the sinful thought conceived in an instant: non serviam: I will not serve” (Joyce, 1916, 133). Thus in adopting Joyce as a literary father, Walcott maintains the right to reconstitute the legacy as he

 et al, 2004, 157). Prose was still interspersed with poetry for a while, but from May of this year until the completion of MS One, poetry was the sole medium. 9 “Derrick” Walcott is very fond of puns.



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sees fit, a species of repudiation which is paradoxically truer to Joyce’s own irreverent assimilative practice. In a book exploring the afterlife of Joyce within an international context, Karen R. Lawrence cogently observes: Derrida says that it is the son and inheritor who dictates the legacy he wants to receive […] This Joycean “inversion,” the son fathering the father, suggests that anamnesis and projection are intertwined, that writers construct what they can use from cultural icons such as “Joyce” and wrestle with or discard what they cannot. (Lawrence, 1998, 2)

It is in much the same spirit as he incorporates Joyce that Walcott engages with Homeric myth. Taking up the challenge of grappling with this “armful of traditions,” the young poet sets out, on unfamiliar seas, to chart the unknown territory of West Indian literature. In Omeros we have the most developed exploration of the Joycean inheritance. Repeating many of the themes of the earlier autobiographical poems Epitaph for the Young and Another Life, the poem repeatedly dramatises the Oedipal mode of struggle between a writer and his predecessor, only to deconstruct dominant theories of influence and originality. These allusions and disavowals which recur throughout Walcott’s work can best be understood as rhetorical performance; Walcott repeatedly bemoans his dependency on a European literary tradition and then, even more vehemently declares his entitlement to it. Father figures populate Walcott’s poem to the extent that one of the underlying themes of Omeros could be said to be a sustained examination of father-son relationships in a postcolonial context. Shapeshifting personages, or “interchangeable phantoms” (Walcott, 1990, 266), they appear in many moulds, inhabiting or being inhabited by classical (Telemachus, Odysseus, Proteus, Aeneas, Anchises), biblical (Adam, God, Jesus) and literary forms (writers such as Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare and Joyce and characters such as Hamlet, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom). Chapter XXIX of Omeros sees the journeying poet-persona visiting Ireland, travelling first to Wicklow, the birth place of Walcott’s created Irish character Maud Plunkett,10 and from there on to Dublin where he spots Joyce in a restaurant by the Liffey. This section is significant in that it details Walcott’s engagement with another literary forefather. The link between the ghost of Warwick as his literal father, and of Joyce as his

 10

Maud Plunkett’s specific ethnic coding marks her as a postcolonial hybrid, connected to the machinery of British Imperialism through her marriage to the Major, though the historical experience of her countrymen designates her victim of it.



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literary forefather, is emphasized by a paralleling of events in two ghostly visitations. In Chapter XXXVI Warwick’s return is preceded by a dog that “kept barking, ‘Hough, hough!’ at the stiff horizon” (Walcott, 1990, 186); in Chapter XXIX this scene is mirrored as Joyce’s ghost is followed by a scene “where a dog barks ‘Howth! Howth!’ at/ the shawled waves” (Walcott, 1990, 201).11 Walcott memorably describes Ireland as a “nation/ split by a glottal scream […] still splitting heirs, dividing a Shem from a Shaun, / an Ireland no wiser as it got older” (Walcott, 1990, 199). Walcott’s Ireland is as divided by religion as the Caribbean is by race. While early works focus on Stephen Dedalus, later works branch off into other areas of the Joycean canon as a model; the older Walcott engages with the full spectrum of Joyce’s literary canon as well as with the figure of the writer himself. Ulysses is evoked as the poet-persona leans on an embankment “as if he/ bloomed there every dusk with eye-patch and tilted hat”; “The Dead” from Dubliners are spotted “singing in fringed shawls” and references to Finnegan’s Wake proliferate this chapter (Walcott, 1990, 200/1). Anna Livia, Joyce’s personification of the Liffey, appears scurrying along by the river “in black cloche hat and coat” (Walcott, 1990, 200/1). Shem and Shaun, also from Finnegan’s Wake, are two interdependent figures that represent opposing facets of their father, H.C.E., who is the book’s central character; their inclusion here thus furthers Walcott’s exploration of father/son relationships as well as the trope of internal bifurcation. Seeing Joyce in a pub by the Liffey, Walcott praises him as “our age’s Omeros, undimmed Master/ and true tenor of the place!” (Walcott, 1990, 200). Recognizing a debt of inspiration Walcott proclaims “Mr Joyce/led us all” referring both to the literary precedent provided by Joyce and the fictitious scene of Joyce singing in the pub (Walcott, 1990, 201). Significantly if it is the “gaunt, // cane-twisting flaneur” who leads in song he is accompanied on piano by Maud Plunkett, a character created by Walcott in Omeros (Walcott, 1990, 200). Thus Walcott both honours Joyce and declares his right to alter the tune.

 11

The place name “Howth” recalls both the location where Bloom and Molly kissed and passed a morsel of masticated seedcake from mouth to mouth in Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as Anna Livia’s final monologue in Finnegan’s Wake.



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Romare Bearden Romare Bearden’s Odysseus Series is a cycle of collages detailing the trials and travels of Homer’s epic wanderer. 12 Given that Bearden is recognised primarily as a chronicler of black American life through his explorations of urban environments and his conception of a jazz aesthetic, the shift from Harlem to Homer might be viewed as curious to some. However, a closer analysis of his work reveals that these interests are by no means mutually exclusive, and that Bearden’s deep immersion in the humanities, especially in literature,13 music14 and the history of art, inform his inter-artistic method. Bearden’s earliest explorations of Homeric myth had culminated in a series of watercolours and drawings based on The Iliad. The collection, entitled The Iliad: 16 variations by Romare Bearden was exhibited at Manhattan’s Niveau Gallery in 1948. The 1977 collages therefore represent a return to earlier preoccupations rather than an artistic departure. The 1970s were an important decade for Bearden both in terms of his Homeric appropriations and the beginning of the Caribbean phase of his work. It was during this time that Bearden was beginning to take regular trips to the Caribbean, and St. Martin in particular, where his wife Nanette (nĠe Rohan) was from. A decision was made to build a house and art studio in St. Martin on the Rohan family land. In 1977, Bearden would exhibit his Odysseus Series in the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York. For art critics Sally and Richard Price, and for Walcott also, these collages are unquestionably set in the Caribbean, the shift from North America to the Caribbean archipelago most decisively announced by a radically altered colour palette in Bearden’s work. Walcott has commented: I think you can’t live in the archipelago – and Bearden lived in the Caribbean – without that great poem [The Odyssey] in the back of your head all the time. And it’s not sort of adapting it to the Caribbean – it’s

 12

As Bearden was a contemporary of, and collaborator with, Walcott, this section will include an examination of biographical material not deemed relevant to the section on Joyce. This decision has been made in order to highlight biographical and artistic convergences between these Caribbean and Afro-American artists. 13 Bearden draws repeatedly on biblical and mythical sources throughout his career. Other literary projects include projects based on the writings of Federico García Lorca and François Rabelais as well as the Walcott collaboration. 14 Bearden considered abandoning art for musical composition at one point and had one hit single Seabreeze recorded by Billy Eckstein and Tito Puente. In the 1980s he also collaborates with alto saxophonist Jackie McLean in “Sound Collages and Visual Improvisations.”



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direct [...] If you’re living in the archipelago, the light is there, the rituals – the primal Greek rituals, the pantheism of Greek culture, it’s still there in the Caribbean. You know, sacrifice and ritual and celebration. Plus the figures [...] very Homeric (Price, 2006, 94).

Bearden has always maintained that “art will go where energy is” (Price, 2006, 50) and his own itinerant career certainly seems to reflect this. Coming of age in the 1930s, Bearden had been part of the Harlem Renaissance milieu which included Claude McKay, Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois. Moreover, the G.I. Bill gave him nine months in Paris where he met with Picasso and socialised with Wilfredo Lam, Georges Braques, and Sidney Bechet. A 1961 return to Paris left him disillusioned and with the conviction that the city was no longer the centre of artistic ferment it had once been.15 In his later years, Bearden would become active in Caribbean cultural life, especially renowned for his generosity and encouragement of younger artists.16 Derek Walcott and Romare Bearden had first met in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, sometime in the 1970s.17 The meeting was to prove significant, inaugurating a period of cross-pollination and collaboration in the art of each. In 1979, Walcott used a collage from Bearden’s Odysseus Series entitled The Sea Nymph on the dust-jacket for his poetry collection The Star-Apple Kingdom (Fig. 3-1). Bearden had by this time come to be

 15

In interview he has elaborated: [k]nowing what Paris is today, I don’t think I’d have the enthusiasm for seeing it as I did in the 1950s when Matisse and Picasso and Léger and the rest were alive. Right now there should be art – and there is – coming from this region, where the Caribbean Sea touches – e.g., Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Derek Walcott, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, C. L. R. James, Georges Lamming and others. All of these are here, and I feel that this region could be tapped for many other things, because there’s a certain energy here” (Rowell, 1987, 443). 16 For a full account of Bearden’s cultural activities in the Caribbean see Price, Sally and Richard Price. 2006. Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension, pp. 67-78. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 17 Walcott amusingly recalls the occasion of their meeting in “Reflections on Omeros”: “So I go upstairs, and there are two guys there. One is a sort of Buddhalike guy, with a bald head, and then there was another Black guy there. And I said to myself, “That’s Romare Bearden. What’s he doing in my room?” So I sit down, and Romare sits down, and then his friend, the other painter, gently sits down as well. And we are looking at each other. So I think Romare must be thinking, “Well, didn’t he invite us up here?” And I’m thinking, “I don’t know how these guys got in here.” Eventually, I said, “Well, what happened?” And Romare said, “I think Charles thought we should meet.” So Charles the doorman arranged this historic meeting.” (Walcott, 1997b, 231)



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a committed fan of Walcott’s poetry and the two artists had decided to work on a collaborative project. Published in 1983, The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott and Romare Bearden is a luxurious cloth covered quarto volume of Bearden’s selection of Walcott’s poetry, accompanied by eight monoprints. The Limited Editions Club in New York printed only 250 copies of the book, each of which are numbered and signed by the artist and the writer. In 1984, Walcott agreed to write the poem inspired by Bearden’s Obeah’s Dawn for the catalogue accompanying Beaden’s Rituals of the Obeah collection.18 In 1987, the Bearden’s would host Walcott and his wife Sigrid Nama during the FOCUS festival in St. Martin, despite Romare Bearden’s failing health; Bearden died the following year. Walcott would later dedicate his play Walker to the memory of the deceased artist. In a talk given in Duke University in 1997, Walcott would pay tribute to Bearden and acknowledge the correspondences between Bearden’s Homeric appropriations and his own: [o]ne of the most spectacular pieces of illustration, in my opinion, is Romare’s set of collages based on the Odyssey. I’m not sure it didn’t influence me when I undertook to do that long poem [Omeros]. (Walcott, 1997b, 229)

On a more fundamental level, the significance of Bearden’s collages for Walcott transcends critical preoccupations with imitation and influence. According to Frank Stewart, Bearden referred to the island of St. Martin as a “mystical place where the mythology that makes life bearable could still be found” (Price, 2006, 49). He therefore echoes Walcott’s identification of a “mythopoeic coast” (Walcott, 1964, 14), an archipelago intrinsically given to the act of mythmaking. Walcott stresses that this conflation of the Mediterranean with the Caribbean is not to posit the Caribbean Sea as a “second-rate Aegean,” but rather to emphasize the former as suitable for transposition (Walcott, 1997b, 230). He maintains that it is for him “as it is for Romare […] perfectly valid to think [...] of the Odyssey in terms of the Caribbean” (Walcott, 1997b, 236) and not the other way around. Walcott and Bearden draw our attention to the fact that the world of literary and cultural influence is not a one-way mirror, but rather is based on a complex system of reciprocity and interchange. In their Odyssean reimaginings, poetic worlds are reversible. That is to say that in adopting classical modes, they are not interpreting Caribbean realities through the

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Walcott’s own interest in the obeah women that appear in Bearden’s collection is most clearly expressed in the figure of Ma Kilman in Omeros.



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eyes of the Western literary tradition, rather they are interpreting the Western literary tradition from the vantage point of Caribbean realities. Furthermore, comparisons can be drawn in regard to the manner of artistic creation of both artists in terms both of conception and method. Like Walcott, Bearden has frequently been compared to both Odysseus and his alleged creator, Homer.19 Both artists, like Odysseus, had also experienced “homecomings without home” through returning to a childhood home that was significantly altered; significantly Bearden’s Odysseus Series came a year after a return to Mecklenburg County, North Carolina where he spent the first few years of his life (Walcott, 1969b, 128).20 Similarly, both artists populate their work with what Bearden has termed “journeying things” (Richardson, 1988, 424) such as sailors, ships, birds, trains, aeroplanes and sea creatures. Like Walcott, the “energy” that he located in the Caribbean archipelago seemed to be linked to the region’s landscape. In an interview a year before his death he elaborated that both artists shared views of the importance of island topography in the creation of their art: “[a]s Derek Walcott once said to me, ‘All a man needs to do here is stand on a rock, and you’re at one with the sea and the sky’” (Rowell, 1987, 441). Finally, both use a method of assemblage drawn from various cultural resources in the creation of their New World classicism. With an awareness of this deep affinity between Walcott and Bearden, this section will analyse Bearden’s Odysseus collages as an expression of his integrative modernism, in the light of attempts to label the work as protest art, and as an examination of the relationship between collage and creolization. In terms of modernist artistic precursors for Bearden’s Odysseus Series, Picasso and Matisse are obvious candidates. Both had illustrated

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Marilyn Richardson has commented that “[l]ike the hero of his Odysseus series, Bearden journeyed far and drank deeply of the ideas and impressions he encountered beyond his immediate horizon” (Richardson, 1988, 424) while Charles H. Rowell writes “at his home on the side of a mountain in the Caribbean Sea, I realised that Mr. Bearden was an Odysseus, that he was the subject of his extensive series of collages that bear his name.” (Rowell, 1987, 429). 20 Bridget Moore remarks “This same year [1976] he is invited to return to North Caroline for a talk at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, which also provided him the opportunity to revisit the area. More than fifty years after his boyhood, the towns, the homes, the land, and the people he remembered so vividly had changed – everything had been transformed [...] it is intriguing that at this juncture Bearden would passionately propel himself into his next major artistic project: a visual reinterpretation of Odysseus’s adventures – filled with wars, struggle, exploration, temptations, loss, sacrifice, and countless obstacles – that would eventually lead him home after a twenty year absence” (Moore, 2008, 5).



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books based on ancient Greek figures. Matisse’s own series of engravings based on The Odyssey, originally commissioned for James Joyce’s Ulysses, contains many of the same figures that Bearden would choose to depict. Furthermore, the use of saturated colours and black silhouettes also hearkens back to Matisse’s Jazz paintings from the early 1940s. The lack of perspective and stark figuration in the collages can similarly be traced back to Picasso, Braque and Matisse, as well as techniques used in Asian, African and African-American art.21 However, to read Bearden’s work in terms of his debt to Picasso for instance, would be to miss the point. In A History of African-American Artists from 1972 to the Present, which Bearden co-wrote with Harry Henderson, the artist outlines two particularly destructive readings of the work of African-Americans. The first sociological perspective sees work by black artists excluded from the mainstream. Here they cite the “exhibition policies of state fairs of the 1930s and 1940s, where work by black artists was often displayed in a special section alongside the needlework of the handicapped” (qtd. in Price, 2006, 42). The second recounts stereotyped expectations about the type of work African-American artists should produce. Bearden writes “[t]he more talented the artists were, the more they were subjected to pressure to paint in ways that the majority perceived as ‘primitive’” (qtd. in Price, 2006, 42). Though European primitivism relied heavily upon African and Asian cultural artefacts for inspiration, non-European artists aligned with primitivist movements were read as a variant of a wider European artistic movement. The African-American artist was thus placed in the double bind of being read in terms of a discourse of primitivism that was in turn regarded as derivative of European modernism. Though Bearden apprenticed himself to the great masters, working hard to absorb a wide variety of techniques and a broad artistic knowledge, his artworks are innovative and ground-breaking. As he has written, “[a]n artist is an art lover who finds that in all the art that he sees, something is missing: to put there what he feels is missing becomes the center of his life’s work” (qtd. in O’Meally, 2008, 9). It would be reductive therefore to view Bearden’s modernism as an off-shoot of an “originary” European art movement. If we consider Bearden’s collage Battle with Cicones (Fig. 3-2) for a moment, we can see how appropriation is neither passive nor uncreative. The scene is rich with an ambiguity that distinguishes it from the univocal

 21

The lack of perspective in Japanese wood-block prints and highly stylized treatment of the human figure in African sculptures were hugely influential in the modernist visual arts. Bearden’s own published works including A Painter’s Mind demonstrate a preoccupation with spatial relations in the pictorial arts through various ages and cultures.



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account of the Homeric. In Homer’s Odyssey the invading Greek army storm the lands of the Cicones at Ismarus, killing their men and taking their wives and riches. However, the Greeks grow careless in victory, lingering too long while the Cicones rouse fresh reinforcements who ultimately drive the Greeks from their lands to the cost of many human lives. In Bearden’s collage, the use of black silhouettes makes it impossible to tell the Greeks from the Cicones, or to distinguish the violent attackers from the fallen victims. Either the pictorial narrative tells the tale of the invading Greek army subjugating the Cicones, or it depicts the point in the battle where the Cicones gain the upper hand. In other words, neither side is privileged. The artist refuses to take the side of the violent invaders or the equally violent defender’s of their territory. In war it seems all are equally implicated. The ship’s mast that resembles a cross,22 as well as the context of overseas invasion foretell future cultural conflicts and raise pertinent questions for studies of colonisation across diverse spatial and temporal coordinates. Kobena Mercer uses the labels “integrative modernist” and “diasporic modernism” in an attempt to account for the depth and breadth of Bearden’s cross-cultural artistic allusiveness. Mercer writes: [t]here is something else that makes Bearden’s modernism so distinctive. When we consider his acknowledgement of the Mexican muralists as an early influence; his deep-seated interest in African art, which he approached on the same plane as ancient Greek artifacts; or his brief experiments with Chinese landscape painting when he grappled with abstract expressionism in the 1950s [...] it is from the vantage point of what I refer to as “diasporic modernism” that we are best equipped to understand the unique position that he occupies. (Mercer, 2008, 12)

Mercer’s words are useful in foregrounding an artistic method that transcends national, cultural and temporal boundaries. Attempts to exercise proprietorial control over art based on such arbitrary restrictions are futile, for art is the province of all. Bearden writes “we must remember that people other than Spaniards can appreciate Goya, people other than Chinese can appreciate a Sung landscape, and people other than Negroes can appreciate a Benin bronze” (qtd. in O’Meally, 2008, 9). Like Walcott, Bearden does not regard artistic allusiveness as problematic, reading the appropriated material as fodder to be assimilated by the artist

 22

This mast/cross reading is reinforced by Bearden’s The Sirens’ Song collage, where a physically inert Odysseus is tied to the mast in a manner suggestive of crucifixion. Other depictions of the mast in the series bear the more traditional trapezium outline for the crow’s nest.



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in the creation of something new. In this regard, the assimilative techniques of modernism are enabling rather than restrictive, enriching rather than furacious. Bearden’s multicultural aesthetic thus echoes Walcott’s in the combination of elements from the disparate intellectual resources to express a personal and original vision; he is a proud and open assimilator. Like Walcott, Bearden has advocated an apprenticeship to past masters, stating “art is made from other art” and that the artist “must learn from other painters how to integrate things” (qtd. in Rowell, 1988, 433). He has also compared the artist to a creature of the sea, being a “whale, swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs” (Bearden, 1989, 56). Romare Bearden’s Odysseus Series collages of the late seventies provide a re-visioning of the ancient Greek myth through the lens of African-American experience. In order to supply the “something [that] is missing” (O’Meally, 2008, 9) from the epic, Bearden re-visions the paradigmatic journey narrative in the light of an Afro-American past of slavery and enforced migration. Bearden’s collages draw on various cultural resources from both African and European art. Taking the storyline from Greek mythology, Bearden recasts these Greek figures as black silhouettes. While re-imagining the Odyssean characters in an African-American mould, Bearden stresses that he is not interested in creating protest art, stating “I create racial identities so far as the subjects are Negro, but I have not created protest images” (Price, 2006, 39). In interview, Bearden elaborated on his position: I had a show, an exhibit, of all the Odysseus Series at a college. And a Japanese student asked me why are all the people in the series black, because it’s Homer’s Odyssey. I said, well, everyone says that this is a universal statement. It has to do with the search for a father […] And it is universal. So if a child from Benin or in Louisiana […] sees my paintings of Odysseus, he can understand the myth better […] you say it’s universal. It’s universal to me in this way. (Rowell, 1988, 433/4 my emphasis)

Thus Bearden is able to combine cultural specificity with a universal frame of reference that posits his Homeric appropriations as nonadversarial reinterpretations. For a younger generation of artists, such as Dawoud Bey, Bearden’s “championing of the black subject” while simultaneously “articulating a firm critical and conceptual grasp of the grand sweep of art history” was hugely enabling – “[h]e became a kind of permanent permission slip” (Bey, 2008, 69).23 Clearly then, Bearden is not

 23

Bey remarks on his early photographic training “When I was a very young artist and art student, one of the vexing questions, that initially left me dumbstruck, I



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merely trying to substitute a white hero with a black one, rather, through his use of black figures in a “universal” narrative, he is forwarding a view that an epic hero who is also black need not be a contradiction, or a protest statement. However, the black silhouettes, while forwarding the use of black subjects recoil from essentialist motivations and speak to a cross-cultural sensibility. Articulating an African-American subjectivity as well as establishing a commitment to modernist principles, the collages are also perfectly in keeping with the classical black silhouettes to be found on Greek vases. For O’Meally, Bearden’s collages articulate a view that “human culture, ancient to modern, is fundamentally mongrelized” and that while Homer’s Odyssey does tell the story of a particular people “it is not “about” race or nation or a specific group at all. Walcott clearly concurs with this reading, commenting on “the brilliance of making black silhouettes” that come from “Greek vase silhouettes” (Price, 2006, 95), a fact that aids interpretation of his own Homeric appropriations. For Walcott, the relevance of The Odyssey for the Caribbean is that it is “about surviving,” managing to endure within a context of subordination “[b]ecause that Odysseus figure going down...that’s a Caribbean guy diving” (Price, 2006, 95). Bearden’s position that the use of black silhouettes makes the narrative “universal to me” (Rowell, 1988, 433/4) is therefore in direct accord with Walcott’s view that “the more particular you get, the more universal you become” (Hamner, 1975, 24). In an effort to steer interpretation away from Eurocentric and Afrocentric readings, Walcott would later extend this observation to encompass Bearden’s Odysseus collages: it’s not positing a Black Jesus or a Black Odysseus. The art in these collages represents what is antecedent to, or what precedes, our judgement of it as African, or an adaptation, or whatever. (Walcott, 1997b, 234)

The point here is not to engage in a battle over originality with those who would read Caribbean art as derivative, merely to find a speaking position from which such arguments become irrelevant.

 periodically had to endure from teachers and viewers alike was, ‘Why do you only photograph black people?’ That no white student in any class I was in was ever confronted with this loaded question in relation to their own subject matter was an irony that seemed to completely escape the myopic worldview of my early teachers. It was the example of Romare Bearden, and my early exposure to his work, that made the ignorance contained in this question a moot point for me” (Bey, 2008, 69).



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Mercer’s conception of Bearden’s diasporic modernism is closely tied to the artist’s integration of elements from diverse cultural sources. In many ways then, creolization can be seen (pace Ten Kortanaar) as an expression of New World modernism. In his depiction of The Return of Odysseus, Bearden provides in the picture’s subtitle, Homage to Pintoricchio and Benin (Fig. 3-3), a clue to his method. The mention of Pinturicchio establishes the piece within the context of Italian Renaissance painting, the mention of Benin indicating his appropriation of Benin sculpture. A glance at Pinturicchio’s 1509 painting Penelope with the Suitors (Fig. 3-4) will reveal that the Italian’s painting served as a direct compositional model. Both pictures depict Penelope on the left reaching out to greet her loyal son, who returns with his father, still disguised as a beggar and standing in the doorway. While Telemachus’ right hand reaches towards his mother’s embrace, the extension of the index finger of his left proffers a private signal to forestall some action on his mother’s part; this scene comes shortly before the slaughter of the suitors in the narrative, caution must still be exercised if the plan is to succeed. Between Penelope and the suitors on the right, stands her impressive loom, indicating the stratagem she employed to ward off their advances through the years. Domestic details such as the crowding suitors, the female servant and the cat playing with the ball of yarn are included in each. Here is where the similarities end. While Pinturicchio’s piece is detailed, depicting scenes from the Odyssey in the background (such as Odysseus strapped to the mast of the ship to withstand the Siren song), Bearden’s interior space is flattened by the repeated high-colour floor tiles, halting the viewer at the picture plane, and eschewing excessive ornamentation. The draughtsmanship, saturated colours and lack of perspective are redolent of Matisse, rather than the Italian masters. Where Pinturicchio’s cast are white and dressed in typical Renaissance garb, Bearden’s figures are black, depicted in profile in the manner of Benin sculpture, and wearing clothes from disparate eras and cultures. The suitors’ boots and leggings highlight the Renaissance connection while the ladies’ headscarves recall the American South, the suitors African headgear forwarding the Benin influence. Bearden’s polycultural aesthetic thus echoes Walcott’s in the combination of elements from disparate intellectual resources to express a personal and original vision. Collage was the preferred medium because as Bearden held “assemblage forges a variety of contrary images into one unified expression” (qtd. in Richardson, 1998, 424). The use of fragments to assemble the collages echoes the fragmentation and disruption that features in much high modernist art; like Joyce, Bearden is quintessentially a



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“scissors and paste man” (qtd. in Danius, 2008, 1004). Similarly, creolization is an art of mixing and re-combining, though one that evolves from necessity rather than choice. It is unsurprising therefore that much Bearden criticism will place emphasis on the “fractures,” “breaks,” “cuts” and “divisions” in his work. However, in his analysis of the collages Robert G. O’ Meally has forwarded the notion that critics need to substitute the vocabulary of “fragmentation” for one of “layering” in order to properly appreciate Bearden’s aesthetic. The matter for O’ Meally has profound political implications. It implies that “African Americans are not a smashed up people,” though they have experienced persecution; instead he holds that they are a “people of toughness and multiple layers, many of them not readily seen or easily fathomed” (O’Meally, 2007, 97). Given the tenor of Bearden’s remarks on essentialising identitarian construction paradigms,24 this distinction seems more than appropriate. Furthermore, the collages are consistently reaching out, the silhouettes suggesting a black subjectivity while simultaneously resonating with multiple cultural coordinates. Bearden explains: [i]n my work I seek connections so that my paintings can’t be only what they appear to represent. People in a baptism in a Virginia stream, are linked to John the Baptist, to ancient purification rites, and to their African heritage. (qtd. in Price, 2006, 35)

Thus, as we have previously examined, the deployment of black silhouette, for example, can signify African-American subjectivity, the modernist art of Matisse, the surviving artefacts of classical Greece and contemporary critical arguments regarding the potential Afro-asiatic sources of Greek culture. The centripetal drive outwards to gather materials and make connections is tempered by the centripetal impulse of epic – to speak of a particular people. The universalising force is kept in check by the drive towards specificity, “it’s universal to me in this way” (Rowell, 1988, 433/4). As noted previously, Walcott frequently utilizes the trope of carpentry as a metaphor for his own poetic craft, “consonants scroll/ off my shaving plane/ in the fragrant Creole/ of their native grain” (Walcott, 1987d, 9). The etymological root of the word “verse” (to turn), would applaud this

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Bearden repeatedly undermined attempts to posit “pure” and “discrete” racial identities. As O’Meally recalls, “[o]ver and over in interviews in the 1970s and afterwards, Bearden would answer questions about race and American culture by declaring that whether they are aware of it or not, all Americans inherit a four-part cultural background: all of us, he declared, are part-Yankee, part-pioneer, partIndian, and part-black” (O’Meally, 2008, 15).



