Abstract
This article explores how Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) critically engages with the concepts of home, roots and identity, and dismantles their essentialized constructions. Its interpretation of the poem illustrates how filial determinacy and the quest for genesis are bound to fail in the Caribbean context of massive transplantations and dislocations. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s concepts of errance, digenesis, rhizomic identity, relation and creolization, the article demonstrates how the African Caribbean protagonist Achille comes to understand that any stable association of roots and home with genealogy and geography will fracture in this landscape. Instead of locating an ancestral home/land, Achille learns that the New World inhabitants should try to develop a sense of rhizomic at-homeness in the ambivalences of their new location.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Valérie Loichot and Justine McConnell, whose comments on an earlier version of this article helped develop its theoretical scope.
Notes
1. The Plunketts are European; however, Maud is nostalgic for her Irish homeland, and Dennis, an English expatriate, is on the quest for a progenitor/progeny.
2. Betsy Wing, translator of Poetics of Relation (Glissant Citation1997a), translates errance as “errancy” while “errantry” is the usual English equivalent.
3. Like Achille, Shabine, in Walcott’s The Schooner Flight, also encounters the harrowing image of the seabed (the Middle Passage crossing) in his “salvage diving”; the image of the corpses is so chilling that he does not dare make the “third dive” (Walcott Citation1986, 349). On the sea in Walcott’s work, see Jefferson (Citation2013) and Boeninger (Citation2011).
5. Achille goes to Africa with his canoe, In God We Troust.
6. On the distinction between root identity and rhizome identity, see Clarke (Citation2000, 19–24), Glissant (Citation2002, 291), Kaiser (Citation2012, 132–133), Dalleo (Citation2004, 3–6), Loichot (Citation2007a, 128–130), Friedman (Citation2007, 456) and Dash (Citation1995, 179). For criticism of Glissant’s concept of “rhizome”, see Clarke (Citation2000, 23–24).
8. Ma Kilman believes Hector to be the biological father of Helen’s child (Walcott Citation1990, 318).
10. Analysing characters’ engagement with origins, Joe Moffet (Citation2005) compares Achille with other characters in Omeros and argues that Achille “shows the smallest personal growth by the close of the book” (2). Toward the end of his discussion, Moffett even calls Achille “an anti-hero” as he “fails to acquire self-awareness which appears to have come to many characters of the poem” (18). I disagree with Moffett and have argued here that, after his revelatory journey to Africa, Achille’s previously limited ontological frame of mind undergoes a drastic transformation. Carol Dougherty (Citation1997) also believes that journeys –in particular, sea voyages – expand the traveller’s arc of understanding and perceptions (355).
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