“Walcott’s Journey of Self Discovery and Representation in Omeros” by Grant Bellchamber
Derek Walcott’s epic poem, Omeros, dances in the midst of the tensions of life and poetry in the post-colonial Caribbean during the late 20th century. Throughout the poem, the plot of the characters’ lives is woven with the plot of Walcott (as a poet-character in the story, henceforth referred to as Walcott-the-poet) navigating the journey of becoming a poet and the tensions between his cultural identity and the artistic debts he owes to his predecessors. During this journey, Walcott-the-poet undergoes visions of his ancestry and the ethereal which both unite him to his past and call him toward something in the future: the first of these being when Walcott-the-poet encounters his father, the second being when he travels around the world, and the third being his final dialogue with Homer in which salvation is found within his identity. The most important of these encounters, however, is Walcott-the-poet’s first encounter with his father, during which he is given the mission of being the voice of the women who carry coal, marching up a bluff in their bare feet (and first, figuring out what this cryptic command means). This command finds direct connection with the issues of representation discussed in Naomi Nkealah’s essay “(West) African Feminisms and their Challenges”, in which she questions whether the academic jargon and colonized languages in which feminist work is written leaves the movements out of reach of the working class, rural women of Africa which they are meant to uplift. In Omeros, Walcott’s poetry couples with the question of representation presented in Nkealah’s article on West African Feminism, as Walcott-the-poet undergoes a series of self-discoveries which are surrounded by his inner cultural tensions and paralleled by Achille’s journey into his heritage as he learns his duty as a poet.
In Nkealah’s article on the problems in West African feminism, she questions the representation that the academic theories provide to the women they are meant to be helping, and this relates to Walcott-the-poet’s internal conflict in reshaping an ancient epic poem to fit his purpose. Nkealah brings to the reader’s attention numerous problems within the theories of West African Feminism, but in doing so, also presents the numerous and varied approaches to feminism seen in West Africa. While she details numerous issues, the central hindrance of these theories is their limitations in representing all African women. There are questions of application (do these feminisms apply to the diaspora?) and questions of cultural experiences (can Southern African women be helped by West African understandings?), but the central question presented by Nkealah is one that challenges the importance placed on academic feminism and its limitations in representing the African women it claims to help. This is most succinctly presented in the article in the form of this question, “Is [African feminist] theory meant for only the elite, or can the fruit and vegetable seller on the streets, who is an entrepreneur in her own right, also engage with and learn from it?” (Nkealah, 67). In other words, are these feminist theories propounded through dense academic jargon and in the language imposed by the colonizers really accessible (and by extension, representative) of these rural women who they claim to help? Walcott-the-poet faces a similar challenge in achieving his father’s mission (representation of his people) while also remaining true to a poetic tradition that feels removed from his experience as a multicultural Caribbean. How can he simultaneously represent the humble working-class people who are caught between multiple cultures and do justice to great, singularly cultural heroes of the epic poems he loves so much? Thus, these questions of representation, although dealing with different geographical areas, hint at the same challenge for both West African feminist theorists and Walcott-the-poet.
The first, and most important, episode in which Walcott-the-poet undergoes self-discovery is his meeting with his father, in which he is fully exposed to his heritage and the meaning that it has upon his struggle for actualization among the vast art of poetry. His father, was, “raised in this obscure Caribbean port, where [his] bastard father christened [him] for his shire: Warwick. The bard’s country,” (p. 68). The narrator’s direct lineage from the people who subjugated his homeland is a part of his identity, just as it was his father’s. This quote is also representative of a larger phenomenon within colonialism; the people within the colony are inhabited, named contrary to their culture, and, when the colonizers eventually depart or are forced out, they are left with that stain on their history: the tainted remnants of a people who monopolized and exploited the narrator’s place of origin. Additionally, Walcott-the-poet has retained his father’s spirit of an amateur poet (Walcott, 68), thus aligning him closer with his father’s identity.
