From an early age Derek Walcott felt a special “intimacy with the Irish poets” as “colonials with the same kind of problems that existed in the Caribbean. They were the niggers of Britain.”¹ Passionately identifying with Yeats, Joyce, Synge, and other Irish writers, Walcott shared especially in their conflicted response to the cultural inheritances of the British empire—its literature, religion, and language. At school, Walcott recalls, Joyce's Stephen Dedalus was his “hero”: “Like him, I was a knot of paradoxes,” among other things “learning to hate England as I worshipped her language.”² His best known lyric, “A Far Cry from Africa” (1956), elaborates the poem of ambivalence toward imperial and anti-imperial bloodshed, building on Yeats's simultaneously anticolonial and anti-anti-colonial stance in works such as “Easter, 1916” and “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”³ As Yeats used a series of counterbalanced questions to dramatize his inner divisions after the Easter Rising, Walcott forty years later responds to the Mau Mau rebellion with a spiral of questions that “turn” on each other with ever stronger torque:

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?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?

Another thirty-four years later, in his Caribbean epic, Omeros (1990), Walcott is still puzzling out what it means to love the English language yet hate English imperialism. As a character within his own narrative, Walcott travels to Ireland, literalizing his revisitation of Joyce and Yeats as precursors, and there—struck anew by the shared postcolonial problem of linguistic and literary inheritance—he memorably declares Ireland “a nation / split by a glottal scream.”⁴

An epic divided to the vein, a poem split by a glottal scream, Omeros asks how the postcolonial poet can both grieve the agonizing harm of British colonialism and celebrate the empire's literary bequest. Walcott's pervasive figure of the wound can help us to understand his answer to this question, as the figurative site where concerns with imperial injury, literary archetype, and linguistic heritage most graphically intersect. “This wound I have stitched into Plunkett's character,” ventures the poet early in Omeros. Conflating wound and suture, Walcott suggests that the odd surgery of poetry may have to disfigure a character with wounds to repair historical injuries. “He has to be wounded,” continues the poet defensively. Why must the poet stitch some kind of wound into all of his major characters, from Philoctete, the emblematic black descendant of slaves, to Plunkett, the representative white colonial; from the lovelorn Achille to Hector, Helen, even himself? Because, the poet explains, “affliction is one theme / of this work, this fiction,” as indeed of Afro-Caribbean literature and much Third World literature in general (28). That the wound trope is central to Omeros suits preconceptions of postcolonial writing as either “victim's literature” or “resistance literature.” But Walcott's use of the figure—for example, attaching it here to the white colonial Plunkett—frustrates the assumptions it elicits. Indeed, this seemingly unsurprising motif continually turns strange and unpredictable in Walcott's hands; this strangeness starts with his willingness to embrace the motif after having denounced the literature of Third World suffering for decades.

In examining Walcott's elaboration of the wound in Omeros, I trace the complex genealogy of its primary bearer, the black fisherman Philoctete. Appropriating the classical type of the wound-tormented Philoctetes paradoxically enables Walcott to give new voice to the suffering of Afro-Caribbean peoples under European colonialism and slavery.⁵ In this character, Walcott fuses still other literary prototypes of North and South, Old World and New. The astonishing hybridity of Walcott's black victim exemplifies the cross-cultural fabric of postcolonial poetry and contravenes the widespread assumption that postcolonial literature develops by sloughing off Eurocentrism for indigeneity. Repudiating a separatist aesthetic of affliction, 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. Hybrid, polyvalent, and unpredictable in its knitting together of different histories of affliction, Walcott's radiant metaphor of the wound helps to dramatize poetry's promise as one of the richest and most vibrant genres of postcolonial writing.

Perhaps the most ambitious English-language poem of the decolonized Third World, Walcott's massive Omeros is written in long rolling lines—typically of twelve syllables—grouped in loose terza rima stanzas; alludes abundantly to Homer, Joyce, and Aimé Césaire; and ranges from precolonial Africa to eighteenth-century Saint Lucia, from the nineteenth-century United States to contemporary Ireland. Interwoven with its story of Philoctete's wound are plots of a Saint Lucian Achille and Hector struggling over a beautiful Helen, of an English Plunkett and Irish Maud seeking peace in the Caribbean, and of a composite poet—part Walcott, part blind pensioner—striving to tell the history of his island. Of Afro-Caribbean poems in English, only Kamau Brathwaite's The Arrivants (1967-69) is a work of comparable scope, size, and aspiration. Brathwaite's fragmentary trilogy also revisits the trauma of the Middle Passage and looks back to Africa, bases characters on inherited literary types and intermingles West Indian creole with literary English. But whereas an epic poem of Caribbean “wounds” or “hurts of history” might be expected of Brathwaite, professional historian and poet of New World African dispossession and survival, Walcott in the 1960s and 1970s declared his hostility to Afro-Caribbean literature about “the suffering of the victim.”⁶ While many Caribbean writers of this period chronicled the inherited devastation of European slavery and colonialism, Walcott, accusing Brathwaite among others of being absorbed in “self-pity,” “rage,” and “masochistic recollection,” called instead for an artistic celebration of the Adamic potential of the New World African: perpetual exile was, in his view, the condition for a new creativity.⁷

In Walcott's poetry of this period, the wound or scar is often the figurative locus of such criticisms. Toward the end of his grand autobiographical poem Another Life (1973), Walcott blasts Caribbean artists for their “masochistic veneration of / chains,” for revering “the festering roses made from their fathers' manacles.”⁸ He casts into the volcanic pit of his Antillean hell “the syntactical apologists of the Third World”:

Those who peel, from their own leprous flesh, their names,
who chafe and nurture the scars of rusted chains,
like primates favouring scabs, those who charge tickets
for another free ride on the middle passage. …
.....they measure each other's sores
to boast who has suffered most,
and their artists keep dying,
they are the saints of self-torture,
their stars are pimples of pus
on the night of our grandfathers,
they are hired like dogs to lick the sores of their people. …(9)

Pitching his voice in a willfully intemperate tone, Walcott attributes the scars, scabs, and sores of his damned not only to slavery but to recent masochistic indulgences. Grimly yet gleefully analogizing, Walcott maps onto Africanist returns to the trauma of slavery the Dantean figuration of hell as compulsive repetition of the past.

But in writing an epic poem of his native Saint Lucia, Walcott takes up the postcolonial poetics of affliction he once condemned, anatomizing the wounded body of Caribbean history through Philoctete,¹⁰ injured by a rusted anchor:

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,
then were hooked on the anchors of the abattoir.

(19)

Walcott makes an oblique reference to colonialism, comparing the wound to the “puffed blister of Portuguese man-o'-war” (19); and he also evokes “a wounded race” (299) and “the tribal / sorrow that Philoctete could not drown in alcohol” (129). Even after he is supposedly healed, Philoctete joins Achille in a Boxing Day rite that, like the Caribbean limbo dance, recapitulates the trauma of the Middle Passage, including the primordial deracination that Philoctete reenacts when he slaughters the yams:

                                                                                                                        All the pain
re-entered Philoctete, of the hacked yams, the hold
closing over their heads, the bolt-closing iron. …

(277)

In using the wound motif to signify slavery and colonialism, Omeros resembles countless other texts of African diaspora literature, and the reason for this prominence and pervasiveness is far from obscure. As C. L. R. James recalls in his discussion of the vicious treatment of Caribbean slaves, wounds were inflicted in many gruesome ways, and even “salt, pepper, citron, cinders, aloes, and hot ashes were poured on the bleeding wounds.”¹¹ Early on in Omeros, Walcott uses one of Philoctete's seizures to suggest that the inexpressible physical suffering of enslaved Africans is retained in the bodies of their descendants and that the pain still presses urgently for an impossible verbal release:

                                                            His knee was radiant iron,
his chest was a sack of ice, and behind the bars
of his rusted teeth, like a mongoose in a cage,
a scream was mad to come out; his tongue tickled its claws
on the roof of his mouth, rattling its bars in rage.