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return to a utilitarian reading of the craft of poetry, deriving as it does from the metaphor of ploughing, of “turning” from one line to another as a ploughman does. Poetry, it seems, can be both pleasurable and useful. Concomitant with his own self-styling as a craftsman poet, Walcott interprets Bearden’s collage method as proffering a similar serviceable trade, denoting a comparable humility: [n]ow the scissors is the weapon and the tool of a matriarchal society. Scissors cut cloth. So what the paintings represent is the same as if a mother or an aunt or a grandmother had cut fabric to make a utilitarian object […] If you draw it, then you’re doing some kind of assertion. But if you make it utilitarian, then you have a phenomenal humility. (quoted in Price, 2006, 35)

His insistences on his creative art as simple craft is connected with a desire to humbly serve the people of his archipelago, a vocation that he describes both as a “benediction that is celebrated” and as a “frightening duty owed” (Walcott, 1992, 79). Walcott takes advantage of the fact that “craft” as a homonym denotes both a “trade” and a “vessel” in his frequent combining of the trope of carpentry with that of sailing or shipbuilding, thereby connecting his woodwork with the industry necessary to build a raft, launch his metapoetic craft and sail for home.



Figure 3-1: Front cover of Derek Walcott’s The Star-Apple Kingdom

Figure 3-2: Romare Bearden Battle with Cicones

Figure 3-3: Romare Bearden The Return of Odysseus: Homage to Pintoricchio and Benin

Figure 3-4: Pinturicchio Penelope with the Suitors



CHAPTER FOUR ENCIRCLING REVERSIBLE WORLDS

Odysseus strung his mighty bow. Quickly his right hand plucked the string to test its pitch And under his touch it sang out clear and sharp as a swallow’s cry. —Odyssey, Book 21 I followed a sea-swift to both sides of this text; her hyphen stitched its seam, like the interlocking basins of a globe in which one half fits the next —Walcott, Omeros

Walcott’s best known Homeric appropriations and adaptations – Omeros and The Odyssey – place considerable attention on the figurative potential of the swallow. In doing so, the poet not only performs a rewriting of Homeric epic; he also offers an insightful rereading. For, it is through his insistence on the centrality of the swift to his Omeros that Walcott draws the reader’s attention to the significant role that the bird already occupies within the Homeric narrative. It is no accident that when the returning Odysseus would string his bow in Book 21 of The Odyssey, it would sing with the voice of the swift, as the quoted passage above indicates. It is the successful plucking of the bowstring therefore, that publicly announces the triumphant return of the absent king. Attuned to the migratory nature and vernal return of the swallow, Losada makes the point that: the swallow and its call might be the quintessential metaphor for the idea of returning […] Through the simile of the swallow’s call, the singing bowstring heralds the hero’s return. (Losada, 1985, 34)

Like Homer’s hero Odysseus, the swallow is an archetypal metaphor both for the wanderer and for his eventual nostos. Similarly, in Walcott’s Omeros, the restless swallow inaugurates a series of circular journeys that bring the travellers back to the place in which they began. That Walcott’s transatlantic guide also pours benediction on the homecoming of all the poem’s travellers is apt given that the reading of the swallow as “emblematic of domestic bliss and fidelity recurs in a wide variety of



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literatures of different periods” (Borthwick, 1988, 17). The migratory cycle of the bird would have been well-established and commonly alluded to in Greek antiquity. Furthermore, the note made by the plucked bow would have been apposite, granting that the “swallow’s call, not merely its appearance, was often taken as the signal of its return” (Losada, 1985, 34 my emphasis). Walcott’s awareness of the bird’s symbolic resonance as a portent of return is attested to in his version of The Odyssey: “When you hear this chord // Look for a swallow’s wings” (Walcott, 1993, 1). That the plucked bow would release a musical note is also entirely in keeping with Walcott’s frequent metaphorical associations of storytelling and sailing. In his verse drama adaptation of The Odyssey, Walcott transmutes the horizon into a lyre, the typical instrument of accompaniment in the Greek oral tradition, “its line my bow-string, and its waves my lyre” (Walcott, 1993, 21). Chapter Two has already outlined how Walcott takes advantage of the semantic possibilities of the word “craft” to combine tropes of carpentry with sailing in the building and launching of his own metapoetic craft. In Walcott’s verse, tropes of migration and settlement are combined in the craft’s ploughing through the waves, as the ploughman poet turns from one furrowed line of verse1 to the next. The combination of tropes of craftsmanship, sailing and storytelling continue in the figurative possibilities outlined by the ship’s bow. These metaphoric wanderings return us to the original etymology of the word whereby the bow as lyre/ weapon/ front of the ship would plough the waves, its twists and turns outlining the shape of his verse. Homer’s Odyssey is after all the story of a voyage and its hero is both an accomplished voyager and teller of tales. If The Odyssey narrates the story of a voyage, it also represents the voyage of a story, being a narrative that is endlessly re-told and re-imagined through the ages and in various cultures. Odysseus’ wanderings continue beyond the crafted diegesis attributed to Homer, plunging the reader into a network of textual relations, as the peripatetic hero reappears in various guises through the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Joyce, and Kazantzakis. Attuning the tale to his own circumstances as postcolonial Caribbean poet, Walcott would have to herald the return of Odysseus by sounding his own swallow song. This chapter will examine the promise and the pitfalls of Homeric verse in the construction of a postcolonial epic.

 1

As noted previously, this reading is enriched by an awareness of the etymological root of the word “verse”, meaning “to turn”. Furthermore, it is entirely appropriate in poetic adaptations of The Odyssey given that Odysseus is frequently awarded the epithet polytropus, signifying that he is a man of many twists and turns.



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Walcott’s Homeric appropriations are always tinged with the anxiety that in engaging with a European cultural inheritance, he may be abandoning his Caribbean home. To assuage this anxiety, he declares his poetic mission to be the honouring of his island archipelago. The language of these poems articulates a desire for exchange, a wish to give something in return for the benediction of home. If in the poem, “Homecoming: Anse la Raye,” the poet had anxiously “hoped it would mean something to declare/ today, I am your poet, yours,” then the St. Lucian’s would similarly lay claim to their own native son, renaming Christopher Columbus Square as Derek Walcott Square in honour of his Nobel Prize win (Walcott, 1969b, 51). The renaming of the square marks a landmark moment, where the colonial subjects would refuse the external definition of Western history, with its polemic contention that the New World had been “discovered” by Columbus, and hand the conch to their own poetic “conqueror[] who had discovered home” (Walcott, 1973, 53). This act of renaming, itself explored in so many poems by Walcott, asserts the right to lay claim to the archipelago as a natural inheritance. Walcott’s engagement with Homeric myth would operate on a similar level of exchange. Despite the poet’s repeated evocation and disavowal of mythical figuration, it would be the enabling figure of Omeros who would confirm for Walcott that despite all his wandering, all he had really perfected was his “skill with one oar” (Walcott, 1990, 291). A circular traveller, Walcott’s voyager knows his metapoetic craft “returns to the port from which it must start” (Walcott, 1990, 291). In return, Walcott would offer a new perspective on the Homeric narratives, inviting readers to read backwards, retraining the ear to the salty freshness of the Greek bard’s verse. For Walcott, the Homeric works are “reversible” in that they can be redeployed (or re-versed) within different contexts, and in the sense that the new rewriting can also forward new rereadings of the original texts, thus altering the trajectory of traditional trends of scholarship. Forwarding a reciprocal rather than a genealogical model for the relationship between Homer and the contemporary writer, Walcott challenges Bloom’s Oedipal model of literary filiation. In their study of twentieth century Homeric appropriations, Graziosi et al, point to the two-way process of literary correspondence: it seems entirely appropriate, in the context of the reception of Homer in modern Greece after 1950, to speak of “Seferis’ Homer” and – in the early decades of the twentieth century – of “Cavafy’s Homer”. In such conditions, to look for the Homeric “source” is actually to look for the source from which knowledge of Homer is drawn. (Graziosi, 2007, 8)



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The example of Walcott using Bearden and Joyce to explain the appeal of Homer to him, refutes the simplicity of linear, chronological models of literary influence. In this regard, Bearden, Joyce and Walcott can be regarded as becoming new hubs of meaningful interpretation. Walcott’s Homeric appropriations therefore, do not read the Caribbean in terms of Greece, but Greece in terms of the Caribbean.

L’hirondelle des Antilles Omeros is structured around a series of journeys, journeys which, like Homer’s Odyssey are circular in nature. The poem begins and ends in the poet’s native St. Lucia, with Books Four, Five and Six travelling to Africa, North America and Europe respectively, thus representing facets of Walcott’s colonial background and contemporary writing career. Three main plotlines run concurrently through the poem. The first strand concerns itself with the poorer black St Lucians, in particular the fishermen Achille2 and Hector who are rivals for the love of Helen. The second story line deals with Major Denis Plunkett and his wife Maud, and the relationship this white couple have with the island. Finally, the third plotline traces the voice of the poet-persona, detailing autobiographical events and meditations in the poet’s own life. The ethnic coding of the characters thus establishes ancestral links to both Africa and Europe, the twin poles of the poet-persona’s mixed heritage. The naming of the protagonists in the Greek tradition, along with the insistent paralleling of events in their lives with classical episodes, seems to invite comparison to Homeric works. However, since it was an established practice of slaveholders to borrow from biblical or classical sources to rename their human property, Walcott’s choice of names also serves as a reminder of a more recent history of colonialism and exploitation. Two Afro-Caribbean elders, one male, one female, represent the theme of cultural continuity. The blind wanderer Seven Seas is a Caribbean counterpart of the Greek Homer, a connection testified to by the fact that the characters transform back and forth into one another in Chapter LVI. Ma Kilman is an updated version of the Afro-Caribbean Sybil from the earlier poem “Origins”. Her religious syncretism allows her to perform the half-forgotten rites of West African Obeah as well as to commune with the

 2

Pronounced “Ah-sheel” following French Creole pronunciation. The spelling alteration is deliberate.



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Christian dead.3 A proprietor of the No Pain Café, she is a healing force in the poem and draws on the diverse cultural inheritances of the Caribbean to effect her cures. The figure of the swift is key to the poem’s various crossings. In the poem two central journeys map the internal division of the Caribbean subject that Walcott’s “A Far Cry from Africa” outlines. In the first, Achille imagines himself reversing the Middle Passage to return to Africa and to the village of his ancestors. The second sees the poet-persona, embarking on a Grand Tour of Europe under instruction from the ghost of his dead father. The swift instigates both odysseys on behalf of the poem’s various father figures, as well as performing the function of a transatlantic guide. The common aim of each journey away from the islands is itself to return home. In his journey to Africa and back Achille is visited by God (the Father) who addresses him in creolized English: “And God said to Achille, ‘Look, I giving you permission/ to come home. Is I send the seaswift as a pilot’” (Walcott, 1990, 134). The poet-persona receives similar instruction from both biological and cultural father figures. The ghost of the poet’s biological father, Warwick Walcott, appears at the end of Books One and Four. Warwick, who is identified as “the swift’s blown seed” (Walcott, 1990, 69) presents the journey to Europe as a necessary precursor to homecoming: “[b]ut before you return, you must enter cities/that open like The World’s Classics” (Walcott, 1990, 187). Meeting with his father in Book One, Warwick advises his son to “simplify/ your life to one emblem, a sail leaving harbour/ and a sail coming in” (Walcott, 1990, 72). In Chapter LVIII Seven Seas informs the poet-persona that this is “why the sea-swift was sent to you: / to circle yourself and your island with this art” (Walcott, 1990, 291). Though presented as a figure for migration, the odysseys instigated by the swift provide the necessary tools for a successful homecoming; the outbound journey is therefore also a species of return. The explicit engagement with Homer/Omeros, Virgil, Shakespeare and Joyce (among countless other allusions and references) has led critics such as Bruce King to conclude that Walcott might well be a “Telemachus in search of a literary parent” (King, 2000, 519). In assessing Walcott’s verse however, the reader needs to be attuned to the fact that the poet complicates straightforward genealogical paradigms of literary filiations. The figure of Warwick, for instance, introduces another interesting

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In Chapter LXI Ma Kilman is able to comfort a bereaved Major Plunkett that his deceased wife Maud is at peace: “Plunkett never thought he would ask the next question. / ‘Heaven?’ He smiled. / ‘Yes. If heaven is a green place.’ [...] That moment bound him for good to another race” (Walcott, 1990, 307).



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dynamic to Walcott’s work – that of reversal. Meeting Warwick’s ghost, his father comments on the difference in their ages, “Now that you are twice my age, which is the boy’s, / which the father’s?” (Walcott, 1990, 68). The incongruity of the age difference makes Walcott old enough to be the father of his own father, to make Warwick his son. Blending his voice with that of his father, “they are one voice.” (Walcott, 1990, 68); with Maud Plunkett’s piano accompaniment of Joyce, “I murmured along with them” (Walcott, 1990, 201); and with Omeros, “I heard my own thin voice riding on his praise the way a swift follows a crest” (Walcott, 1990, 286), Walcott refutes the hierarchical paradigm of relationships between the writer and literary predecessor. This trope of reversal is reproduced in other father/son relationships also. Major Denis Plunkett, last in his line, scours the annals of history to find a satisfactory heir. In the character of midshipman Plunkett, who fought and died in the Battle of the Saints, he fulfils the need to continue the line, although this time the line travels in the opposite direction, time folded over onto itself. Similarly, although Afolabe is ostensibly the father in his relationship with Achille, the fact that he is born of Achille’s subconscious also renders him a son in this parthogenetic siring.4 In a postcolonial context, Walcott’s reversals could be regarded as an attempt to reverse the flow of influence, to assert a right to creation that is more than merely derivative of European culture. This position reiterates Walcott’s previous contention that the “vision” of “great poets of the New World” is “Adamic” (Walcott, 1974a, 37). In his invocation of the figure of Adam, Walcott sees an opportunity to become the start of a line rather than the end. On a more symbolic level, the swift exemplifies the divisions created by colonial history. Forever vacillating between two cultures it resembles the predicament of dislocation inherent in Caribbean culture. Crisscrossing the Atlantic the swift itself is potent figure of migrancy and displacement. If the swift is representative of division, it also operates as a symbol of unity, crossing east-west meridians and thus linking the disparate aspects of a Caribbean heritage into one coherent identity. Persistently traversing lines of longitude, its journeys enact a “monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice” (Walcott, 1974a, 64). For Walcott, the swift is a comfortable hybrid able to inhabit a mixed society, without forgetting the individual cultures that compose its heritage.



4 As Athene is born out of the side of Zeus’s head in classical mythology, so Achille enacts an analogous birthing of his own father.



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As transatlantic guide, John Thieme makes the point that the “swift occupies much the same role as Athena, Odysseus’s guiding deity in The Odyssey” (Thieme, 1999, 186). Athena operates throughout The Odyssey as a benevolent force within the life of the protagonist keeping him safe on his voyages and ensuring that he arrives safely home. Guardian and protector of Odysseus, Pallas Athene elects to take the hero’s loved ones under her wing, thereby giving strength and inspiration to Penelope and Telemachus at critical junctures. The goddess serves also as a plotpropelling device, rousing characters from their apathy and spurring them on to meet their fates. Akin to her favourite Odysseus, she too is a master of disguise and frequently appears in various human forms. Significantly she appears in bird form on no less than three separate occasions in the Odyssey, transforming in Book 22 of The Odyssey into a swallow.5 It is appropriate then, that in Walcott’s subsequent stage adaptation of The Odyssey, Athena would appear in the form of a swallow. In rewriting The Odyssey, Walcott also provides new ways of reading backwards. Echoing Homeric instances, Walcott’s sea-swift, like the goddess, functions to bring both Achille and Walcott home after their sustained wanderings. For Walcott, it is the sea-swift, “l’hirondelle des Antilles” that links these various quests and provides a central transcendent metaphor for cultural integration (Walcott, 1990, 88). It is the swift that can “carry the cure/ that precedes every wound” and return the wandering writer home to the seat of his inspiration (Walcott, 1990, 239). The swift carries the seed to St. Lucia that Ma Kilman later uses to cure Philoctete of his ancestral wound. At Maud Plunkett’s funeral, the swift that she had sewn into her shroud of birds of St Lucia lifts off the silk and flies into the air with “all the horned island’s/ birds, bitterns and herons, silently screeching there” (Walcott, 1990, 267). The swift thus links the lives of all the islands inhabitants regardless of their origins. As the fates of the lead-actors in Homer’s verse seem propelled forward by celestial forces greater than themselves, so Walcott’s poetic practice seems ordained from the outset by external powers. A benevolent companion, the swift pours benediction both on the poet and his art, guiding him and his creations through outward odysseys and internal migrations. In Book Three of Omeros, Achille is “lured by the swift,” who “touched both worlds with her rainbow” (Walcott, 1990, 130/1). The fisherman, in his sunstroke delirium, pulls up the anchor line and dredges

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Rousing words – / but she gave no all-out turning of the tide, not yet, / she kept on testing Odysseus and his gallant son, putting/ their force and fighting heart to proof./ For all the world like a swallow in their sight/ she flew on high to perch / on the great hall’s central roofbeam black with smoke (Od. 22. 246/52).



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up the face of his ancestor from the watery depths. The swift here performs the role of messenger who “prompts him towards his future and his past – ‘for the first time, he asked himself who he was’” (Walcott, 1990, 130/1). Achille travels back to Africa and through the historic journey of the slaves’ Middle Passage to the Americas. The deity that appears to Achille reminds him that the sea-swift is also invested with the power of bestowing blessings, its cruciform shape in flight pouring benediction on those who encounter it. Yet though this quest seems blessed from the outset, it does not mark an uncomplicated re-union with a ruptured tradition. Though welcomed into the village of his ancestors, Achille finds he cannot simply be re-inserted into that society. In his journey, he meets with his father/ancestor Afolable, and they have a discussion about the relevance of names, “His father said: ‘Afo-labe,’/touching his own heart. / ‘In that place you have come from/ what do they call you?’” (Walcott, 1990, 137). Afolabe’s sense of identity suggests an immutable relation between the name and its bearer, a confidence that the signifying name bears an intrinsic connection to the signified man. When Achille explains the Caribbean predicament that, “[e]verything was forgotten” and that “we yearn for a sound that is missing,” his ancestral father grows alarmed (Walcott, 1990, 137). Afolabe is concerned with finding Achille’s lost name since his tribe recognizes that the name reflects the person, denoting qualities or character. That Achille is unable to offer any etymological explanation for his inherited name causes his ancestors to weep for a future that is closing in upon them, “just as branches sway in the dusk from their fear/ of amnesia, of oblivion, the tribe began to grieve” (Walcott, 1990, 138). In Achille, the amnesia of the Middle Passage is made manifest, a portent of things to come. It is a future where loss must be accepted and renaming provides a means of reclaiming that which is missing. Achille sees the villagers dancing and hears their music, recognizing those aspects of culture that survived the Middle Passage, “[t]he same, the same” (Walcott, 1990, 143). He takes part in their customs but remains removed, tears filling his eyes “where the past was reflected/ as well as the future” (Walcott, 1990, 139). He tries to invoke the gods of the trees but they ignore his incantation. When war came he finds he cannot fight and fifteen slaves are taken. He considers changing the course of history, of becoming their deliverer but, in epical fashion, his hubris pre-empts a fall: “[t]hen a cord/ of thorned vine looped his tendon, encircling the heel/ with its own piercing chain. He fell hard” (Walcott, 1990, 148). It would seem that nature fashions her own shackles to chain those who would impede



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the inexorable march of history. Walcott argues here as elsewhere that the past must be accepted – it is time to move on: [t]o such survivors, to all the decimated tribes of the New World who did not suffer extinction, their degraded arrival must be seen as the beginning, not the end, of our history. (Walcott, 1974a, 41)

For the poet, it is time to shirk off the weight of an all too burdensome history, the shame of a degraded past and embrace a new horizon. For the victims of colonial oppression fortitude is the new form of heroism, “[t]hey crossed, they survived. There is the epical splendour” (Walcott, 1990, 149). This psychological return to Africa that Achille embarks on is overshadowed by a problem that every postcolony must face. In truth, the return to a pre-colonial past is utopian. One of the main problems is that the Africa that is imagined is one that no longer exists. It is this same “phantom Africa,” worshipped by Warwick’s barber that both father and son turn from at the end of Book One (Walcott, 1990, 72). The roots to which the colonised direct their gaze are withered and dead. This imagined, pure, pre-colonial Africa cannot be addressed as a presence; rather it is an imagined site. This spiritual quest of Achille is a quest for self-knowledge through an understanding of his origins. As Philoctete explains to Seven Seas, “[h]is name/ is what he out looking for, his name and his soul” (Walcott, 1990, 154). However, having healed a wound brought on by a colonial past, the “homesick shame/ and pain of his Africa,” Achille must now return to his hybrid present (Walcott, 1990, 134). If Africa is a necessary port of call on a journey to self-knowledge, it by no means constitutes the destination. The roots to which Achille “returns” are imagined and based on a need of the fisherman to renegotiate his identity as opposed to locating a firm point of origin from which this culture derived. The artificiality of this imagined homeland is emphasized in that the scene which Achilles’ delirium conjures up “was like the African movies/ he had yelped at in childhood” (Walcott, 1990, 133). The culture he must create belongs in the future not in the past. As Stuart Hall suggests: [s]ilencing as well as remembering, identity is always a question of producing in the future an account of the past, that is to say it is always about narrative, the stories which cultures tell themselves about who they are and where they come from. (Hall, 2001, 283)

Achille’s journey highlights Walcott’s position on the formation of cultural identity: while celebrating the manifold sources of cultural



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inheritance, there is no going back, to Africa or anywhere else. Informed by a long held view that writes “amnesia is the true history of the New World,” he contends that “cultures can only be created by this knowledge of nothing” (Walcott, 1974a, 39; 57). The offshoot of this is his contention that cultures must be formed out of this void. Omeros is a significant milestone in the poet’s career in that it achieves a larger incorporation of African cultural sources into the poet’s multicultural vision of New World classicism than is evident in his earlier work. Achille’s journey proves that there is no going back to an untainted pre-colonial past; however, the imaginary journey has a purpose, allowing him to achieve a greater understanding of the past as well as his role on the present. Moreover, while acknowledging Africa as a potential homeland, it is also read in measured terms as being but one of the possible horizons that the New World castaway can look to for clues to the past. As Achille travels to Africa, the poet-persona admits that only: [h]alf of me was with him. One half with the midshipman/ by a Dutch canal. But now, neither was happier/ or unhappier than the other. (Walcott, 1990, 135)

If Africa fulfils with one aspect of his cultural composition, Europe must equally provide another; Achille’s journey to find his African “father” Afolabe is counterpoised by Plunkett’s efforts to find a “son” in midshipman Plunkett. At the end of Book Four, Walcott’s father’s ghost appears for a second time in the narrative, again compelling his son to fulfil his poetic vocation. The poet-persona is strolling on a beach in Marblehead, depressed because of his recent divorce and the racial alienation he experiences in Boston. Warwick serves here as a link to St. Lucia in Omeros as the narrative travels farther and farther from the Caribbean archipelago. At this point in the poem, having traversed longitudinal lines to an Africa past and latitudinal axes to evoke a North America present, the poet-persona prepares to traverse spatial and temporal dimensions to explore various stages of his European inheritance. Warwick’s presence here serves as a reminder that the centre of these ever expanding circular journeys is always St. Lucia. These locations represent aspects of Walcott’s ancestral history and contemporary livelihood, essential cultural components of his hybrid St. Lucian identity. Representing the poet’s commitment to his island, Warwick thus legitimizes further travels away from it; the move away is therefore legitimised as a precursor to an eventual return, “[o]nce you have seen everything and gone everywhere, / cherish our island for its green simplicities, / enthrone yourself” (Walcott, 1990, 187). He reminds his son



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that though the swift may come and go “yet in its traveling all that the seaswift does / it does in a circular pattern” (Walcott, 1990, 188). With that he bows out of the narrative. Travelling to Europe, Walcott devotes individual chapters to Portugal, England, Ireland and the Mediterranean. Lisbon is significant in that it represents the first European nation to trade in black African slaves. In this section, Walcott relates how the “world’s green gourd was split like a calabash/ by Pope Alexander’s decree” (Walcott, 1990, 191). This passage refers to the division of colonial holdings between Portugal and Spain, authorizing Portugal’s hegemonic control over Africa and Spainish dominion of the New World. It should be noted too that Walcott is creolizing official history here, reading Europe through a Caribbean sensibility – the world globe connoting the tropical calabash rather than a temperate fruit (Walcott, 1990, 191). The etymology of the name of the city of “Ulissibona” further links the city to Odysseus/Ulysses, due to the mythical belief that avowed this the settlement was “founded by Ulysses’ (Walcott, 1990, 189). From Lisbon, the poet-persona travels to London where he spies Omeros coming out of a Tube station. That Omeros emerges from the railway station indicates that he is travelling up from the Underground/Underworld, his “bargeman’s black greatcoat” suggesting a ferry ride across the river Styx (Walcott, 1990, 193). Here again Walcott depicts Omeros as a shabby wanderer with rather than a sanctified literary progenitor. Collapsing on the steps of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the beggar is thrown out by a church warden. The uncharitable nature of the cleric who kicks the homeless wanderer from the church steps, is ironically counterpoised by the sign on the door which announces “this Sunday’s lesson in charity” (Walcott, 1990, 194). Leaving the city that “can buy and sell us/ the packets of tea stirred with our crystals of sweat” the poet-persona moves on (Walcott, 1990, 197). Following a visit to Ireland (as discussed in Chapter Three) the poem regresses back in time and traverses spatial coordinates to an Ancient Mediterranean, thus inaugurating the only appearance of Homer’s hero Odysseus in the entire Homeric appropriation. This passage, which sees the journey of Odysseus to the Caribbean, appropriately dwells on tropes of transformation. The palimpsestic nature of the scene is revealed by the gradual metamorphosis of the Aegean into the Caribbean Sea. This brief appearance of Odysseus setting out off the Aegean coast in Chapter XL marks the beginning of his translation into a Caribbean figure, initially signalled by an epidermal transformation. Standing on the “scorched deck”, he “peels the sunburnt skin in maps of grey parchment// which he



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scrolls absently between finger and thumb” (Walcott, 1990, 202). The image of an ever-darkening Odysseus who rolls his skin into scrolls that provide a map of future voyages is an enabling figure for his future Caribbean configurations. Furthermore the image of the privileged hero whose voyages are sustained by an expendable crew is challenged by the Creole speaking crew who object to their captain’s warmongering and eternal wandering: “Captain, who treat we like swine, you ain’t seeing shore. / Let this sun burn you black and blister your lips so/ it hurt them to give orders” (Walcott, 1990, 203). The postcolonial epic, it seems, finds no place for uncomplicated notions of heroism. To underscore this alteration in the concept of heroism, the warlike Achilles of Homer’s The Iliad is replaced by the pacifistic Achille of Omeros. Walcott’s Achille is a simple fisherman, not the stout-hearted warrior of classical myth who shares his name: I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe’s son, who never ascended in an elevator, who had no passport, since the horizon needs none, never begged nor borrowed, was nobody’s waiter, whose end, when it comes, will be a death by water (which is not for this book, which will remain unknown and unread by him). I sang the only slaughter that brought him delight, and that from necessity – of fish. (Walcott, 1990, 320)

Uneducated, he will never read the book written of him, and while having no heroic feats to his name, this Caribbean Achille is yet worthy of dignity and praise. Given the stamp of historical violence in the region, it is unsurprising that Walcott’s poetics reifies the humble and peaceful, rather than the conquering hero. Walcott’s Homeric appropriations, which innovate freely with the source material, thus raise some interesting questions with regard to the parameters of the epic genre. Freely assimilating and reformulating diverse literary influences within his broader poetics, his writing testifies to the poem’s generic indeterminacy and challenge to classification.