However, Walcott does not just visit his father in order to be reminded of his heritage. He is on a journey to discover his place as a poet, and he is searching for meaning within that heritage. His father takes him on a tour of the village in which he was raised and throughout it points out certain clues toward Walcott-the-poet’s ultimate mission. When they first spot the wharf, he is told to “measure the days you have left. Do just that labour / which marries your heart to your right hand,” (Walcott, 72). Through this, he is commanded to continue his journey into poetry, as his father knows the poetic spirit is inherent in Walcott-the-poet’s soul. However, Walcott-the-poet still has the burning question of how to balance the two seemingly incompatible debts he owes: the one to his people and the one to the poetic tradition. His father provides him with a cryptic answer in the form of pointing out a group of women who are carrying coal in baskets on their heads up the side of a bluff. He commands him to “walk up that coal ladder as they do in time, / one bare foot after the next in ancestral rhyme … give those feet a voice,” (Walcott, p.75-76). Here, an initial interpretation presents itself to the reader; Walcott-the-poet must give these women (representations of the people of his homeland) a voice in his poetry.
Nevertheless, he is confronted with the challenge of balancing this mission with his debt to a culture very far removed from St. Lucia (the tradition of historically lauded poetry, particularly Greek) along with the tension created by his partially-colonized heritage. Maeve Tynan deals with these multicultural roots in his essay, “Mapping Roots in Derek Walcott’s Omeros”. Within this essay, she claims that “Omeros therefore is concerned with the disparate strands that compose a hybrid Caribbean identity and how these components interact,” (Tynan, 233). Not only does Tynan claim multiculturalism to be a major theme of the book, he goes as far as to claim that Walcott-the-poet’s struggle with identity is the central theme and driving force behind Omeros. This means that his mission to represent his people through his poetry cannot be taken as a simple charge; it must be viewed through the lens of his struggle with identity, and Walcott-the-poet will spend the rest of his journey discerning how he can fulfill this mission while being, in varying degrees, separated from all of the cultures he must acquiesce to, especially his own.
In an effort to discern the true meaning of his father’s command, Walcott-the-poet travels throughout the world to regions of great literary achievement and, in the process, realizes his duty toward the working class of his country: characters like Achille His travels to these places of historical greatness represent both his desire to widen his perspective and fulfill his duty to be knowledgeable about the traditions of the greats: the shoulders of the giants on which he stands. In this traveling, he is faced with a familiar problem; how can he mold these traditions to fit a culture that is entirely separate from them? Additionally, his identity does not provide a solid ground on which he can place his artistic feet, as his heritage’s connection to the colonizers brings even that into question. However, during his travels, he encounters the painting The Gulf Stream by Winslow Homer (Walcott, 183), and in this masterpiece he sees Achille, a representation of who he is meant to give a voice to, and his mission begins to cement itself in his being. Even the name of the artist, Winslow Homer, provides a reconciliation between the literary greats (Homer) and the Afro-Caribbean identity. In this discovery, Walcott-the-poet has symbolically reconciled his mission with his perceived duty toward tradition. This reconciliation is vital to his self-actualization and to Walcott-the-poet building a poetic identity. According to Paul Jay, “Walcott reopens the old critical wound caused by his indebtedness to European literature in order to heal it, creating a profoundly paradoxical poem that uses a classical Western poetic structure to argue against using classical Western poetic structures,” (546). In this moment, Walcott-the-poet becomes aware of the potentiality of this paradox and is able to embrace it as his mission, although doubt still lingers.
This doubt presents itself in Walcott-the-poet’s final dialogue with Homer, during which, in his despair, he is offered salvation, a comfort that he can fulfill his purpose, and this finalization is paralleled by Achille’s own solidifying of identity. Walcott-the-poet, in speaking with Homer (Omeros), reveals his insecurity in his ability to accomplish his mission, claiming he had not even read the Iliad and the Odyssey all the way through (Walcott, 283). This insecurity at his unworthiness for such a mission is assuaged by Homer, who says, “Love is good, but the love of your own people is / greater ….” (Walcott, 285). Now, Walcott-the-poet not only has his father’s charge but also the charge of his literary idol. Any sense of unworthiness, of ungrounded identity, is now gone. This is reflected in his refrain following his return to the island:
Why waste lines on Achille, a shade on the sea-floor?