(21)

Naming conditions of black enslavement with the words “iron,” “bars,” “rusted,” and “cage,” Walcott portrays the pain of the wound as colonizing Philoctete's entire body. More than any of Walcott's previous works, Omeros memorializes the institutionalized atrocity of New World African slavery. Though as late as the 1980s Walcott continued to castigate West Indian literature for sulking—“Look what the slave-owner did”¹²—at the beginning of Omeros, Philoctete rolls up his trouser leg and “shows” his punctured shin to paying tourists, figuring, by extension, the poem's large-scale exhibition of Afro-Caribbean pain to the touristic reader (4). And whereas Walcott once locked in hell “those who peel, from their own leprous flesh, their names,” Philoctete refers to the colonially imposed name as one source of the ancestral wound:

                                                                                                    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.

(20)

Nursed and inspected, magnified and proliferated, the metaphor of the wound forms the vivid nucleus of Walcott's magnum opus. In an interview, Walcott indicates that the figure was the germ of Omeros: “A very good friend of mine had died,” he recounts, “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.”¹³ How can we reconcile Walcott's earlier and later positions? Part of the answer is that they are less antithetical than my juxtapositions make them appear to be. In spite of his pronouncements, Walcott was already mourning early on what he memorably called the “wound,” the “deep, amnesiac blow” of slavery and colonialism.¹⁴ He was deeply aware of the central trauma of Afro-Caribbean history and drawn to bodily figurations of it. Even so, he remained hesitant about fully sounding this theme before Omeros, so what made it possible for him to shift from one self-defined stance on the literature of Third World suffering to its apparent opposite? The classical figure of Philoctetes is an important part of the answer, the bridge by which Walcott crosses his own divide. His Afro-Greek Philoctete is a compromise formation, the venerable vehicle legitimizing the tenor of black rage and suffering. While still granting cultural authority to Europe, Walcott also reclaims it for Caribbean blacks more vigorously than before, tropicalizing and twisting an ancient Greek hero into a vibrant new figure for Afro-Caribbean pain. One of the oldest dead white European males is reborn in a wounded black body; a member of the colonizing tribe resigns his part to limp among the colonized.

Walcott's appropriation of the wounded Philoctete broadly resembles other well-known indigenizations of canonical Western characters. To dramatize Caribbean suffering and anticolonialism, Aimé Césaire remakes the doltish Caliban in his play Une tempête, Kamau Brathwaite the submissive Uncle Tom in The Arrivants, and Jean Rhys the raving Bertha Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea. Racked by an unhealing wound, Philoctete's body literalizes the anguish and anger of his celebrated West Indian counterparts. Like these writers, Walcott poetically inverts the material transfers of colonization, abducting a major character from the Western canon to dramatize the legacy of the West's atrocities. Just as “empires are smart enough to steal from the people they conquer,” Walcott has remarked, “the people who have been conquered should have enough sense to steal back.”¹⁵

But whereas Césaire, Brathwaite, and Rhys appropriate characters already oppressed by virtue of their gender, class, or race, Walcott strangely blacks up the classical white male war hero responsible for victory in the Trojan War. Like Walcott's seemingly perverse use of Crusoe instead of Friday to personify the Caribbean condition, the metamorphosis of this wounded Greek castaway is more violent and tangled than that of Caliban, Tom, or Bertha—white to black, colonizer to colonized, classic to contemporary.¹⁶ These dislocations are not merely subversive or “exotic” but emphatically defamiliarizing.¹⁷ Keeping the ironies acute, Walcott presents his Philoctete as even less a self-standing character, even more a signifier of the work of postcolonial reinscription—a Mona Lisa with a distinctively Caribbean mustache.¹⁸ With only minimal credibility as a naturalistic Caribbean fisherman, Walcott's Philoctete seems to have wandered out of Greek literature and stumbled into a textual universe where he suddenly embodies the colonial horrors perpetrated by the West. To highlight his reliance on a culture of slavery to indict the practice of slavery, Walcott pointedly refers to the institution as “Greek” (177) and ironically adduces “the Attic ideal of the first slave-settlement” (63), even as he turns a Greek hero into his synecdoche for all the damage wrought by slavery and colonialism. He repeatedly signals the seeming oddity of Philoctete's name in the Saint Lucian context (greater than that of the simpler Achille or Hector or Helen), as if to make of the name a foreign-language sign hung around his neck. “Pheeloh! Pheelosophee!” scream boys on their way to school (19), and sheep bleat “Beeeeeh, Philoctete!” (20); only at the moment of his apparent cure, “The yoke of the wrong name lifted from his shoulders” (247). Instead of naturalizing the name, Walcott turns it into a trope for violent colonial imposition, a partial cause of the wound to which it is metonymically linked.

Most familiar from Sophocles' eponymous play but also portrayed in countless other retellings from Homer to Seamus Heaney and in the visual arts from Attic vase painting to neoclassical sculpture, Philoctetes, with his exquisitely elaborated pain, has long served as the classical alternative to Christ in the Western iconography of pathos and innocent victimhood. Bitten by a venomous snake and abandoned on the isle of Lemnos by his Greek compatriots, the groaning, shrieking Philoctetes languishes for nine years, his wound stinking, his body convulsed with pain, his flesh covered only with rags.¹⁹ If Philoctetes enabled Lessing to affirm his neoclassical faith in the “moral greatness” of heroic endurance and helped Edmund Wilson to advance a psychological conception of artistic genius as “inextricably bound up” with “disability” and “disease,” he becomes for Walcott, as for Heaney in The Cure at Troy (1991), an allegorical figure for the postcolonial condition.²⁰ As agent of Troy's defeat, Philoctetes might seem a dubious choice to represent the colonial victim, yet it is also true that the Greeks exploit him to conquer Troy, that he is transported to an island and abandoned there, and that he lives in poverty, hunger, and pain. Unintelligible stammerings—literally the discourse of the barbaric—interrupt his Greek when he suffers spasms of pain. And his wound suggests not only affliction but also colonial penetration, evacuation, and forgetting. Faithful to the classical Philoctetes in remembering his stinking wound, island fate, physical misery, and eventual cure, Walcott nevertheless transports him to a different archipelago, darkens his skin, trades his bow for a fisherman's net, transcribes his pained ejaculations in creole, and effects his cure through an obeah woman. While it might be a tempting, if pedantic, exercise to dissect each of these modifications, the risk would lie in trapping Walcott's Philoctete in an exclusive relation to his Greek namesake; but his affinities are more culturally polyphonous than such a narrowly typological analysis could allow.

Despite the apparently obvious line of descent signaled by his name, from Philoctetes to Philoctete, Walcott has spliced a variety of literary genes and even antithetical cultures to create a surprisingly motley character. Like a composite character in one of Freud's dreams, the wound-bearing Philoctete encompasses a strange array of penumbral literary figures. Rei Terada discerns the “variegated” and even “confusingly overdetermined” models behind characters in Omeros, but critics have tended to see Philoctete as a character with a simple pedigree.²¹ If even the character in Omeros who appears to be simplest in his cultural inheritance turns out to have a multiple and contradictory parentage, then perhaps the postcolonial poet's seeming capitulation to or seeming subversion of Western influences needs to be rethought as a more ambiguous and ambivalent synthesis than is usually acknowledged.

