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language: English
country: Saint Lucia
year: 1990
form: poetry
genre(s): epic
dates read: 11.3.25-25.3.25
Derek Walcott’s Omeros is a postmodern epic of Saint Lucia, playing with and alluding heavily to — but not strictly adapting or reworking — the Homeric epics. the narrative is nonlinear, moving between timeframes and characters, from the 18th century to the mid-late 20th, though it’s centered in the mid-late 20th.
as poetry I really enjoyed it. it’s written in a very loose / free terza rima, with three-line stanzas that often include end-rhyme, but not necessarily always the strict ABA BCB CDC of traditional terza rima and also often using off-rhymes rather than exact rhymes. taking just one passage for example: drill / grille, sent / went, empty / by / sky, squares / cars, plumes / palms, centre / enter. there’s some tasty language use here, and it’s paired with a fascinating use of classical allusions, playing off Saint Lucia’s colonial nickname, the “Helen of the West” (because it passed repeatedly back and forth between British and French control). early in the poem the narrator is informed that in modern Greek (though he seems to take it as all Greek over all of history) Homer is known as Όμηρος, and as the poem progresses the narrator moves through its characters lives in search of “Omeros”, finally — sort of — finding him in a poignant passage, though it’s marred by some gratuitous heterosexuality, near the end of the poem.
the problem is the narrative. the protagonists, if you will, are:
their stories intersect and overlap across time: Achille and Hector court (and at times fight over) Helen; Helen used to work for Plunkett and Maud as a maid; Plunkett is later revealed to have been the narrator’s drill sergeant while he was a cadet, presumably during the Second World War; the narrator is, rather vaguely, in love with Helen, whom he has seen several times in passing. Plunkett is also engaged in writing a history of Saint Lucia in his retirement, and finds that one of his ancestors was a midshipman on a British naval vessel in the 18th century, giving us glimpses of that period through his ancestor’s eyes.
the poem begins with Achille, Hector, and other fishermen cutting down trees to make dugout canoes. this is implicitly equated with the genocide of the “Aruacs”, who are explicitly identified with the trees that must be cut down in order to make space for Black life and belonging. are you seeing this, Shona Jackson?
Indigenous peoples — Caribbean and otherwise — are repeatedly invoked throughout the poem, but almost always as an absence, as if the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas was total. a single Cherokee woman is mentioned late in the book, appearing in a photograph sent back to Saint Lucia by a migrant laborer living in Florida.
this is paired with the striking and kind of disappointing dream-or-is-it sequence where Achille travels back in time to the village in (implicitly West) Africa that one of his ancestors was enslaved from. on one level, this is a powerful meditation on the door of no return and the ways in which enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and their descendants were violently severed from their histories and traditions. unfortunately, it also positions Africa as entirely past and, following the raid where slavers take everyone from the village except the old griot captive, as entirely empty. the Caribbean is severed from Africa, and at the same time Africa is severed narratively from the modernity of which the Caribbean is the proverbial crucible. it’s not a great look.
there’s also, of course, the classic little anti-communist vignette about a Polish immigrant waitress, who doesn’t even get to have a surname — she’s literally referred to as “Nina Something” — while the narrator muses about how repressive her scary evil communist government is (and of course invokes Miłosz and other ~dissident~ writers).
more generally, many of the passages I enjoyed were immediately undercut by passages that reproduced either trite liberalism (some weirdness about (post)colonial ressentiment, e.g.) or just straight-up colonial tropes: “over him the tasselled palanquins of Portuguese man-o’-wars / bobbed like Asian potentates”. hello??? perhaps the most egregious example is the narrator’s comparison of himself to “a Jap soldier on his Pacific island / who prefers solitude to the hope of rescue” — a particularly damning metaphor considering that Onoda Hiroo murdered between 30 and 130 civilians (and wounded or maimed many more) during his time “prefer[ring] solitude”.
I would say the predominant tone of the poem is nostalgic, but it’s a nostalgia for a place and time that never existed — a precolonial Saint Lucia whose current culture exists but without the pressures of capitalism and colonialism, and also still without Indigenous peoples, or rather with its Black residents substituted for the absent “Aruacs”.
all told, then, I loved the poetry but didn’t love the poem, if you see what I mean.
moods: hopeful, reflective, sad