Omeros is Derek Walcott’s longest and most ambitious poem, evoking the tradition of epic poetry through its stylistic features. The title is a variation on the modern Greek pronunciation of “Homer.” Various characters have Homeric names: Helen, Achille, and Hector. The poem is composed in hexameter lines, which follow the meter of both The Iliad and The Odyssey, and the rhyme scheme is a loose terza rima (aba bcb etc.) that is reminiscent of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
The narrative of Omeros centers on the tourist and fishing village of Gros Ilet on the island of St. Lucia, in the Caribbean Sea, and develops four main subplots. One is a love triangle involving two local fishermen, Achille and Hector, and Helen, a woman of stunning beauty. Helen was formerly the servant of Dennis and Maud Plunkett, two British expatriates whose marriage forms a second subplot.
The third concerns another fisherman, Philoctete, who suffers from an open sore on his shin that is finally cured by Ma Kilman, a practitioner of obeah (a Caribbean form of magic). The final storyline follows the narrator, a representation of Walcott, as he tries to construct a poem comparing Helen to Helen of Troy while wandering across Europe and America reflecting on the history of colonialism.
Throughout the different narrative strands of the poem, Walcott continually meditates on the nature of language and art in the Caribbean world. He explores different metaphors of wounding since, for Walcott, the legacy of colonialism scars all inhabitants of the Caribbean. Walcott represents the theme of affliction both literally and symbolically in the figure of Philoctete, whose sore represents the communal pain that African descendants in the Caribbean experience with the loss of their language and history.
Philoctete’s cure requires that he perceive his world not only with metaphors of wounding, but also with metaphors of renewal. The narrator compares Philoctete to Adam at the moment of his cure, declaring, “And the yard was Eden. And it’s light the first day’s.”
Walcott’s allusion to the Bible fits with his recurrent pattern of linking praise of the natural world to praise of God. Throughout the poem Walcott depicts the natural world as a necessary component to overcoming the pain inherent in the legacy of colonialism. Philoctete’s cure enables him to recognize divinity in nature.
The narrator experiences a parallel form of healing when the ghost of Homer (Omeros) challenges him to see the island of St. Lucia without artistic vanity and celebrate the everyday beauty of the island. This meeting enables him to recognize that he can desist from using allusions to Homer and write about Helen and St. Lucia “with no Homeric shadow.” The natural world of the Caribbean, particularly the sea, becomes the source of inspiration for both art and everyday life.
Bibliography
Farrell, Joseph. “Walcott’s Omeros: The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World.” In Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community, edited by Margaret Beissinger, Jane Tylus, and Susanne Wofford, 270–296. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Ramazani, Jahan. The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Categories: Caribbean Literature, Literature, World Literature
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