I

In exploring Derek Walcott's abiding recourse to Homer in his creative writing, I have chosen to invoke the discursive paradigm recently advertised by Paul Gilroy in his book because whatever problems we may agree it creates in its analysis of the condition of blacks in Western society, the book has at any rate invited us to rethink familiar assumptions about questions of self-apprehension created by centuries of stressful relations between peoples of African and European descent. In formulating his concept of a “black Atlantic,” Gilroy abjures all obsessive attachment to an African racial antecedence, embracing in the process a modernist consciousness that entails, as he puts it (following Habermas), “a rift between secular and sacred spheres of action” whereby contemporary artists feel “a sense of artistic practice as an autonomous domain either reluctantly or happily divorced from the everyday life-world” (50, 73). Gilroy especially celebrates the “rhizomorphic, fractal structure” (4) of this unique formation because in “[transcending] both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (19), it enables us “to construct an intercultural and anti-ethnocentric account of modern black history and political culture” (4). In this project, he adopts the image of “ships” as a guiding metaphor in their signification far less of “the triangular trade” (16-17) than of “the unfinished history of blacks in the modern world” (80).

Gilroy's book provides us a point of departure here because it foregrounds the interplay of issues of history and identity that characterize Caribbean discourse generally. This discourse may be reduced to two main strands. The first of these is represented by European travel accounts and histories (Columbus, Trollope, Froude, etc.) that present a uniformly negative portrait of minority American peoples. This imperialist outlook, designed to support planter/mercantile adventurism and the exploitation of Caribbean society and economy, poses a denial of Caribbean history and culture and makes no concessions whatever to the innate humanity of the people. “There has been splendour and luxurious living,” says Froude, “and there have been crimes and horrors, and revolts and massacres. There has been romance, but it has been the romance of pirates and outlaws. The natural graces of life do not show themselves under these conditions […]. There are no people in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own” (305-06). Have they made any contributions to science and technology? “Rocks and trees and flowers remain as they always were, and Nature is constant to herself; but the traveller whose heart is with his land, and cares only to see his brother mortals making their corner of the planet an orderly and rational home, had better choose some other object for his pilgrimage” (306). Needless to say, the more humane interventions of contemporary writers (de las Casas, Sewell) did little to dent the image enshrined by this dominant imperialist discourse.

The second strand of Caribbean discourse involves responses by native Caribbean artists and intellectuals to the above position. Between the two strands, however, lies an intermediate position represented by a writer like V. S. Naipaul who, in castigating (from his British exile) the failures of Caribbean society, has not hesitated to preface his portraits of it with passages such as those quoted above from the likes of Froude and Trollope. We may call this the tough love of someone saddened by the wasted promise of his native land; but nothing excuses the readiness with which he echoes the imperialist sneer. “How can the history of this West Indian futility be written?” he asks in The Middle Passage, then answers: “The history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies” (28-29).

Most of the prominent Caribbean writers are, unlike Naipaul, of part-African descent and, though they have often condemned some of the shortcomings of Caribbean society that Naipaul addresses, have nonetheless shown considerable sympathy for and commitment to the fortunes of the region. In his Cahiers d'un retour au pays natal, Aimé Césaire debunks European claims to rationality and civilization, and extols the indigenous cultural propensities of African descended peoples (animism, idolatry, etc.), even the absence of Western technology. Black people may never have invented things or brought the world under exploitative control, posits Césaire; but they remain the final guarantee of the humane sensibility. Hence, while proclaiming the richness both of nature and of Africa's cultural traditions, he pursues a broad humanist agenda that entails a “celebration of universal love and a plea for recognition of man's universal ties in a world beset by hatred and divisiveness” (Cudjoe 136).

In his Afrocentrist trilogy titled Arrivants, Kamau Brathwaite proudly acknowledges that

          we
who have cre-
ated nothing,
must exist
On nothing.

(“Postlude/Home,” Arrivants 79)

Here he makes a determined connection with his African roots, subjecting himself to ritual seances that renew his ties to ancestral spirits and customs and prepare him, upon his return, to revitalize his Caribbean society with creative essences derived from Africa. In an earlier effort, History of the Voice, he asserts the persistence of Africa in Caribbean expressive arts and recognizes in the entire culture a substratum of religious sensibility. And he is so forceful in arguing a fundamental African quality to Caribbean oral arts that he finds ethnic peculiarities in the folk speech of the region, using the phrase “nation language” to acknowledge the ethnic identities that cohere in the Caribbean. Hence he tries to document the ways in which “the native language as spoken by Africans” (5) have left their impress on English as spoken in various Caribbean communities.