Philoctete represents Walcott's absorption and refiguration not only of Philoctetes but also, strangely enough, of Caliban. Caliban? Doesn't Walcott scorn the postcolonial transvaluation of Caliban as West Indian hero? Doesn't this poet, who saw himself in youth as “legitimately prolonging the mighty line of Marlowe, of Milton,” belong, unlike George Lamming, Aimé Césaire, and Kamau Brathwaite, among the adherents of Prospero, whose Caribbean makeover as “white imperialist” he debunks as “fashionable, Marxist-evolved” revisionism?²² Walcott's seemingly shameless mimicry of a character out of the classical tradition distracts us, I believe, from his covert refashioning of the Caribbean paradigm of anticolonial defiance. Philoctete, when we first meet him, describes the cutting down of trees, though for making canoes rather than firewood. Closely associated with the land, he mirrors, as if by magical sympathy, his natural island environment in the Caribbean. He personifies his entire race's grievance against the colonizers. He launches an abortive revolution by demolishing the garden that sustains him. He “curse[s]” because never “black people go get rest / from God,” much as Caliban curses and rues his compulsory hard labor (21). At the moment of Philoctete's cursing, “a fierce cluster of arrows / targeted the sore, and he screamed”; similarly, Caliban's curses prompt his master to promise, “I'll rack thee with old cramps, / Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar.”²³ Seized by the unpredictable onset of physical torment, Walcott's Philoctete fuses a classical paradigm with the Third World's transvaluation of Shakespeare's wretch. But whereas the new Caliban was already becoming a West Indian cliché a couple of decades earlier, Walcott paradoxically refreshes the symbol of postcolonial agony and anger by reaching for a still more wizened prototype. His career-long resistance to Caliban, as to the wound trope, helps him to flush these literary inheritances with new power and complexity.

As figures of Caribbean oppression, Philoctetes and Caliban complement each other: one of them, tormented on an island that is rightly his, is especially well-suited to allegorizing colonization, while the other, transported to an alien island, easily figures the displacement and deracination of West Indian slavery. But whereas Philoctetes has remained the cultural property of the West, Caliban's postcolonial indigenization has been so vigorous that, at least regionally, he is as much a Caribbean as a Shakespearean figure. Walcott's closet Caliban bears the impress of postcolonial revisionism or what he concedes are the often “brilliant re-creations” by fellow Caribbean authors.²⁴ Unlike Shakespeare's but like Césaire's Caliban, for example, Walcott's Philoctete is suspicious of his cumbersome name and even wants, as we have seen, to slice it from his body. In Césaire's Une tempête, Caliban decides he doesn't “want to be called Caliban any longer” because Caliban “isn't [his] name” and his real “name has been stolen.”²⁵ To perpetuate Caliban, Walcott paradoxically de-indigenizes him, reroutes the figure back through colonial culture, and thus makes him new. Exemplifying the twists and turns of intercultural inheritance, this literary maneuver belies the narrative of postcolonial literary development as progression from alien metropolitan influence to complete incorporation within the native cultural body. The culturally alien and native, outside and inside can, it seems, stage a polyrhythmic dance.

Nevertheless, to see Walcott's wounded character as a combination of the classical Philoctetes and the Caribbean Caliban still oversimplifies his genesis. When Walcott yanked Philoctetes out of antiquity to recast him, still other figures from other cultures stuck to the prototype. Philoctete, as Walcott remarks of Crusoe, “changes shape … with Protean cunning.”²⁶ Drawing on Western classicism for his character's base, veering homeward for a Caribbean admixture, Walcott spins the globe again and picks up other traces from Western modernism. Caliban may seem fishlike, but a Euromodernist text that also interpolates The Tempest provides a closer antecedent for Walcott's wounded fisherman, who, with his “unhealed” wound, “limp[s]” and languishes at the waterside, feeling his “sore twitch / its wires up to his groin”—a mysteriously unhealed wound that reflects the wounded condition of the land and indeed the entire region (9, 10). Like the Fisher King in Eliot's Waste Land, Philoctete is a synecdochic figure for a general loss, injury, and impotence that must be healed for the (is)lands to be set in order. If Philoctete is a kind of Caribbean Fisher King, Achille plays the role of questing knight who must journey to the Chapel Perilous—in Omeros, Africa, site of ancestral enslavement—to rejuvenate the wounded fisherman, the land, and its people.

Remembering the modernist metamyth of the wounded vegetation god, Walcott places Omeros in a line that stems not only from Eliot but from a throng of Western artists and anthropologists as well. The animistic opening scene of Omeros recalls, for example, Sir James Frazer and Robert Graves in its description of the sacrificial felling of godlike trees for the making of canoes. Philoctete narrates how he and his companions steeled themselves “to turn into murderers,” “to wound” the trees they depend on for their livelihood (3). As a tree fell, the sun rose, “blood splashed on the cedars, / / and the grove flooded with the light of sacrifice” (5). Achille “hacked the limbs from the dead god, knot after knot, / wrenching the severed veins from the trunk” (6), but once the tree is reborn on the water as a canoe, it and Hector's canoe “agreed with the waves to forget their lives as trees” (8). Alluding to the annihilation of the Arawaks, Walcott adapts the vegetation myths of the aboriginal inhabitants of the island, as mediated through archetypalist modernism: “The first god was a gommier.” He metaphorically reenacts a sacrificial rite to open the way for his own tale: much as the fishermen must kill trees to remake them as canoes, so the poet must hew the linguistic timber of his forebears to remake it as his own vehicle. Introducing the character Philoctete before anyone else, the poem insists on the analogy between his representative wound and what it repeatedly calls the “wound” suffered by the trees. Thus it makes of him the poem's spirit of life, of nature, and of the island, and his wounded body the synecdoche for all the wounds suffered by the island's natives, slaves, and natural beings, possibly even its epic poet.

Like Osiris and other vegetation deities in the modernist metamyth, Philoctete requires the ministrations of a female counterpart to be healed, in his case the obeah woman or sibyl Ma Kilman. Paralleling Achille's magical return to Africa, Ma Kilman discovers an herbal antidote of African origins, transplanted by a sea swift, and she brews the remedy in an old sugar cauldron, allegorized as “the basin / of the rusted Caribbean” (247). His “knuckled spine like islands,” Philoctete emerges from his healing bath “like a boy … with the first clay's / innocent prick”—the new Caribbean “Adam” (248). But whereas the concept of the New World Adam resonates throughout Walcott's earlier work, he is now an aspiration, a potential achievement in the New World; the wounded, impotent Adonis, Parsifal, Fisher King, or Philoctetes more nearly represents the New World condition, overcome provisionally and strenuously. Philoctete becomes Adamic because an African flower rejoins him to the African past, not, as in the earlier Walcott, because of his “amnesia.” Indeed, at the risk of crowding the field of prototypes still further, we can gauge Walcott's change in the difference between his earlier tendency to imagine the West Indian as healthy castaway and Crusoe's replacement in Omeros by another sort of castaway—this one harboring a stinking, ulcerous wound, his body tormented by the persistence of the past, ameliorated only by the retrieval of a precolonial inheritance.²⁷

For all Philoctete's links with the Euromodernist figure of the vegetation god, we must spin the globe again to appreciate why the wound-healing quest in Omeros turns to Africa. Responsible not only for the postcolonial reappraisal of Caliban but also, of course, for the Caribbean recuperation of African aesthetics and values, negritude might seem an unlikely influence on Walcott, given his testy assessment of it in essay like the grudgingly titled “Necessity of Negritude” (1964).²⁸ While granting that negritude helped to restore “a purpose and dignity to the descendants of slaves,” Walcott suggests that “nostalgia” and uniquely French pressures of “assimilation” produced the movement's “artificial” reconstruction of a black identity rooted in Africa. “Return,” Walcott later writes, is “impossible, for we cannot return to what we have never been.”²⁹ Yet in Omeros the return to Africa is key to healing the torn black body and racial memory of the Caribbean, as personified by Philoctete. Walcott describes in loving detail how “centuries ago” an African swift managed, in bringing a special seed across the ocean, “to carry the cure / that precedes every wound” (238, 239). This curative plot of return to a precolonial Africa would have been unimaginable without negritude, however long past its heyday and however often resisted by Walcott. Moreover, Ma Kilman commits what would seem to be another cardinal Walcottian sin in reviving the African gods “Erzulie, / / Shango, and Ogun” to find the African flower that will cure Philoctete (242). For “the new magnifiers of Africa,” Walcott had tartly stated, the “deepest loss is of the old gods,” and poets who look “to a catalogue of forgotten gods … engage in masochistic recollection.”³⁰ True, the narrator of Omeros emphasizes that the gods, “their features obscured” and “thinned,” “had lost their names / / and, therefore, considerable presence” (242). Nevertheless, he assures us, “They were there” (243). In one of the most memorable scenes of Omeros, the gods, having earlier “rushed / across an ocean” in “loud migration,” swarm like bats in Ma Kilman's grove, their wings forming “crisscrossing stitches” that presage the closing of Philoctete's wound (242). Walcott even flirts momentarily with the concept of race-based blood inheritance of African belief: the old gods sprout through Ma Kilman's body, “as if her veins were their roots” and her arms their branches (242).³¹

