Walcott’s Mid Eval-ism: un St. Lucian Mémoire

Let Omeros be what it is, the masterwork, and let Homer serve.
--C.L. Nepaulsingh

That the work called Omeros by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, is a work of genius is not debatable; however, that the work offers a theory, or rather a framework (private and public space) on how to be and remain relevant is. This brief paper will examine such broad themes as memory, exile and hell and ironically attempt to contradict what Walcott himself has stated: “I find theory exasperating. And I find a confident theory even more exasperating.” Especially, as I will argue, how Walcott’s Omeros functions within such a self-assuring exercise in memory and/or craft re-telling. Like Dante’s Virgil then, Omeros will be my guide, my pseudo-Muse and my judge.

To begin, Omeros is a rather lengthy poem compartmentalized into seven books. Within each book are further sections compartmentalized into their respective chapters and sub-sections per chapter labeled via roman numerals. Moreover, Omeros is structured into tercets, which resemble the terzina used by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) though Walcott uses the hexameter rhythm of classical epic. The point here is that Walcott recognizes the classical past, but is a master of the free verse form. The poem opens like one recalling a far-off event with the aid of language. This can be considered a type of craft telling via the use of memory, that romantic agent of history that engages both the past and present and relies on the rhizomporphic to tell its tale. After all, the poet’s language is anything but linear and static; his work then, is itself polysemic. For instance, take the following passage from Omeros Book One, Chapter I, sub-section I:

“This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes.”
Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try taking
his soul with their cameras. “Once wind bring the news

to the laurier-cannelles, their leaves start shaking
the minute the axe of sunlight hit the cedars,
because they could see the axes in our own eyes.

[…] I lift the axe and pray for strength in my hands
to wound the first cedar. Dew was filling my eyes,
but I fire one more white rum. Then we advance.” (3)

The word play of “axe” and “axes” alone is enough to keep the critic busy turning and folding the word and its meaning and its [con]text on itself. Moreover, reading the “x” from a creolized language set offers an increase in the semantic circle of “axe” as “ask” and “axes” as “access”. Movement is also evident in these few opening lines: sunrise, wind bring, leaves…shaking, and of course, then we advance. To complete the circuit and cycle of progression from sunrise and sunlight, Walcott’s final lines at the end of the poem offer us the darkness, the shadow. This is the opposite from where we began our reading odyssey. In Book Seven, Chapter LXIV, sub-section III:

[…] The nets were closing their eyes,

sagging on bamboo poles near the concrete depot.
In the standpipe’s sandy trough aching Achilles
washed sand from his heels, then tightened the brass spigot

to its last drop. An immense lilac emptiness
settled the sea. He sniffed his name in one armpit.
He scraped dry scales off his hands.

[…] Night was fanning its coalpot
from one catching star. The No Pain lit its doors
in the village. Achille put the wedge of dolphin

that he’d saved for Helen in Hector’s rusty tin.
A full moon shone like a slice of raw onion.
When he left the beach the sea was still going on. (324-25)

Of interest here, is not only how the “Night” and “full moon” contrast the earlier “sunrise” and “sunlight,” but how “axes in our own eyes” have become “The nets were closing their eyes” (324). What better way to convey the circular and spiraling dynamism of the poem, its non-static language and secondary epic framework than “the sea was still going on” (325). Moreover, the poem which opens in media res is reminiscent of Dante’s fourteenth century Commedia. We note:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita. (Canto I: 1-3)

Dante here recalls a time, a place and space where reflection, much like a dark forest, is best represented as middle age; i.e. Dante is re-telling via craft how his memory, a personal and private entity made public, is relevant as well as immortal. Otherwise, his tale is merely, at best, a glorified mid-life crisis in print taking on secondary epic characteristics. Neither Walcott nor Dante are doing this. In both cases, the craft is genius—period. For instance, note how the subject of woods as a dark, public space is privileged in both, but reaffirms Walcott’s play mechanism throughout Omeros. Our analysis of the poem’s rich language and progressive movement, arguably, is best reflected in Achille’s hallucinatory [re]turn to an Africa from memory, from exile and descends much like Dante and Virgil did in Il Inferno.