Wilson Harris offers a slightly different though cognate perspective on Caribbean reality. Like many of his contemporaries, he is a scion of mixed racial backgrounds (vividly reflected in the hybrid worlds of his novels)—so mixed, in fact, that he deserves to be taken seriously when in “History, Fable, and Myth” he claims he has “no racial biases” (Selected Essays 156). Also like them, he is a product of a British colonial education that put tremendous emphasis on the classics and encouraged a propensity for crosscultural, universalist insights. But two other aspects of his life are especially pivotal to the contributions he has made to Caribbean discourse. One, working as a land and river surveyor in the interior of Guyana brought him to encounter the sheer organum of its centuries-old ecology and native peoples, filling him with a sense not only of history in continuity but of the numinous interfusion of various forces—organic, inorganic, and especially nonsubstantial—with human life in a way that transcends temporal reality.¹ Two, his readings in German philosophy and metaphysics disposed his mind to an “inner time” undergirding temporal reality in much the same sphere as dreams and other forms of supraconscious experience. No wonder, then, that Harris—as he again states in “History, Fable, and Myth”—is intellectually attracted to the symbolic kinship of limbo and Haitian vodun as “variables of an underworld imagination,” or that for him Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre are linked by “a universal heritage” of the “nightmare” consciousness (159-60). History as a linear continuum, as well as political ideologies guided by it, has little place in his search for “the life of the imagination” (“Continuity and Discontinuity,” Selected Essays 177). Rather, he has a cyclic sense of time that sets no barriers between peoples and epochs in the fluid and ongoing history of the Caribbean world (“Tradition and the West Indian Novel,” Selected Essays 141).

This reaction to “history” finally brings us to a recognition, in some segments of Caribbean thought, of a separate reality characterizing the region, as amply articulated by the writer/scholar Edouard Glissant. This consciousness is represented, in large degree, by the rejection of History (with a capital H) as a totalizing project in Western (colonial, imperial) discourse which, utilizing the privilege of its literate resources, constructs a universal narrative that sets Europe at the center of humanity and thrusts the peoples without writing to the margins. Glissant advocates a strategy that puts emphasis on the “lived reality” of the Caribbean world, rather than on an hegemonist epistemology that relies on the myth of Europe's manifest destiny. This theory of the uniqueness of Caribbean fortunes, generally referred to as antillanité, does not exactly disown an African antecedence, but it sets its real historical sights on the experiences that constitute the sources of a peculiar Caribbean world, beginning with the slave trade:

The journey that has fixed in us the unceasing tug of Africa against which we must paradoxically struggle today in order to take root in our rightful land. The motherland is also for us the inaccessible land.

Slavery, a struggle with no witnesses from which we perhaps have acquired the taste for repeating words that recall those rasping whispers deep in our throats, in the huts of the implacably hostile world of slavery.

The loss of collective memory, the careful erasing of the past, which often makes our calendar nothing more than a series of natural calamities, not a linear progression, and so time keeps turning around in us.

(160-61)

In the circumstances the Caribbean, no longer able to see the world through the same experiential lens as African countries (62-63), has been forced to realize “the creative energy of a dialectic reestablished between nature and culture” (65) in the New World. “The creative link between nature and culture,” says Glissant, “is vital to the formation of a community” (63); despite their diverse histories, Caribbean peoples have survived the traumas of the Middle Passage and kindred historical struggles in the New World, and are today “the roots of a cross-cultural relationship” (67). “[This] past, to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as history for us, is, however, obsessively present. The duty of the writer is to explore this obsession, to show its relevance in a continuous fashion to the immediate present” (63-64).

We might say, then, that Caribbean discourse hinges on two principal axes, each of which is committed to seeking a viable aesthetic as well as political identity: one that affirms Africa as its ultimate point of reference, and another whereby Africa is recognized as an inevitable but hardly dominant source of the larger Caribbean or Antillean universe. A writer like V. S. Naipaul stands somewhat outside of this discourse, especially because he has shown very little sympathy for the region's fortunes and aspirations.

II

Where does Walcott belong in this configuration? His backgrounds and his earlier career definitely evince a personality more akin to Harris than to Césaire or Brathwaite. Like Harris, he comes of a hybrid racial stock (less so, perhaps) and a classically grounded colonial education. Walcott's writing reveals an appreciation for the Caribbean's natural environment as deeply felt as Harris's, though the visual artist in him seemed at first attracted more to the open topography of an all too accessible island universe than to the recessed inner life of Harris's tropical forests. Finally, although like Harris he observed a guarded distance from radical political ideologies, and was especially disdainful of strident demagoguery (Gulf 110) and rabid, opportunistic Afrocentrism (O Babylon!; “Muse of History,” What the Twilight Says), there is nonetheless greater evidence in his work than in Harris's of a sympathy with proletarian interests.

Whatever his ideological leanings, Walcott in his early work was no less determined than his contemporaries in responding to issues of history and identity foregrounded by the antecedent colonialist discourse. In the poem “Air” (Gulf 69-70), he mocks the colonialists' denial of history and achievement in the Caribbean, working through a parody of Euro-Christian presumptions to assert the challenges posed by the native environment and ending with a clinching laugh, “there is too much nothing here”! And in Another Life, he ridicules those who, while waving as trophies of achievement the elimination of indigenous races, charge “nothing” was ever created in the region (144-45). He disdains the sorts of “history” by which the Caribbean has been conventionally defined—the bloody, exploitative careers of adventurers and colonists—and sees his generation as exiles positioned, like Adam in a virgin Eden, and certainly more like Crusoe than Prospero, to give a fresh cultural identity and dignity to their inherited world (“The Figure of Crusoe,” Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott 36).²