While negritude overcomes Walcott's resistances in his mythologizing of Africa as site of wholeness and cure, it also plays a part in engendering the wound figure itself. Since Walcott is seldom thought to owe much to negritude poetry, it might be worth pausing on this seemingly improbable point of connection, for all the obvious differences. In Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1947), called by Walcott “the most powerful expression of Negritude,” Césaire repeatedly personifies his West Indian homeland as a wounded body.³² The speaker reconciles himself to returning to and even embracing a land disfigured by its forgotten wounds (“je reviens vers la hideur désertée de vos plaies”; “je dénombre les plaies avec une sorte d'allégresse”).³³ Even as he celebrates and idealizes the black body, he also remembers its wounds cut by the slavemaster's whip and brand, wounds that still sound like tom-toms (“tam-tams inanes de plaies sonores”).³⁴ One year after the first French edition of the Cahier was published, another crucial text of negritude followed hard on its heels in 1948, an anthology of francophone African and West Indian poets, prefaced by Jean-Paul Sartre's influential essay “Orphée Noir.” The black poet, according to Sartre, writes great collective poetry when, in part, “exhibiting his wounds.”³⁵ The black poet's capacity for articulation is so fused with a historical condition of pain and injury that, in one of the poems Sartre cites, the Haitian writer Jacques Roumain pleads in an apostrophe to Africa, “make … / of my mouth the lips of your wound [plaie].”³⁶ The collective memory that unites black poets of different languages and regions, according to Sartre, is one of untold, massive suffering. Slavery, despite its abolition half a century before the negritude poets were born, “lingers on as a very real memory,” a point that he supports by quoting first Léon Damas of French Guyana:

Still real is my stunned condition of the past
of
blows from knotted cords of bodies calcinated
from toe to calcinated back
of dead flesh of red iron firebrands of arms
broken under the whip which is breaking loose …

and, second, the Haitian poet Jean-François Brierre:

… Often like me you feel stiffnesses
Awaken after murderous centuries
And old wounds bleed in your flesh …
[Et saigner dans ta chair les anciennes blessures …](37)

The vividness of the trope of the wounded black body in these influential negritude texts should prompt us to reconsider the assumption that in Omeros Walcott has simply transported the classical Philoctetes among other Homeric types to the Caribbean, reincarnating him in a black body, encasing him in African skin. It may be equally plausible to argue that Walcott places a Greek mask on the wounded black body of negritude.

Yet neither of these paradigms offers the definitive solution to the implicit question I have sought to complicate by oscillating between North and South, West and East, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean: simply put, where does Philoctete's wound come from? Literally, from a rusty anchor, and allegorically, from slavery; but once the question is shifted from the mimetic to the literary historical register, the puzzle of origins multiplies. Does it come from the wounded black body of Afro-Caribbean negritude or the Euromodernist fertility god? From the Caribbean Caliban or the Greek Philoctetes? Yet even these regional designations are reductive: the Caribbean Caliban evolved from a Western canonical figure; many vegetation gods appropriated by Western modernists were originally Eastern; and negritude developed in part as a dialectical reversal of Western colonialist stereotypes. In intermingling Caribbean and European literary paradigms, Walcott thickens the cultural hybridity of each. Rather than purify what might be called the “dialectic” of the tribe, Walcott accelerates, complicates, and widens it.

One of Walcott's recurrent metaphors for cultural hybridity may seem, at this point, unsurprising: the scar. Comparing the cultural heterogeneity of the Antilles to a shattered but reassembled vase, Walcott said in his Nobel address that the “restoration shows its white scars” and that “if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture.”³⁸ More somber than Walcott's tropes of webbing and weaving, let alone popular metaphors like melting pot, salad bowl, or callaloo, the scar signifies cultural convergence in the Americas without effacing its violent genesis. At the end of “The Muse of History,” Walcott movingly recalls the violent past deposited in his body, apostrophizing a white forefather, “slave seller and slave buyer,” and a black forefather “in the filth-ridden gut of the slave ship.” But the scars left by the slavemaster's “whip” are metamorphosed in Walcott's magnificent image for his and the Caribbean's fusion of black and white skins, of Northern and Southern Hemispheres: “the monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice.”³⁹ Even though the wound has scarified in these descriptions, Walcott never reduces the bitterness or pain to a condition that can be repaired completely; rather, it is constitutive of the new synthesis. Walcott returns to this figure near the end of Omeros, when he represents the intercultural labor of his poem as having

          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. …

(319)

In Yeats's words, Walcott suggests that “nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.”⁴⁰

Seaming black skin and white masks, white skin and black masks, Walcott's Philoctete stands in a long line of Walcottian personifications of cultural and racial hybridity. His name taken from the culture of colonizer and slaver, yet his wounded black body allegorizing their cruelty, Philoctete recalls the “divided” speaker of “A Far Cry from Africa,” cursing the brutality of the colonizers yet cursing them in the language they have given him. Greco-Caribbean, Euro-African, Anglo-Hebraic, Philoctete is a boldly intercultural amalgamation, like the self-defined Shabine of “The Schooner Flight”:

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.(41)

Although Philoctete seems at first to represent but one cultural and racial pole of the Caribbean and thus to differ from Shabine and from Walcott's other early hybrids, Walcott suggests that even in constructing a seemingly monocultural character, in this case to allegorize black pain, the Caribbean poet builds into his aesthetic construct inevitably mixed cultural inheritances. Even Philoctete's cure, like his wound, turns out to be transcultural. Ma Kilman relies, as we have seen, on a specifically African plant and on African gods to heal Philoctete's wound. But she attends five o'clock Mass on the day she delivers Philoctete of gangrene. When she finds the curative African flower, she still wears her Sunday clothes. Vacillating between Greece and the Caribbean, the poem calls Ma Kilman “the sibyl, the obeah-woman.” This apposition reverses the presumably literal and metaphoric, and succeeding lines perpetuate the whirligig in naming her “the spidery sibyl / / hanging in a sack from the cave at Cumae, the obeah / … possessed” woman (245).

Decades before the academic dissemination of such concepts as hybridity, creolization, cross-culturality, postethnicity, postnationalism, métissage, and mestizaje, Walcott argued vehemently for an intercultural model of postcolonial literature.⁴² Against a “separatist” black literature that “belligerently asserts its isolation, its difference,” he counterposes a vision of the Caribbean writer as inevitably “mixed”: New World blacks must use what Walcott ironically calls “the white man's words” as well as “his God, his dress, his machinery, his food. And, of course, his literature.”⁴³ But Walcott also attacks pervasive assumptions about so-called white American literature—a more powerful if less visible identitarian counterpart to negritude and nativism: “To talk about the contribution of the black man to American culture or civilization is absurd, because it is the black who energized that culture, who styles it, just as it is the black who preserved and energized its faith.”⁴⁴ For Walcott, as for other Caribbean writers such as Wilson Harris and Edouard Glissant, tribalist views from either extreme disfigure the mixed reality of New World culture, repressing it in favor of simplistic narratives of cultural origin.