Because strong as self-healing coral, a quiet culture
is branching from the white ribs of each ancestor,
deeper than it seems on the surface; slowly but sure,
it will change us with the fluent sculpture of time, (Walcott, 296)
Walcott-the-poet has found salvation in what previously felt like a hopeless struggle to fulfill his mission. This is evident in the language he uses to describe his writings about Achille and the subsequent purpose he provides for such writings. This is paralleled by Achille’s own journey, as he travels to Africa in a sun-stroke induced daze and meets his father. Once there, he is unrecognized by his ancestors, and recognizes that this place he had felt a longing toward is not his home, “Having experienced the unhomely sensem of home in his homeland along with the shame of amnesia, Achille comes to understand that Africa cannot be his home. Hence, Walcott sets the stage for his return to St. Lucia but with a renewed sense of identity, self, community, and home,” (Zargarzadeh, 834). Walcott-the-poet, much like Achille, has been given the opportunity to explore his longing and has been satisfied with the discovery that St. Lucia is his home. They have both achieved self-actualization: both become entirely sound in their identity. While Achille returns to his humble fishing job, Walcott-the poet is able to return to his task of being the voice of those women marching up the bluff. He now knows how it is possible to honor his own identity simultaneously with the literary traditions he is indebted to; he can answer Nkealah’s call for representation by crafting a work that is a portrayal of the people he claims to represent.
Walcott’s poetry couples with the question of representation presented in Nkealah’s article on West African Feminism, as Walcott-the-poet undergoes a series of self-discoveries which are surrounded by his inner cultural tensions and paralleled by Achille’s journey into his heritage as he learns his duty as a poet. His father’s charge, to be the voice of his own people, creates initial tension with Walcott-the-poet’s own ungrounded identity and desire to honor the traditions of literary greatness which are largely separated from his own culture. Through traveling the world, he is able to recognize the possibility of reconciling these tensions by honoring his culture while reshaping his duties toward tradition. Any insecurities in this possibility are assuaged by a dialogue with Homer himself, and Walcott-the-poet achieves self-actualization in a final recognition of his purpose which coincides with the creation of Omeros. Thus, Walcott-the-poet’s (and Achille’s paralleled) fulfillment of purpose is the driving theme behind the book, and Nkealah’s article sheds additional light on the issue of representation in the academic world that Walcott-the-poet is faced with.
In Nkealah’s article on the problems in West African feminism, she questions the representation that the academic theories provide to the women they are meant to be helping, and this relates to Walcott-the-poet’s internal conflict in reshaping an ancient epic poem to fit his purpose. Nkealah brings to the reader’s attention numerous problems within the theories of West African Feminism, but in doing so, also presents the numerous and varied approaches to feminism seen in West Africa. While she details numerous issues, the central hindrance of these theories is their limitations in representing all African women. There are questions of application (do these feminisms apply to the diaspora?) and questions of cultural experiences (can Southern African women be helped by West African understandings?), but the central question presented by Nkealah is one that challenges the importance placed on academic feminism and its limitations in representing the African women it claims to help. This is most succinctly presented in the article in the form of this question, “Is [African feminist] theory meant for only the elite, or can the fruit and vegetable seller on the streets, who is an entrepreneur in her own right, also engage with and learn from it?” (Nkealah, 67). In other words, are these feminist theories propounded through dense academic jargon and in the language imposed by the colonizers really accessible (and by extension, representative) of these rural women who they claim to help? Walcott-the-poet faces a similar challenge in achieving his father’s mission (representation of his people) while also remaining true to a poetic tradition that feels removed from his experience as a multicultural Caribbean. How can he simultaneously represent the humble working-class people who are caught between multiple cultures and do justice to great, singularly cultural heroes of the epic poems he loves so much? Thus, these questions of representation, although dealing with different geographical areas, hint at the same challenge for both West African feminist theorists and Walcott-the-poet.