The search for a proper identity for the Caribbean is itself beset with obstacles that must needs be overcome. For Walcott, the answer lies neither in the all too easy but false image of the Caribbean as a tourist paradise (“Prelude,” Green Night 11), nor in an appeal to the discredited survivors of European vandalism—the Indians and their violated sanctuaries (“The Voyage Up River,” Castaway 50). Nor does Walcott find Africa any more attractive as a point of reference. Although his roots lie partly there, he feels considerable distrust of it especially in light of the contemporary postindependence record of horrors (“A Far Cry from Africa,” Green Night 18). In Dream on Monkey Mountain, Makak recovers from his hallucinations of a royal African past to confront once again his oppressed proletarian lot and real-life (servile) identity, Felix Hobain. Clearly Shabine, in “The Schooner Flight,” articulates Walcott's sentiment when, confronting the phantoms of his ancestors, he dismisses the epiphany with the question, “Who knows / who his grandfather is, much less his name?” (Star-Apple Kingdom 11).

Having rejected the panoply of ancestors usually employed in defining Caribbean identity, Walcott opts for an inclusive geopolitical framework that recognizes contemporary realities. For instance, in “A Map of the Antilles,” he acknowledges the unity of an Antillean universe despite the divisions forced upon it by history and politics (Green Night 55). In “Bronze,” he affirms the essential hybridity of a Caribbean society blended from old-world and new-world sources, best captured perhaps in the icon of a Caribbean beauty as a multiracial monument greater than the masterpieces of Grecian art or myth—unbroken by imperial rape, and proudly projecting the stubborn hopes of a people struggling to be unified (Green Night 78-79). He then recognizes the reality of a larger American world, wherein the Caribbean is seen as united with the mainland by common experiences of a historic colonialism (“Muse of History,” Twilight Says 36) and present-day racial prejudice (“Lines in New England,” Castaway 48-49; “The Gulf,” Gulf 58-62). This ever-widening landscape finally leads Walcott, especially in the later travel poems, to a certain universalist sensibility. Hence, in “The Schooner Flight,” a social critic like Shabine would conclude that “this earth is one / island in archipelagoes of stars” (Star-Apple Kingdom 20), while in “Spoiler's Return” the calypso king (Spoiler) summons the aid of a (European) “Old Brigade” in castigating the dog-eat-dog, doom-bound excesses of Caribbean society (Fortunate Traveller 53-60). Sadly, at this point Walcott's Caribbean critics are moved to lament, with Fred D'Aguiar in a review of Midsummer, that the poet's universalist forays have cost him his “sense of purpose and resolve.”

Walcott's progression from a local to an ecumenical vision should perhaps be read as a “need to escape static, essentialist constructions of personality” (Thieme 152). A less sympathetic view might, however, see in this the influence of colonial education, with its notorious record in orienting the native youth away from their roots in pursuit of models offered by the imperial system. Some of this, at any rate, is evident in Walcott's early immersion, with his friend Dunstan St. Omer (“Gregorias” of Another Life), in the fine arts under their apprenticeship of Harry Simmons, who guided his wards in internalizing the traditions of European Renaissance art to a level amply revealed in Walcott's oeuvre especially from Another Life and Midsummer to the more recent Tiepolo's Hound. Equally significant is his attitude to language, where he reveals an interesting ambivalence. In “What the Twilight Says,” he is so “madly in love with English” he sees himself as “prolonging the mighty line of Marlowe, of Milton” (Twilight Says 10); yet he can hardly escape the aesthetic tug of the local environment, where “in the dialect-loud dusk of water-buckets and fish-sellers, conscious of the naked, voluble poetry around me, I felt a fear of that darkness which had swallowed up all fathers” (28). The result of this ambivalence is a studied lexical management of English and Creole on a separate but hardly equal basis in much of Walcott's earlier poetry. There is little of the bold experimentation we find in the poetries of Kamau Brathwaite and Louisse Bennett. Indeed, Walcott sees these revolutionary ventures in language as pointless because they can never capture the essence of the old tribal traditions, and concedes the superiority of standard European grammar by suggesting that “the great poem of Césaire's could not be written in a French Creole because there are no words for some of its concepts” (“Muse of History,” Twilight Says 51).

A similar crisis is evident in Walcott's embrace of the European classics. Of his education he admits the “grounding was rigid—Latin, Greek, and the essential masterpieces” (“Meanings,” Critical Perspectives 50). So binding, indeed, was the hold of the classics that in St. Lucia, as he tells us, while folk and Christian songs and pageants were performed in open-air festivals, “On the verandah, with his back to the street, he began marathon poems on Greek heroes which ran out of breath, lute songs, heroic tragedies, but … the rhythms of the street were entering the pulse beat of the wrist” (“What the Twilight Says” 20). So we are not surprised to find troubling images of classical civilization here and there, as in the poem “Statues,” which castigates Roman imperialism enshrined in stone (Castaway 40-41). In “C. L. R. James,” he compares the British empire of James's day with Greece as slavocracies (Twilight Says 116); and in “Ruins of a Great House” he presents a tragic image of imperial demise: “Marble as Greece, like Faulkner's South in stone, / Deciduous beauty prospered and is gone” (Green Night 19).