The twisted skein of intercultural influences in Philoctete reveals the distortion involved in conceiving of postcolonial literature as a progression from colonial dominance to indigeneity, European subordination to nativist freedom.⁴⁵ According to this standard narrative, Walcott's use of the Philoctetes type would seem to be a regression to an earlier phase of Eurocentric indebtedness; yet the same linear narrative would also have to note in the figure a progressive step toward indigenous articulation of West Indian suffering. Is Walcott recolonizing Caribbean literature for Europeans by using this and other Greek types? Or is he decolonizing it by representing Caribbean agony? Does the poet reenslave the descendant of slaves by shackling him with a European name and prototype? Or does he liberate the Afro-Caribbean by stealing a literary type from former slavers and making it signify their brutality? Too simplistic for the cultural entanglements of a poem like Omeros, the evolutionary model of postcolonial literature is rooted in a discredited model of national development. We need a more flexible language to describe how a poet like Walcott can put into dialectical interrelation literary and cultural influences that may seem incompatible. Critics have seen an evolution in Walcott's work from literary Eurocentrism to Afrocentrism, from denying to embracing African influences on his and others' Caribbean art. Yet Philoctete's wound and cure show Walcott not shedding but deepening his European interests as he explores his African commitments, becoming neither a Eurocentric nor an Afrocentric poet but an ever more multicentric poet of the contemporary world.

Having traced the cross-cultural literary genealogies of the wound and its bearer in Omeros, I would like to turn from the vertical axis and questions of literary sedimentation to the horizontal and the wound's intratextual resonances, and here too the profoundly intercultural character of Walcott's trope emerges. Once again this hybridity may be surprising, since the wound in Omeros at first seems to encode unambiguously the painful Afro-Caribbean legacy of slavery and colonialism. While using the wound motif to honor the uniqueness of this black experience, Walcott nevertheless cross-fertilizes the trope, extending it to other peoples as well. Hybrid in its intertextual ancestry, the wound is also a trope of polymorphous diversity within the text. No sooner has Walcott identified the wound motif with the black experience than he introduces his principal white character, who also happens to be wounded. “He has to be wounded,” because of the poem's cross-racial thematics: “affliction is one theme / of this work” (28). What caused Plunkett's wound, other than Walcott's desire to create a cross-cultural echo? Like Philoctete's wound, Plunkett's has only the bare outlines of a literal pathogenesis. Major Plunkett, wounded in the head by an explosion during the North African campaign of World War II (27), also seems to bear the inherited wound of European colonialism. He even discovers that a midshipman with his name suffered a “fatal wound” in the Battle of the Saints, the famed eighteenth-century battle for Saint Lucia (86). Certainly, Plunkett's wound differs suggestively from Philoctete's: it is to his head, not his body, and it never induces spasms of uncontrollable physical pain. These and other differences point up the more cerebral nature of white suffering in the aftermath of colonialism. Even so, Walcott insists by emblem and analogy that both colonizer and colonized inherit a legacy of affliction in the Caribbean.

As if repeated application of the word “wound” to a Euro-Caribbean and an Afro-Caribbean were not enough to reveal their commonality, Walcott rhymes Plunkett and Philoctete in a variety of ways. Their names may not literally rhyme, except perhaps for the final syllable, but they share an initial p, an l, and the nearly anagrammatic final letters -kett and -ctete. Though the men differ predictably in appearance, Plunkett, with “a cloud wrapped around his head” during convalescence, recalls the “foam-haired Philoctete” (28, 9). The stoic Philoctete resolves to “endure” his affliction with the patience of an “old horse” (22), even as Plunkett, true to his own stiff-lipped heritage, rejects the “easy excuse” of blaming his temper on his injury (22, 56). Philoctete's wound apparently renders him impotent, and the great sorrow of Plunkett's life is his inability to father a son (29). Like Ma Kilman, the female anointer of Philoctete's wound, Plunkett's wife, Maud, his nurse in the war, looks after his head injury.⁴⁶ After Maud dies, Ma Kilman acts as a medium in Plunkett's effort to contact her. Whether these links are instances of “Homeric repetition,” “coincidence,” or Joycean counterpoint (96), they make inescapable the connections between one affliction and the other. As early as “Ruins of a Great House” (1962), Walcott tries to hold in a single work the bitter knowledge that “some slave is rotting in this manorial lake” and “that Albion too was once / A colony like ours,” that both slave and master inherit histories of excruciating pain, cruelty, and abuse.⁴⁷ As Walcott says of “doubt,” the wound “isn't the privilege of one complexion” (182).

Walcott's use of the wound at first seems to satisfy Fredric Jameson's well-known generalization: “All third-world texts are necessarily … allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories.”⁴⁸ Read thus, the Walcottian wound would be a trope of unproblematic referentiality and stand for the particular historical experience of a particular race in a particular part of the world. Long codified as a dominant trope for black enslavement and mimetic of real wounds perpetrated on real black bodies for hundreds of years, the wound would seem to be the perfect, unambiguous allegory of Afro-Caribbean history. But Walcott plays energetically on the instabilities of the trope. For the wound also has, as Elaine Scarry observes, “a nonreferentiality that rather than eliminating all referential activity instead gives it a frightening freedom of referential activity.”⁴⁹ Discourses of realist fiction and of nationalist politics might seek to control and even defeat the “referential instability” of the wound, affixing it to a particular people, motive, or cause. But by attaching the wound trope to the name Philoctete and to a black body, Walcott already contaminates and disrupts the specificities demanded by “national allegory.” Moreover, the lancet wound that Philoctete suffers from confounds inside and outside; it is the point at which racially unmarked interiority erupts as exteriority and the world within breaks through the epidermal surface. While much contemporary criticism views postcolonial texts, more than their metropolitan counterparts, as preeminent examples of the literature of national and ethnographic specificity, Walcott devises a transnational allegory about both the wound of black Saint Lucian history and a larger subject—what he calls “the incurable / / wound of time” (319).

To write about pain and mortality as transcultural experiences may seem to risk an easy humanism or discredited universalism. Walcott keeps this tendency in check by reserving for the wound an interpretive opacity. Philoctete's wound is a piece of body language that, like many literary wounds, signifies its status as polyvalent sign by resembling a “mouth” (18). But it is a dumb mouth, a sign that also signifies its inarticulateness. Although it is an external mark that tourists, associated elsewhere in the poem with neocolonialism, pay “extra silver” to see, it remains mysterious, turned inward, folded and guarded. Walcott describes it as “puckered like the corolla / of a sea-urchin,” in contrast to “a garrulous waterfall” that tourists hear “pour out its secret.” Philoctete “does not explain [the wound's] cure. / ‘It have some things’—he smiles—‘worth more than a dollar’” (4). Hovering between dumbness and communication, the wound offers touristic readers an entryway into Afro-Caribbean experience even as it reminds them that they can never fully comprehend the local burden of historical pain, that they must remain voyeurs peering from without. Philoctete's wound elicits from him a scream that is “mad to come out” but that is held back “behind the bars / / of his rusted teeth” (21). Inducing yet disabling speech, the wound figures both the promise and the limits of language as vehicle of interpersonal and intercultural understanding.