Walcott begins Achille’s journey to his ancestral home by [re-]writing the epic motif of journeying toward the underworld in classic mythlore fashion. The narrative, the story-telling begins in Book Three, Chapter XXV where: “Mangroves, their ankles in water, walked with the canoe. / The swift, racing its browner shadow, screeched, then veered / into a dark inlet. It was the last sound Achille knew” (I.133). Achille continues to float in this manner until: “He saw the first signs of men, tall sapling fishing-stakes; / he came into his own beginning and end, / for the swiftness of a second is all that memory takes” (I.134). Achille, attempting to make carnal sense of a rather spiritual experience, once more relies on memory, what I have called earlier in this paper as that romantic agent of history that engages both the past and present. Walcott pens, in answer to the naming ceremony and an exilic identity, or misnaming, the following from Achille:

What would it be? I can only tell you what I believe,
or had to believe. It was prediction, and memory,
to bear myself back, to be carried here by a swift,

or the shadow of a swift making its cross on water,
with the same sign I was blessed with, with the gift
of this sound whose meaning I still do not care to know.
(Chapter XXV.III.138)

If sound is lost to Achille, and Walcott’s Afolabe asks: “And therefore, Achille, if I pointed and I said, There / is the name of that man, that tree, and this father, / would every sound be a shadow that crossed your ear” (III.138) how can his response be anything other than what he mentions. One could argue that Walcott, who held confident theorists, those agents who argue concrete points with the mixing materials of mist, air and liquid vocabulary, in some ill repute is demonstrating the fickleness of meaning, of understanding even one’s identity. For Achille, there is no mask to hide behind and we get his rather in your face response: “…I still do not care to know” (138). Forget the question: why not? Of stronger interest is the how of his arrival. That is, his floating and drifting and recalling of events that cater to his frame, his person is solely centered on two things: “prediction” and “memory,” respectively. Ah, but herein lies the rub. Walcott, who has been crafting a genuine secondary epic as well as not constructing a secondary epic has given Afolabe the unifying voice and strand, which unifies this paper and the poem at large. As Walcott “can only tell” us what he believes, and confidently so, his theory of epic/non-epic is Omeros. In other words, it is and is not Homer; Philoctete is and is not Philoctetes; Helen is and is not Helen; Achille is and is not Achilles. From the rising of the sun, until the going down of the same—the name of Omeros is to be praised. Put another way, what began in sunrise and sunlight and moved toward Night and full moon has not lost its identity, but has remained. After theory has had its say then, Omeros still remains; Achille still remains. Like memory, they exist in fragments that at once demand a fitting, but not a classification; a borrowed taxonomy for the moment of a moment. They live out in the shadows of mimetic use manipulated by like or as. In the words of Afolabe then:

No man loses his shadow except it is in the night,
and even then his shadow is hidden, not lost. At the glow
of sunrise, he stands on his own name in that light.

[…] and you look through
my body as the light looks through a leaf. I am not here
or a shadow. And you, nameless son, are only the ghost
of a name. Why did I never miss you until you returned?
Why haven’t I missed you, my son, until you were lost?
Are you the smoke from a fire that never burned?

There was no answer to this, as in life. Achille nodded,
the tears glazing his eyes, where the past was reflected
as well as the future. The white foam lowered its head. (XXV.III.138-39)

Walcott has tied together in the afore state passage the elements of memory, exilic identity and the loss of self as perhaps Dantean concentric circles of hell. As Dante and Virgil travel the nine or so rings, likewise Achille travels, with Walcott as Narrator, down similar circles, or layers of memory via “eyes, where the past was reflected as well as the future” (139).
Raoul Granqvist, in his essay “Does It Matter Why Walcott Received the Prize?” positions the poet Walcott in terms of a “slippery and disobedient postcolonial writer” (151). His description of Walcott is further problematized by James V. Morrison’s “Homer Travels to the Caribbean: Teaching Walcott’s Omeros,” which looks to teach the work and the poet under the tag of mythologist. This shift within some critical circles to catalog and classify Derek Walcott, and in this case, his Omeros, under a conventional banner proves just how unattainable such exercises prove to be. That is, Walcott will remain relevant because he is not easily labeled—period. At the onset of this paper, I mentioned the position of Walcott’s Omeros as a work on relevance. In the words of Morrison who teaches Omeros in a mythology college class:

My goal is to encourage others to consider the possibility of introducing this work into a variety of Classics in Translation courses, most easily those dealing with
epic, mythology, the Trojan War, or the classical tradition. Omeros not only offers
a valuable study in literary and mythological allusion, but also provides
discussion regarding the persistence of the classical tradition and the relevance of
the classical world today. (83)

This point on relevance comes full circle when the author of this present paper is himself part St. Lucian, who grew up on an island called St. Croix in the West Indies and is studying and publishing in the field(s) of Medieval Studies Literature. As I continue to discover my craft, whether it is literary critic or literary theorist, I hope to be labeled amongst those who defy classification, who defy category. For Walcott, Omeros has kept him relevant to the Classics world and beyond, and in doing so, continues to exasperate present and future critics.