The commanding guide in Walcott's explorations of classical European literature is, of course, Homer. So deeply did Walcott internalize his model that he saw himself as the Homer of the Antilles, appointed—by genius or by fate, it's not quite clear—to record the region's virtues, its woes, and its destiny. Hence he is convinced St. Lucia would remain “a naturalist's scrapbook”

till our Homer with truer perception erect it,
Stripped of all memory or rhetoric,
As the peeled bark shows white.

(“Roots,” Green Night 60)

And we may well hear Walcott in the voice of the Odyssean voyager Shabine, declaring, “I am satisfied / if my hand gave voice to one people's grief” (“The Schooner Flight” 19). There is a wide range of images in Walcott's oeuvre taken from the Iliad and Odyssey, not the least of which is the figure of St. Lucia as the “Helen of the West” (“Leaving School,” Critical Perspectives 24). But far the most prominent theme in Walcott is the Ulyssean—influenced either by direct classical reading or by the modernist tradition of Joyce, who may be judged Walcott's immediate model in seeking to articulate “the uncreated conscience of his race.” In fact, the Odyssean journey may be seen as the commanding paradigm in most of Walcott's middle period—Gulf, Sea Grapes, Star-Apple Kingdom, Fortunate Traveller, Midsummer, and Arkansas Testament—in which we see either the poet himself or some alter ego traveling through the Caribbean/American region and lamenting the fallen world of its sociopolitical life, though not without a touch of chastened optimism. Sea Grapes, for instance, sees the voyager home to a cherished native earth, to reconciliation, and to the peace of old age very much as in Homer's Odyssey.

III

Who was this Homer, by whom Walcott sets so much store? There already exists today an enormous body of well-informed conjecture and comment on Homer's backgrounds and identity. Despite the volume of more recent opinion on the issue, it remains safe to invoke T. W. Allen's detailed review of a broad range of loci classici relating to Homer and the post-Homeric guild of minstrels called Homeridae (descendants of Homer), which led him to various conclusions, such as (I) that Homer was a traditional bard from the Aegean island of Chios, and (ii) that the so-called progeny of minstrels may have originally been family though other guild members became attached to the family through stages of professional affiliation (11-50).³ The classic image of Homer as a blind singer—not the least aided by evidence from the first Hymn to Apollo—may have come either by eponymization of the word homeros or by deduction from contrast with the deep inner vision homeros by the bard's tales. This biographical point is significant because of Walcott's focalization of the blind minstrel in his two adaptations of Homer. I will be concerned here, therefore, mainly with the ramifications of the Homeric identity for the use to which it has been put by Walcott.

For instance, one implication of Chios is to make Homer either a colonial pandering, with his songs, to the glory of the imperial rulers of his region, or else a Greek colonist celebrating the traditions and triumphs of his mainland home with a touch of patriotic pride. At any rate, the epics reveal a tremendous familiarity with a universe defined as much by the mainland regions of Greece and the Troad as by the archipelago of islands especially in the Aegean. There is a comprehensive feel for the variety of peoples in that universe even when they are marshaled against one another: thus the recognition scene between Diomedes and Glaukos (Iliad 6.119-236) reveals a network of kinship and hospitality ties unifying cross-regional class and other interests. Homer also shows a deep empathy with the marine world by his graphic representations of color and activity around it, so that “the archipelago comes alive,” despite the toll of dying nearby, “in a sort of animate relief” and “a certain order, a certain rhythm” (Vivante 103).

Another implication of a Homer from the outposts has some bearing with the language of his epics, with their intricate layering of dialects. Whether this palimpsest arose from an itinerant Homer adjusting his performances to the dialects of many host peoples, or from a harmonization of episodes performed by rhapsodes across regions (as the Pisistratean recensionists would have it) and especially their standardization for performance at regional or national festivals (as Wade-Gery and, more recently, Nagy would have it⁴), the implications of such a dialectical relationship between the center and the margins in the use of language is certainly of interest to a postcolonial poet like Walcott.

But what kinds of audience did Homer perform for? The evidence of bards in the Odyssey (Phemios, Demodokos) would suggest he sang for royal or aristocratic hosts. The blind Chian of the Hymn to Apollo would signify, rather, an itinerant bard who sang to all and sundry. What we have here is a possible polarity between class interests. On the one hand the blind Chian, whose sympathy seems to lie with the unaccountable folk “whose suffering never ends” (167-68)—a sympathy augmented by Homer's frequent punctuation of the lofty aristocratic world with similes of humble life and occupations especially in the Iliad—evidently identifies the epics no more as a celebration of the klea andron (Iliad 9.189) than as a general reflection on the human condition, so that the plight of proletarian characters like the hapless Thersites in Iliad 2 and the servants on Odysseus's Ithakan estate loom larger in the poet's ideological consciousness than we are inclined to think. On the other hand, recent radical scholarship has argued the basic hegemonist ideology of Homer's epics by suggesting that, whatever solace the images of the lowly and underprivileged may offer either to the bard or to his non-elite audiences, the underlying outlook of those tales is elitist (Rose, Thalmann) and sexist (Murnaghan); the marginalized characters, male or female, are too easily led to accept their submission or are in any case in no position to stand up to, or enjoy meaningful support from any quarters against, the inequities imposed on them by a largely slave-owning, feudal, and patriarchal system. Again, such arguments have implications for ideological stresses evident in the use of which Walcott has put Homer in his work.