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Postcolonial Epic Since its publication in 1990 Omeros has sharply divided critics as to whether or not it satisfies the criteria of an epic. While critics such as Mary Lefkowitz, Carol Dougherty and Jahan Ramazani6 freely dispense the epic label to Omeros, established West Indian critics such as John Figueroa state flatly that “Omeros is not an epic” while Patricia Ismond regards it to be informed by a “lyric rather than an epic sensibility” (qtd. in Farrell, 1997, 250). For classicists, the temptation is often to highlight a debt to Western culture; those who reject this continuity of tradition are more likely to assert the poem’s independence from European culture. Between these extremes sit a number of critics who either take the view that Omeros is “almost an epic but not quite”, or else that it “is an epic but only just.” Theorists confident in assigning the genre epic to the poem generally feel the need to qualify their decisions by referring to the numerous deviations Omeros makes from a traditional prescription of classical poetry. For Robert D. Hamner Omeros is a “foundation epic” or “epic of the dispossessed,” asserting its rightful place in the genre while simultaneously pointing to its divergence the more traditional epic form (Hamner, 1997, 3). Similarly Farrell, Davis, and Dougherty all focus on how Walcott’s epic deviates from preceding epics. The generic indeterminacy surrounding the poem has proved a critical battleground, frequently revealing as much about the assumptions and ambitions of the academics involved as it does shed light on the question itself. This section will trace some of the main arguments on both sides, providing also the poet’s own views on the subject. Finally, it will elaborate the position that Walcott’s Omeros does belong to the epic genre, a genre more defined by its deviations from predecessors than by any sanctified classical mode. Walcott’s creolization of epic sets his mythopoeic craft in motion on the seas shuttling between Old World and New, conjoining both in a revised genre that belongs neither wholly to one or the other. In order to assess whether or not Walcott’s poem can fruitfully be classified an epic, it is necessary to examine the contours of the form. In



6 See Lefkowitz, Mary 1997. Bringing Him Back Alive. In Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, pp. 400-404. Colarado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Dougherty, Carol 1997. Homer after Omeros: Reading a H/Omeric Text. In The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives, ed. Gregson Davis, pp. 335-358. Durham: Duke University Press and Ramanazani, Jahan 2003. The Wound of Postcolonial History. In Derek Walcott: Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom, pp. 175-204. Broomall: Chelsea House Publishers.



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defining epic, an initial distinction must be made between classical epic and epic writing in general. The former, exemplified in Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey and Virgil’s The Aeneid, can be generally described as a long narrative poem that tells a story central to the myths and beliefs of a people. Common features include a beginning in media res, superhuman heroes, recurring heroic epithets, arduous journeys and glorious battles, a visit to the underworld, prophecy, and divine intervention. More generally, epic poetry can refer to literary works modelled upon classical epic, which though deviating from classical prescriptions, yet contribute to the form. This could describe, for example, Nazim Hikmet’s Human Landscapes, Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, or Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Such neat divisions between traditional epic and epic writing can obscure the deviations traceable within these categories. For instance, Virgil’s Aeneid diverges from the Homeric epics in being a literary, rather than an oral epic. Similarly, Joyce’s Ulysses is frequently described as an epic, even though it is not a poem at all. The ancient Greek epics express a polytheistic belief system; Milton’s Paradise Lost by contrast expresses a Christian vision of the universe. Clearly then, we are analysing a genre that can be both oral and literary, poetry and prose, polytheistic and monotheistic, one that expresses the concerns of a people and that expands beyond national borders to express global and even cosmic concerns. In discussing epic therefore, we are analyzing a form that cannot entirely be confined to static definitional characteristics. Auerbach’s seminal Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature famously opens with a comparison between the world as represented in Homer’s The Odyssey and The Old Testament. The theories on classical epic that result from this comparative reading can be summarised in the three following points: no suspense, no background, no psychological complexity or development. Epic is teleological and therefore lacking in suspense; the righteousness of the epic hero, as echoed in heroic epithets and digressions, propel the narrative forwards toward an inevitable conclusion. Moreover, Auerbach maintains that all events occur in a “uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present,” a fully realised foreground that denies narrative ambiguity (Auerbach, 1953, 7). These provisos for Auerbach result in a certain flatness within the narrative and a lack of mental depth within the cast of characters. Carol Dougherty elaborates: [t]he Homeric poems approach the problematic of heroic behaviour paratactically, that is, by displaying various themes and qualities embodied in different heroes. Achilles fights, Odysseus travels, Philotectes suffers.



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None alone comprises the integrated hero; instead that concept is articulated between and among them. (Dougherty, 1997, 352)

Clearly, the majority of contemporary epic writing does not adhere to this description. Walcott’s Omeros for example, is ambiguous and selfreflexive, mired in the complexities of the historical inheritance of colonialism, and peopled with characters who, if not innately complex, do show signs of psychological development and internal debate. Auerbach’s analysis is interesting in the sense that it summarises many suppositions that regulate the boundaries of the epic genre. Though the ideas presented therein are themselves debatable – for example, it could be argued that it is through the trials encountered on his voyages that Odysseus develops as a character and acquires the necessary skills to ensure his final victory – they express common critical assumptions surrounding the genre. Furthermore, these theories develop a political dimension in a postcolonial context. David Quint’s Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton offers the following definition of epic: [t]o the victors belongs epic, with its linear teleology; to the losers belongs romance, with its random or circular wandering. Put another way, the victors experience history as a coherent, end-directed story told by their own power; the losers experience a contingency that they are powerless to shape to their own ends. (Quint, 1993, 9)

This classification would clearly exclude Walcott’s Omeros, which is a narrative poem centred on colonial subjects marginalised by empire. Moreover, if we accept this definition, then the notion of a postcolonial epic seems almost a contradiction in terms. However, if we are to adhere to Quint’s prescription to the letter, we see that Homer’s Odyssey – a paradigmatic text of the wanderer tossed upon the waves of providence – fits romance more than epic (a point that Quint himself acknowledges). Yet there are few scholars that would argue against the inclusion of The Odyssey within the epic genre. For, if even the paradigmatic texts of the genre can be excluded, then surely the danger arises than no epic will provide a perfect fit and the generic category will itself cease to serve any practical function. The arguments presented here impugn attempts to fix the epic genre within limiting definitional moulds. However, the opposing danger of expanding the definition of epic beyond all usefulness must also be acknowledged. In current parlance, the term epic is frequently used as a synonym for “major” or “large-scale,” as typical advertising campaigns for Hollywood blockbusters will inform us. Clearly, the term cannot be gainfully employed if put to such diffuse purposes. To avoid both



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extremes, it is necessary to acknowledge both continuity and change. Epic is a coherent genre with recognisable characteristics. However, it is not a dead or obsolete form; it is a dynamic and vital genre that grows according to the creative innovations of its practitioners. Tracing the lines of connection and divergence allows for a more nuanced assessment of the possibilities of postcolonial epic. For Sidney Burris, the tracking of Homeric parallels in Walcott’s Omeros is inevitable, but constitutes a “particularly ill-fated approach” given that a central function of the poem’s allusions resides in its “deliberate deflation of analogy” (Burris, 1995, 261). Walcott himself has repeatedly rejected the mantle of epic, insisting that his poem lacks the dimensions of epic, being a poem about ordinary people, not a reification of heroes and battles. Anticipating critical scrutiny in a work filled with classical references, Walcott has insisted that he was not writing a “conundrum for scholars”7 (Bruckner, 1990, 399): I do not think of it as an epic […] “epic” makes people think of great wars and great warriors. That isn’t the Homer I was thinking of; I was thinking of Homer the poet of the seven seas. (Bruckner, 1990, 396)

Walcott’s Omeros does not contain the monumental battle scenes and superhuman figures traditionally associated with the epic genre, but instead like Joyce’s Ulysses it contains a parodic element that mocks the military heroism of epic. Homer, for Walcott, is not a sanctified literary progenitor, he becomes rather a species of creolized wanderer, a drifter, “the word ‘Homer’ meant joy, / joy in battle, in work, in death, then the numbered peace// of the surf’s benedictions” (Walcott, 1990, 283). It is worth noting too that Walcott shifts the focus away from the mythical Greek hero and towards the apocryphal Greek poet. Davis notes how this identification introduces an “implied convergence between the epic singer/ writer and his theme, between the wandering Odysseus and the drifting epic bard” (Davis, 1997, 329). As in previous shorter poems such as those in the castaway/ Crusoe vein, both creator and created share an exiled sensibility, stranded in the Caribbean as a result of colonisation. Though commonly identified with one of his characters in The Odyssey, it is the court bard Demodocus that is typically associated with Homer,8 rather

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In this regard, he claims his agenda to be diametrically opposed to that of Joyce who boasts of Ulysses “I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality” (qtd. in Ellman, 1959, 535). 8 As Manguel indicates, “[t]he description of a bard’s performance appears in the Odyssey, when, at the court of King Alcinous, the blind bard Demodocus sings



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than Odysseus; for Walcott, aligning his wanderer/ castaway figure with his classical creator allows for a closer affiliation with the figure of the author rather than the more problematic conquering hero. Though the comments above would suggest Walcott’s own disavowal of epic, I would argue that what he conducts is rather an interrogation of the genre, that his comments reveal hostility to the assumptions that surround epic rather than anything intrinsic to the epic genre itself. Lest any doubt surrounds Walcott’s own criterion for epic, Walcott provides another instance of how he defines the theme of classical epic: “The Odyssey is the story of some man who wandered around, and the story of wandering is the classical epic” (Walcott, 1997b, 235). Moreover, tropes of travelling, homecoming and the establishment of roots indicate Greek and Roman epics as literary progenitors for Walcott’s New World classicism. The use of character names such as Achille, Hector, Philoctete and Helen stress the strong connections between Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Walcott’s poem. Though Walcott is anxious to differentiate his poem from certain assumptions as to what epic entails, it is the assumptions rather than the genre which he regards his work as being outside. In Omeros he writes: [t]his was the cry on which every odyssey pivots, that silent cry for a reef, or familiar bird, not the outcry of battle, not the tangled plots of a fishnet, but when a wave rhymes with one’s grave, a canoe with a coffin, once that parallel is crossed, and cancels the line of master and slave. (Walcott, 1990, 159)

However, a perception remains that epic should be exclusively seen as an imperial genre. Tobias Döring posits that “epic typically sides with the winners and with narrative teleology” (Döring, 2002, 172). Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey for instance, document the Greek sacking of Troy and the rightful re-establishment of order in Odysseus’s kingdom in Ithaca. The Homeric poems therefore express the epic vision from the perspective of the conquering heroes, sailing abroad, subduing enemies and acquiring wealth and fame along the way. Virgil’s Aeneid, though concerning itself with the fate of the defeated Trojans, is quick to shift the focus to the divine ordinance of the army whose descendants would found the city of

 three stories to the sound of a kittara or lyre [...] The first and last are wonderful moments of story within story, since Ulysses himself, unrecognized, is part of the audience and weeps at the memory of his retold past” (Manguel, 2007, 32).



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Rome, a city which would in turn go on to defeat the Greeks. A panegyric commissioned by the Emperor Octavian, the objective of the Aeneid is to establish a heroic past for the Romans. Conrad neatly expresses the heroic militarism of Virgil’s epic: [w]hen Virgil announces that he will sing of arms and the man, he is claiming for poetry a prerogative like that of the weaponry he extols. Epic words are his means of regimenting phenomena. Language is his armament, literature his means of self-glorifying actions and achievement. (Conrad, 2006, 2)

This militaristic code frequently attributed to the genre would seem to reinforce its reputation as an imperial genre. However, in the early poem, Epitaph for the Young, Walcott exhibits his understanding that empires were not won by military might alone and that guns and ideology went hand in hand in mastering the colonial subject. Furthermore, if epic verse can serve the needs of empire, it can certainly also open a channel of resistance. In creolizing the martial spirit of Virgil’s epic with an alternative form of revolution, “[s]o I began to write, to take up arms,” the pen is adjudged mightier than the sword (Walcott, 1949, 25). Walcott’s Omeros clearly possesses none of the teleological certainty of Virgil’s epic. This is one of the reasons Walcott himself is slow to assign epic status to the poem. In a talk at Duke University, he elaborated on this feeling: [t]he difference, I would think (and the reason why I don’t like the idea of its being called an epic), is that a particular epic, any epic, has a kind of political destiny…take Virgil’s epic, where you get the founding of Rome in terms of Aeneas does this, and you Romans, x or y. That’s manifest destiny. (Walcott, 1997b, 243)

As Hamner’s formulation “epic of the dispossessed” would seem to suggest, Walcott’s poem concerns those victims of the machinery of colonialism rather than its operators (Hamner, 1997, 3). Refusing to celebrate the imperialist ideology of earlier epics, Walcott’s island home is deliberately coded as exploited and denigrated by empire. Terada notes that it is Walcott’s “postcolonial American status, parallel to Joyce’s as an Irish writer in English” that “accounts for this conspicuous modification of epic protocol” (Walcott, 1992, 186). Thus one of the main reasons why Walcott would regard his work as outside of the genre relates to his refusal to adopt a political position, to reify the virtues of the St. Lucian population according to the heroic code. Though characters such as Achille, Hector and Philoctete recall, by their very names, the classical



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mode, theirs is the story of ordinary fishermen, going about their daily business. The celebration of the everyday is thus a strategic move to accord dignity to those whom history has denied stature. Walcott’s narrative poem is not the story of superhuman figures, warriors and demigods whose towering feats distance them from the common man. Reifying the virtues of the provincial fishermen of St. Lucia, the broad sweep of Omeros encompasses precisely the opposite perspective to the heroic code, concentrating on those individuals who are traditionally peripheral in standard epic. They are ordinary people “who set out to found no cities; they were the found, / who were bound for no victories; they were the bound, / who levelled nothing before them; they were the ground” (Walcott, 1990, 22). In this fashion, characters such as sailors and servants emerge from the back stories of classical epic to become the protagonists of Walcott’s poem. While the Homeric poems do concede the ambiguities of colonisation, they are presented from the point of view of conquering heroes and fighters rather than those that occupy the invaded territories; in bringing the postcolonial experience into focus, Walcott inverts this process. Like Joyce before him, Walcott does not feel obliged to elevate their status, to ennoble the ordinary people by assigning superhuman feats to them; they are celebrated simply for being what they are. As in the earlier poem Another Life, mythical analogies are constructed in Omeros only to be dismantled as the poem progresses. It is an effective poetic strategy for dramatising the poet’s desire to celebrate the inhabitants of St. Lucia without reducing them to Homeric echoes. Walcott’s epic therefore deviates from the imperial ideology frequently ascribed to the genre, his commitment to celebrating the inhabitants of St. Lucia forming part of a broader postcolonial project relating to those whose cultures have been degraded by colonialism. A subaltern epic, it relates the tales of those who found they could not speak. It also reflects the anxiety of a poet who must write about those who he can only know at a distance, separated from the subjects of his poetry as a result of his education and status in society.

Reversible Worlds Walcott’s Homeric appropriations do not simply rewrite classical epic, substituting Greek elements for their Caribbean analogues. He also provides a rereading of Homer and epic poetry, insisting that epic is not a static and moribund genre and that it is the vital energy encoded within these Homeric works that continually inspires the impetus to reimagine them. For Walcott there is an affinity with Greek experience in the



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Caribbean. However, in order to appreciate this, he claims it is necessary to empty artworks of the assumptions accreted through historical analyses of art appreciation. The implication of this view is that art should be understood in a constant present tense, rather than being loaded with historical baggage. Insisting on the simultaneity of artistic works provides another strategy for refuting the label of mimicry or indebtedness. The poetic Greek and Caribbean worlds are in this sense reversible. The trope of transformation is central to the logic of Walcott’s Homeric appropriations. It is this quality of mutability that the poet believes explains the continuing relevance and vitality of Homeric verse. It is Walcott’s insistence that his poem is a local epic that leads to the inbuilt dismantling of the epic structures contained within it. Yet, this dismantling is itself a double gesture; on the one hand Walcott claims his poem to be incompatible with the militaristic code of epic poetry, on the other hand he reads Homer backwards to locate a small-scale, community driven narrative within. Speaking on early Greek sculpture, he comments that the brightly coloured statues of the past have been sanitized by historical readings into visions of bleached white stone. In interview he claims that his affinity is with the “vigour and elation of an earlier Greece, not a later Greece, not the sort of Romanesque Greece” (Brown et al, 1990, 183): [t]here are too many people who are horrified at the idea of what would turn out to be the bad taste of the Greeks, because our concept of Grecian sculpture is a bleached-out Elgin marbles frieze […] You wouldn’t want to believe that Greek statues were painted in the way that Catholic icons are painted, or that they had eyes and simulations of lips, and flesh colour, or bright clothes. In other words, if we looked at Greek sculpture now, we would judge it to be bad art. (Walcott, 1989, 22/3)

Art seen through the lens of history is contaminated according to Walcott, who views it as antithetical to the discourse; Walcott insists, “art itself does not contain history” (Walcott, 1989, 22). Rejecting the idea that “power/ and art were the same” the poet repeatedly opts for the living present over the decaying past, “since what I preferred/ was not statues but the bird in the statue’s hair” (Walcott, 1990, 204). The meaning of Greek sculpture is lost to those who look on it as historical artefacts, as epochs and eras, rather than vibrant pieces as fresh today as the day they were made. Furthermore, Walcott holds that schools of thought which view art and culture chronologically support an erroneous supposition that art carries the guilt of empire. He argues that the art, the language and the culture of the coloniser, cannot be made to share the blame for human cruelty. For



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example, though the spread of the English language and literature is coterminous with that of Empire, making the language itself guilty of the crimes of Empire means that those forced to adopt it (like the colonised inhabitants of the Caribbean) must remain slaves to the language, and are never allowed to be masters. In “The Muse of History” Walcott categorically refutes this position of necessary servitude, “[i]t is this awe of the numinous, this elemental privilege of naming the New World which annihilates history in our great poets” (Walcott, 1974a, 38). In freeing the language of historical guilt, those who use it are similarly freed of subjection to “the language of the colonizer” and all the anxiety of this inexorable position. Walcott explains: [i]f you think of art merely in terms of chronology, you are going to be patronizing to certain cultures. But if you think of art as a simultaneity that is inevitable in terms of certain people, then Joyce is a contemporary of Homer (which Joyce knew). (Walcott, 1997b, 241)

The elation and wonder for the poet in the Caribbean has come as a result of the forced jettisoning of history brought about as a result of colonialism in the region. Compelled to forget everything that came before, all cultural creations are treated with the freshness of new discovery, making Homer, Shakespeare and Joyce contemporaries rather than outmoded fossils. It is perhaps for this reason that Walcott restores to the poet Homer his Greek name “Omeros”, seeing him in the freshness of simultaneous creation. Reversing Homer’s name from the translated English “Homer” to the modern Greek “Omeros,” Walcott reclaims classical mythology from the English literary tradition. In returning Homer’s Greek name “Omeros” to him, Walcott again both honours the Greek poet and at the same time creolizes him. It is a move that John Thieme contends “reclaims Homer from his assigned role at the headwaters of Western European culture” and “propounds an altogether different etymology” for him (Thieme, 1999, 154). In Chapter II of the poem the poet submits a phonetic translation of the name “Omeros” where: O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer was both mother and sea in our Antillean patois, os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes. (Walcott, 1990, 14)

This act of renaming both restores Homer’s own cultural specificity as Greek, while simultaneously reinventing him as a Caribbean poet. It also points to the ability of good verse to stand the test of time. As Carol Dougherty notes, the modern Greek name emphasizes the “enduring



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modernity of this well-told tale”, while the image of the graying bone captures its antiquity (Dougherty, 1997, 336). This creolizing impetus is emphasized in the conflation of the wandering Omeros with the Caribbean figure Seven Seas. Classical influences abound but are imagined anew. Walcott reanimates Homer as a character in his poem, restoring his Greek name to him and making him half of the character pair of Omeros /Seven Seas. This pairing is significant in stressing both the specificity and as a corollary the universality of both. Chapter LVI marks the most sustained exploration of the Proteus episode in the poem. It begins with the poet-persona walking down from his hotel room to the sea. The beach is deserted and the cloudy sky of this January morning plays tricks of light and shadow on the poet’s eyes. He sees something in the water which he initially takes to be a coconut, only to realise that it is a marble bust of Homer (signifying the bleached preserved version of the literary progenitor). Inspired to rename the head Walcott writes: “I heard my own voice// correcting his name, as the surf hissed: ‘Omeros’” (Walcott, 1990, 280). The naming exerts the power of an invocation and the marble bust emerges from the ocean, his head “fringed with its surf curls and beard” (Walcott, 1990, 280). Through this act of naming Omeros is restored to freshness, being recognized as itinerant figure rather than a hallowed literary originator. This initial transformation heralds another metamorphosis as a cloud passes over the sun and the scene changes once more. The sky darkens “until it was black” and the figure of Omeros changes once more, “the shallows in that second/ changed to another dialect as Seven Seas stood// in the white foam manacling his heels” (Walcott, 1990, 280). These two “Old Men of the Sea” slip back and forth into the form of the other with protean fluency, “[t]hey kept shifting shapes, or the shapes metamorphosed/ in the worried water” (Walcott, 1990, 280): [s]o one changed from marble with a dripping chiton in the early morning on that harp-wired sand to a foam-headed fisherman in his white, torn undershirt, but both of them had the look of men whose skins are preserved in salt, whose accents were born from guttural shoal, whose vision was wide as rain. (Walcott, 1990, 281)

As with Odysseus in the earlier Mediterranean episode of the poem, the epidermal transformations of Omeros here signal a process of creolization. That the shape-shifting is a reciprocal process reiterates the mutuality rather that a one-way line of inheritance.



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The epic scaffolding utilised by Walcott represents the tools that the New World craftsman adopts to create anew. So while epic references and meanings are first established by way of names, themes and rhetorical strategies that render St. Lucian realities in an identifiably classical mode, they are ultimately dismissed by Walcott as “[a]ll that Greek manure under the green bananas” (Walcott, 1990, 271). In characteristic fashion this renunciation is itself loaded with contradictory meaning – manure it must be remembered fosters growth. The fundamental thing to grasp about Walcott’s evocation of classical analogies is that he freely inverts the terms of inheritance for his is a “reversible world” (Walcott, 1990, 207). That is to say that in adopting classical modes, he is not interpreting Caribbean realities through the eyes of the Western literary tradition, rather he is interpreting the Western literary tradition from the vantage point of Caribbean realities. In doing so, he demonstrates that poetic influence can flow both ways. Walcott can certainly be regarded as belonging to a long line of epic writers that stretch back to Homer; however, his own poem supplements this tradition and provides new ways of interpreting Homeric works, thus influencing the tradition in reverse order. His disavowal of epic centres on a reluctance to confer any sense of belatedness to Caribbean culture. In his recurrent evocation and disavowal of classical myth, Walcott demonstrates both the enabling qualities of mythology for reconfiguration, and also his reluctance to read his Caribbean world in terms of European culture. In the poem “Homecoming: Anse La Raye” the poet himself is a nomadic Odyssean figure, having returned home after years of wandering to a people who no longer recognize him. So it is in Omeros where his literary education manifests as a cataract that clouds the poet’s vision, broadening the gulf between the writer and the subjects of his work, “[w]hen would the sails drop// from my eyes, when would I not hear the Trojan War/ in two fishermen cursing in Ma Kilman’s shop?” (Walcott, 1990, 271). Homeric allusions proliferate, yet Walcott has been categorical about the fact that his poem is not a direct adaptation or a rewrite of that epic. These literary correspondences are problematic for the postcolonial writer who runs the reducing his own people to literary symbols. His anxiety that his work would be misperceived may be what inspired the astonishing claim of the poet-persona never to have read the Iliad or the Odyssey, “‘I never read it,’/ I said. ‘Not all the way through.’” (Walcott, 1990, 283). If the claim seems disingenuous, it is perhaps more understandable to consider that Walcott’s resistance is a defensive gesture against having his poem interpreted as “a sort of Iliad in blackface,” a fear that dogged the poet in relation to the epical elements of “The Schooner



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Flight” (Schoenberger, 1983, 92). Through combining the specificity of St. Lucian realities with the abstraction of mythological reference, Walcott seeks to express both the actuality and universality of human experience, to speak specifically for his race and thus for humanity. Here again Walcott finds inspiration in the model provided by the Irish literary renaissance: Yeats has said it; Joyce has said it. It’s amazing Joyce could say that he wants to write for his race, meaning the Irish. You’d think that Joyce would have a larger, more continental kind of mind, but Joyce continued insisting on his provinciality at the same time he had the most universal mind since Shakespeare. What we can do as poets in terms of our honesty is simply write within the immediate perimeter of not more than twenty miles really. (Hirsch, 1985, 105)

As in Walcott’s use of the Crusoe figure, his Homeric reconfigurations operate in a more complex fashion than a standard rewriting. The characters themselves mark both a continuity with and deviation from their classical precursors, a fact hinted at in the slight alteration of some of their names, itself a standard feature of postcolonial rewriting. The connections between these Caribbean characters and their Greek counterparts are easy enough to spot. Helen, for example, is a remarkably beautiful woman who arouses desire and consternation, and Achille and Hector are rivals throughout the poem. The differences are equally pronounced; if this Achille has a frown like a “growing thunderhead” and is described as being in possession of “fists of iron,” he differs from his Greek counterpart both in his peaceable demeanour and in the special rites he performs to honour his dead rival Hector’s body (Walcott, 1990, 320). The traditional characterization of Hector as level-tempered, and of Achilles as hot-head, are also reversed in Walcott’s schema. Direct comparisons are further complicated by the way Walcott’s characters are confusingly overdetermined. To use the same example, Hector and Achille mimic their Greek equivalents to a degree; however, the fact that their rivalry is over Helen conflates this warring character pair with another in Paris and Menelaus.9 Walcott’s Helen is similarly burdened with the weight of diverse identifications. The Greek figure of Helen is identified with primarily with a local St. Lucian woman who is also named Helen. However, the fact that

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Walcott’s stage adaptation of The Odyssey will similarly get individual characters to stand in for more than one character in the Homeric poems. This has an obvious practical advantage in terms of staging in that it reduces the cast of characters considerably, thus propelling the action onwards.