Walcott can thematize Philoctete's wound as language without betraying the Afro-Caribbean experience because Caribbean blacks also suffered the wound of colonially imposed languages, such as French and English, which are interwoven (sometimes in creole) throughout the poem. Just as Philoctete experiences his alien and inscrutable name as a festering wound he wishes he could cut from his body, Achille realizes that he does not share his forebears' belief in an essential connection between names and things, that he does “not know” what his name means: “Trees, men, we yearn for a sound that is missing” (137). If Philoctete's wound is a language—partly readable, partly opaque—his language is also a kind of painful wound haunted by the memory of an Adamic language it has displaced. But this woundlike language is also potentially its own cure: as the narrator remarks near the end of Omeros, “Like Philoctete's wound, this language carries its cure, / Its radiant affliction” (323). The line break, in a pregnant syntactic ambiguity, hovers between an elided conjunction (which would make the cure and affliction opposites) and a relation of apposition (in which the cure would be the affliction). The metaphor of light, repeated from earlier descriptions of the wound as “radiant” (9, 21), tips the seeming antithesis toward identity, much as the poet has done earlier in punningly mistranslating Philoctete's complaint in French creole that he is wounded, “Moin blessé,” as “I am blest” (18). The poet's discovery of likeness between the words blessé and “blest,” like his monolingual play on “affliction” and “fiction” (28), demonstrates how the European languages inflicted on West Indians can be turned from curses into blessings. Like Yeats, who could never give up his “love,” in spite of his “hatred,” for the English language, the poet of Omeros refers to “the wound of a language I'd no wish to remove,” even after the poet character and Plunkett mimic upper-class accents in a linguistic charade (270).

Philoctete's wound, no less than the colonial language it partly figures, carries its cure dialectically within itself. Indeed, wound, weapon, and cure belong to a metonymic family that Walcott strengthens by metaphoric substitutions throughout the poem. When Walcott compares a “running wound” to “the rusty anchor / that scabbed Philoctete's shin,” for example, he identifies the shape and color of the wound with the weapon, and the word “scabbed” suggests both the injury and its cure (178). As if to close the gap between a punctured leg and the healing agent, Walcott chants their prepositional coalescence: “the flower on his shin,” “the flower on his shin-blade,” “the foul flower / on his shin” (235, 244, 247). The tropological binding up of seeming antitheses also works in the opposite direction. In writing that the “pronged flower / / sprang like a buried anchor,” Walcott identifies the curative African plant with the weapon whose injury it reverses, as later with the wound it heals: “The wound of the flower, its gangrene, its rage / festering for centuries, reeked with corrupted blood, / / seeped the pustular drops instead of sunlit dew” (237, 244). Using metaphor to leap the gap between destruction and healing, Walcott's language performatively converts injury into remedy. The only flower that can heal Philoctete's wound must match, perhaps even exceed, the wound's “bitterness,” “reek,” and “stench” (237); thus Walcott suggests that the poem cannot contribute to healing the wounds of Afro-Caribbean history without reproducing their pain. Like the Boxing Day rite in which “all the pain / / reentered Philoctete,” the poet's language carries a cure that must continually reopen and expose the wound (277). In fashioning a mirror relation between injury and remedy, Walcott represents within Omeros the poem's homeopathic relation to the traumatic history of the West Indies. Joining black and white, Old World and New, the wound's cross-cultural metaphoricity exhibits the structural doubleness that is fundamental to the poem's logic.

The wound motif exemplifies the slipperiness and polyvalence of poetic discourse that circulates between races, crossing lines of class and community, bridging differences between West Indian fisherman and Greek warrior. With its resonance and punning, imagistic doubling and metaphoric webbing, Walcott's poetry demonstrates the kinds of imaginative connections and transgressions that have ironically made poetry a minor field in postcolonial literary studies. For poetry, at least in Walcott's hands, is less respectful than prose fiction of racial, regional, national, and gender loyalties.⁵⁰

The lancet wound migrates from Philoctete to a white American woman, when Walcott attributes to Catherine Weldon “the wound of her son's / / death from a rusty nail” (176). By means of the wound trope and others, Walcott crosses and recrosses lines of race, nation, and gender. Moreover, Walcott rides the trope across the line between narrative and lyric poetry as he compares his personal loss in a failed marriage to Philoctete's historical and communal injury: “There was no difference / between me and Philoctete” (245), he says, later coupling himself and Philoctete in a mirror image when they wave in greeting: “We shared the one wound, the same cure” (295). Although postuniversalist sensibilities might bridle at such assertions of identity, Walcott signals the distances he traverses by trope. The poet stays at a hotel; the fisherman lives in a poor village. The estranged poet looks “down” from a “height” at his island, “not like Philoctete / / limping among his yams and the yam flowers” (250). Philoctete is a contemporary black man; Catherine Weldon is a nineteenth-century white woman. But Walcott refuses to accept the identitarian fear that shuttling across these enormous differences erases them; he shoots the gulf (in Emerson's phrase), suggesting that the greater danger lies in becoming captivated by the narcissism of differences. As the poem's primary wound-bearer, Philoctete embodies the principle of metaphorical coupling, mediating not only between Greece and Africa, white and black, wound and cure but also between Achille and Hector (“Philoctete tried to make peace between them” [47]), between capitalist and Marxist parties (he campaigns for “United Love” [107]), and between the living and the dead (he names drowned fishermen [128]), as well as between male and female (he and Achille become “androgynous / warriors” during their Boxing Day dance [276]).

The wound joins the major characters of Omeros in a large metaphorical company. The pervasive love wound is one example of this effect: Hector's transport or minivan is like a “flaming wound” because he fears Helen still loves Achille (118); Achille “believed he smelt as badly as Philoctete / from the rotting loneliness” (116); Helen so misses Achille that it seems the nightingale's “monodic moan / / came from the hole in her heart” (152); Plunkett is afflicted with another wound on the death of his wife (309); and Saint Lucia's fishermen suffer “that obvious wound / made from loving the sea over their own country” (302). Promiscuously linking various characters in amorous anguish, the wound trope also comes to signify the love that poets like Shelley have long associated with metaphor. A metaphor for metaphor, the wound even circulates through various parts of the nonhuman world, from the volcano whose “wound closed in smoke” (59) to the French colonial ship Ville de Paris “wallowing in her wounded pride” (85), and from a field (170), a bay (238), a cauldron (246), and a hut (272), to shacks (178), coves (249), the entire island (249), the sky (313), even the whole Caribbean basin (247). Unleashing the pathetic fallacy, Walcott sees the region's brutal history reflected throughout its natural and human landscape. While a prodigious passion for likeness is characteristic of Walcott's poetry, this passion also typifies a much older and larger propensity of poetry, harnessing the metaphorical play of resemblance within language to amplify and free it. Acknowledging this legacy, he presents the phantasmagoria of the poet, Omeros, as the ideal embodiment of metaphorical conjuncture. Omeros's language is a “Greek calypso,” and his images flicker between black and white, the living and the dead, the real and the fantastic (286).

From the perspective of the identity politics that sometimes underwrites the study of Third World literatures, metaphor and postcoloniality might seem to be strange bedfellows, but they should be regarded as reciprocal, interwoven, and mutually enlarging. The movement of metaphor across ethnic, regional, and gender boundaries is well suited to the openly hybrid and intercultural character of postcolonial literature and finds perhaps its fullest articulation in poetry, from Walcott to Ramanujan, Soyinka, and Agha Shahid Ali. Forced and voluntary migration, crossings of one people with another, linguistic creolization, and racial miscegenation—these are the sorts of displacements, wanderings, and interminglings that poetic metaphor can powerfully encode in the fabric of a postcolonial text. To trace the spiralings of the wound motif in Omeros is to begin to understand how a poetic imagination as fecund as Walcott's can, in its restless work of discovering and creating resemblance, confound tribal, ethnic, or national limits.

