Derek Walcott's Omeros and the refiguration of the Caribbean Eden

Abstract

In his 1992 Nobel lecture, Derek Walcott describes “Antillean art” as the “restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent”. His epical Omeros is a journey‐based and transformative gathering of those pieces, emphasizing the significance of language as an anti‐imperial instrument. Its language reflects the power dynamic that shaped the cultural intersections in the Caribbean as well as embeds the notion of time–space transcendence as an important aspect of the healing process. The trajectory of Omeros includes a projective journey into the future as well as a vital reconnection with the renewing past – Africa in this instance – via language and memory. Significantly, and regardless of Walcott's stated inclination towards extending the “mighty line” of Milton, the source field for healing in Omeros is Africa.

Keywords:

• Derek Walcott
• Omeros
• Africa
• the Caribbean
• memory

Notes

1. The Iliad depicts the transformation of trees into scepters with genealogical significance. For instance, Agamemnon perceives “the royal scepter of his fathers” as imbued with a “power [that] can never die” (101). In The Aeneid, Aeneas “shaped his fleet” (by cutting timbers) on Phrygian Ida, and Cybele, the Great Mother Goddess of Phrygia, actually appeals to Jove (or Jupiter) on behalf of Aeneas: “… let your mother's plea avail / In this: that those ships' timbers not be breached / Or swamped on any course by any storm” (262). Thus, the mother of the gods puts nature in the service of empire. In Pharsalia, Caesar destroys a sacred grove as part of his imperial project; in fact, he sets the pace in the destruction of this mythological world (“a grove from a bygone age, / never ravaged” [71]): “Leaving the blade sunk deep in the ravaged bole, / he intoned: / “lest any of you hesitate longer / to overthrow / a wood, assign me the sacrilege” (73). Instead of a divine reprisal, Julius Caesar historically won the Battle of Pharsalia.

2. In his study of the Jewish Kabala, for instance, C.C. Zain charts the “divinatory significance” of these numbers in this manner: three for action, four for realization, and seven for victory (2).

3. In his Historia de las Indias, written in 1527 or thereabouts but published in Madrid only in 1875, Bartolomé de las Casas, a reformed encomendero and slavery supporter, relates the 1519–21 plague of ants in the Antilles to the introduction of plantains as a relatively inexpensive staple for blacks: “The original cause of this ant infestation, said some, was the importation and planting of plantains” (Benítez‐Rojo 91). Friar Tomàs de Berlanga, a Catholic priest, is usually credited with introducing plantain to Santo Domingo, from the Canary Islands, in 1516 – a signal food passage that preceded the massive importation of black slaves.