IV

By the time Walcott came to adapt Homer's epics, he had been compelled by various factors to adjust his outlook somewhat. Persisting racial conflict across the world involving black peoples—as much in the U.S. as elsewhere—must have urged a firmer commitment.⁵ Walcott also came under considerable attack for his elitist portraits of popular culture and his increasing Euro-modernist leanings. As revolutionary movements in the Caribbean gained in popularity and commanded the respect even of the political class,⁶ it became increasingly risky to be seen as opposing such forces, especially for a writer who aspired to be the conscience of his people. Even the scholars were gaining greater prominence in their pursuit of research into African connections, thus tilting the scales of critical opinion—in the debate highlighted by the likes of Edward Lucie-Smith, Gordon Collier, Arthur Drayton, Patricia Ismond, and more recently June Bobb—on the side of Brathwaite against Walcott. Finally, despite continuing social and political woes, it would seem that Africa was at last getting the attention of Walcott, not least with achievements recorded by artists like Wole Soyinka, the first black writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1986).

Walcott must thus have come to a point where he needed to resolve the tensions between his ecumenical instincts and his growing black consciousness. As early as the title poem of Sea Grapes, he admits, “The classics can console. But not enough” (3). In reviewing Walcott's adaptations of Homer's epics, however, we must begin by acknowledging his deep indebtedness to the Greek poet. For a start, he was aware that, in being positioned at the cross-currents of the world's political, cultural, and other forces, the two archipelagos of the Aegean and the Caribbean have been subject to comparable tides of history as well as heirs to analogous fortunes: in Omeros he tells Homer that these “tides,” of both sea and history, are “Our last resort as much as yours” (296). From Homer, also, Walcott absorbed a touching regard for the marine environment in both its positive and negative aspects: its prepossessing natural beauty (as in “conch-coloured dusk,” Omeros 11) as well as its menace to life (“variegated fists of clouds,” Green Night 11). Like their “blind” Chian counterpart, the itinerant bards of Walcott's versions (Seven Seas in Omeros and Billy Blue in the stage Odyssey) distill life's deeper truths—the limitations of human aspiration, and especially the subordination (despite the modernist creed) of human life to a supernatural network of forces—from communities across time and space, for the benefit of contemporary audiences.

In Omeros, Walcott uses the interesting figure of “the fallen schism / of a starfish” (294) to characterize his “homage to Homer” as an act of “exorcism.” Whatever else this figure implies, it appears that in his adaptations of Homer he is finally able to resolve what in Sea Grapes he calls “the ancient war / between obsession and responsibility” (3). I drew attention above to the stresses in Homer's epics between, on the one hand, an obvious deference to the aristocracy and, on the other, an arguable sympathy with the proletarian class. In his case, the tensions Walcott addresses are evidently between, on the one hand, a sustained cultivation of an elitist Eurocentric sensibility and, on the other, an increasing sympathy for elements in his society fundamentally excluded, by structures of control enshrined by European colonialism, from attainment of the basic privileges of human existence.

But Walcott's departures from his model are just as striking. In the first place, despite the colossal scope of a work like Omeros, he feels a certain ambivalence about the convention of the “epic” as a medium for articulating the antihegemonist sentiments that would form the bedrock of his vision of Caribbean history and culture. Admittedly, there is a certain stoic regularity, even “high seriousness,” in the stanzaic design—terza rima, with varying rhyme schemes—that propels the narrative, analogous perhaps to the steady hexametric movement of the Homeric epic. But in terms of poetic form, it would be fair to say that Walcott is somewhat less beholden to Homer than to latter-day transformations of the genre, if not exactly in Callimachus, Vergil, and Dante, at least in the modernist poetic of the generation of Ezra Pound, in whose hands the epic edge tends to have suffered some blunting. Rei Terada thinks that “Walcott does […] pastoralize the Homeric poems in Omeros” (186). Gregson Davis also draws attention to “the centrality of pastoral motifs and obsessions in the economy of [Omeros]” (“Pastoral Sites” 43), and judges the poem “a multilayered palimpsest” that, in mixing the creole of characters like Philoctete with the “elegant musings of the phantom narrator” (49), altogether abdicates the high seriousness of the Homeric model. Although Davis earlier saw something of a generic sleight of hand in Walcott's disavowing the Homeric form even when he is most indebted to it (“‘With No Homeric Shadow’”), it is fair to conclude that in Omeros Walcott succeeds considerably in distancing himself ideologically from his model and creating “a polysemous, demotic narrative” (Hamner, Epic 32).