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the island of St. Lucia is popularly referred to as the “Helen of the West Indies” adds another layer of significance here. Moreover, the North American pioneer Catherine Weldon is described by Walcott as walking “like a Helen among their dead warriors” (Walcott, 1990, 216). The correspondences continue; St. Lucian Helen, implicitly imbricated with her postcolonial island, becomes Penelope in her concern for Achille, lost on his journey to Africa, “[n]ot Helen now, but Penelope/ in whom a single noon was as long as ten years, / because he had not come back” (Walcott, 1990, 153). Terada’s postmodernist study of Walcott astutely observes that “[a]ny character so laden with variegated counterparts cannot really resemble any single counterpart” suggesting that the excess of mythical correspondences collapse into an unfixable identity in flux (Terada, 1992, 188). Pollard reiterates this observation maintaining that Walcott “proliferates his correspondences to transform imitation into invention” which would seem to vindicate Walcott’s own theories on mimicry being an inherently creative process (Pollard, 2004, 154). Thus the overdetermined identities of the poem’s characters can be seen to perform a strategic function also, in that they undermine the classical structures upon which they initially rely. Walcott’s engagement with classical figurations for St. Lucian realities has spanned his entire career, yet it represents an allegiance that he is both committed to and anxious about, being aware of the implications whereby the colonial’s fidelity to the Western canon can be read as treason to those who have been subjected to European domination. Omeros avoids a straightforward endorsement of European source texts by enacting a complex process of evocation and disavowal of epic throughout, engaging with the epic genre on the one hand, refuting it on the other. In fact, it is in those moments when Walcott most categorically challenges its epic status that his poem reveals its most striking epigonal features. Interestingly this strategy of disavowal is itself a noted feature of classical verse. Davis notes that “literary scholars who work in the Greco-Roman tradition conventionally refer to the move as recusatio,” a rhetorical device whereby the work of literary predecessors is initially rejected only to be reincorporated throughout the text (Davis, 1997, 323). Thus Walcott’s disavowal and simultaneous evocation of the epic genre is entirely characteristic of the genre itself. The final third of the poem deconstructs its own project, selfconsciously reflecting that the epic apparatus may in fact be in collusion with imperial ideology. Walcott is aware of how his attempts to speak for the inhabitants on St. Lucia echo the presumption of empire in speaking for a subaltern who is conspicuously silent. Yet this very deviation from



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the epic genre, that is the poet’s commitment to write for those marginalized by history, simultaneously draws the poem in closer connection to epic poetry, the central aim of which is to speak of the concerns or fate of a people. This engagement with and disavowal of classical co-ordinates is therefore built into the very structure of Omeros. While the first two thirds of the poem persistently, sometimes laboriously, draw classical comparisons to Caribbean experience, the final third is deconstructive, tearing down the classical scaffolding in an effort to step beyond mythic inflation. Insisting on the domesticity of his own epic, Walcott’s writing also encourages us to reread the Homeric poems, to look back from the catalogue of battle scenes and glorious deeds to see what is for Walcott a local poem concerned with everyday realities in the archipelago. Reading backwards enables the colonial writer to create a work that is not only influenced by literary predecessors, but which influences in turn how those predecessors are to be read. Supplementing and shaping a tradition that in turn shaped the poet lingers on the reciprocal nature of cultural exchange.







PART III: THE RETURN





CHAPTER FIVE RITES OF PASSAGE

Bending closer she started to bathe her master...then, In a flash, she knew the scar – that old wound —Odyssey, Book 19 Like Philoctete’s wound, this language carries its cure, its radiant affliction —Walcott, Omeros

In Book 19 of The Odyssey, the protagonist Odysseus is recognised by his old nurse Eurycleia who spies an old hunting scar on his leg while washing his feet. Her immediate response to inform her nearby mistress Penelope that her husband who has been absent some twenty years has returned is checked by Odysseus who cautions her that his identity must remain secret awhile yet. The moment of recognition is followed by a Homeric digression of some ninety lines where two meetings with his mother’s father Autolycus are described. In the first, Autolycus, bending over the newborn Odysseus, leaves his parents Anticleia and Laertes with two instructions. The first relates to the naming of the child: “so let his name be Odysseus.../ the Son of Pain, a name he’ll earn in full” (Od. 19. 463/4). The second instruction is that the child should visit him when he comes of age that his grandfather may shower him with treasure. It is during this visit to Autolycus and his sons that Odysseus receives his thigh wound while hunting boar. The scar of Odysseus is therefore intrinsically connected to his heroic identity. Not only is the unmistakeable mark which allows his beggar’s disguise to be penetrated but as the Homeric digression indicates it is also linked to the naming of Odysseus by his maternal grandfather and the prophesying of his preordained suffering – Odysseus is to be a “Son of Pain.” Furthermore, the filial inheritance from Autolycus goes beyond material riches. This grandfather, whom the poem describes as “one who excelled/ the world at thievery, that and subtle, shifty oaths” (Od. 19. 448/9) can be regarded as a double for Odysseus. Odysseus after all, accumulates wealth through unscrupulous means and is identified as a



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trickster storyteller figure at many points in the narrative. Autolycus is also afforded divine support, protected and championed by Hermes as Odysseus is by Athena. If, as Aeurbach and Dougherty suggest, the Homeric characters can be seen as two-dimensional aspects of a dispersed identity (see previous chapter), then Autolycus can be seen as a brief exploration of an aspect of the Homeric hero who is gifted at weaving words to suit his purposes, an Odysseus in disguise in that sense. Other characters can be read as performing a similar doubling function. For example, the two mentions of Philoctetes in Homer’s Odyssey identify him firstly, as a character supremely skilled with a bow and secondly, as a figure who achieves his homecoming. As Dougherty perceptively notes, these details are “the primary themes of the Odyssey and what characterizes Odysseus as its hero” (Dougherty, 1997, 344). Unlike Homer who disperses aspects of identity among two-dimensional characters, Walcott attempts the opposite. In collapsing Homeric figures into one another – a strategy that is obvious in his adaptation of The Odyssey and also evident, as I will argue here, in Omeros – Walcott adds an extradimension to these Homeric characters, forcing the reader to recognise their complexity. It is this character development which disrupts the Homeric analogies established in earlier parts of the poem. Thus Odysseus’ scar can be regarded as a nodal point within the poem about which tropes of wounding, naming and disguised identity accumulate. In a similar fashion, Walcott explores these tropes within his poem Omeros. For one thing, all of the characters in the narrative are wounded. Furthermore, these wounds are intricately bound up with issues of language and colonial inheritance. Finally, in a poem that ponders the power of reversals, Walcott’s Homeric appropriation effects a significant reversal with relation to the characters of Odysseus and Philoctetes. If Philoctetes is a marginal figure compared to the central character of Odysseus in The Odyssey, then Walcott’s Omeros turns this relationship around, casting Philoctete1 as a key character occupying a central place from the first page of the poem while Odysseus is shunted to the very margins of the text. Given that Odysseus is typically characterised as a conquering hero and sacker of cities whilst Philoctetes is an allegorical figure for the wounded, dispossessed exiled outsider, the reason for such a substitution in a postcolonial epic becomes clear. As mentioned previously, the poem begins by establishing Homeric analogies but ends by deconstructing these parallels. Two projects are



1 The altered spelling of the name Philoctetes to Philoctete indicates that Walcott’s appropriations will freely diverge from their source texts.



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undertaken that depend on Homeric correspondences; each attempt in their own way to heal the wound of imperial conquest. The first is the character Major Plunkett’s attempts to write a history of St. Lucia. Enamoured by his housemaid, the local beauty Helen, he wishes to offer his account of the “Helen of the West Indies” to her. The second project explores the poet-persona’s own attempt to appropriate Homeric verse in the creation of Omeros. By exploiting Homeric parallels in his postcolonial epic, he hopes to honour his island home through his poetic craft. Both projects fail and the final third of the poem is dedicated to dismantling the Homeric scaffolding which structures earlier sections. Moreover, the poem’s commitment to alternative viewpoints highlights the contingency and improvisatory nature of mythmaking; its inclusion of African and Amerindian elements stresses that the mythopoeic impulse could just as easily draw upon alternative cultural resources to the Homeric myths. While wounding is a central theme within the poem, the narrative also explores the possibility of healing. Forwarding the poem’s broad multicultural vision, it is the integration of various cultural resources that seems to bring about this miraculous cure. The figure of the sea swift, whose transatlantic flight stitches together the lives of the various characters within the poem, is instrumental in this regard. Omeros is a poem that is notable also for demonstrating Walcott’s greater integration of African cultural resources in his New World poetics. Ma Kilman, the proprietor of the No Pain Cafe must tap into her half-forgotten African ancestral roots in order to achieve her apotheosis as an Afro-Caribbean Sybil. The healing involves an acceptance and reconciliation with the past, an acknowledgement of suffering and a desire to move forwards. This chapter will explore tropes of wounding and healing within Omeros as well as charting the possibility of redressing the balance of colonial rupture.

Wounding Early in the narrative of Omeros, Walcott explicitly announces his intention to explore the trope of wounding, “affliction is one theme/ of this work” (Walcott, 1990, 28). Though wounding is a common trope in postcolonial literature, where a physical or mental wound establishes a metaphorical link to the suffering of the colonised subject, it is a device towards which Walcott has shown much hostility in his earlier career. Equally derisive of resistance literature or the literature of victimhood that either “yellows into polemic or evaporates in pathos” (Walcott, 1974a, 37), he once dismissed both as the “chafing and rubbing of an old sore”



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(Walcott, 1985, 115). In Chapter 19 of Another Life, for example, Walcott pre-empts the Dantean inferno in Omeros with another hellish pit, placing in it a selection of politicians and Caribbean artists who exploit the suffering of their ancestors: [t]hose who peel, from their own leprous flesh, their names, who chafe and nurture the scabs of rusted chains, like primates favouring scabs, those who charge tickets for another free ride on the middle passage. (Walcott, 1973, 269)

Given that so much of Walcott’s previous work has railed against this focus on suffering in favour of an Adamic vision of the New World, his use of the trope of wounding as a central theme in Omeros would therefore appear to suggest a certain contradiction. However, Walcott’s deployment of the figure of the wound is not as simple as it might first appear. Firstly, Walcott’s antagonism towards resistance literature has never sought to deny the hurt inflicted by colonialism; his poetry acknowledges the existence of the colonial wound but feels it must be accepted “as part of [the] body. But this doesn’t mean you nurse it all your life” (Hirsch, 1985, 115). If the vision of the ideal New World poet he refers to in “The Muse of History” is Adamic, Adam is now a wiser figure fully attuned to the horrors of colonialism, a “second Adam since the fall” (Walcott, 1965b, 69). Secondly, it should be acknowledged that while the poem Omeros does focus on wounding, it does so as part of a broader move towards the healing and reconciliation of a multicultural people whose hybridity conjoins the disparate strands of a divided identity. The figure of the wound in Walcott’s handling can therefore be seen as a pervasive and polyvalent figure, a site where issues of colonial rupture, linguistic inheritance and cultural creolization converge. Thirdly, wounding is an affliction that is visited on all of the island’s inhabitants, coloniser and colonised alike. Philoctete bears a festering wound on his leg, Hector and Achille suffer their love for Helen like a disease, Ma Kilman is afflicted with the amnesia of the Middle Passage that distances her from her African culture of origin, Maud Plunkett is infected with a cancer that eventually claims her life, and the Major has an invisible head wound as a result of his military service. In this manner, Walcott challenges some of the narrower preconceptions of postcolonial literature that seek to define it as exclusively positioned in opposition to the culture of the coloniser; the inclusion of Plunkett demonstrates that the wound is not the sole preserve of the victims of colonial trauma. Furthermore, the literary figures encountered are referred to as blind. Their blindness thus links them to the apocryphal figure of Homer who



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was reputedly blind.2 Walcott’s creolized wanderer Omeros is blind as is his Caribbean counterpart Seven Seas, Their blindness functions as a metaphorical link to the “true vision” that is identified as a necessary precursor to the act of creation. It is interesting to note at this point that St. Lucia, was named after the patron saint of blindness. The saint who is also known as Saint Lucy, Santa Lucia or Saint Lukia, was believed to be a blind virgin martyr. Furthermore, the name “Lucy” means “light,” while the same Latin root, lux, translates as “lucid,” “clear,” “radiant” or “understandable.” This etymological root of the name of Walcott’s island therefore imbricates blindness and illumination, whereby true vision is regarded as an internal faculty unavailable to the worldly senses. In the Hades section of Omeros, the poet-persona, whose wound is the alienation he feels from those he would seek to write about, is guided through the volcanic pools at Soufrière by the blind Omeros / Seven Seas. The pools echo the nine circles of hell from Dante’s Inferno. Walking by the Malebolge (in Dante’s schema this eighth circle represents fraud) he encounters several pools. In the “Pool of Speculation” he sees politicians whose exploitative practices sold the islands precious resources for profit. In another pool he sees his perished character Hector who is confined to hell due to his faith’s insistence in the necessary passage through hell en route to heaven. A third pool is filled with poets whose verses fail to penetrate through to the deeper nature of things, “[s]elfish phantoms with eyes/ who wrote with them only, saw only surfaces/ in nature and men, and smiled at their similes” (Walcott, 1990, 293). The poet-persona recognises his poetic transgressions in these phantoms “[p]ride in my craft. / Elevating myself” and begins to slide towards the mouth of the pit (Walcott, 1990, 293). However, Omeros takes his hand and drags him to safety and higher ground. Grabbing the poet-persona’s head in his hands Omeros demands “whether a love of poverty helped you/ to use other eyes, like those of that sightless stone?” (Walcott, 1990, 294). Learning to see with blind eyes the poet must resist the urge to elevate himself and his island through lofty classical correspondences and to cherish the island for its natural beauty and worth. Part of the success of Omeros as a postcolonial epic is its multicultural vision, its commitment to including the various members of the cross-

 2

The popular legend that Homer was blind was forwarded by the Greek historian Thucydides who quotes a passage from the Hymn to Apollo (which he attributes to Homer) as a self-reflexive autobiographical detail. The passage in question refers to the “sweetest of singers” as “[a] man who is blind, and lives in rocky Chios” and is the earliest textual evidence of Homer’s supposed blindness (qtd. in Dalby, 2006, 174).



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cultural society. Speaking of the character of Major Plunkett the poet discloses his own authorial investment in the fictive lives of his characters through direct narrative intrusion: [t]his wound I have stitched into Plunkett’s character. He has to be wounded, affliction is one theme of this work, this fiction, since every “I” is a fiction finally. Phantom narrator, resume. (Walcott, 1990, 28)

This passage is noteworthy for a number of reasons. It is not the first reference to wounding in the poem – Philoctete’s wound, Seven Sea’s blindness and the “wounding” of the tree gods having already been mentioned. Nor is it the first example of Walcott highlighting the fact that autobiographical content has been dissolved into the poem. What is significant about this passage is Walcott’s willingness to include a white British Army Major into his postcolonial epic as representative of another facet of his island community. Plunkett may be British and his military service in World War II links him to Empire building, yet he is also part of the St. Lucian community having lived on the island since the war. His love of the Caribbean archipelago is clear, “England seemed to him merely the place of his birth” while in St. Lucia “harbour after crescent harbour closed his wound” (Walcott, 1990, 61). By “universalizing this need for healing” Pollard maintains that the poet purports a “common experience upon which he can rely to articulate his interethnic, cross-cultural, and cosmopolitan New World poetics” (Pollard, 2004, 188). In other words the inclusion of Plunkett signifies Walcott’s genuine commitment to voicing the region’s multicultural diversity. Eschewing a separatist agenda that links suffering to only the victims of empire, Ramazani contends that: Walcott turns the wound into a resonant site of interethnic connection within Omeros, vivifying the black Caribbean inheritance of colonial injury and at the same time deconstructing the uniqueness of suffering. (Ramazani, 2003, 177)

The trope of wounding therefore represents an area of common ground shared between colonisers and colonised, thus dismantling the seemingly intractable opposition between the two. The position of the white couple on St. Lucia is further complicated by the fact that the Major’s wife is Irish, herself hailing from a postcolony on the edge of Europe. The ambiguous position of the Irish within the postcolonial paradigm is skilfully navigated in the figure of Maud who manifests traits of both coloniser and colonised. As Irene Martyniuk perceptively notes, though Maud’s “specific ethnic coding” is rarely understood in postcolonial



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terms, she is in many ways the “quintessential post-colonial” (Martyniuk, 1999, 145). The ambiguous relationship of Ireland to the postcolonial paradigm moves beyond the Manichean dualism of either/or, postcolonial/ non-postcolonial designations to a more inclusive both/and formulation.3 Martyniuk contends that “Walcott, in creating and celebrating Maud Plunkett, creates and celebrates the post-colonial hybridity of the Irish” (Martyniuk, 1999, 147). The Plunkett’s marriage transcends the binary opposition of coloniser and colonised; here again we see evidence of Walcott setting up a seeming opposition only to dismantle it. The marriage of Maud and Dennis also bodes well for the future in that it represents a union that transcends old antagonisms. As Paul Breslin points out: Dennis Plunkett’s wife, Maud, is Irish, so the marriage already crosses a boundary between colonizer and colonized, establishing both of them as likely candidates for assimilation into St. Lucian identity. (Breslin, 2001, 257)

The inclusion of the Plunketts within Walcott’s schema is therefore vital to the realization of a fully representative diegesis. Walcott’s poetics of affliction is most fully explored through the character of Philoctete, who was the initial inspiration for Walcott’s Omeros.4 The figure of Philoctete is, like his Greek counterpart Philoctetes, emblematic of all suffering. In Sophocles’ play Philoctetes, Philoctetes is a Malian warrior who had originally accompanied the Greek expedition to Troy. On visiting the temple of Chryse Philoctetes is bitten by a poisonous snake; the serpent’s wound prove incurable and give off such a stench that Odysseus and his former comrades abandon him on the island of Lemnos. Here he spends ten years of the Trojan War in wretched isolation, reduced to animalistic existence. Subsequently, a prophecy reveals that the Trojan War could not be won without Philoctetes’ bow. Odysseus and Neoptolemus are obliged to travel to Lemnos to recover man and bow. However, Philoctetes proves unwilling to make peace with those who treated him so



3 Howes and Attridge sum the matter of Ireland’s postcolonial status up succinctly when they write “One version of the postcolonial rests upon a dichotomy between the West and the non-West, and the other invokes an opposition between the colonizer and the colonized […] A further reason for controversy over Ireland’s relation to the postcolonial is that Ireland clearly belongs to both sides of each dichotomy” (Howes and Attridge, 2000, 8). 4 In an interview with Bruckner Walcott explains; “A very good friend of mine had died, an actor, and I was thinking about that. And where this poem started was with the figure of Philoctetes, the man with the wound, alone on the beach: Philoctetes from the Greek legend and Timon of Athens as well” (Bruckner, 1997, 397).



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cruelly, making divine intervention necessary. The resonance of the figure of Philoctetes for the postcolonial writer is demonstrated not only by Walcott’s appropriation of the figure, but also by the fact that Seamus Heaney would adapt Sophocles’ play in his The Cure at Troy, and publish it in the same year as Omeros.5 Heaney’s Philoctetes, like Walcott’s, is divided to the core, “I’m besieged. / I’ll be my own Troy” (Heaney, 1990, 63). For both writers then, Philoctetes is an allegorical figure for the postcolonial condition. Furthermore, as a Malian, Philoctetes is an outsider that has been nevertheless incorporated into the Greek side against Troy, but though absorbed, will never be fully Greek. Terada notes that the classical model for Walcott’s Philoctete is an “anti-Greek Greek hero and an exile who lives on an out-of-the-way island” (Terada, 1992, 197). In this sense Philoctetes is a “Caliban within the Greek poetic tradition” regarded as the “antithesis to civilization,” his outsider status and prolonged suffering thus serving as a more fitting analogue to the Caribbean experience (Dougherty, 1997, 341/2). However this character who is initially considered marginal and unimportant turns out to be the crux on which the entire Greek victory hangs. Thus the myth that Walcott’s Philoctete relies on demonstrates the absolute necessity of offering inclusion to those on the margins of society. Walcott’s Philoctete is an Afro-Caribbean fisherman who, like his earlier castaway figures, has been shipwrecked by history. Philoctete is convinced that his wound has been inherited from his ancestor’s suffering in the Middle Passage, as if his body retained and manifested a physical memory of the horrors of that crossing, a nightmare from which he is as yet unable to awake: He believed the swelling came from the chained ankles of his grandfathers. Or else why was there no cure? That the cross he carried was not only the anchor’s but that of his race, for a village black and poor as the pigs that rooted in its burning garbage,

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Heaney and Walcott have been close friends for many years. Their common interest in Greek myth has been remarked upon by both; it is quite possible therefore that they may have mutually developed views on the significance of the character of Philoctetes. The following quotation describes Heaney’s recollection of sharing a coconut with Walcott on a visit to St. Lucia, “[s]till, when your host tells you, ‘Stand like this,’ and tilts the swilling bounty to his lips, something in you knows to follow suit and decline the tourist straw the vendor offers. Face to face, between you you make a little watershed where Greek meets Greek” (Heaney, 2002/3, 113).



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then was hooked on the anchors of the abattoir. (Walcott, 1990, 19)

Comparing the lot of poor blacks to pigs on hooks in the abattoir, Walcott dramatically presents the suffering inflicted on Philoctete’s ancestors. That the hooks are anchors neatly ties the image to the implied traversal of the Middle Passage. The choice of pigs serves a double function; as well as suggesting the manner in which the slaves were treated like animals it also recalls the episode in The Odyssey where Odysseus’s crew were turned into pigs, an effect emphasized by the later announcement that “if History saw them as pigs, History was Circe” (Walcott, 1990, 64). Philoctete’s wound is also here referred to as a cross, linking him also by implication to the figure of the crucified Christ. At several points in his writing Walcott has suggested that those who have suffered and been dispossessed should have more immediate access to the divine. This point is emphasized by the fact that Walcott has God speak to Achille in Book Four and that the conversation takes place in French Creole. The linguistic medium of French Creole used again in Philoctete’s conversation with Ma Kilman has the added effect of emphasising the ambiguity of Philoctete’s wound as both an injury and a blessing, as is evident in the pun on the French word “blessé” which translates as “wound” but which is here glossed as “blest” (Walcott, 1990, 18): “Mais qui ça rivait-‘ous, Philoctete?” “Moin blessé.” “But what is wrong wif you, Philoctete?” “I am blest wif this wound, Ma Kilman, qui pas ka guérir pièce. Which will never heal.” (Walcott, 1990, 18/9)

Philoctete’s wound is described in the opening sequence poem as a “scar made by a rusted anchor,” the choice of the word scar, rather than wound thus linking him to another mythical figure – Odysseus, Philoctete’s sworn enemy in the play by Sophocles (Walcott, 1990, 4). The conspicuous position of Philoctete within Walcott’s Homeric appropriation, along with the striking absence of the central figure of Odysseus underscores Walcott’s postcolonial agenda. Walcott’s disavowal of the heroic code places a poor, black fisherman – a nobody in terms of power and influence – at the centre of his Caribbean epic. In a skilful reading of Omeros, Carol Dougherty puts forward a surprising thesis that Odysseus, the crafty master of disguise who is, as already mentioned, curiously absent from Omeros, reappears in a submerged



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form, through the presentation of Philoctete as an Odyssean figure. Like Odysseus, his scar/wound is central to his identification, he is also a master archer, and both are exiles driven by a longing to return home. If Philoctetes only receives scant mention in The Odyssey and The Iliad, he is a central character in Omeros. Dougherty’s article suggests that Walcott’s Philoctete may in fact be Odysseus in disguise, a king who is seen by all who know him as a simple fisherman: Odysseus may play at being “Nobody” in the famous scene with Polyphemus the Cyclops, but he literally becomes nobody in Omeros, where he appears only in the guise of Philoctete – his trademark scar temporarily appropriated by the very man he once abandoned on a desert island. (Dougherty, 1997, 340)

If Philoctete is Odysseus in disguise, then he is another postcolonial hybrid, aligned with both victor and victim, centre and periphery. He therefore represents the complexity of Caribbean ancestry which frequently negates the reductive binary logic of coloniser and colonised. A figure who can comfortably traverse both sides of an assumed divide, Philoctete’s suffering and real wound provides a suitable frame to the suffering and wounding undergone by all the characters in the poem. The polyvalency of the wound topos demonstrates its suitability in fully encompassing a broader Caribbean perspective. As Odysseus’s/ Philoctetes’ scar/wound is intrinsically tied up with his identification, so Walcott’s Philoctete identifies his imperial injury as a mark of his identity. Furthermore, he characterises his burden in terms of his inherited name. Philoctete’s foreign name weighs heavily upon him, representing both the loss of his culture of origin and the burden of the imposed imperial culture, its language and its literature that would render all New World experience derivative or belated. It was common practice for slave owners to rechristen their human property after biblical or mythical figures; Philoctete’s name therefore is “rotting” due to the corruption at its root (Walcott, 1990, 20). He hears this name repeated back to him like a taunt, “the boys in blue uniforms, going to school, // screaming at his elbow: ‘Pheeloh! Pheelosophee!’ the sheep in the field bleating ‘Beeeeeh, Philoctete!’” (Walcott, 1990, 19/20). Like his Greek counterpart, he is tempted to cut off his leg altogether if it can end the suffering: What did it mean, This name that felt like a fever? Well, one good heft of his garden cutlass would slice the damned name clean from its rotting yam. (Walcott, 1990, 20)



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In a fit of rage, Philoctete wages war on his garden, hacking “every root at the heel” (Walcott, 1990, 21). Twisted in pain and resentment he rails against easeful growth, “He cursed the yams: / ‘Salope! / You all see what it’s like without roots in this world?’” (Walcott, 1990, 21). Philoctete’s foreign name is a further symbol of his alienation from a lost Africa that he never knew. Philoctete’s suffering can therefore be aligned with the analogous affliction that weighs on his friend Achille; their separate sufferings are yoked together in the phrase “his wound was Philoctete’s shin” (Walcott, 1990, 40). Similarly alienated from his African culture of origin, Achille must travel back to Africa, reversing the Middle Passage in his sunstroke delirium in a personal odyssey to reconnect with “his name and his soul” (Walcott, 1990, 154). The Philoctetes evoked by Sophocles is a character wronged and wounded without cause. His hatred focuses on the Greeks, and on Odysseus in particular, for marooning him so callously. However, no cure will be made available until he shows the magnanimity of spirit required to join with his enemy and end his besiegement. Hatred and suffering exist symbiotically within him, it is not until he agrees to leave his island of suffering that the wound and the hatred will equally disappear. Walcott’s cure is similarly founded on acceptance of the past as a precondition to progression in the future. However, his Philoctete does not have to leave an island of hatred; in letting go of his colonial injury he achieves a species of homecoming for his island is itself a healing place. In substituting the ocean liners with canoes in the framing sections of the poem the poet stresses that the preferred journeys are circular, encircling the island in ever decreasing rings.