“Trauma” is, of course, Greek for wound, and Walcott's Omeros could be said—extending a psychological analogy of Glissant's—to remember, repeat, and work through the trauma of Afro-Caribbean history.⁵¹ But this ameliorative work should not be confused with a definitive healing. Although both the character Philoctete and the “phantom narrator” are represented as being cured, Walcott so proliferates and disperses the trope that, even after the climactic scene of healing, the wounds of history and language are shown to persist. As early as the opening of Omeros, to which I return by way of conclusion, we can already see that Walcott turns the trope with such vigor that no fictive cure will ever put a stop to its motion. Even in this first canto, the wound bounces from trees to earth to blacks to native people. In the poem's scene of origination, Walcott wants to show victimizer and victimized to be ambiguous, shifting positions.⁵² Philoctete starts out as neocolonial victim: he “smiles for the tourists, who try taking / his soul with their cameras.” Walcott suggests that the neocolonial tourist and, by implication, the touristic reader perpetuate the colonial trauma in trying to penetrate the interior of the Caribbean descendant of slaves (“trauma” derives from a word for “to pierce” [tetrainein]). But soon enough Philoctete is telling how he and the other fishermen had “axes” in their “eyes,” as the tourists have piercing gazes. Indeed, he and his comrades, like latter-day colonizers, become “murderers”: “‘I lift up the axe and pray for strength in my hands / to wound the first cedar’” (3). Suddenly reader, tourist, and colonizer become vulnerable to the wounding they at first seemed accused of committing. If metaphor turns Philoctete's wounds into weapons, it also inverts his black victimization as soon as that status is established. But neither is the alternative role stable, for Philoctete now reveals his own painful scar, which identifies him with the wounds that he will perpetrate on the trees. And as Walcott alludes to the annihilation of the Arawaks and their language, he recalls a still-earlier trauma from which there can be no question of recovery. Sharing a fate of island suffering yet surviving it to replace the native population, Philoctete and the other black fishermen soon resume the role of inflicting, not receiving, wounds: they turn off the chain saw and then, ripping “the wound clear” of vines, “examine the wound it / had made,” as the blood of a Saint Lucian sunrise “trickled” and “splashed” on the trees (5).

Is Walcott, as poet of cross-cultural affliction, a “fortunate traveller” of transnational trope? Because he sets this most politically loaded of metaphors spinning, does he irresponsibly confound distinctions between colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed? How can this cross- racializing of the wound be reconciled with the asymmetrical suffering that marks colonialism and postcoloniality, let alone slavery? These are the undeniable risks of Walcott's free riding of the wound trope across moral and historical divisions, but his wager is that they are risks worth taking.

If exclusive fidelity to a single history of affliction is required of the Third World poet, then Walcott certainly fails this test. But Walcott conceives the Antilles as a site of multiple and inextricable histories of victimization and cruelty, histories deposited not only in its landscape and its languages but even in his body. From an identitarian perspective, poets like Walcott who metaphorically enact interethnic connections falsify the historical specificity of their people's experience. But for Walcott, the greater falsification would lie in an aesthetic separatism blind to the culturally webbed history of the Caribbean, of his ancestors, and of his imagination, in a viewpoint hostile to the cross-racial and cross-historical identifications the New World offers.

As graphic emblem of convulsive, bodily pain, the wound in Omeros memorializes the untold suffering of Afro-Caribbeans, yet as trope, it inevitably poeticizes pain, compares this particular experience with others, and thus must either mar or deconstruct experiential uniqueness by plunging it into the whirlpool of metaphorical resemblance and difference. Anchor-like in shape and origins, the wound trope in Omeros drifts from the ground of a particular people's experience to the afflictions of native peoples, Greeks, Jews, colonial Americans, even the English. Because Walcott's intermappings of suffering never occlude Philoctete's primacy and never sugarcoat the trauma of slavery, they keep in view differences between oppressor and oppressed, even as they open up and reveal the connections between the experiences of Afro-Caribbeans and others. Appropriating a Western icon of suffering and refashioning a polysemous and multiparented trope, Walcott's Omeros champions a postcolonial poetics of affliction that unravels the distinction between “victim's literature” and its supposed opposite.

Notes

1. Derek Walcott, Conversations with Derek Walcott, ed. William Baer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 59.

2. Derek Walcott, “Leaving School” (1965), in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, ed. Robert D. Hamner (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1993), 32.

3. Recalling Yeats's description of the Black and Tans as “drunken soldiery” (“drunken officer of British rule”), Walcott also transmutes Yeats's lines, “All men are dancers and their tread / Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong,” into a similarly bleak description of the compulsive brutality of “man”: “Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars / Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum.” See W. B. Yeats, The Poems, rev. ed., ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 207, 208; Derek Walcott, Collected Poems, 1948-1984 (New York: Noonday-Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), 17-18. Laurence A. Breiner dates the first publication of “A Far Cry from Africa” in An Introduction to West Indian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 159; 247, n. 20.

4. Derek Walcott, Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), 199. All further references to Omeros appear parenthetically in the text. Although Joyce is the more direct influence on Omeros, Yeats's presence is evident from the introduction of the two major female characters in the story: an Irishwoman notably named Maud and a local woman named Helen, who caribbeanizes a Greek paradigm as Yeats had earlier “irished” her.

   Walcott has often been fruitfully discussed as a poet of “mixed” culture, “divided” inheritance, and “schizophrenic” allegiance; see Paul Breslin, “‘I Met History Once, But He Ain't Recognize Me’: The Poetry of Derek Walcott,” Triquarterly 68 (1987): 168-83; Joseph Brodsky, “On Derek Walcott,” New York Review of Books, 10 November 1983, 39-41; James Dickey, review of Collected Poems, 1948-1984, by Derek Walcott, New York Times Book Review, 2 February 1986, 8; Rita Dove, “‘Either I'm Nobody, or I'm a Nation,’” review of Collected Poems, 1948-1984, by Derek Walcott, Parnassus 14, no. 1 (1987): 49-76; J. D. McClatchy, review of Collected Poems, 1948-1984, by Derek Walcott, New Republic, 24 March 1986, 36-38; James McCorkle, “‘The Sigh of History’: The Poetry of Derek Walcott,” Verse (“Derek Walcott Feature Issue,” ed. Susan M. Schultz) 11, no. 2 (1994): 104-12; J. A. Ramsaran, “Derek Walcott: New World Mediterranean Poet,” World Literature Written in English 21, no. 1 (1982): 133-47; Rei Terada, Walcott's Poetry: American Mimicry (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992); Helen Vendler, “Poet of Two Worlds,” review of The Fortunate Traveller, by Derek Walcott, New York Review of Books, 4 March 1982, 23+; Clement H. Wyke, “‘Divided to the Vein’: Patterns of Tormented Ambivalence in Walcott's The Fortunate Traveller,” Ariel 20, no. 3 (1989): 55-71; and John Thieme, Derek Walcott (New York: Manchester University Press, 1999).

   A biographical synopsis may be helpful for readers new to Walcott. He was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, on January 23, 1930. His father, a civil servant and amateur painter, died before he was a year old. His mother was the head teacher at a Methodist infant school on the predominantly Catholic island. His background was racially and culturally mixed. His grandmothers were of African descent, his white grandfathers a Dutchman and an Englishman. Speaking the Standard English that is the official language of the island, Walcott also grew up speaking the predominant French creole (or patois) that is the primary language of the street. At the age of fifteen, Walcott published a poem in the local newspaper, drawing a sharp rebuke in rhyme from a Catholic priest for his heretical pantheism and animism. A few years later, he borrowed money from his mother to print a booklet of twenty-five poems, hawking it on the streets to earn the money back. This book and his first major play, Henri Christophe, also met with disapprobation from the Catholic church.

   In 1950 he left Saint Lucia to enter the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, where he was a vibrant literary entrepreneur among the university's first graduating class in liberal arts. Staying on in Jamaica, he made his living through teaching and journalism. He moved to Trinidad in 1958, still working as a reviewer and art critic but also pouring energy into directing and writing plays for the Trinidad Theater Workshop until 1976. His poetry began to receive international attention with In a Green Night (1962).

   Since 1981, he has been teaching regularly at Boston University. He recently built a home on the northwest coast of Saint Lucia where he paints and writes. Among his major plays are Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958), Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967), and The Odyssey (1993). He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992. See Bruce King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Paul Breslin, Nobody's Nation: Reading Derek Walcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, in press).

5. In Omeros the name is spelled “Philoctete” and pronounced “Fee-lock-TET,” in accordance with the French creole of Saint Lucia.

6. Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 210, 249, 265; Walcott, “The Muse of History: An Essay,” in Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods in the Caribbean, ed. Orde Coombs (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1974), 3.

7. Walcott, “Tribal Flutes” (1967), in Critical Perspectives, ed. Hamner, 43, and “The Muse of History,” 8, 2-3. Brathwaite and Walcott have often been compared; see, e.g., Patricia Ismond, “Walcott versus Brathwaite,” in Critical Perspectives, ed. Hamner, 220-36; and J. Edward Chamberlin, Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 154-55.

8. Walcott, Collected Poems, 269, 286.

9. Ibid., 269, 270.

10. Walcott uses the Philoctetes type in his unpublished play The Isle Is Full of Noises (1982), but there the wound signifies indigenous political corruption, not inherited colonial injury. I am grateful to Paul Breslin for sharing with me the play's typescript.

11. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2d ed. (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1989), 12.

12. Walcott complains bitterly that such “historical sullenness” results in “morose poems and novels” of “one mood, which is in too much of Caribbean writing: that sort of chafing and rubbing of an old sore.” See Edward Hirsch, “The Art of Poetry” (1986 interview), in Critical Perspectives, ed. Hamner, 79.

13. D. J. Bruckner, “A Poem in Homage to an Unwanted Man” (1990 interview), in Critical Perspectives, ed. Hamner, 397.

14. Walcott, “Laventille,” in Collected Poems, 88.

15. Anthony Milne, “Derek Walcott” (1982 interview), in Critical Perspectives, ed. Hamner, 62.

16. On Walcott's use of Crusoe instead of Friday, see his “The Figure of Crusoe” (1965 lecture), in Critical Perspectives, ed. Hamner, 33-40.

17. Walcott earlier belittles “exotic,” cross-racial recasting of characters like Hamlet; see “Meanings” (1970), in Critical Perspectives, ed. Hamner, 47.

18. Other Greek-named characters in Omeros share a similar genealogy, but their looser affinities with their namesakes make them more independent characters than the allegorical Philoctete. On the relationships between Walcott's characters and their Homeric counterparts, see Robert Hamner, Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott's “Omeros” (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997); Terada, Walcott's Poetry, 183-212; Geert Lernout, “Derek Walcott's Omeros: The Isle Is Full of Voices,” Kunapipi 14, no 2 (1992): 95-97; and Oliver Taplin, “Derek Walcott's Omeros and Derek Walcott's Homer,” Arion, 3d ser., 1, no. 2 (1991): 213-26.

19. On the traditional fascination with Philoctetes' pain, see Oscar Mandel, Philoctetes and the Fall of Troy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 35-36. Mandel surveys Philoctetes' iconography (123-49).

20. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 29; Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow (London: W. H. Allen, 1952), 257, 259; Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' “Philoctetes” (New York: Noonday-Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991).

21. Terada, Walcott's Poetry, 188, 187.

22. Derek Walcott, “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” in “Dream on Monkey Mountain” and Other Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 31, “The Figure of Crusoe,” 36, and see also “The Muse of History,” 4; Rob Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest,” Critical Inquiry 13 (1987): 557-78; and A. James Arnold, “Caliban, Culture, and Nation-Building in the Caribbean,” in Constellation Caliban: Figurations of a Character, ed. Nadia Lie and Theo D'haen (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1997), 231-44, and other essays in the latter collection.

23. Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2.369-70. Walcott's remark about Timon of Athens and his script for The Isle Is Full of Noises indicate an additional Shakespearean prototype for the cursing Philoctete.

24. Walcott, “The Figure of Crusoe,” 36.

25. Aimé Césaire, A Tempest, trans. Richard Miller (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986), 17, 18.

26. Walcott, “The Figure of Crusoe,” 37, 35.

27. As an indication that Walcott closely associates Philoctetes and Crusoe, he gives the nickname “Crusoe” to the Philoctetes character in The Isle Is Full of Noises. Carol Dougherty argues for yet another Western prototype: Walcott introduces the scar-bearing Philoctete “as an Odysseus of sorts” (“Homer after Omeros: Reading a H/Omeric Text,” South Atlantic Quarterly 96 [1997]: 339-47).

28. Walcott, “Necessity of Negritude,” in Critical Perspectives, ed. Hamner, 20-23. On negritude and various conceptions of Africa in West Indian poetry, see Breiner, An Introduction to West Indian Poetry, 156-64.

29. Walcott, “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” (1974), in Critical Perspectives, ed. Hamner, 53.

30. Walcott, “The Muse of History, 7, 8.

31. At a more general level, Walcott follows the lead of negritude writers insofar as he, like them, dialectically inverts colonial stereotypes. Fanon, who worried about negritude's tendency to duplicate colonial views through such inversion, mentions as one of colonialism's dehumanizing terms the “stink” of the native. When Walcott stresses the foul “smell” of Philoctete's wound, he not only remembers the Greek prototype but also flouts a repressive stereotype (10). See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press-Présence Africaine, 1963), 212-13, 42.

32. Walcott, “Necessity of Negritude,” 21.

33. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, 2d ed. (bilingual), English trans. Emile Snyders (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1968), 40, 126.

34. Ibid.: “whip” (130), “brand” (114), “tom-toms” (94).

35. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus” (1948), trans. John MacCombie, reprinted in The Black American Writer, ed. C. W. E. Bigsby (Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edward, 1969), 2:13. The anthology in which Sartre's “Orphée Noir” was originally published is Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, ed. Léopold Sédar Senghor (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948).

36. Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” 36; “Orphée Noir,” 41.

37. Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” 31-32; “Orphée Noir,” 36.

38. Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” reprinted in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1992), 14.

39. Walcott, “The Muse of History,” 27.

40. Yeats, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” in Poems, 260.

41. Walcott, Collected Poems, 346.

42. See Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), and Roots (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989); Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); and David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic, 1995). The mixture in some models is primarily cultural, in others racial, and Walcott often conflates the two. Regarding the West Indies, “almost all contemporary approaches to Afro-Caribbean culture(s),” according to Richard D. E. Burton, “stress its (their) syncretistic or mosaic character,” with significant differences in emphasis (Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997], 3). On the hybridity of Caribbean literature, see Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James Maraniss (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992); Silvio Torres-Saillant, Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetics of West Indian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and J. Michael Dash, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context, New World Studies (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998).

43. Walcott, “Necessity of Negritude,” 20.

44. Walcott, “The Caribbean,” 52.

45. See Frantz Fanon's classic formulation of the three-stage “evolution” of native writing, from “unqualified assimilation” to nativist “exoticism” to “revolutionary,” truly “national literature” (The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington [New York: Grove, 1963], 222-23). For a more recent example, see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 1989), 4-5: “Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can be seen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousness and of the project of asserting difference from the imperial centre.” For Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, as for many other critics, this literary historical narrative remains fundamental, despite a growing interest in “models of hybridity and syncreticity” (33-37).

46. According to John Barrell, the traditional image of Philoctetes, “with his wounded and unsupported foot, … express[es] the fear of castration,” which “derives from the belief that the woman is castrated” and thus “produces the need for the companion representation” of a female figure (The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992], 213).

47. Walcott, Collected Poems, 20. Joseph Farrell comments on the “unending succession whereby formerly enslaved and colonized peoples become oppressors in their own right” (“Walcott's Omeros: The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World,” South Atlantic Quarterly 96 [1997]: 265).

48. Frederic Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 69.

49. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 119; and see 121 for the ensuing quotation.

50. Arguably, even postcolonial novels such as Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven and J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, which like Omeros allegorize the wound and scar, more readily satisfy the imperatives of much postcolonial criticism than poetry does.

51. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 65-66.

52. On the ambiguous historicity and positionality of trauma, see Cathy Caruth, introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 3-11; and Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness; or, The Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (Routledge: New York, 1992), 57-74.