In placing Creole speech and culture on equal footing with the dominant colonialist style, Omeros indeed gives Walcott an opportunity to descend from his elitist high horse more decidedly than he ever did in his earlier work. Here, distortions of standard English forms are indulged both by characters (Achille christens his boat “In God We Troust”) and the narrator himself (of Helen: “Were both hemispheres part of the split breadfruit of her African ass … ?” 312), from a clearly anti-imperialist impulse (compare Hofmeister 52); and now and then Walcott uses the unglossed names of local Caribbean cultural items (e.g., “acajou,” 18). In Omeros, he is finally able to demonstrate his belief that “the speeches of Caliban are equal in their elemental power to those of his tutor” (“Muse of History” 39).

It is in dignifying the dispossessed of the Caribbean that Walcott makes his clinching departure from the superior claims of Homer's aristocratic culture. The “epic” battle of Omeros pits not highborn warlords leading national armies in a contest over a woman, but two fishermen, descendants of slaves, in a fight over the mere means of survival. Although the animosity between Achille and Hector has its roots in their rivalry over Helen—so much for Walcott's adoption of the Homeric motif—the point at issue is really a bailing tin. The two rivals never quite get the chance to make up, because Hector dies in a car accident; but Achille mourns the man in a way Homer's Achilles is incapable of—a token no doubt of Walcott's recognition of the pacifist instincts of these humble folk (compare Terada 186). In dealing with their fellow men they also reveal a basic nobility and humaneness that their more elitist counterparts like the Plunketts are less capable of; we see these qualities clearly in their rallying around Plunkett upon the death of his wife, Maude. If there is anything “epic” in these humble folk, it is the way they tower above the haughty colonial elite by the largeness of heart and consideration they show for the plight of their fellow men, whatever the social or other distinctions between them.

Equally significant in Omeros's revisionism is the identity of the marginalized. In Homer's epics, there is an obvious fetish in the detailed recognition of the principal figures by patronymics and other tokens of distinguished affiliation. But very few of the rank and file are given detailed identification; thus, in the fight sequences many are acknowledged only by name as they fall to the onslaught of the likes of Patroklos and Hector. In Achille's “journey” to Africa, however, Walcott takes the symbolic step of restoring the erased identity of the dispossessed elements of Caribbean society. The colonial elite are also given an opportunity, with the Plunketts, to revisit their native homes, but the reconnection is uneasy and ultimately aborted; Achille, on the contrary, is able to rediscover his ancestral name (Afolabe) as well as his native African land, albeit filtered through a kaleidoscope of scenes recalling the tragic history of enslavement and expatriation. In this event, Walcott also manages to correct a flaw in Makak's earlier “journey” to the same source in Dream on Monkey Mountain. After Achille's journey, it will no longer do to lament, as Philoctete early in Omeros, “what it's like without roots in this world” (21).

The vindication of these marginalized elements is ultimately a comment on the structures of domination that constrain their existence. Walcott has, of course, been consistent in exposing the ugliness, sham, and futility of the imperial enterprise that put these hegemonic structures in place, as witness poems like “Ruins of a Great House” and “Roots” in Green Night, as well as “Air” and the “Guyana” sequence in Gulf. In Omeros and the stage Odyssey he is able to weave this theme into a broad historical and mythic tapestry. In Omeros, the ravages of the U.S. army against native Americans and the slave raids in Africa expose the horrors of imperial domination; in the stage Odyssey, Odysseus' acquisitive greed and the paranoia that assails him upon his return to his Ithakan home reveal the sheer emptiness of these foreign exertions. Between them, these adaptations give Walcott an opportunity to rethink his relations with his model by taking an anti-hegemonist stand against whatever role the tale of Troy, as the prime text of the European literary canon, has played in enshrining the claims of the West over the rest of us.

Of the dispossessed, it is clearly Helen who—despite Walcott's well-advertised problems with real-life women—has triumphed the most against the sexist fate imposed upon her by Greek myth and history through the Homeric epos. In both the Iliad and the Odyssey, she groans with self-reproach for the tragedy she has caused the embattled peoples by breaking her marital faith. On the contrary, in both Omeros and his stage Odyssey, Walcott gives us a Helen who is poor but proud, a saucy and irrepressible will-o'-the-wisp who chooses her affiliations between Achille and Hector with a random sense of independence, though she is humane enough to spare a tear when one of them (Hector) dies in an accident. She flaunts her charms and enthralls men in them, not least her former employer Plunkett who, seeing her as symbolizing the much-contested island of St Lucia, tries but fails to construct a coherent narrative of her historical fortunes. For Walcott, Helen thus represents “the evasiveness of the signified,” a clear proof not only of the inadequacy of history but even of “the infirmity of his [Walcott's] own medium” of art (Terada 196-97) in attempting to arrest the shifting signs of temporal reality.