Redressing the Balance Colonialism is the perpetuation of imbalance and exploitation. In Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, Neoptolemus disobeys the orders of his Greek leader Odysseus to return the bow crookedly stolen from Philoctetes. The act is an attempt to “redress the balance” (Heaney, 1990, 65). However by the end of his Cure at Troy, Heaney seems less than hopeful as to the regenerative effects of art, “[n]o poem or play or song/ Can fully right a wrong/ Inflicted or endured” (Heaney, 1990, 77). Both Heaney and Walcott explore in their work the potential of poetry to assuage the hurt of colonial rupture. In numerous essays and poems Walcott expresses his native archipelago in his art, his sense of duty to overcome degrading colonial stereotypes through inspired poetic expression. In his Nobel Prize speech he describes his artistic mission in terms of a blessing and responsibility: “[t]his is the benediction that is celebrated, a fresh language



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and a fresh people, and this is the frightening duty owed” (Walcott, 1992, 79). Alongside this duty the poet registers an attendant concern that his efforts will not be enough; poems like “Homecoming: Anse La Raye” and “The Light of the World” explore this disquiet. Though Walcott’s verse is replete with poetic expressions of the poet’s anxiety with regard to his ability to honour or give something back to his island home, his poetic mission is clearly centred on this endeavour. In Walcott’s Omeros we encounter two projects that explicitly set out to redress a wrong; both are dedicated to Helen. The first is the one undertaken by the poet-persona. At the end of Book One, the poet-persona encounters the shade of his dead father Warwick Walcott. Warwick recalls the female coal carriers who trekked like ants to the harbour to bring fuel to the waiting ships. Though the work of balancing the hundredweight baskets of coal up these narrow wooden planks is described as infernal, the grace of perfected labour acquires an independent beauty, these “Helens from an earlier time” are made “beautiful by balance,” their persistence embodying the beauty and passion for survival of the St. Lucian population (Walcott, 1990, 73/4). Rather than lament the conditions which induced servitude, Walcott chooses to celebrate their forbearance. Pre-empting Walcott’s later definition of epic, which centres on endurance rather than heroism these women speak for an indomitable human spirit, unbroken by hardship and exploitation. Warwick conflates the physical labour of the coal carriers with poetic labour in instructing the poet on his need for disciplined effort: [k]neel to your load, then balance your staggering feet and walk up that coal ladder as they do in time one bare foot after the next in ancestral rhyme. (Walcott, 1990, 75)

Warwick’s memory of these labourers articulates the poet’s vocation, “[t]hey walk, you write [...] your duty” is “to give those feet a voice,” punning on the semantic congruity of physical and metrical “feet” (Walcott, 1990, 75/6). Unlike the grand destiny Anchises maps out for his son Aeneas in The Aeneid, the father’s injunction to the son here is not to found a great city, but to voice the concerns of ordinary people, underlining the centrality of honouring the inhabitants of the island to the poetic mission (Walcott, 1990, 76). Walcott recalls how as a child he was taught that “St Lucia was ‘The Helen of the West Indies’ because she was fought over so often by the French and British” (qtd in Döring, 2002, 183). In depicting the Battle of the Saints, which established the island as a possession of the British crown, Walcott relates another heroic battle fought to win “Helen.” Thus in announcing a project to speak for the



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island and its people, to voice their lives and labour, Walcott is declaring his intention to voice the concerns of Helen and her people, who have been silenced by colonialism (Walcott, 1990, 76). This poetic vocation set out by the summoned shade of Warwick represents the first attempt to redress the balance of a colonial wrong. The second project is undertaken in honour of another Helen that walks across the pages of Walcott’s Omeros. This mortal Helen is a local woman, whose beauty is of such distinction that she dominates the males in her presence. Local fishermen Hector and Achille fight over her in yet another Homeric parallel. Major Plunkett, for whom Helen worked as a former housemaid, is infatuated by Helen, much to his wife’s dismay. Inspired by her beauty he decides that “Helen needed a history […] Not his, but her story. Not theirs, but Helen’s war” (Walcott, 1990, 30). Plunkett’s project weighs on him as a “duty//towards her hopelessness, something to redress […] that desolate beauty/ so like her island’s” (Walcott, 1990, 29/30). The pun on the word redress here also refers to a dress that Helen stole from Maud Plunkett, which Plunkett recognizes “had an empire’s tag on it” (Walcott, 1990, 64). The guilt of empire causes him to concede that the “butterfly dress was hers” and he wonders whether she wants “[h]istory to exorcise her/ theft of that yellow frock?” (Walcott, 1990, 62-4). Burdened with the coloniser’s guilt that “[w]e helped ourselves/ to these green islands like olives from a saucer” and the “bill had never been paid,” Plunkett longs for the peace of islands where “what they call history could not happen” (Walcott, 1990, 25-31). Plunkett attempts to redress the balance of a degraded history by ennobling local history through infusing fact with mythical parallels: [h]e smiled at the mythical hallucination that went with the name’s shadow; the island was once named Helen; its Homeric association rose like smoke from a siege; the Battle of the Saints was launched with that sound […] the true bounty was Helen (Walcott, 1990, 31/2)

Helen, for Plunkett, embodies the essence of the island and thus his project to immortalize her echoes the poet’s own. Both are couched in Homeric parallels and analogies that link their endeavours back to Europe, displacing their St. Lucian Helens from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean.



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In his poem Walcott compares the poet-persona’s and Plunkett’s desire to impose order on the colonial land and the female body as a form of domination. The tendency of colonialist discourse to describe native women and their bodies in terms of the fear and promise of the colonial land makes such projects suspect. The metaphoric use of the female body is employed to facilitate the exploitation of the colonised by the coloniser. In conflating St. Lucian Helen with the island of St Lucia in a tangle of classical associations, the real island and the woman that both poet and Plunkett seek to celebrate, is undermined. The danger engendered in both projects which attempt to immortalize Helen and her island, is that both will become frozen in art and historiography, removed from the actuality of their existence. The fact that both island Helen and mortal Helen are habitually described in terms of their ability to seduce, reinforces the extent to which Helen is objectified. Helen is thus spoken for in these projects, but offered no subject-position from which to enunciate her own outlook. Thus Plunkett and the poet narrator run the risk of being in collusion with patriarchal and colonial discourses in their efforts to preserve Helen in monolithic script. Both projects are opened up to the accusation of speaking for a Subaltern who remains conspicuously silent. The palimpsestic nature of colonial naming highlights another problem for the immortalizing project that both Plunkett and the poet-persona are engaged in. If the sobriquet “Helen of the West Indies” denotes a Caribbean reality displaced onto a Mediterranean metaphor, then it needs to be remembered that this was not always the case. Chapter XVII of Omeros relates an interesting stage in Plunkett’s research. Reading a museum pamphlet, Plunkett discovers that the island’s aboriginal inhabitants had named the island “Iounalao” (misspelt perhaps deliberately in Plunkett’s reading as Iounalo), meaning iguana. While Plunkett had delighted at the mythical associations offered by the classical moniker, he clearly objects to this alternative act of indigenous naming. Sneering at a nearby lizard he asks aloud, “‘[c]ome to claim it?’ [...] ‘Every spear of grass on this ground/ is yours […] It’s all folk-malarkey!’” (Walcott, 1990, 92). Plunkett is unable to recognize this name as history proper; in his mind there is a clear demarcation between imperial history and folk narratives “History was fact, / History was a cannon, not a lizard” (Walcott, 1990, 92). The pun on the word cannon/canon has the effect of subtly implicating literature as a form of imperial control, guns and ideology going hand in hand. Raging, he vehemently denies the right of the lizard to embody the island: Iounalao, my royal arse! Hewanorra, my hole! Was the greatest battle



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in naval history, which put the French to rout, fought for a creature with a disposable tail and elbows like a goalie? (Walcott, 1990, 92)

His guilt manifests as he speculates that, “It will be rewritten/ by black pamphleteers, History will be revised, // and we’ll be its villains […] And when it’s over/ we’ll be the bastards!” (Walcott, 1990, 92). For Walcott, expressions of colonial guilt are as futile as colonial recrimination; the only way to ameliorate the wound of colonial history is through transcendence of these old antagonisms. Yet the names that Plunkett dismisses out of hand as “folk-malarkey” is interesting in that it points to an alternative historical narrative, an etymology of dispossession (Walcott, 1990, 92). As part of his commitment to voicing diverse and even contradictory positions within his poetics, Walcott grants the maligned iguana right of response. In the final pages of the poem it is now the lizard’s turn to speak; Walcott describes how the lizards “emerged like tongues from the mouths of cannons” (Walcott, 1990, 312). Offered a turn to respond the lizard insists on the transience of empires and stakes its own parallel claim to the island. Here again oral folk history presents a viable alternative to the universalizing drive of Western history. Utilizing the pun on cannon/canon to emphasize the military force needed to erect the annals of North Atlantic historiography, Walcott writes: [i]f you rest one palm on the hot iron barrel it will burn it, but a lizard crawls there and raises it question: “If this place is hers, did that empty horizon once flash its broadsides with their inaudible rays in her honour? Was that immense enterprise on the baize tables of empires for one who carries cheap sandals on a hooked finger with the Pitons for breasts? Were both hemispheres the split breadfruit of her African ass […] Who gives her the palm? (Walcott, 1990, 312)

Men may be punished for resisting the official version of events, signified by the canon/cannon, but empire has no jurisdiction over nature. If a woman can be immortalized as the spirit of the island, why not a lizard? This section of the poem bears a strong resemblance to Walcott’s earlier poem “The Sea is History” where legal and judicial representatives are



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replaced by insects, bullfrogs and birds. Here, as in the earlier poem, Walcott is clearly having fun with the iguana motif, yet the point is well made. The mythopoeic impetus can take many forms and while the colonial identification of the land with the desirable female other was common, other indigenous identifications can claim to predate and challenge this presumption. In a parallel fashion to the Seven Seas/ Omeros pairing, Walcott pairs a Caribbean Helen to a Greek Helen to highlight the similarities and difference between them. It is the lizard that initially insists on their differences, “[t]hese Helens are different creatures, / One marble, one ebony” (Walcott, 1990, 313). However, the lizard’s catalogue of differences dissolve their oppositions at the end of the sequence as it is admitted that “each draws an elbow slowly over her face/ and offers the gift of her sculptured nakedness, / parting her mouth” (Walcott, 1990, 313). Both Helens seem now frozen in art, couched in terms that highlight only their ability to seduce: One unknots a belt of yellow cotton slowly from her shelving waist, one a cord of purple wool, the other one takes a bracelet of white cowries from a narrow wrist; one lies in a room with olive-eyed mosaics another in a beach shack with its straw mattress. (Walcott, 1990, 313)

Though one wears imperial purple, while the other by necessity is clothed in a stolen dress, the implication at the end of the poem is that the Helen that is “here and alive” is preferable (Walcott, 1990, 313). The stasis of their arrangement is emphasized by a reference to Maud’s quilt which follows immediately after. The quilt depicts in thread the likeness of all the regions birds – they too are captured in art, “each origin/ enriching the islands to which their cries were sewn” (Walcott, 1990, 314). This stasis is undercut in the final section where the birds fly off the tapestry6 and Plunkett and the poet-persona recognize the flaw in their respective projects. Plunkett, transformed since the death of Maud, perceives that “every name// somehow sounded different” as he grows in affinity to the

 6

Maud’s needlework establishes an obvious link to Homer’s Penelope in the poem. However, her frustrated attempt to capture the beauty of the island in her art recalls similar frustrations of the poet-persona in the realm of painting, as detailed in Another Life, another poem that depends on the generative tension between the stasis of art and the vitality of the natural world.



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people around him (Walcott, 1990, 309). Now, “when he thought of Helen/ she was not a cause or a cloud, only a name/ for a local wonder” (Walcott, 1990, 309). In his growing understanding of the island’s inhabitants, “his wound healed slowly” (Walcott, 1990, 309). This section of the poem calls the integrity of the entire project into question as the poet chastises himself for failing to celebrate his island for its own inherent worth, its “green simplicities” (Walcott, 1990, 187). Self-doubt is rife as Walcott assesses the ethical dimensions of his poetic tribute to the island. In Chapter LIV he calls both efforts to immortalize Helen to task, for allowing history and art to obfuscate reality. The poet narrator realizes that: there was no real need for the historian’s remorse, nor for literature’s. Why not see Helen as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow, swinging her plastic sandals on that beach alone, as fresh as the sea-wind? (Walcott, 1990, 271)

The remarkable strength and independence of the mortal St. Lucian Helen seems to emphasize the futility of both projects. The attempts to immortalize her beauty only serve to obscure the reality of Helen, who pragmatically negotiates the trials of sexual harassment, unemployment, pregnancy, bereavement and poverty (Walcott, 1990, 34). If Helen is an epical figure, it is not due to that remarkable beauty of hers that seems to invite allegory, or as a result of the mythical associations surrounding her name, but because or her capacity for survival and adaptation in changing circumstances. The inherent threat to the poet’s own project is alluded to obliquely in the Hades section of the poem where Omeros rescues the poet from sliding into the pit inhabited by the shades of poets who have been consumed by ambition and fame. That this pit is described as a “soul-shaping forge” – the forge here recalling both Dante’s Inferno and Stephen Dedalus’ own artistic vocation in Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man7 – seems to suggest that Walcott’s poetic project to celebrate St. Lucia runs the danger of self-aggrandizement (Walcott, 1990, 293). This danger is undercut however in the third section of the poem which dramatically seeks to deconstruct its own agenda. Bruce King contends:

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At the end of the novel Stephen Dedalus announces his artistic ambition to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (Joyce, 1916, 288).



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Chapter Five [t]he last third of Omeros is deconstructive, anti-myth, anti-metaphor, as both Plunkett and the narrator are found to be wrong. Joyce is the model because he […] created his race from daily life without mythic inflation. (King, 2000, 517)

In presenting the lives of ordinary people with everyday concerns, Walcott’s Caribbean odyssey reflects the influence of Joyce’s epic Ulysses. The fact that Bloom is human rather than heroic, emphasizes his humanity. In a similar fashion, Walcott deems the transplanted slave population of St. Lucia as being heroic due to the fact that they survived the “Middle Passage” in the first instance. He writes: “[t]hey crossed, they survived. There is the epical splendour” (Walcott, 1990, 149). The poet however, is forced to recognize the problematic dependence on mythical parallels in his own writing. Critiquing his inherently analogical mind, Walcott interrogates his agenda in a series of rhetorical questions that culminates in an appeal to “enter that light beyond metaphor” (Walcott, 1990, 271). In a lecture transcribed for South Atlantic Quarterly, Walcott explains why both projects were doomed – “the woman doesn’t need it” (Walcott, 1997b, 233). He identifies the “conceit behind history […] behind art” as “its presumption to be able to elevate the ordinary” (Walcott, 1997b, 233). As in his earlier poem “The Villa Restaurant,” Walcott perceives that his poetics must honour, not elevate the “terra-cotta waitress” (Walcott, 1987c, 25). Such praise is neither necessary nor desired. Walcott writes: I have seen their stone eyelids in marble almonds say: ‘Your sea has its own Iliads, Noli me tangere.’ So others can look for her beauty through dusty glass in Greek urn or amphoraI choose the living vase. (Walcott, 1987c, 26)

Although the poet plays with the notion of transfixing the waitress into art, making a “terra-cotta” vase out of the woman with the “stone eyelids,” the poem simultaneously highlight her capacity for reconfiguration into art and her interdiction “Noli me tangere” (Walcott, 1987, 25/6). The line attributed to the waitress, “[y]our sea has its own Iliads” further rebukes the poet for attempting to read the worth of the islands in comparative terms (Walcott, 1987c, 26), for reading the Caribbean as derivative of the Aegean. Walcott has remarked that this last section of the poem Omeros



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is a “total refutation of the efforts made by two characters” (Walcott, 1997b, 232). Acknowledging their error, the poem examines the impetus of both; if Plunkett had with best of intentions “tried to change History to a metaphor,” the poet acknowledges that “I, in self-defence, / altered her opposite” (Walcott, 1990, 270). Though both had utilized “two opposing stratagems,” it had been “all for her,” with “her” here referring to both island Helen and Helen the island (Walcott, 1990, 270/1). This ennobling drive is characterised as a form of blindness in the poem. It is not until the poet learns to see with other eyes that he can appreciate the miracle of the ordinary. Guided by Omeros/ Seven Seas the poet voyages across the world only to discover that there is no place like home. Walcott writes: “‘You ain’t been nowhere, Seven Seas said [...] ‘no matter how far you have travelled’ [...] ‘you have learnt no more than’ [...] ‘your skill with one oar’” (Walcott, 1990, 291). In Walcott’s poetics, the outward journey anticipates an inevitable return; his circular voyaging consistently brings the wanderer back to the place from which he began.

Healing Walcott has often articulated his mixed heritage as being a source of anxiety, perhaps most famously in “A Far Cry From Africa”: I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? (Walcott, 1962b, 18)

These lines sum up a central problematic in Walcott’s poetics, which is ultimately a problem of language. Knowing the tainted history of the English language in the Caribbean, Walcott finds it difficult to freely accept the imposed language of the coloniser without a sense of betrayal of his African heritage. Here again, the precedence of Joyce may have articulated some common ground for a colonial writer mired in the now familiar linguistic dilemma.8 This colonial disquiet would inform Walcott’s views on language, rendering him anxious lest his gift for writing would never amount to more than “this classic/ condition of servitude” (Walcott,

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Walcott’s position echoes that of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus who, in A Portrait of the Artist, thus expresses his quandary, “I cannot speak or write these words without some unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech” (Joyce, 1916, 215).



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1973, 59). Growing up in the West Indies, he was deeply drawn to the cultural tradition of the West as inculcated through a colonial education. As a young writer he faced the uncomfortable paradox that whilst he could, due to his mixed ancestry, see himself as “legitimately prolonging the mighty line of Marlowe, of Milton” he could also perceive that English literature was “hallowed ground and trespass” and that while “colonial literatures could grow to resemble it closely [they] could never be considered its legitimate heir” (Walcott, 1970a, 28). It would, however, be overly simplistic to read Walcott’s colonial education and subsequent apprenticeship to the English literary tradition as a betrayal of roots. If Walcott’s early writing displays a “yearning to be adopted” by Europe, his poetics in its entirety represents a commitment to celebrate his island archipelago and all of the peoples in it (Walcott, 1970a, 27). Walcott’s poetic odyssey in the English language is therefore not a journey away from his island home but a circular route whose outward journey ensures a return inward. The voyager leaves home and is changed, yet his presence also alters all that it comes in contact with, shaping the language which shaped his expression, re-creating the home which created him. Walcott’s education, which was received in the English language, has increased the gulf between him and the island’s poorer inhabitants, who speak French Creole in the main. However, if his linguistic choices drew him closer to Europe and away from his St. Lucia, his writings have also served to decentre the metropolis as the core of literary production, exerting a counter pull from the margins. As Joseph Brodsky cogently remarks, “[c]ontrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends – they are precisely where it unravels” (Brodsky, 1983, ix). Like Odysseus’ wife Penelope who daily dutifully weaves her father-in-law’s shroud only to unravel it nightly, Walcott’s fidelity to the language of the master must also be read as a method of deconstruction, an unravelling. Furthermore, the more mature poet, turning sixty in the year that Omeros is published, has learned to more successfully reconcile the different facets of his ancestry. Tropes of division shade into metaphors of multiplication as Walcott’s later poetry more openly celebrates his broad cultural heritage. The protean nature of identity is explored throughout the poem, most explicitly in the shape-shifting Seven Seas/ Omeros character pair, though other characters, and notably Helen, demonstrate this tendency also. So too the poet-persona, another self-acknowledged hybrid, shades into other characters in Omeros, finding himself in both coloniser and colonised. Having acknowledged his empathy with Plunkett’s project, the poet also finds now a close family resemblance, “there was Plunkett in my father” (Walcott, 1990, 263). Plunkett, like the poet himself, is an



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Odyssean figure “a khaki Ulysses” trying to negotiate a foreign shore (Walcott, 1990, 263). If this character of his creation is made to recall his father, it follows that the acknowledgement discloses a poetic investment in the character, “there in that khaki Ulysses// there was a changing shadow of Telemachus/ in me” (Walcott, 1990, 253). This passage exhibits the fluid nature of identity in Walcott’s schema; Plunkett, an Odyssean character based on the actual figure of Warwick, is also said to be a father to the Telemachus in Walcott. Yet this Odyssean Plunkett has already undergone another transformation, as the Roman translation from Odysseus to Ulysses would indicate, and if the poet is another Telemachus, he is merely the “changing shadow” of this classical figure (Walcott, 1990, 263). This passage indicates the transformative nature of identity in Walcott’s New World classicism, a fluidity encoded within the poem for the purpose of fostering greater inclusivity, “[t]he New World was wide enough for a new Eden/ of various Adams” (Walcott, 1990, 181). The point of these mutations is to transcend the Manichean oppositions – black/white, colonised/coloniser, Africa/Europe, New World/Old World – that have propagated colonial tensions. Cultural intermingling in the Caribbean has rendered such oppositions irrelevant, being unfeasible to sustain; in their stead a hybrid sensibility emerges and creolization flourishes. This mutable identitarian construction paradigm not only allows Walcott to make peace with his European ancestry, it also provides him with the opportunity to reconnect to his African heritage (Walcott, 1964a, 18). Allowing for his own integration into the St. Lucian community “[t]here was no difference// between me and Philoctete” the poet can begin to “[f]eel the shame, the self-hate// draining from all our bodies” (Walcott, 1990, 245). Likewise Walcott’s agenda eschews separatism, avowing the necessity of a hybrid sensibility that will bridge the gulf between his fragmented African and European heritages. Walcott never solves the dilemma of choosing between Africa or Europe making instead, as Heaney puts it, “a theme of the choice and the impossibility of choosing” (Heaney, 1993, 305). His hyphenated identity thus becomes a line of creative tension. Finding himself simultaneously cleaving to and from both positions, the vacillations between provide one of the more prominent themes of his writing. Housing division within, Walcott’s recursive odysseys don’t allow for the luxury of closure or finitude. Rather they resemble the wash and backwash of tidal waters, whose currents and eddies complement and contradict their perpetuance. If Walcott’s cure requires a hybrid sensibility, it is apt that the curative seed is carried over by his transatlantic muse, the sea-swift, “[a] swift had carried the strong seed in its stomach/ centuries ago from its antipodal



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shore” (Walcott, 1990, 238). The circular migration of the swift can traverse time in both directions; thus her movement both pre-empts the wound and carries the cure, “[s]he aimed to carry the cure/ that precedes every wound; the reversible Bight/ of Benin was her bow” (Walcott, 1990, 239). The swift sacrifices her life to carry the seed from Africa to the Caribbean island; it is from her bones that the plant that carries the cure will grow. The persistence of nature in this sequence offers a symbolic correlative to the capacity for survival that the poet venerates in his African heritage. Walcott writes: [i]n a year she was bleached bone. All of that motion a pile of fragile ash from the fire of her will, but the vine grew its own wings, out of the ocean it climbed like the ants, the ancestors of Achille, the women carrying coals after the dark door slid over the hold. As the weed grew in odour so did its strength at the damp root of the cedar, where the flower was anchored at the mottled root as a lizard crawled upwards, foot by sallow foot. (Walcott, 1990, 239)

The swift’s sacrifice similarly charts a transformation of elemental fire from flames to ash. The strength and determination of the vine inspires the simile of progressing ants, an association which acts as a precursor to the reappearance of the female coal-carriers, who are again compared to ants in their relentless progress. Both are endowed with the same qualities of resilience, which ennobles their back-breaking labour. Though the “dark door” that closed over them serves as a reminder of enslavement during the Middle Passage crossing, their strength and adaptability enables them to anchor strong roots, in contrast to Philoctete’s “rotting yam” (Walcott, 1990, 20). The solemn procession of the women resonates with the poet’s own poetic progress “the couplet of those multiplying feet” (Walcott, 1990, 75) in his mission to celebrate his island and its inhabitants “foot by sallow foot” (Walcott, 1990, 239). The conflation of the women with the ants thus establishes a link between an African history of enslavement and a Caribbean rooting through the trope of endurance. The ants reappear later to jog the memory of Ma Kilman into reconnecting with her African heritage and finding a cure for the suffering Philoctete. Ma Kilman, who is proprietor of the local rumshop the “No Pain Café,” is held in awe in the village as a “gardeuse, sybil, obeahwoman” (Walcott, 1990, 58). Liberally mixing her ancestral traditions with a newly adopted Roman Catholicism, she takes “Holy Communion/



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with Maud sometimes, but there was an old African/ doubt that paused before taking the wafer’s white leaf” (Walcott, 1990, 58). The crosspollination of divergent faiths on the islands is a popular topic with Walcott. In Another Life the poet describes this relationship between Christianity and Ancient Custom as an “atavism stronger than their Mass” on an island where “[o]ne step behind the church door stood the devil” (Walcott, 1973, 167). While poems such as “Tale of the Islands” adopt a sardonic tone in the face of this religious syncretism, Omeros presents this creolization of faiths in a more favourable manner, demonstrating a greater openness to incorporating alternative belief systems within his cosmopolitan diagetic world. The mythical syncretism of the scheme is playfully evoked in Chapter IX for example, where a cyclone hitting St. Lucia is re-imagined as a rowdy fête that rages for days. The intermingling of discrete mythologies is evident in lines such as the “Shango drums // made Neptune rock,” where we read of “Erzulie / rattling her ra-ra,” “Damballa winding” at a party where “Ogun can fire one with his partner Zeus” (Walcott, 1990, 52/3). Inspired to compassion by Philoctete’s suffering, Ma Kilman spends most of the narrative racking her brain for the memory of the curative root: “a flower somewhere, a medicine, and ways / my grandmother would boil it. I used to watch ants / climbing her white flower-pot. But, God, in what place?” (Walcott, 1990, 19). Ma Kilman’s mind is shrouded in the amnesia that fractures her umbilical link to her African heritage. She goes to the forest to perform what rites she can to remember. The ancestral gods are present in the thicket “waiting to be known by name; but she/ had never learnt them […] Erzulie// Shango, and Ogun;9 their outlines fading, thinner/ as belief in them thinned” (Walcott, 1990, 242). Romare Bearden, whose work exhibits a fascination with the Obeah and Conjur women echoes this idea in saying, “[w]hen you stop believing in the gods, they pack their bags and go someplace else!” (Price, 2006, 122/3). Speaking of the Obeahs in the Caribbean, he laments the decrease of faith that signifies their finitude: I’m afraid one of the island national treasures the “Obeah” are about doomed, not only by the need for more space but also the fact that rationality has entered with its concomitant of a lack of belief in such

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These Gods are of African origin and have been brought to the New World via the Middle Passage. Some of their qualities are said to be femininity and compassion (Erzulie), power and leadership (Shango) and war (Ogun). A rough correspondence with gods of Greek mythology might be Aphrodite, Zeus and Ares.