V

What, then, is Walcott's place in black New World discourse? It is, perhaps, fair to start by saying that he is one with the likes of Harris and Gilroy in seeing New World history as an ongoing process, its identity as continually evolving, rather than as something to be arrested at a point in time decreed by a dominant imperial culture. In Omeros, as Achille hangs up his fishing net and walks home with “the odours of the sea in him,” we are told in the very last line, “When he left the beach, the sea was still going on” (325). This metaphor of the sea as history, which Walcott uses in The Star-Apple Kingdom to mock the touted trophies of imperial adventurism, serves also to inscribe the fluidity of time and the unfinished nature of all efforts in personal or national self-fashioning. But the fact that Achille bears this element in him suggests that he and his kind, once erased from the privileged accounts of the imperial establishment, will in the end have taken their proud proprietary place when the intruders' grand edifices have been flushed down the flood of time.

In Omeros, Walcott mocks the concept of “history” in the sense it has statutorily assumed in master chronicles. Imperial history is, in the final analysis, official record documenting the systematic appropriations of other peoples' territory and selfhood by adventurers with superior tools of control, technological and otherwise, which is why Hegel and Trevor-Roper have variously pronounced that African history begins only with the coming of white people to the continent (Fage 7). Walcott delivers a double blow at such presumptions. To begin with, he demonstrates that if we look hard enough among various sites of the natural environment, we will find evidence of the pristine cultural history that the imperial machinery tried to erase in the process of its appropriation. People have always lived here since the dawn of time, and have always carried on a viable existence; they will never forget who they are or the things that have always sustained them. More than that, in his survey of the record of imperial dispossession of peoples in the Americas, Walcott revises the conventions of geographic partitioning of the world that suits the exploitative designs of empire. Although they are different peoples culturally, blacks and Amerindians are united in one fate as the wretched of the American earth under the European machinery of exploitation.

In endorsing the concept of unfinished history, Walcott has nonetheless come to recognize the primacy of the African factor in Caribbean identity. In sending Achille on an African “journey” to recover his identity, Walcott ultimately embraces the archeology of knowledge that has been central to the thought of Césaire and Brathwaite. Even more, in integrating elements of African metaphysics and theology in the enterprise of “recovery” by Achille and Ma Kilman (Omeros) and in the foreign worlds of Odysseus's appropriative ventures (stage Odyssey), Walcott would seem to contest the separation of the secular from the supernatural that is central to Gilroy's conception of the “modern.” Above all, although Walcott reconciles the races in his vision of a harmonious Antillean universe, his centralization of dispossessed elements like Achille, son of Afolabe, who plies the waves in an African-style canoe (Omeros 287)—not in a ship (pace Gilroy) that cargoed his ancestors to the Americas—is Walcott's deft Afrocentric move in foregrounding the black identity and coming to terms with the dominant structures of feeling in the Caribbean.⁷

Finally, I think it would be fair to say that, although Walcott recognizes the disparate identities from which the Caribbean is constituted, his work seems to have moved steadily beyond the paranoia of fragmentation, the sense of what Gilroy calls a “rhizomorphic, fractal structure” which does not recognize such an entity as the nation. Omeros shows the poet returning to his home region, prodigal-like (to borrow a thought from Dan Izevbaye), and here using St Lucia as a microcosm for the larger Caribbean world. It represents his hopes for a universe self-sufficient and at peace with itself; a unified society in which the varied cultural identities, the Plunketts as well as the Philoctetes, find a welcome home however they may have been brought there by the vagaries of history; most of all, a society in which the dispossessed elements are finally restored to their due place as the true energies driving Caribbean society. That pride of place basically privileges the Black factor in the Caribbean. In Omeros Walcott, unlike Gilroy, finally comes to recognize the “image” of Africa that continually “insists”—to borrow a phrase from the late Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo, whose work Walcott grew to respect (King, Caribbean Life 356)—on being credited as the basic substratum of Caribbean identity.

Notes

1. The stories in The Guyana Quartet are, without question, Harris's deep-felt acknowledgment of the interpenetration of the temporal and the timeless in the native cultures of the Caribbean. The stories were designed, he tells us in his somewhat nuanced introduction to the Quartet, to uncover the inherent truth of works outside the canons of (Western) realism, “by bringing the fictions I had in mind into parallel with profound myth that lies apparently eclipsed in largely forgotten so-called savage cultures” (7). With a writer like Harris, we are introduced to a tradition of writing that has become very much a staple of ‘Third World’ fiction—magical realism—in which “the entire apparatus of verisimilitude, which was the focal point of nineteenth-century European realism, proves inadequate as a medium for registering the difference of the colonial subject” (Wilson-Tagoe 5).

2. The figure of Robinson Crusoe evidently served Walcott's programmatic conception of the Caribbean artist struggling to fashion something out of the apparent cultural vacuum in which he has been marooned. But the figure itself—derived as it is from a classic work of colonial fiction—comes saddled with a curious political baggage of which Walcott seems to have been aware early enough in his work. For a “black” artist to use a “white” colonial figure as a prototype of the Caribbean creative imagination does raise questions as to what side the artist is really on. Indeed, so much is invested in Crusoe as the focal figure of The Castaway—a focalization hardly redeemed by his equation with Columbus, Adam, even God in the essay “The Figure of Crusoe” (Critical Perspectives 35-36)—that the radical reader soon flinches at the writer's “continued wrestling-match with European discourses” (Thieme 78). In time, however, the excesses of the figuration soon dawn on Walcott, as the Crusoe persona is thrown into increasing self-contestation of his hegemonist relations with the dispossessed of his new world. Bruce King gives some background to Walcott's composition of the play Pantomime (Walcott and West Indian Drama 295), which sheds light on the interesting dissolution of the hegemonist gulf in the running argument between the English (white) hotel manager Harry (Crusoe) and his black employee Jackson (Friday).