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Unlike Christian deities, these figures have been with largely forgotten; as Walcott explains they have “lost their names/ and, therefore, considerable presence” (Walcott, 1990, 242). In order to resurrect the submerged memory, Ma Kilman does penance to the forgotten deities thrashing herself “for the sin/ of doubting their names before the cure can begin” (Walcott, 1990, 243). Thus begins her apotheosis. Inspired by the divine presence of the African gods, Ma Kilman carefully undoes the steps towards outward respectability she had taken to attend the Christian mass ceremony. Removing hat and wig, she allows the ants to crawl through her unbound wiry curls, the “ants talking the language of her greatgrandmother” (Walcott, 1990, 244). She removes her church dress, rubs dirt in her hair and prays to the “silent black workers,” the phrase here again yoking together the ants and her female ancestors, “[s]ee her there, my mother, my grandmother, my great-great-/ grandmother. See the black ants of their sons, / their coal-carrying mothers” (Walcott, 1990, 244/5). After undergoing a series of incantatory transformations Ma Kilman sets her eyes on the root in question: One wound gibbers in the weeping mouth of the sibyl, the obeah-woman, in the swell of the huge white satin belly, the dark gust that bent her limbs till she was a tree of snakes, the spidery sibyl hanging in a sack from the cave at Cumae, the obeah

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Bearden’s fascination with Obeah and conjur women is evidenced in an array of watercolours devoted to the subject of obeah, which culminated in a exhibition entited Rituals of the Obeah in 1984. In Bearden’s Obeah paintings the borders of discrete figures are permeable with murky waterstains leaking colours from one to the other to suggest trance induced states and possession. This dissolution of selfhood indicated by this staining effect serves to conjoin and also serve to occlude parts of these figures, depicting the magical rites of the obeah and thus making them available for the viewer whilst simultaneously reminding us of their impenetrability. In rendering the interdependence of human beings to each other and to their spiritual and natural worlds Bearden’s artistic vision complements Walcott’s poetics. In a poem written for the opening catalogue of the exhibition Walcott writes “In all rituals sacrifices matter, / but to these rituals we ascribe malign reasons” and compares the rituals of obeah to the sacrificial lamb in the Christian faith (Price, 2006, 153).



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that possessed her that the priests considered evil in their white satin frocks, because ants had lent her their language, the flower that withered on the floor of moss smelt sweet and spread its antipodal odour from the seed of the swift. (Walcott, 1990, 245)

The mystical rites of the Greeks and the Afro-Caribbeans are combined in the conflation of the Sybil of Cumae, the priestess overlooking the Apollonian oracle, and the Obeah woman who forms part of the African diasporic folk religions. Other submerged references include the snakes linking Ma Kilman to Medusa, and the adjective “spidery,” which evokes Anancy, the trickster spider god of Afro-Caribbean folk tales. The disappearing priests represent an imperial religion which sought to crush alternative belief systems in the name of the civilizing mission; that Ma Kilman’s “white satin belly” precedes their “white satin frocks,” emphasizes her entitlement to draw from the well of this alternative religious discourse also (Walcott, 1990, 245). The antipodal odour of the flower brought to root in the Caribbean reminds us of the circular journey of the swift as the poet’s transatlantic muse. Having located the necessary African root, Ma Kilman sets about preparing her cure for Philoctete. She builds a pyre, feeds the root with some kerosene, seawater and sulphur into a cauldron in which she bathes Philoctete. As an “icy sweat// glazed his scalp”, Philoctete can feel the “putrescent shin/ drain” until finally “the foul flower/ on his shin whitened and puckered, the corolla/ closed its thorns like a sea-egg” (Walcott, 1990, 247). Philoctete has been completely restored to vitality: “[t]he bow leapt back to the palm of the warrior. / The yoke of the wrong name lifted from his shoulders” (Walcott, 1990, 247). The equivalence of Philoctete and the poet persona is emphasized again in New Year benediction, “[t]hen Philoctete// waved ‘Morning’ to me from far, and I waved back; / we shared the one wound, the same cure” (Walcott, 1990, 295). Like the poet, Philoctete’s wound stemmed from an alienation from his African ancestry and the burden of an imposed Western language and culture. In Philoctete’s reconnection with the African “roots” harvested by Ma Kilman, his burden is alleviated. He became resigned to their “tribal shame/ a shame for the loss of words, and a language tired// of accepting that loss, and then all was accepted” (Walcott, 1990, 248). The cure is thus revealed to be a matter of acquiescence; the poet realises that “[l]ike Philoctete’s wound, this language carries its cure” (Walcott, 1990, 323); furthermore, his anxiety dissolves in the realisation that it is a “wound [...] I’d no wish to remove” (Walcott, 1990, 270). This acceptance marks a



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new beginning, a fresh start for the Caribbean as Ma Kilman “threw Adam a towel. / And the yard was Eden. And its light the first day’s” (Walcott, 1990, 248). Philoctete, a figure emblematic of the suffering of the island, has been cured and the radiance of his restoration ripples outwards in waves of healing. Pollard reads Walcott’s writing as an acknowledgement that poetry: operates through its rhetorical skill with language, not to circumvent reason by arousing people’s passion, but to promote cultural healing by serving as a “radiant affliction,” a language that “carries its own cure” by opening and cauterizing the scars of the past so that people will live more fully in the present. (Pollard, 2004, 189)

If the swift carrying a seed in its belly is aiming to “carry the cure/ that precedes every wound,” than languages serve an analogous function (Walcott, 1990, 239). Though the use of an imperial language in a colonial situation displaces the colonised subject, the mastery of the imposed language cures this sense of displacement. As with the scar on Philoctete’s shin, a scar will remain on the poet marking “the wound of a language I’d no wish to remove” (Walcott, 1990, 270). Poetry for Walcott may not be able to undo the past but it can soothe a troubled soul. Castaways in the Caribbean piece together a selfhood from the assembled detritus of cultural histories that wash up on the shore. They do not have the privilege of a linear, sequential cultural and historical narrative, their own links to their cultures of origin having been damaged beyond repair. However, this does not need to be a cause for despair, their combined experiences can offer a means of creating a patchwork culture that transcends historical degradation, creolization offers a means to shrug off the burden of a ruptured past. Walcott writes: “the mirror of History/ has melted and, beneath it, a patient, hybrid organism// grows in his cruciform shadow” (Walcott, 1990, 297). Where Froude in his Caribbean explorations found only “[f]ragments and echoes of real people, unoriginal and broken,” Walcott finds a celebratory hybridized identity (qtd. in Patke, 2006, 208). In his Nobel lecture, Walcott offers the image of his ideal Caribbean city: It would be so racially various that the cultures of the world – the Asiatic, the Mediterranean, the European, the African – would be represented in it, its humane variety more exciting than Joyce’s Dublin. Its citizens would



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intermarry as they choose, from instinct, not tradition, until their children find it increasingly futile to trace their genealogy (Walcott, 1992, 74).11

Walcott’s vision of the polyglot city, a fertile meeting point of cultures, offers a geographic correlative for “how Athens may have been” (Walcott, 1992, 74). Once again, Walcott reverses lines of inheritance so that the Athens of the past would serve only as a “cultural echo” to a Caribbean of the present (Walcott, 1992, 74). Rather than lament the loss of origins, the complex intermingling of ethnicities and cultures offers a means to render essentialising identitarian discourses defunct. Making manifest his project to remain open to all the traditions available in the archipelago, the poet humbly states, “I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad” (Walcott, 1992, 69). Reversing the terms of engagement, Walcott finds in his island archipelago a meta-city, a paradigm for multiculturalism that transcends the disempowering binarism of imperial history. Providing a site where self and other can interact and interconnect, Walcott’s ideal city creates a zone that renders genealogical lines indistinct and racial boundaries obscured.

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He subsequently identifies this utopian city as Trinidad’s Port of Spain.





CHAPTER SIX VOYAGES OF HOMECOMING

They say Ulysses, tired of astonishments, Wept for love at once again seeing his Ithaca Humble and green. Art is like that Ithaca Of green eternity, not of mere astonishments. —Jorge Luis Borges, Arte poética What patterned then unravelled threads does the surf return, other than the wanderer’s shadow on scorching stone, if all the other mythologies were forgotten —Walcott, The Bounty, “29”

In an interview the year that Omeros was published Walcott made the startling claim: I don’t know the Iliad and I don’t know the Odyssey. I’ve never read them [...] I always found it hard to penetrate past all those gods, and all those endless battles and who did what to whom. (White, 1990, 173)

If the veracity of this statement is questionable, though perhaps understandable in the context of a writer adamant that he was not writing “a conundrum for scholars,” two years later, with the first stage adaptation of Walcott’s The Odyssey, there could be no doubt regarding the poet’s acquaintance with Homeric epic (Bruckner, 1990, 399). Omeros proved instructive for the poet who later claimed “[i]t was as if I was learning to read Homer when I was writing it” (Bruckner, 1997, 399). If the poem denies an in depth knowledge of Homeric works, Chapter LVI of Omeros stages a meeting with the classical bard in which the Walcott humbly proffers the tribute, “[m]aster, I was freshest of your readers” (Walcott, 1990, 283). The tribute is apt, the connotations of the word “fresh” denoting both newness and audacity. It is clear that any adaptation of Walcott’s will also involve a process of translation, a reversal and honouring of a past tradition. Walcott’s stage Odyssey is innovative, supplementing and reshaping the epic tradition, yet retaining all the key features of the Homeric text. The transposition of epic verse to dramatic



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form remains the most marked departure from the original, necessitating as it did an entirely new set of requirements. Firstly, the poem had to be condensed considerably; in his play Walcott has “compressed a poem of more than twelve thousand line to dramatic poetry of just under two thousand” which despite its succinctness, loses “almost nothing substantial or vital to the action” (Burnett, 2000, 284). Walcott employs a hexameter line, ordered into quatrains, but he divides the line up among characters who sometimes switch after only monosyllabic utterances. This keeps the dialogue and action fast-paced and thus suitable to dramatic theatre, while maintaining fidelity to the Homeric metre. If in Omeros, Walcott learned how to read Homer, his rewriting of the classical Greek poem is interwoven with a more contemporary postcolonial Caribbean awareness. It is no coincidence that in relocating the funeral of Achilles at the play’s beginning, Walcott’s prologue rewords a phrase that inspired one of postcolonial literature’s central texts, “Cause once Achilles was ashes, things sure fell apart” (Walcott, 1993, 1). The reference to the Yeats poem “The Second Coming,” and by implication the novel whose title it also inspired, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, allows Walcott to manifest his postcolonial agenda. The feminine principle is also given more emphasis in Walcott’s adaptation, with female characters fleshing out their allegorical significance with additional agency. Penelope and Eurycleia express disapproval of war and the slaughter it entails, while an aging Helen now asserts that the Trojan War was “not over me but some sea-tax” (Walcott, 1993, 31). Such deviations typify the urtext/adaptation relationship. As Julie Sanders comments, “myth is never transported wholesale into its new context; it undergoes its own metamorphoses in the process” (Sanders, 2006, 64). Walcott seconds this view, opining that “every new mythology has screwed up the one, including Christianity. They got it wrong – and then they started something!” (Walcott, 1997b, 242). Using this observation as base, he points to Greek mythologies reliance on previous Egyptian myth. The point is astute, recognizing as Walcott’s Eurycleia would later put it that “[i]s Egypt cradle Greece till Greece mature,” thus rendering the foundational texts of Western literature as the illegitimate offspring of African sources (Walcott, 1993, 9).1 However, in defending the right of cultures to repetition with difference,

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The vexed question of ancient Greece’s relation to Africa received much attention in academic circles from the late 1970s onwards. Notable scholarly works explored include Snowden, Frank M. 1970. Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press and Bernal, Martin. 1987. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization 17851985. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.



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Walcott simultaneously affirms the ability of each culture to found something new. In many ways, Walcott’s Odyssey is a postcolonial and feminist rewriting of Homer’s poem, albeit one that exhibits remarkable fidelity to the original. It is perhaps the freshness of Walcott’s approach that manages to capture the spirit of the original, restoring in its questioning approach to these master narratives, the original vigour and zest of the oral tradition it sprang from. As Dougherty notes, “[t]he authority and fixity with which time and scholarship have invested the Homeric poems obscures their original flexibility and synthetic impulse” (Dougherty, 1997, 339). Rather than “further calcifying these texts” through overly careful handling, a slightly irreverent handling might prove an expedient way to “recapture their full narrative potential” (Dougherty, 1997, 339). The pleasure principle for the reader or audience member operates through the anticipation and recognition of the original whilst at the same time confounding their expectations in new innovation. Like so many of the figures throughout Walcott’s verse, Odysseus is a character torn between conflicting desires and allegiances. Repeating the creative tensions that run through his work, the longing for homecoming is associated with a return to a beloved wife and family and a permanent rooting in the homeland. The desire for adventure is associated with the promise of new experiences and a navigation of new routes. Odysseus’ peripatetic nature threatens the success of his eventual nostos; the pull of the outbound voyage represents a centrifugal force within the narrative. An opposing centripetal force is evident in the wanderer’s yearning for his native Ithaca; the gravitational pull of home therefore maintains the integrity of the quest though the arrival itself is somewhat deferred. Walcott’s verse drama adaptation of The Odyssey energises the source text by bringing this potential for disintegration to the forefront of the narrative. His Odysseus is a trickster storyteller, a self-serving and avaricious anti-hero; in refusing to elevate the Greek wanderer through awarding him superhuman status, the poet greatly increases the narrative tension within the original poem.

Storytelling Two key themes of Homer’s Odyssey are given extensive treatment in Walcott’s adaptation; these are storytelling and voyaging. The Odyssey is full of accounts of storytelling and oral performance. Beginning as it does in media res, the bulk of the story is related retroactively; that is, though the story covers a time span of twenty years (more if Laertes’ story of his



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youth is taken into account), the plot takes place over approximately forty days. Walcott remains true to this epic convention, presenting much of the retrospective narration in flashback; however the figure of Odysseus telling his story is replaced by an Odysseus who performs these actions as an active participant. This dramaturgical innovation has the added advantage of adding momentum to the poem’s central episodes, thus making the extended narration palatable to a theatre audience. Walcott deliberately draws attention to the storytelling topos in his adaptation, both to emphasize the oral tradition from which the poem originally emerged, and to intentionally deflate some of the poem’s more fantastical elements. Furthermore, in introducing the idea that Odysseus may be exaggerating his exploits, Walcott invites an alternative reading of Homer. By doing so he once again invites audiences and readers to read backwards to the Homeric source text to find potential corroborative material for his own specific take on the poem. Homer’s Odyssey focuses extensively on both storytelling and wandering. The poem opens with the poet’s invocation to the muse to tell of the wandering Odysseus. Book’s 1-4 of the poem detail Telemachus’ journeys to Pylos and Sparta in search of news of his father. In the kingdoms of Nestor and Menelaus he is entertained with tales of the travels of his father Odysseus and the other Greek heroes who fought with him at Troy. In the court of the Phaeacians the singer Demodocus moves a disguised Odysseus to tears with his songs of Troy; these songs take on a more sinister aspect when sung by the Sirens, almost endangering Odysseus’ quest for homecoming. Furthermore the quintessential wanderer Odysseus, is also the master storyteller within the poem. In Books 9-12 he reveals his true identity to King Alcinous and his court at Scherie and tells the Phaeacians of his trials to date; he has no troubling keeping his audience entertained with stories of the Lotus Eaters, the witch Circe who turns men into pigs, the sea monster Charybdis, and his time with the goddess Calypso on the island of Ogygia, and so on. In a comparable fashion, he tells a number of tales on his return to Ithaca that are designed to keep his actual identity secret. These “lying tales” are told in turn to Athena, Eumaeus, Antinous, Penelope, and Laertes. What is interesting about the true tales and the lying tales is that while the lying tales are largely constructed using realistic historical information, the true tales contain a high degree of mythical and fantastical elements. The fact that these apparently truthful accounts prove highly profitable for Odysseus, earning him considerable riches and a safe convoy home to Ithaca, provides a clear motive for hyperbole and embellishment, a possibility that is exploited in Walcott’s adaptation. Furthermore, Odysseus



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has been characterised as a pragmatic trickster figure by his own account and in the eyes of others. In The Iliad, for example, the warrior Achilles, who abhors falsehood proclaims “I hate that man like the very Gates of Death/ who says one thing but hides another in his heart” (Il. 9. 378/9). Similarly, when Odysseus tells the Phaeacians that he is “known to the world/ for every kind of craft” that his craftiness makes him adept at deceiver (Od. 9. 21/2). Walcott’s heightens the suspense of his adaptation by introducing the possibility that Odysseus’ great deeds may in fact be nothing more than boasts, making his eventual success seem less certain. In Walcott’s play, the visible role of court bard ascribed to the characters of Phemius and Demodocus in Homer’s Odyssey is ascribed to “Blind” Billy Blue, a blues singer whose Egyptian origins are represented through Creole speech, a strategy that is also used for Odysseus’s nurse Eurycleia. In many ways Walcott’s “Blind” Billy Blue and Eurycleia take over the roles of Seven Seas2 and Ma Kilman in Omeros or those of the creolized wanderer and African Sybil in the earlier poem “Origins.” Though dramatically important characters, they are cast in “socially subordinate” roles, their linguistic and racial coding making the “class map of the society abundantly clear” (Burnett, 2000, 301). Burnett suggests that in “coding Eurycleia and Billy Blue as both ‘Egyptian’ and ‘Caribbean’ or ‘African American,’” Walcott stresses the oral tradition as a “precious cultural resource […] passed on particularly by those whose racial and cultural otherness are marked as Egyptian and therefore signaled as part of an African tradition” (Burnett, 2000, 290). As in Omeros, Walcott’s presentation of both the classical bard and his protagonist as storytellers and wanderers present both creator and subject as comparable figures; as another creolized wanderer, “Blind” Billy Blue is a character double for both Homer and Odysseus. Eurycleia is also an important storyteller throughout the narrative, and the first who sows the seeds of doubt about the truthfulness of the heroic tales of superhuman figures and divine entities; she tells Telemachus that they are nothing more than “Nancy stories me tell you and Hodysseus” (Walcott, 1993, 8). The “nancy stories” are a reference to Anancy, the trickster spider of Caribbean folk tales, who always managed to elude his enemies through quick wittedness and deception. As such Anancy is a counterpart to Walcott’s reinterpreted Odysseus whose mythical heroism is subjugated here to his wiliness and unquenchable survival instinct.



2 The fact the Demodocus is taken as a poetic representation of Homer underscores this connection here to the Omeros/Seven Seas character pair.



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The identification of Odysseus as an Anancy figure, a strategist rather than a warrior, a figure who pits his wits against foes of superior strength, is an idea captured in the image of a ship that “crawled like a fly up the wall of the sea” (Walcott, 1990, 27). He is demythologized from his superhuman status to a more plebian character whose mode of expression is informal and who unerringly looks after his own interests. Odysseus, for Walcott, is the master storyteller, whose aptitude for circumvention and greed for riches calls the veracity of his tales into question. The suitors are quick to dismiss the stories told by Odysseus, when they encounter him disguised as a beggar. Eurymachus declares the talk to be “[a] bag of wind from the old windbag,” an opinion which Polybus seconds in denouncing his words as “[o]ld sailor’s lies” (Walcott, 1993, 143). The play’s exploration of the storytelling topos provides therefore an alternative way of considering the trials of Odysseus. The Scylla and Charybdis episode in the play is shrouded in ambiguity Here we are introduced to a childlike Odysseus, flanked by the twin terrors of the whirlpool and sea-monster, curling up to sleep on his raft while Eurycleia, rocking a cradle, sings in turn with Billy Blue. The storytelling pair here assume the role of the chorus in Greek drama; their song suggests that monsters can appear from shadows, that horrors are born of the imagination as “a child see what grows/ From his shadow on the nursery wall” (Walcott, 1993, 106). The song ends with a pair of successive questions, “Are all of these monsters a child’s imagination? […] Or the madness of a mariner too long alone?,” questions left unanswered as the six heads that bear down on a screaming Odysseus (Walcott, 1993, 106). By associating storytelling with both dreams and madness, Walcott encourages active interrogation of the story by the reader/audience. However it is worth noting that the suitors’ doubting is soon followed on by their death, their disbelief punished if never fully refuted. Burnett notes that if Walcott’s presentation of this scene “draws attention to the ‘fiction’ aspect” it also represents it “with such imaginative power that the quasi-factual authority dominates” (Burnett, 2000, 289). This doubt sown into the narrative greatly intensifies the dramatic tension and uncertainty, reanimating a story that might have grown weary through exact repetition. Echoing the transformation from a narrative poem to verse drama, Odysseus, in Walcott’s play enacts a transformation from renowned hero to a storyteller of questionable honesty, thus increasing the dramatic tension for the reader/audience who are forced to ask themselves whether this Odysseus will actually be able to face the trials ahead. Weaving in Walcott’s Odyssey, as in much of his writing, provides a metaphorical vehicle for storytelling. Chapter Two of this book has



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already discussed the figurative significance of tropes of weaving and carpentry in the context of poetic creation. It is Odysseus’ ability to travel that ensures his homecoming; in constructing his raft on Ogygia he ensures that he will achieve his homecoming and that his story will be told. Penelope’s “craft” is not a sea-faring vessel, but her loom. As her principal strategy for deceiving the unwelcome suitors, it too is a storytelling device, telling a tale that is unpicked and reconstructed daily. In deploying tropes of weaving and carpentry as twin figurative devices to articulate the storytelling topos, Walcott conjoins a series of oppositions upon which the poem is structured: travel/stasis, Odysseus/Penelope, sea/land, outbound journey/homecoming. As in Omeros, where the sea becomes an “epic where every line was erased/ yet freshly written in sheets of exploding surf” (Walcott, 1990, 296), or in Another Life which opens on the lines, “[v]erandahs, where the pages of the sea/ are a book left open by an absent master” (Walcott, 1973, 145), Walcott’s Odyssey is a voyage across the lines of the play’s verse, written on the sea’s waves, woven by the poet. The shuttle is a metapoetic vessel charting the progress of the poem and its characters across the pages of the book, an image that revisits Shabine’s “The Schooner Flight”: “I go draw and knot every line so tight / as ropes in this rigging [...] my pages the sails of the schooner Flight” (Walcott, 1979a, 347). In The Odyssey, the craft of weaving is elaborated into the conceit of the ebbing and flowing tide: “[t]he shuttle of the sea moves back and forth on this line, // All night, like the surf, she shuttles and doesn’t fall / Asleep, then her rosy fingers at dawn unstitch the design” (Walcott, 1993, 1). The remarkable compactness of this design belies the layers of meaning contained within as imagery compounds metaphor upon metaphor. The stock phrases, scenes and heroic epithets at the oral poet’s disposal are also alluded to here in the “rosy fingers at dawn” which “unstitch the design” subsuming the goddess Dawn, to whom Homer bequeaths the epithet “rosy fingered” into the figure of the weaving Penelope, herself absorbed into the sea as creator of the story (Walcott, 1993, 1). The pun on the word “shuttle” here suggests both the device in a loom which passes the thread from one side of the web to the other, and a sea vessel on which to launch the plot, sailing it from one end of the drama to the other (Walcott, 1993, 1). The conceit is repeated in Penelope’s musings on the horizon where sea, string and song once again unite, “its line my bow-string, and its waves my lyre” (Walcott, 1993, 21). The continual weaving and unweaving emphasizes the contingency of related episodes, which could change according to changing circumstances. That the poem, like Penelope’s shroud for Laertes to which the line in Walcott’s Odyssey alludes, is woven and unwoven again links the epic to



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the oral tradition where the oral poet “in an improvisatory process not unlike that of a jazz musician, composed his song on the spot, responding to the circumstances of each occasion and the interests of his audience” (Dougherty, 1997, 338). It highlights the continuity and open-endedness of all storytelling, a point Walcott stresses in the very last line of Omeros, “[w]hen he left the beach the sea was still going on” (Walcott, 1990, 325). Thus the hero in one tale could equally be the villain of the next, much as the heroic coloniser at home becomes the colonial oppressor abroad. We could consider the role played by Odysseus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, for example, in order to highlight a less than heroic aspect of Homer’s hero. As Dougherty notes of Homer’s Odyssey: Odysseus himself weaves together different accounts of his travels, varying them throughout the poem to please or persuade the wealthy and reclusive Phaeacians, a hungry and lawless Cyclops, or his patient and perceptive wife, Penelope. The successful poet is one who can adapt his song to satisfy his audience, and this structural flexibility extended to the larger cultural audience for oral poetry as well. (Dougherty, 1997, 338)

As a rhapsodos, a “singer of woven words,” Homer is identified with a tradition of improvisation; it is this contingency and transformative potential that Walcott’s Homeric appropriations seek to highlight (Dalby, 2006, ix). The symbolic power of weaving thus also denotes unpredictability or a reversal of fortune. If we consider Omeros, for example, Major Plunkett has a dark prognostication of his wife’s death on watching Maud embroider her tapestry of birds, “[t]onight he shuddered like the swift, thinking, / This is her shroud, not her silver jubilee gift” (Walcott, 1990, 89). Similarly, Penelope’s shroud for Laertes is a pall that is meant for Odysseus’s father who is slowly dying of grief for his absent son. The suitors urge its completion as this will mean Penelope is forced to choose one in marriage. However, in forcing her to complete the shroud, they inadvertently seal their own destruction, which follows when the final contest for Penelope puts the lethal bow back into Odysseus’s hand.3 The completion of woven shroud urged on by the unwitting suitors thus portends their own end. The trope of carpentry is employed throughout the play as a signifier of Odysseus’s will to successfully complete his nostos. If readers of Homer’s Odyssey have struggled with Odysseus’s account of his eight-years

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There is perhaps an echo of this movement in Omeros when the curing of Philoctete in Walcott’s poem becomes analogous to Odysseus dropping his disguise in Homer’s, “[t]he bow leapt back in the palm of the warrior./ The yoke of the wrong name lifted from his shoulder” (Walcott, 1990, 247).



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entrapment on the goddess Calypso’s island, his eventual building of the raft represents a committed step towards his return. Carpentry has long been associated with poetic writing in Walcott’s verse, where poetry is viewed as a craft to which the writer must humbly apprentice himself before achieving any mastery. In this association of poetry with a trade (as in Omeros where Walcott compared his writing with the work of the female coal-carriers), Walcott seeks to bridge the distance between himself and the inhabitants of his island brought on by education, fame and wealth. For the poet therefore, as for Odysseus, carpentry is a way of reconnecting to his homeland. As Pollard argues: Walcott contends that just as carpenters painstakingly learn the conventions of making windows level and square because such training ensures that the windows will function according to their purpose, poets must master the conventions of their craft to create useful poems. (Pollard, 2004, 131)

Carpentry, in the context of Walcott’s Odyssey, is frequently associated with shipbuilding, and compounded in the conceit of the poet building and launching his metapoetic vessel, where the tenor of writing relies on the vehicle of sailing. In his decision to adapt the Odyssey for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Walcott describes the process as like “like undertaking the building of a schooner or a ship: rig the thing out, and then plank it, and then hopefully launch it, you know. The carpentry was very exciting” (qtd. in Burnett, 2000, 284). In a self-reflexive appraisal of the virtues of the Homeric poem, Walcott dissolves his own dramatic interpretation into the Homeric narrative: FIRST COURTIER You can build a heavy-beamed poem out of this. SECOND COURTIER It will ride time to unknown archipelagos. (Walcott, 1993, 59)

The implication of this exchange is that the metapoetic vessel launched by Homer has been sturdy enough to weather all storms, voyaging time into an unknown future, the unknown archipelagoes referring to a Caribbean as yet unknown to the Greeks, unless in dreams “[i]n maps the Caribbean dreams/ of the Aegean, and the Aegean of reversible seas” (Walcott, 1997a, 62). The appeal of the character Odysseus, a wanderer relying on his wits to survive, has also maintained resonance throughout the ages; he too is contained within the figurative nexus of the ship as a metapoetic craft, “[t]his body is a ribbed ship that never went down” (Walcott, 1993, 141). Though carpentry provides a principle figure for ship building and



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travel within the narrative, it is also closely tied to tropes of homecoming and stasis. The quality of the carpentry within Odysseus’ home ultimately ensures the final re-union between husband and wife; in passing Penelope’s test about the rooted bed, Odysseus is invited to resume his rightful place within it.