3. There is, of course, an enormous amount of critical opinion, both attesting to and questioning the historicity of the poet “Homer,” but the balance of judgment seems to uphold popular (which does not exclude scholarly) habit—as well as classical iconography—in seeing the “blind Chian” as the creator of both the Iliad and Odyssey. No less contested has been the issue whether Homer was an oral or a literate poet; in this regard, I find Nagy's arguments about Homer as a “stitcher,” “weaver,” or “joiner” of songs—in the same artisanal convention as a traditional carpenter (Best of the Achaeans 296-333, Homeric Questions 89-93, and Poetry as Performance 74-75)—rather convincing in demonstrating the poet's status as a member of a traditional, oral culture, whatever shape may have been given to his compositions in later times for arguable festival performances. I think West has, in his recent article, made a forceful attempt to prove that the name “Homer” was only an eponymous coinage, especially by the so-called “Homeridae,” designed to dignify their guild with an ancestry of sorts; there was no such ancestor from whom they traced their descent; and the idea that Homer was a blind poet was only a claim made on the basis of minstrelsy being “a favored occupation for the blind in many societies” (374). Unfortunately, even were we to overlook some notable flaws in his argument, the idea of Homer as an oral poet has become too well established by the Parry-Lord tradition of scholarship for West's erudite thesis to elicit more a deferential nod. And some of the authorities that he cites in support of his case, such as Janko and Nagy, are really more inclined toward the oral hypothesis than West seems to acknowledge; a close reading of Janko's chapter 2 is especially rewarding.

4. See Wade-Gery, The Poet of the Iliad 14-18; Nagy, Best of 6-7, Questions 42-43 and 80-81, Pindar's Homer 21-24, 60-73. The idea that Homer's narrative songs, originally performed by him or by later singers in independent episodes, were ultimately cobbled together into continuous wholes at some point in time—possibly under commission from the sixth-century bc Athenian tyrant Pisistratos—has some respectable ancient authority behind it: e.g., Plato, Hipparchus 228b; Cicero, De Oratore 3.137; Josephus, Contra Apionem 1.12. In 1795 a German scholar by the name of Friedrich August Wolf published a essay titled Prolegomena ad Homerum (the actual Latin title is much longer!), which put a whole new spin on the theory of Homer's songs being in scattered and later unified forms. It caused a rift, for over a century, between “Analysts,” who treated Homer's texts as curious pieces of patchwork, and “Unitarians,” who saw a coherent pattern and genius in the poems. For a useful discussion of this issue, see at least Davison, “The Homeric Question”; Adam Parry's introduction (x-xxi) to his father Milman Parry's collected essays; and Foley 2-6.

5. The title poem of The Arkansas Testament, a meditation on racial prejudice in the US inspired by a visit to Fayetteville, Arkansas, contains some of the strongest language ever used by a writer who has, to this point (1987), embraced an identity pretty evenly shared between black and white ancestries. Images of cross burning and other emblems of segregation shake Walcott gruffly from his color-blind liberalism, forcing him to seek comfort in his kind—“my race” (110), “my people's predicament” (116)—and wonder what has become of the foundations of “this aging Democracy” (114). The effect of his encounters is altogether devastating: “My metre dropped its limp …,” he confesses,

                                                                                                                           hairs
   fall on my collar as I write this
   in shorter days, darker years,
   more hatred, more racial rage.

   (112-13)

6. Walcott's play O Babylon! was seen by some Caribbean critics as being either out of touch with the real aspirations and culture of the Rastafarian elements of Jamaica, the subjects of the play, or else unconscionably elitist: see, for instance, reviews of it by Earl Lovelace and “Sule Mombara” (Horace Campbell). Indeed, after the Rastafarian reggae superstars Bob Marley and Peter Tosh showed such a strong presence at Marley's “One Love Peace Concert” in Kingston (1978), which brought together Jamaica's warring political leaders Michael Manley and Edward Seaga in a momentary show of accord (Barrett 223), no one could ignore the influence of these revolutionary elements in Jamaican society, despite their periodic clashes with law enforcement authorities. In prefacing one of his poems, “The Light of the World,” with lines from Marley's song “Kaya” (Arkansas Testament 48), Walcott is clearly acknowledging the pervasive influence of Rasta music and culture not only in Jamaica but across the Caribbean.

7. Compare Thieme: “Omeros concludes with a message which revitalizes Walcott's life-long preoccupation with classical epic and nervous engagement with the anxiety of influence. It […] admits the importance of African retentions in the Caribbean in a way that has hitherto been rare in Walcott's verse” (187); and Hamner: “Achille's odyssey reestablishes African roots and affirms their influence in island customs” (Derek Walcott 147).

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