Rewriting In Homer’s Odyssey, almost all of Odysseus’s attempts to return home are thwarted by his arch-enemy Poseidon, God of the Sea, who wishes to revenge Odysseus’ blinding of his son, Polyphemus. In Walcott’s Odyssey, the roles of the gods are greatly reduced in a psychological drama that raises the existential question of human agency. In the blurring of borders between the hero and the teller of tales, the king and the itinerant, and the ruler and the madman, Walcott introduces an Odysseus whose mind may be wandering as much as his body, who admits that his “house has dark rooms that I dare not examine” (Walcott, 1993, 131). The final words of Odysseus in the play are his confession to Penelope, “[m]onsters […] We make them ourselves” (Walcott, 1993, 159/60). Walcott thus transforms the epic poem into a psychological drama in which it is suggested that the mythical creatures encountered by Odysseus may well be a figment of his imagination. What is interesting in this adaptation is that while Walcott may interrogate the truthfulness of the tales of Odysseus, the play is ultimately faithful to the source text; ambiguity is introduced but none of the central episodes of the Homeric poem are ever directly challenged. The theme of personal responsibility is clearly articulated in a postcolonial adaptation that can not readily endorse the actions of this “sacker of cities.” This sentiment is pre-empted by Eurycleia in Act I Scene II when she declares “whatever we suffer we bring on ourselves” (Walcott, 1993, 15), and seconded by Circe who denies responsibility for transforming Odysseus’ crew into beasts, blaming instead their own animalistic desire, “[t]he inner animal erupts through their features […] what they become is for what their natures yearned” (Walcott, 1993, 76). In this adaptation, it is not the sea-god that thwarts Odysseus’s efforts to return home but Odysseus himself. Although Odysseus insists that Poseidon is his enemy, introducing himself to the Phaeacians as a man “[w]ho the sea-god hates, but who’s survived every storm” (Walcott, 1993, 53), it is significant that on meeting the Cyclops, he tells him, “I know your father, the sea. He doesn’t like me” (Walcott, 1993, 68). This revelation occurs prior to Odysseus’s blinding of the Cyclops – the very



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cause of Poseidon’s displeasure. This disjunction with the original poem takes the onus off Poseidon as the cause of Odysseus’s misfortune, suggesting that Odysseus’s battles with the sea are not as unavoidable as he might like to suggest. These dynamic warring forces provide the dramatic tension of the play, which Walcott heightens by further undermining Odysseus’ heroic status. Travelling to Sparta for news of his absent father is told by Menelaus of Odysseus’s hunger for riches, “[t]hat sacker of cities? He’d say. ‘Kings have to live’ […] For him that’s why Troy burned” to which Telemachus despondently replies “[h]e sounds like a rug-seller, not a warrior” (Walcott, 1993, 32). However if Odysseus’s heroism is called into account, the differing interpretations of the Trojan War, provided by a domestic spat between Menelaus and Helen, insist on the contingency of all accounts and the subjectivity of all perspectives. Though forwarding a postcolonial perspective in writing back to discourses of authority, this strategy also highlights the flexibility and contingency of the notion of character within classical narratives, whereby the villain of one piece can prove to be the hero of the next.4 When Telemachus piously asks the king, “[b]ut isn’t home God’s bounty, great Menelaus” he receives the curt reply, “[n]o. God’s trial. We earn home, like everything else” (Walcott, 1993, 29). Here again Walcott places responsibility for Odysseus’s purgatorial wandering at his own door. Odysseus’ reappearance in his own palace, disguised as a beggar, is met with a less than enthusiastic response, drawing from an unrecognizing Eurycleia the praise, “[d]amn stinking-toe beggar” and from a disbelieving Telemachus finally reunited with his father, “[t]his mongrel scabbed with mange?” (Walcott, 1993, 136/7). In the final bow-stringing contest, the audience must be as nervous as Telemachus who tentatively asks this outwardly unimpressive man who claims to be his father, “[c]an you string the bow?” (Walcott, 1993, 147). Odysseus’s own self doubt is indicated in his private supplication: “[c]ome, supple ash! Take this bit in your teeth” (Walcott, 1993, 147). The fact that it is this Odysseus that manages to pull off the feat is rendered far more compelling as a result, as dropping his disguise he advances on the princes roaring words, “THE HORN GATE’S OPEN! AN EAGLE IS KILLING YOUR GEESE” (Walcott, 1993, 148). The Gates of Horn5 are identified as the gates through which true dreams

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The different interpretations of the character of Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey and in Sophocles’ Philoctetes provide ample evidence of this mutability. 5 Interestingly Walcott makes reference throughout Omeros to his own “horned island” (Walcott, 1990, 267) which at a first reading suggests both jealousy and dispossession (as well as it’s mountainous terrain); when Helen rejects Achille for



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pass (as opposed to false ones which pass though Ivory Gates), and here refer to the true king throwing out the usurpers. The “eagle destroying the geese” reference is a recurring motif in both Homer’s and Walcott’s Odyssey as an omen foretelling the destruction of the suitors. However Walcott’s own postcolonial background will not allow Odysseus the triumphalism of victory present in Homer’s Odyssey. Immediately after the massacre, Odysseus’s succumbs to a type of shell-shocked madness. Billy Blue explains that “[h]is mind’s dislodged from its masonry. From Troy’s wall,” a view repeated by Eumaeus, “[t]his is the after-shock that is war’s remorse” (Walcott, 1993, 152). This madness is staged as an inner struggle with the sea, once again reiterating the inner struggle between a desire for adventure and a yearning for homecoming that for Walcott defines the character. Walcott writes: EUMAEUS He’s wrestling the god for his mind. ODYSSEUS (Shouting) POSEIDON! (He hurls TELEMACHUS off) TELEMACHUS The sea can’t come in! Stop it! Stop it, please, Father! (Walcott, 1993, 153)

Walcott’s Odysseus is a shell-shocked soldier returning from war, a sailor returning home after twenty years at sea. Mentally compromised by his role in violent campaigns, he is a figure on the verge of total disintegration. The years of voyaging have taken their toll on Odysseus, threatening the success of his nostos. The disintegrative force of the outbound journey, which brings the hero to war and to the verge of madness, is counterbalanced with the stabilising force of the journey home, which promises to reunite Odysseus with his wife Penelope. In Walcott’s Odyssey, a feminist perspective is introduced through the fleshing out of the characters of Eurycleia, Penelope, and Helen. In addition to their allegorical significance as “loyal retainer”, “faithful wife” and “unparalleled beauty,” their characters add to the polyphonic nature of the narrative by providing alternative perspectives to the heroic militarism in the poem. In Homer’s Odyssey, the slaying of the suitors is greeted with a triumphant whoop of victory by Eurycleia, an

 Hector, the spurned lover is said to be “horned like the island” (Walcott, 1990, 40). However, in the light of this reference to the Gates of Horn the “horned island” could take on an additional significance as the true subject that Walcott seeks to express in his poetry but which remains shrouded in metaphor, poetry’s natural medium, “When would I enter that light beyond metaphor?” (Walcott, 1990, 271).



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act for which Odysseus rebukes her; in this scene the poem establishing a mood of exultation while retaining the protagonist’s fair-minded image at the expense of that of his female servant. Walcott categorically refuses to make his Eurycleia a scapegoat for war’s triumphalism for gender, race and class-specific reasons. Walcott writes: EUMAEUS A black howl of triumph for the slain is custom. BILLY BLUE To lift their souls cloud-ward, like rooks beating black sails. EUMAEUS Wheel like a cyclone, a sybil spun by a storm! EURYCLEIA No, no! BILLY BLUE Cry! Woman, your breath will unfurl their souls. (Rising wind, darkness. EURYCLEIA cowls herself, whirls, a long howl) (Walcott, 1993, 150)

Eurycleia refuses to exult at the bloody massacre. Billy Blue’s reference to rooks recalls the folkloric belief in a rook’s function as escort to departing souls into heaven. When Eurycleia does cry, it is a long howl of suffering with which she empathizes with the common bond of human suffering, her compassion providing the departing souls of the suitors with surer passage to their eternal rest. This passage also evidences a stronger feminine principle in operation in Walcott’s adaptation than in the Homeric original. Penelope’s reaction to her husband’s slaying of the suitors is similarly pacifistic. Aghast that her house has become an abattoir, she castigates the “butchers that dyed the whole Aegean’s basin” asking “[w]hen will men learn?” (Walcott, 1993, 154).6 Walcott’s Penelope refuses to glorify the violent slaying of the suitors. However her rejection of the violent deed is

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Another Yeatsian reference is smuggled into Penelope’s rejection of her husband’s claim that all the voyaging and bloodshed were committed for her sake, “To make this a second Troy! When will men learn?” (Walcott, 1993, 154). In Yeats’s poem “No Second Troy” the poet compares Maud Gonne, the ardent Irish nationalist, to Helen of Troy who has “taught to ignorant men most violent ways.” Although Yeats explicitly exonerates Maud from blame, “Why, what could she have done, being what she is?/ Was there another Troy for her to burn?,” suggesting Maud’s nobility is anachronistic being unnatural “in an age like this,” he does implicitly blame her whose mind “made simple like a fire” and “beauty like a tightened bow” are held responsible for his misery and for inspiring much violence (Yeats, 1910, 20). The poem’s title articulates a refusal to romanticize the Irish struggle as heroic.



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also a denial of culpability; she abrogates her husband’s insistence that the violence has been committed as a tribute of his love for her, insisting like Helen that she was not the cause of the slaughter. In Eurycleia’s and Penelope’s refusal to celebrate violent bloodshed, Walcott foregrounds a feminist perspective in the narrative that had previously been unvoiced. Walcott’s Helen is released from her role as allegorical signifier of the destructive beauty. In a comedic back and forth with her husband Menelaus that resembles more of the modern sitcom than the elevated tones of classical epic, she too refuses the role of scapegoat, “[m]en. They’ll blame me for everything now” (Walcott, 1993, 31). In her humorous sniping with her husband, Walcott refuses the lofty pitch of classical verse, preferring the ordinariness of the domestic squabble: MENELAUS Odysseus has spent ten years without coming home. HELEN Well at least he’s travelling. MENELAUS She’s bored. She misses Troy. HELEN I do not miss Troy. MENELAUS Miss being its centre. Its cause… HELEN …Did I say I missed Troy? You and your cheap attacks. (Walcott, 1993, 31/2)

The scene provides a moment of comic relief. Furthermore, it demonstrates that women in Walcott’s play are no longer merely passive victims or objects of desire, they are now reinvented as participants in, and agents of, their own destiny. This point is clearly articulated when Odysseus calls for the death of Melantho, the traitorous kitchen maid; in this version of the tale, both Penelope and Eurycleia stand in his way, actively refusing to allow the execution to take place. This scene highlights a Christian vision at the heart of Walcott’s adaptation. While Odysseus maintains that the girl needs to be taught a lesson for ill-treating him when he wore the guise of a beggar, Penelope insists that such judgment belongs to God. In a line that recalls Christ’s admonishment to the Pharisees, “[l]et him who is without sin cast the first stone,” she recognizes a Christian tenet that all humans bear the burden of sin, “[l]et the hawkfall! Let him hoist me too in his claws,” a belief foreign to the Homeric age in which the play is set (Walcott, 1993, 155). Her admonishment of violence supplies a strong anti-war statement:



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“PENELOPE: No. God. A hawk is God’s image. / ODYSSEUS: I’m not a god. I’m Odysseus. (Walcott, 1993, 155). Overlaying the classical poem with a code of Christian morality that is anachronistic in the context of the Homeric age, Walcott refers briefly to the suffering Odysseus as a Christ figure in yet another transformation: AMPHINOMUS If he outwitted a god he must be a god. EURYMACHUS Let’s see if he’s a god. Slip a spear in his side! CTESIPPUS Spike his brow with pine needles. Make thorns his crown! POLYBUS Just nail KING O’BEGGARS over his bleeding head! (Walcott, 1993, 141)

This superimposed layer of Christian values is in evidence when Odysseus is called upon by Athene to atone for his sins through the act of confession, “[m]ortal, if I were you, I’d start my confession” (Walcott, 1993, 119). Odysseus initially casts around him for others to blame, “[m]y maddened crew butchered the oxen of the sun,” before recognizing his own culpability, “[a]ll right! I gouged the Cyclops, son of Poseidon” (Walcott, 1993, 119). However, though confessing to his deeds, Walcott’s Odysseus is a religious sceptic, a mortal who dares to defy the gods. His offences against the divine powers are enumerated by Athene, “[y]ou mocked the immortal ones […] You were the first to question the constant shining! […] The first to discount each omen!” (Walcott, 1993, 119). A protestant figure, Odysseus acknowledges moral relativism in his universe. If his men ate the oxen, there was a reason, “[c]orn and red wine. We had them. And then they ran out […] Why should men starve when gods have all they can eat” (Walcott, 1993, 120).7 The play espouses the message that Odysseus’s salvation lies in his commitment to the common bonds of humanity, emphasized by his consistent refusal of immortality. In recognizing his own mortality, he also acknowledges his own sin. Offered eternal life by Circe, Odysseus is fully aware of the price, “[b]ut taking what form if not a man’s anymore?” (Walcott, 1993, 81). He will not

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Walcott, himself a Methodist, expresses his belief in the importance of doubt and protest as necessary to honest faith, “I am a believer, and my gratitude is to be honest by his gift. Poetry, in a way, is a quarrel with God, one which I imagine God understands” (Sjöberg, 1983, 84).



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become a god if it means ceasing to be a man. When Calypso too offers everlasting life, Odysseus declines preferring the finite life he already has: FIRST COURIER He declines immortality? God! Tell us why! ODYSSEUS He longs for his own rock, too stony for horses. FIRST COURTIER Over heaven? ODYSSEUS It seemed natural. Men love, then die. FIRST COURTIER But his name, Odysseus, riveted in stars! ODYSSEUS He prefers to kindle the lamps of his own house. (Walcott, 1993, 58)

Identity, here as in Walcott’s other work, is not an easy matter to resolve. As has been examined above, Walcott’s Odyssey is an interrogation of previous readings and translations of the Homeric original, which read Odysseus as a stoic endurer or a straightforward hero. Walcott’s Odysseus retains these characteristics, but new emphasis has been placed on the storytelling feature of Homer’s poem, Walcott choosing to reanimate an idea that has lain dormant within the original – could Odysseus be making the whole thing up? In interview, Walcott has spoken of his deliberate intention to seed doubt within his adaptation: “[i]s this guy lying? Is he just jiving? Is this a fact? The figure in the Homer is somebody who exploits…Because he tells his stories he gets rewarded, and so you say, ‘This guy could be a helluva bullshitter!’- you know what I mean?” (qtd. in Burnett, 2000, 289). Odysseus’s innate capacity to spin tales, disguise himself and use those around him to his advantage, is explored by Walcott to suggest a fluidity of identity within the play’s central characters. Proteus is the model here, a mutable god with the capability to change shape at will. The centrality of Proteus, and as a corollary to this the importance of the theme of metamorphosis in general, is emphasized in another significant amendment made by Walcott to the Homeric story. As Burnett notes: [w]here Homer gives Menelaus the protagonist’s role in the story of the wrestling of Proteus, which he tells to Telemachus, Walcott substitutes Menelaus explaining a vase painting to Telemachus, showing Proteus wrestling not Menelaus, but Odysseus. (Burnett, 2000, 286/7)

The wrestling of the two figures signifies the internal struggle of the play’s protagonist who struggles in his wanderings with multiple versions of



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himself. In his kingdom of Ithaca, Odysseus has a solid identity where his role as husband, father and king is clearly mapped out for him. Odysseus the wanderer however, is a mutable figure, a trickster who transforms to suit the contingencies of each situation he finds himself in. The protean nature of this wandering identity is again highlighted on his arrival to Scherie. When Odysseus washes ashore in the land of the Phaeacians, Nausicaa’s servant Anemone confuses him with Proteus, “I seen him, I seen him, the Old Man of the Sea,” the collocation of the two underscoring their similitude (Walcott, 1993, 46). The fluidity of Odysseus’s identity contributes to the play’s centrifugal threat of disintegration, as the boundaries of the protagonist’s identity become less fixed and stable. This fragmentation of identity operates as a trauma within his mind as Odysseus begins to fall apart. This postcolonial odyssey is attuned to the after effects of cultural conflict, the fracturing of cultural traditions and the internal division that can result. Presented as a shell-shocked war veteran, past and present merge for the wounded Odysseus who sees in the slaughter of the suitors the battles of Troy. The scene points to its own fictional nature, as well as the fiction of the characters themselves: ODYSSEUS Look! (Points at the SUITORS.) Troy’s mulch. Troy’s rain! Wounds. Festering diseases! BILLY BLUE Troy’s glory. ODYSSEUS I’ll kill you for telling boys that lie! (He leaps towards BILLY BLUE, grabs him.) EUMAEUS He’s a homeless, wandering voice, Odysseus. (Pause.) Kill him and you stain the fountains of poetry. (The SUITORS rise, as WARRIORS.) (Walcott, 1993, 151/2)

Odysseus is a fiction, a wandering voice in the fountain of poetry. The suitors too are fictional, their transformation into Trojan warriors highlighting their role as Ithacan counterpoints to the Trojan enemy Odysseus must defeat. Walcott is here extending Homer’s technique of using character pairs to highlight the fabrication of identity in The Odyssey. Walcott innovates on these pairings, both to highlight the techniques of oral poetry, and to draw attention to the negative potential of a fragmented identity, a cultural schizophrenia that is also a form of madness. Explicitly pairing Nausicaa with Melantho, Antimous and Ajax, and Cyclops and Arnaeus in the mind of Odysseus, he manages both to



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suggest the madness of Odysseus and the fictional nature of events in the play.

Nostos Walcott’s rewriting of the Odyssey casts a shadow of doubt on the Ithacan king who always claims to be going home, yet suspiciously takes twenty years to get there. An internal conflict between his desire for nostos and kleos rages as his love for Penelope and his native Ithaca is counterbalanced by his desire for wealth and fame. These warring desires do not escape the attention of his crew, “[h]e wants to get home, but stops off the plunder cities?” (Walcott, 1993, 38). Odysseus’s greed is here cast as motivation for hyperbolic storytelling, “[w]onder what stories our captain pitched to the king?” a way for Walcott to diminish the role of the gods and of fantastical events of the poem, while still remaining true to the Homeric structure (Walcott, 1993, 38). He is goaded into explaining himself by Athene who notes that her favourite is a “man of evasions, man skilled at lying” (Walcott, 1993, 110), Odysseus tries to account for his pragmatism, “Look, I’ve a kingdom to manage when I get home […] I’m not like the others. I’m a small king” (Walcott, 1993, 108). The potential for riches in elaborate storytelling is alluded to in the Phaeacian court where Alcinous tells Odysseus, “[t]he more outlandish your tales, the more they’ll please us,” with Nausicaa adding “[m]y father love stories, he rewards his singers” (Walcott, 1993, 53). Casting doubt on the character of Odysseus has the effect of adding dramatic tension and yet, if we refer back to the original Homeric verse, we see that these uncertainties were always there – they have merely been reanimated by Walcott. Homer’s Odysseus is as much anti-hero as hero, open to a deconstructive reading as a man delaying his homecoming in his desire for kleos, jeopardizing the safety of his crew (as in the Cyclops episode), and leaving his wife and son to face their own perils alone. Though Odysseus is, like Penelope, frequently rewarded the heroic epithet “faithful,” it is clear that Odysseus is anything but faithful. In his wandering, despite frequent protestations of misery and yearning for the marital bed, he manages to spend eight years with the nymph Calypso, be seduced by Circe and to exert enough charm over Nausicaa as to ensure the success to his eventual successful nostos. Walcott is faithful to Homer’s sketch of Odysseus, who is now a weary traveller ready to return home and yet concedes the complexity of his wandering nature in the line, “[a]t the back of all men’s minds is a rented room” (Walcott, 1993, 77). Walcott’s Odysseus is less the stoic survivor of misadventure, than a man with a



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powerful attachment to the sea, returning home in the autumn of his years. This tension has been recognized in Walcott’s earlier poetry, most notably in the poem “Sea Grapes.” In the sailor’s figure, Walcott finds twin desires, both the “father and husband’s// longing” which is “like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name/ in every gull’s story” (Walcott, 1976b, 9). Here, as in the earlier poem the dilemma proves insoluble. The significance of Odysseus’s seafaring desire is set in sharp contrast to the immovable bed of Odysseus and Penelope. Built into the base of an olive tree, it cannot be moved; Odysseus in remembering this fact, passes Penelope’s test to see if this disguised beggar is truly her absent husband. His wife, like the immovable marriage bed, represents his only hope of final mooring: ODYSSEUS The sea still shakes in my body, can you hear it? PENELOPE The sea is quiet and all your trials are done. ODYSSEUS Keep me embraced in your arms, your harbouring heart. PENELOPE Take root, my pine, my shade, my patience’s pardon. (Walcott, 1993, 157)

Penelope tries to ground her husband’s wandering heart by rooting it like a pine in solid ground. Her love is, for her husband, a “harbouring heart” that offers safety and protection (Walcott, 1993, 157). Odysseus is, however, reluctant to leave the sea. If she attempts to quell the restless undulations of his spirit by urging him to “[t]ake root,” he beseeches her to “[d]rown me in those eyes” (Walcott, 1993, 157/8). Walcott’s Odyssey is a roots narrative in the sense that Odysseus’ need to reconnect with his home and native land is central to the success of his quest. Odysseus and Penelope’s bed, built around the base of an olive tree, is literally rooted, suggesting the deep bonds of their marital vows that connect one to the other. Throughout her long years of waiting, Penelope relates how, “I’ve knelt by our olive-tree bed, I’ve prayed and prayed” (Walcott, 1993, 16). When her hope turns to doubt, Eurycleia reminds her, “Mistress, is strongtimbered virtues uphold this house,” wood fibre being equated here with moral fibre (Walcott, 1993, 16). Another example of this is Penelope’s fidelity to Odysseus under extreme pressure from the suitors: PENELOPE I’ll bend when the bow bends. ANTINOUS



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Chapter Six What bow? PENELOPE The one that aims. (Points at his heart) ANTINOUS You’re like some olive tree, waiting for her shadow. (Walcott, 1993, 21)

If Penelope is an embodiment of the rooted olive tree, (echoing also the couple’s immovable olive tree bed) her shadow must be the uprooted Odysseus, whose planking has formed a raft that carries him far from home, “[t]his body is a ribbed ship that never went down” (Walcott, 1993, 141). Walcott’s adaptation is structured on the warring forces between wandering and homecoming acting upon a divided Odysseus. The desire to continue wandering jeopardizes all that the hero holds dear. His homecoming quest will fail, he will lose his wife and kingdom, and his son will not only be in danger of being dispossessed but will probably be killed by the suitors. Odysseus’s heart centre is his “home”; if his relation to this centre dissolves than all that he has striven for is lost. The wandering impetus therefore represents the centrifugal movement in the play with its attendant potential of collapse. The gravitational pull towards home operates on a corresponding centripetal movement, a movement away from potential fragmentation towards a strong centre, a centre that guarantees Odysseus’s heroic status and reinstates order in the cosmos. Even the central climatic action of the play is represented as a man defying the elements, as Odysseus’s charge into battle with the suitors is recast as a battle with a sea that threatens an incomplete homecoming: “EUMAEUS: The breaker’s pluming, it’s going to burst through that door. / ODYSSEUS: If its force swirls us apart, bless you, Eumaeus!” (Walcott, 1993, 150). Realizing that her mate has a nomadic spirit, it is significant that the first question Penelope asks her husband when he returns home is, “[w]ill you miss the sea?” (Walcott, 1993, 159) Odysseus initially avoids answering Penelope’s question as it is in a love of the sea that his true betrayal of her resides. Admitting culpability for his actions, he does not seek to place blame on an angry sea-god or a tyrant Cyclops, conceding that we make our own monsters. The recurrent identification of Odysseus with the sea-turtle, a creature that carries his home on his back, emphasizes this point. In the opening scene Ajax, who has lost Achilles’s shield to Odysseus after Troy, hexes him, “[b]ear it, you turtle! Take ten years to reach your coast” (Walcott, 1993, 4). The shield here transforms into the turtle’s shell which itself will be Odysseus’s mobile home. On arrival in Ithaca, the Phaeacian convoy



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significantly buries the shield for the slumbering Odysseus; Nausciaa instructs them to “burrow the shield like a turtle” (Walcott, 1993, 107). In the midst of the battle with the suitors, Eumaes hands Odysseus his shield with the words, “[h]ere, you cunning tortoise!” to which Odysseus replies, “[t]his turtle took ten years, Ajax, but it’s ashore” (Walcott, 1993, 149). The sea-turtle metaphor emphasizes that Odysseus is at heart a drifter, a “homeless, wandering voice” (Walcott, 1993, 151), a turtle “padding the shield” of his shell (Walcott, 1993, 159). However if Walcott’s Odysseus is more of an eternal wanderer that a stoic survivor, his eventual return is more lasting than his Homeric counterpart. In Homer’s telling Odysseus spends but one night with his wife before journeying inland to meet his father and to perform rites to placate Poseidon, Walcott’s play ends with the “heart in its harbour […] And a house, happy for good” (Walcott, 1993, 160). This movement towards a homecoming is analogous to the poetological journey which Walcott embarks on. The centripetal force here is the movement towards honest poetic labour, which is also a way of seeing, of entering “that light beyond metaphor” (Walcott, 1990, 271). The centrifugal encompasses all that would contribute to broaden the gulf between the writer and his world, his people. This might be represented by for example, a colonial education, fame, wealth, travel and other forms of alienation. It is the tensions created by these two opposing forces that allow Walcott to “circle” his “island with this art” (Walcott, 1990, 291). As Seven Seas explains to the poet-persona in Omeros: there are two journeys in every odyssey, one on worried water, the other crouched and motionless, without noise. For both, the ‘I’ is a mast; a desk is a raft for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak of a pen in its foam, while an actual craft carries the other to cities where people speak a different language, or look at him differently, while the sun rises from the other direction with its unsettling shadows, but the right journey is motionless; as the sea moves round an island that appears to be moving, love moves around the heartwith encircling salt, and the slowly travelling hand knows it must return to the port from which it must start. (Walcott, 1990, 291)





CONCLUSION

String the bow of this harbour tight with your blind hands, Aim the swallow’s arrow from our promontories, Pluck the sea’s wires, poet, till the blue islands Sing what you’ve heard and saw through your bleached eyes. —Walcott, The Odyssey This is the right light, this pewter shine on water, not the carnage of clouds, not the expected wonder of self-igniting truth and oracular rains, but these shallows as gentle as the voice of your daughter, while the gods fade like thunder in the rattling mountains. —Walcott, The Bounty, “37”

Walcott’s verse drama adaptation of The Odyssey signalled the end of his sustained poetic correspondences with the Homeric poems. For a poet as prolific as Walcott, the relatively long break between the publication of The Omeros (1990) and The Bounty (1997) is significant and can rightly be understood as ushering in a new phase of his poetry. Later collections would continue to focus on tropes of voyaging and homecoming but the importance of Greece as a horizon to which the poet directs his gaze has diminished. Indeed, Breslin’s naming of the period following the publication of Walcott’s Odyssey as the “post-Homeric Derek” is quite apt in this regard (Breslin, 2001, 273). Allusions to Greece and classical mythology continue through Walcott’s poetry but they are deployed casually, with none of the previous sense of internal struggle. In poem “29” in The Bounty, for instance, the poet asks rhetorically “[i]f these were islands made from mythologies” and not “merely a blinding cay with incredible water [...] would deeper attention be paid / to the shallows’ scripture?” (Walcott, 1997a, 62). Though the collection as a whole is brooding, the mood here is meditative rather than accusative, the old anxieties with regard to cultural inheritance diluted somewhat in salt water. The epigraph from poem “37” above stresses the declining power of the old gods as the “right light” highlights the natural beauty of ebbing and flowing tides (Walcott, 1997d, 78). The publication of Tiepolo’s Hound in 2000 marks Walcott’s return to the long narrative poem. Here, as in Omeros, it is a European cultural artefact that sets the poem in motion.



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However, Homeric appropriations do not feature here as an organizing principle; in this poem the poet’s quest is to rediscover a Venetian painting by Tiepolo (or possibly Veronese) that depicts a hound at a feast scene. Enthralled by the painterly skill which captured the exact detail of the dog’s inner thigh with a single brushstroke, the poet makes a pilgrimage to Europe to see the painting, a narrative that runs in parallel with a study of West-Indian born artist Camille Pisarro’s life. The mission fails, the poetpersona never finds the painted dog that stirred his imagination but realises that he has something found something more significant in the “still unpainted” living mongrels on his own island, “[t]he hound was here” (Walcott, 2000, 138/9). Departing from Homeric appropriations, the poet continues to explore the complexity of colonial inheritance, returning again to the benediction of home. The Prodigal (2004), like The Bounty, is preoccupied with death; while the earlier collection mourned the loss of his mother Alix, the latter’s commemoration of his dead twin Roddy ushers in fears regarding the poet’s own mortality, “I carry a small white city in my head [...] where my brother and my mother now live” (Walcott, 2004a, 8). Looking back over his life he recalls a youthful pledge to remain in the islands, though the Siren song of Europe rendered the local stifling. Publishing opportunities and fame broke this promise, leading to a sense of betrayal. Walcott writes: [t]hat was a vow I made, rigid apprentice, to the horizontal sunrise [...] but my craft’s irony was in betrayal, it widened reputation and shrank the archipelago to stepping stones, ocean’s to puddles, it made that vow provincial and predictable. (Walcott, 2004a, 95)

The Homeric references have evaporated but the resonance of the wanderer, torn between the promise of the outward journey and the longing for return remains powerful, “[p]rodigal, what were your wanderings about? / The smoke of homecoming, the smoke of departure” (Walcott, 2004, 70). Walcott’s latest collection White Egrets, which was published in his eightieth year, returns to familiar concerns in his writing such as the colonial legacy in the Caribbean and the poet’s complex relationship to Europe. The egrets of the title operate as a polyvalent trope within the collection, highlighting, among other things, the poet’s interest in another migratory bird whose flight pattern stitches continents together. The passage of time is keenly felt and marked in poems that register the rise of Barack Obama and the decline of old loves, now withered through



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age and death. There is a feeling too that the poet is writing his own valediction; poem “51” expresses an awareness of the finite time left to write, “[s]o much to do still, all of it praise” (Walcott, 2010, 86). However, there is also a sense of achievement; the islands that the poet had previously described as unwritten are now “whole self-naming islands” (Walcott, 2010, 89). Lacking the grandeur of European opera houses, the island has “no gilded columns, no wine-dark seats, / no Penelope scouring the stalls” and “yet there are the days/ when every street corner rounds itself into/ a sunlit surprise” (Walcott, 2010, 86). Though the anagrammatic connection between the words “egrets” and “regrets” is not lost to the poet, the overwhelming sense of the collection is one of gratitude and a loosening of tension. Odysseus, already an elusive figure within Walcott’s Omeros has disappeared altogether from these later collections. Having castigated himself for his inherently analogical mind, the poet persona in Omeros announces an intention to let the “sails drop// from my eyes” (Walcott, 1990, 271). The poet’s commitment to cherish the island of St. Lucia for its “green simplicities” is at once a farewell to Homer and an attempt at a more lasting homecoming (Walcott, 1990, 187). As a Caribbean writer, Walcott is all too aware of the difficulties in effecting his nostos. Home is a difficult concept in the Caribbean as a result of the mass displacement caused by large scale migrations (willing or unwilling) of peoples to the New World, which placed an ocean between colonial subjects and their culture[s] of origin. Thus the conception of “home” frequently transgresses the binary of here/there in this context. As Dash contends: [t]oo often Caribbean intellectuals have difficulty turning toward the Caribbean and get caught up instead in detours, which are invariably characterized by a nostalgia for pure origins, whether metropolitan in the assimilationist detour, African in the detour of negritude, or national in the detour of the myth of marronnage. (Dash, 1998, 11)

Walcott by contrast is adamant in grounding his Caribbean subjects in the here and now, even if the reality of colonialism has led to a widespread feeling of displacement. If as Benítez-Rojo proclaims, “Caribbeaness will always remain beyond the horizon” (Benítez-Rojo, 2001, xi), Walcott’s castaway would “[s]eek, like the polyp, to take root in itself” (Walcott, 1964b, 14), beginning to build anew rather than “wailing by strange waters for a lost home” (Walcott, 1974b, 44). Aware of the siren song of pure origins, Walcott blocks his ears and sails through the fog of forgotten routes to bring his boat home.





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Kazantzakis, Nikos. 1958. The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, trans. Kimon Friar. New York: Simon and Shuster. Kavanagh, Patrick. 2000. Epic. In The Bloodaxe Book of Twentieth Century Poetry. Edna Longley (ed.). Northumberland: Bloodaxe. Kiberd, Declan 1996. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Vintage. King, Bruce. 2000. Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klein, Bernhard, and Gesa Mackenthun. 2004. Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean. New York: Routledge. Lawrence, Karen R., ed., 1998. Transcultural Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, Gordon K. 1983. Main Currents in Caribbean thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in its Ideological Aspects, 1492-1900. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press. Losada, Luis A. 1985. Odysseus 21.411: The Swallow’s Call. In Classical Philology. Vol. 80, No. 1, pp. 33-34. Martínez-Dueñas Espejo, José Luis; Pérez Fernández, José Mariá. 2001. Approaches to the Poetics of Derek Walcott. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Martyniuk, Irene 1999. The Irish in the Caribbean: Derek Walcott’s Examination of the Irish in Omeros. In The South Carolina Review: Ireland in the Arts and humanities. 32.1 (Fall. 1999), pp. 142-148. Messier, V. P. and Batra, N. 2007. This Watery World: Humans and the Sea. Mayaguez, Puerto Rico: CEA-CC Publications. Montenegro, David 1996. An Interview with Derek Walcott. In Conversations with Derek Walcott, ed. William Baer, (pp. 135-150). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Naipaul, V.S. 1962. The Middle Passage. London: Picador. Nichols, Grace. 1983. I is a long-memoried woman. London: Karnak House. O’Meally, Robert G. 2007. Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. New York: DC Moore Gallery. Patke, Rajeev S. 2006. Postcolonial Poetry in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pollard, Charles W. 2004. New World Modernisms: T.S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.



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INDEX A Achebe, Chinua, 185 Adam, 25, 43, 47, 50, 55, 97, 121, 153, 181 Aeschylus, 116 Africa, 11, 15, 16, 24, 33, 42, 55, 58, 59, 82, 86, 87, 118, 119, 123, 125, 126, 127, 145, 154, 162, 173, 175, 176, 186 Afro-Greek sibyl, 7, 16, 17 America, 65, 100, 118, 126 Amerindian, 24, 151 Anglophone Caribbean poetry, 31 apprenticeship, 39, 41, 194, 213 appropriations, 6, 16, 40, 41, 43, 51, 54, 56, 70, 71, 79, 88, 89, 92, 100, 102, 106, 108, 109, 110, 114, 116, 117, 118, 128, 129, 138, 151, 160, 193, 213 Ashcroft, Bill, 9, 81 Auden, W.H., 20 Auerbach, Erich, 131, 132 B Bachelard, Gaston, 20 Baker Jnr., Houston A., 85, 86 Balutansky, Kathleen M., 54 Barthes, Roland, 19, 20 Baugh, Edward, 95 Bearden, Romare, 80, 89, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 118, 178, 179 Bechet, Sidney, 101 Begam, Richard, 83 Benin sculpture, 110, 111 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, 215 Bernal, Martin, 186 Bey, Dawoud, 108



Bhabha, Homi, 52, 53 Bloom, Harold, 57 Boehmer, Elleke, 82, 83 Braques, Georges, 101 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 9, 21, 57, 58, 84, 86, 87 “nation language”, 57, 58 Brathwaite, Kamau tidalectics, 21 Breslin, Paul, 55, 157, 212 bricolage, 84, 86 Brodsky, Joseph, 88, 174 Brown, Stuart, 31 Bruckner, D.J.R., 134, 158, 184 Burris, Sidney, 133 C Caribbean, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 95, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 109, 116, 118, 119, 121, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 134, 138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146, 152, 153, 154, 156, 159, 160, 161, 166, 168, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 190, 195, 214, 215 carpentry, 38, 39, 40, 112, 113, 115, 191, 194, 195 castaway, 8, 25, 30, 38, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 56, 60, 62, 64, 74, 87, 126, 134, 159, 182, 215 centrifugal force, 82, 187, 205, 209, 210

182

Index

centripetal force, 82, 112, 187, 209, 210 Cesaire, Aimé, 82 Cheng, Vincent, 85 circular journeys, 115, 117, 118, 120, 127, 176 Clifford, James, 55 collage, 80, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112 colonial education, 10, 27, 29, 66, 72, 173, 210 colonial inheritance, 46, 151, 213 colonialism, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 20, 22, 24, 27, 36, 40, 42, 51, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 80, 81, 83, 85, 90, 91, 119, 132, 134, 137, 138, 140, 153, 163, 164, 215 Columbus, Christopher, 10, 11, 43, 50, 51, 117 Conrad, Joseph, 44, 96 cosmogenesis narrative, 6, 19, 21, 35 craftsman, 30, 40, 46, 48, 49, 51, 53, 112, 142 Crane, Hart, 131 Creole, 64, 92, 93, 112, 118, 128, 160, 174, 189 creolization, 6, 13, 14, 15, 16, 34, 41, 52, 54, 55, 59, 86, 93, 104, 110, 111, 119, 127, 130, 134, 136, 141, 142, 154, 175, 178, 182, 189, 190 Crusoe, 8, 25, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55, 58, 66, 67, 134, 144 Friday, 42, 43, 44, 50, 51 cultural erasure, 22, 87 cultural schizophrenia, 206 cure, 122, 149, 152, 159, 162, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182 D Dalby, Andrew, 39, 79, 154, 193 Dante, 14, 57, 89, 116, 155, 170 Dash, J. Michael, 215 Davis, Gregson, 129, 130, 134, 146



Defoe, Daniel, 43, 44, 50 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 12, 21, 42, 43 Derain, André, 81 Derek, 85, 157 Derrida, Jacques, 97 diaspora, 7, 8, 10, 12, 20, 21, 22, 24, 35, 44, 106, 107, 110, 180 disintegration, 187, 199, 205 displacement, 4, 9, 25, 33, 52, 55, 59, 82, 90, 121, 182, 215 dispossession, 27, 43, 60, 61, 86, 94, 167, 198 Dougherty, Carol, 3, 38, 40, 78, 129, 130, 132, 141, 150, 159, 160, 161, 186, 193 DuBois, W.E.B., 101 E Eckstein, Billy, 100 Eliot, T. S. Fisher King, 9 Eliot, T.S., 9, 57, 77, 81, 86, 87, 89 Ellington, Duke, 101 English language, 58, 90, 93, 140, 173 epic, 3, 7, 12, 13, 14, 22, 26, 38, 69, 70, 71, 74, 78, 79, 80, 92, 99, 107, 109, 112, 114, 116, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 142, 143, 146, 151, 155, 156, 160, 164, 171, 184, 187, 192, 196, 201 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, 54, 55 Europe, 10, 11, 15, 18, 55, 59, 61, 65, 71, 72, 86, 118, 119, 126, 127, 157, 166, 174, 175, 213, 214 exile, 31, 47, 62, 66, 82, 89, 158 F Fanon, Frantz, 4, 5, 6 The Wretched of the Earth, 4 Farrell, Joseph, 130 feminist, 186, 199, 201 Figueroa, John, 130

Postcolonial Odysseys: Derek Walcott’s Voyages of Homecoming fisherman, 123, 125, 129, 142, 159, 160, 161 Freud, Sigmund, 20 Froude, James Anthony, 4, 14, 45, 182 Fuentes, Carlos, 101 G Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 101 Gates of Horn, 198 Gates of Ivory, 198 Gauguin, Paul, 81 Gikandi, Simon, 82, 86, 87 Gilroy, Paul, 21 Glissant, Edouard, 55 Graves, Robert, 71 Greek sculpture, 139 H Hades, 14, 38, 66, 77, 155, 170 Hall, Stuart, 20, 125 Hamner, Robert D., 55, 109, 130, 137 Harlem Renaissance, 85, 101 Heaney, Seamus, 158, 163, 176 heteroglossia, 84 Hikmet, Nazim, 131 Hirsch, Edward, 89, 91, 93, 144, 153 historiography, 4, 5, 6, 7, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 35, 166, 167, 168, 182 history as myth, 5, 6 homecoming, 2, 3, 27, 37, 38, 66, 77, 89, 115, 120, 135, 150, 162, 187, 188, 191, 194, 195, 199, 206, 207, 209, 210, 212, 214, 215 Homer, 2, 3, 7, 14, 26, 30, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 55, 57, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 89, 91, 92, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 106, 108, 109, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140,



183

141, 143, 144, 145, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 160, 165, 166, 169, 170, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 204, 206, 207, 210, 212, 213, 214 Calypso, 37, 188, 194, 203, 207 Ithaca, 67, 77, 136, 184, 187, 188, 189, 205, 206, 210 kleos, 37, 206, 207 nostos, 37 Odysseus, 10, 14, 26, 65, 68, 79, 89, 90, 91, 94, 95, 98, 104, 127, 131, 134, 135, 171, 175, 184 Odysseus polytropus, 28, 78, 116 Odysseus ptoliporthos, 26, 78 Penelope, 13, 40, 68, 110, 122, 145, 149, 169, 174, 185, 188, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 199, 200, 201, 202, 206, 207, 208, 209, 214 rhapsodos, 39, 193 Telemachus, 94, 97, 110, 120, 122, 175, 188, 190, 197, 198, 204 The Iliad, 2, 3, 14, 72, 79, 100, 128, 131, 135, 136, 143, 144, 161, 184, 189 The Odyssey, 2, 3, 16, 26, 30, 37, 38, 40, 41, 67, 70, 71, 78, 79, 92, 100, 102, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 114, 115, 116, 118, 122, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 143, 145, 149, 150, 151, 159, 161, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 204, 206, 208, 212 Howes, Marjorie, 85, 157 Hughes, Langston, 101 hybridity, 7, 16, 44, 59, 84, 98, 121, 125, 127, 161, 175, 176, 182

184

Index

I identity, 8, 30, 42, 44, 53, 59, 61, 63, 121, 123, 125, 127, 145, 149, 150, 153, 157, 161, 174, 182, 188, 204, 205, 206 indentured servitude, 12, 13 Iounalao, 166, 167 Irish, 71, 79, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 137, 144, 157, 200 Irish Literary Renaissance, 89 Ismond, Patricia, 130 J James, C.L.R., 101 Joyce, James, 57, 68, 69, 71, 79, 80, 84, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 104, 111, 116, 118, 120, 131, 134, 137, 138, 140, 144, 171, 173, 182 Stephen Dedalus, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 98, 170, 171, 173 K Kavanagh, Patrick, 71 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 67, 116 Kiberd, Declan, 4 King, Bruce, 14, 47, 65, 68, 120, 134, 171, 188 Klein, Bernhard, 21 L Lam, Wilfredo, 101 Lamming, Georges, 101 Lawrence, D.H., 82 Lawrence, Karen R., 96 Lefkowitz, Mary, 129 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 71 Lewis, Gordon K., 15 Lorca, Federico García, 99 M Mackenthun, Gesa, 21 Manguel, Alberto, 79, 134, 135 Mansfield, Katherine, 82 Marlowe, Christopher, 174 Marryat, frederick, 44



Martyniuk, Irene 122, 123 Matisse, Henri, 81, 101, 104, 110, 112 McKay, Claude, 82, 101 McLean, Jackie, 100 Mediterranean, 13, 14, 15, 41, 55, 70, 78, 103, 127, 128, 142, 166, 182 memory, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 24, 25, 34, 42, 58, 61, 62, 67, 102, 124, 126, 135, 154, 159, 164, 178, 179 Mercer, Kobena, 106, 107, 110 meridian, 53, 60, 61 metapoetic craft, 30, 38, 65, 74, 113, 115, 117, 195 Middle Passage, 7, 11, 12, 21, 23, 24, 33, 34, 35, 58, 119, 123, 124, 154, 159, 162, 171, 177, 178 Milton, John, 131, 174 mimicry, 6, 41, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 59, 60, 61, 95, 139, 145 mixed heritage, 11, 27, 28, 33, 52, 55, 118, 173 modernism, 9, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 96, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112 Montenegro, David, 56, 57 Moore, Bridget, 103 Moses, Michael Valdes, 83 multicultural, 107, 126, 152, 153, 155, 156 mythology, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21, 23, 26, 27, 35, 41, 42, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 84, 88, 89, 92, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 107, 108, 117, 121, 127, 129, 134, 138, 140, 143, 144, 145, 151, 152, 159, 160, 161,165, 167, 170, 171, 178, 179, 184, 186, 189, 190, 196, 212, 215

Postcolonial Odysseys: Derek Walcott’s Voyages of Homecoming mythopoeic Caribbean, 7, 8, 74, 102, 130, 152, 168 mythopoeic coast, 102 N Naipaul, V.S., 4, 45, 53, 61 The Mimic Men, 53 naming, 48, 50, 59, 62, 63, 64, 73, 116, 117, 119, 123, 135, 137, 141, 142, 144, 149, 150, 153, 166, 167, 179, 212, 214 natural world, 8, 15, 17, 23, 24, 25, 36, 45, 47, 63, 71, 72, 169 New World, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 13, 15, 34, 41, 42, 44, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 70, 87, 104, 110, 117, 121, 124, 126, 127, 135, 142, 152, 153, 156, 161, 175, 178, 215 Nichols, Grace, 21 O O’Meally, Robert, 105, 107, 109, 111, 112 Odyssean wanderer, 7, 17, 26, 30, 41, 42, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 99, 115, 119, 127, 128, 133, 134, 135, 154, 173, 184, 187, 188, 189, 190, 195, 205, 210, 214 Odyssean wanderer Odysseus, 2, 3, 5, 13, 16, 23, 26, 27, 28, 30, 37, 38, 39, 40, 50, 66, 67, 69, 74, 77, 78, 80, 94, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 114, 115, 116, 122, 127, 128, 132, 134, 136, 142, 149, 150, 151, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 174, 175, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 214



185

Shabine, 7, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 192 Oedipus complex, 97, 117 Okigbo, Christopher, 84 Old World, 8, 9, 13, 15, 41, 44, 54, 56, 57, 60, 130, 175 oral tradition, 31, 79, 115, 186, 188, 190, 193 origin, 6, 11, 15, 16, 19, 25, 60, 61, 88, 90, 125, 154, 161, 162, 169, 178, 182, 215 originality, 54, 56, 57, 97, 109 origins, 11, 12, 13, 20, 44, 54, 57, 59, 61, 123, 125, 183, 189, 215 Ovid, 54, 116 P p’Bitek, Okot, 84 Paz, Octavio, 101 Picasso, Pablo, 81, 82, 101, 104, 105 Pinturicchio, 110 Pisarro, Camille, 213 Pollard, Charles, 9, 15, 49, 50, 57, 87, 90, 145, 156, 181, 182, 194 polyp, 7, 8, 215 postcolonial, 7, 21, 42, 51, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 86, 88, 97, 98, 116, 121, 128, 132, 133, 137, 143, 144, 145, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 185, 186, 196, 197, 198 postcolonialism, 80, 81, 84, 85 postmodernism, 81 Pound, Ezra, 57, 89, 131 Pratt, Mary Louise, 82 Price, Sally and Richard, 100 primitivism, 105 Puente, Tito, 100 Q Quint, David, 132 R Rabelais, François, 99 Raj Anand, Mulk, 82

186

Index

Ramanujuan, A.K., 84 Ramazani, Jahan, 83, 84, 129, 156 religion, 19, 24, 32, 34, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 58, 59, 69, 71, 90, 91, 92, 97, 98, 99, 118, 119, 131, 155, 160, 161, 177, 178, 179, 180, 196, 197, 202, 203 Renaissance, 18, 23, 110 Rhys, Jean, 43, 82 Richardson, Marilyn, 103 roots, 7, 8, 21, 22, 38, 40, 46, 57, 84, 86, 87, 125, 135, 152, 162, 174, 177, 181, 208 Rowell, Charles H., 101, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 112 S Sanders, Julie, 54, 186 sea, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 59, 61, 62, 65, 66, 68, 73, 96, 104, 107, 114, 119, 122, 123, 127, 141, 152, 170, 172, 176, 181, 185, 188, 190, 191, 192, 196, 198, 199, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212 as origin, 6, 13 Atlantic Ocean, 11, 21, 24 Caribbean Sea, 11, 13, 19, 22, 32, 101, 103, 128 sea-swift, 47, 114, 115, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 152, 176, 177, 180, 182, 193, 212 Shakespeare, William, 54, 57, 89, 97, 116, 120, 140, 144, 195 shipwrecked, 7, 8, 36, 37, 40, 42, 46, 55, 64, 159 Sirens, 2, 3, 5, 6, 36, 40, 106, 110, 188, 213 Sjöberg, Leif, 57, 203 slavery, 9, 12, 13, 23, 33, 34, 42, 44, 47, 59, 60, 62, 85, 87, 107, 135, 161, 171



Slemon, Stephen, 81 Snowden, Frank M., 186 Sophocles, 116, 158, 160, 162, 193, 197 Soyinka, Wole, 84 Sprayberry, Sandra, 91 St. Lucia, 14, 29, 64, 67, 69, 70, 71, 84, 93, 116, 118, 122, 126, 127, 137, 142, 144, 145, 146, 151, 152, 154, 156, 157, 164, 166, 170, 171, 174, 175 “Helen of the West Indies”, 14, 145, 151, 166 St. Martin, 100, 102 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 44 Stewart, Frank, 102 storytelling, 3, 6, 7, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 34, 37, 39, 56, 78, 115, 116, 150, 169, 187, 188, 190, 191, 203, 204, 206 syncreticsm, 7, 13, 15, 54 Synge, John Millington, 90, 91 T ten Kortenaar, Neil, 86, 87, 110 Terada, Rei, 4, 52, 61, 137, 145, 158 Thieme, John, 26, 57, 121, 122, 141 Thucydides, 154 topography, 15, 48, 54, 56, 104 transformation, 7, 41, 65, 70, 128, 139, 142, 175, 177, 191, 202, 206 translocalism, 13, 84 transoceanic migration, 7, 12, 55 turtle, 210 V Virgil, 57, 89, 97, 120, 131, 132, 136, 137 The Aeneid, 131, 136, 164 voyage, 2, 3, 7, 11, 23, 26, 30, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 62, 94, 113, 115, 116, 136, 173, 187, 192, 195, 199, 200, 212

Postcolonial Odysseys: Derek Walcott’s Voyages of Homecoming

W Walcott, Alix, 213 Walcott, Derek Another Life, 13, 16, 29, 30, 39, 48, 68, 92, 95, 97, 138, 153, 169, 178, 192 The Bounty, 91, 184, 212, 213 The Castaway and Other Poems, 42 Dream on Monkey Mountain, 4 Epitaph for the Young, 16, 91, 94, 97, 136 In a Green Night, 14 The Fortunate Traveller, 70 The Gulf, 64 The Odyssey, 13, 55 Omeros, 13, 14, 16, 21, 22, 30, 34, 38, 41, 47, 48, 60, 74, 78, 80, 93, 97, 99, 101, 102, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 160, 161, 163, 165, 166, 168, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 178, 184, 185, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 198, 211, 212, 213, 214 The Prodigal, 56, 213 Sea Grapes, 37, 52, 67, 207 Tiepolo’s Hound, 213 White Egrets, 214 “29”, 184, 212 “37”, 212 “51”, 214 “A Far Cry From Africa”, 173 “The Castaway”, 8, 44, 46, 51 “Crusoe’s Island”, 8, 25, 44, 46, 67 “Crusoe’s Journal”, 8, 44, 56, 58 “Cul de Sac Valley”, 39 “From This Far”, 70 “Greece”, 70, 73



187

“Homage to Edward Thomas”, 56 “Map of the New World”, 70 “Names”, 52, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62 “Origins", 6, 7, 11, 13, 35, 56, 62, 70, 119, 189 “Roots”, 14 "From This Far", 70, 72 "Homecoming Anse la Raye”, 29, 66, 68, 116, 143, 163 “The Light of the World”, 163 "The Schooner Flight", 6, 7, 26, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 144, 192 “The Sea is History”, 6, 7, 17, 18, 32, 35, 168 “The Villa Restaurant”, 171 “Volcano”, 96 “The Lost Empire”, 72 Walcot, Derek essays “The Antilles:Fragments of Epic Memory”, 2 “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?”, 52, 53, 56 “The Figure of Crusoe”, 48 “The Muse of History”, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 47, 52, 58, 77, 140, 153 “What the Twilight Says”, 31, 52 Derek Walcott Square, 117 Nobel Prize, 70, 87, 117, 163 Walcott, Roderick, 213 Walcott, Warwick, 94, 98, 120, 125, 126, 127, 163, 164, 165, 175 weaving, 13, 38, 40, 150, 169, 191, 193 Williams, Aubrey, 82 Woolf, Virginia, 86 wound, 16, 17, 22, 36, 122, 125, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 167, 170, 176, 180, 181, 182 Y Yeats, W.B., 89, 91, 144, 185, 200, 201