The first, and most important, episode in which Walcott-the-poet undergoes self-discovery is his meeting with his father, in which he is fully exposed to his heritage and the meaning that it has upon his struggle for actualization among the vast art of poetry. His father, was, “raised in this obscure Caribbean port, where [his] bastard father christened [him] for his shire: Warwick. The bard’s country,” (p. 68). The narrator’s direct lineage from the people who subjugated his homeland is a part of his identity, just as it was his father’s. This quote is also representative of a larger phenomenon within colonialism; the people within the colony are inhabited, named contrary to their culture, and, when the colonizers eventually depart or are forced out, they are left with that stain on their history: the tainted remnants of a people who monopolized and exploited the narrator’s place of origin. Additionally, Walcott-the-poet has retained his father’s spirit of an amateur poet (Walcott, 68), thus aligning him closer with his father’s identity.
However, Walcott does not just visit his father in order to be reminded of his heritage. He is on a journey to discover his place as a poet, and he is searching for meaning within that heritage. His father takes him on a tour of the village in which he was raised and throughout it points out certain clues toward Walcott-the-poet’s ultimate mission. When they first spot the wharf, he is told to “measure the days you have left. Do just that labour / which marries your heart to your right hand,” (Walcott, 72). Through this, he is commanded to continue his journey into poetry, as his father knows the poetic spirit is inherent in Walcott-the-poet’s soul. However, Walcott-the-poet still has the burning question of how to balance the two seemingly incompatible debts he owes: the one to his people and the one to the poetic tradition. His father provides him with a cryptic answer in the form of pointing out a group of women who are carrying coal in baskets on their heads up the side of a bluff. He commands him to “walk up that coal ladder as they do in time, / one bare foot after the next in ancestral rhyme … give those feet a voice,” (Walcott, p.75-76). Here, an initial interpretation presents itself to the reader; Walcott-the-poet must give these women (representations of the people of his homeland) a voice in his poetry.
Nevertheless, he is confronted with the challenge of balancing this mission with his debt to a culture very far removed from St. Lucia (the tradition of historically lauded poetry, particularly Greek) along with the tension created by his partially-colonized heritage. Maeve Tynan deals with these multicultural roots in his essay, “Mapping Roots in Derek Walcott’s Omeros”. Within this essay, she claims that “Omeros therefore is concerned with the disparate strands that compose a hybrid Caribbean identity and how these components interact,” (Tynan, 233). Not only does Tynan claim multiculturalism to be a major theme of the book, he goes as far as to claim that Walcott-the-poet’s struggle with identity is the central theme and driving force behind Omeros. This means that his mission to represent his people through his poetry cannot be taken as a simple charge; it must be viewed through the lens of his struggle with identity, and Walcott-the-poet will spend the rest of his journey discerning how he can fulfill this mission while being, in varying degrees, separated from all of the cultures he must acquiesce to, especially his own.
In an effort to discern the true meaning of his father’s command, Walcott-the-poet travels throughout the world to regions of great literary achievement and, in the process, realizes his duty toward the working class of his country: characters like Achille His travels to these places of historical greatness represent both his desire to widen his perspective and fulfill his duty to be knowledgeable about the traditions of the greats: the shoulders of the giants on which he stands. In this traveling, he is faced with a familiar problem; how can he mold these traditions to fit a culture that is entirely separate from them? Additionally, his identity does not provide a solid ground on which he can place his artistic feet, as his heritage’s connection to the colonizers brings even that into question. However, during his travels, he encounters the painting The Gulf Stream by Winslow Homer (Walcott, 183), and in this masterpiece he sees Achille, a representation of who he is meant to give a voice to, and his mission begins to cement itself in his being. Even the name of the artist, Winslow Homer, provides a reconciliation between the literary greats (Homer) and the Afro-Caribbean identity. In this discovery, Walcott-the-poet has symbolically reconciled his mission with his perceived duty toward tradition. This reconciliation is vital to his self-actualization and to Walcott-the-poet building a poetic identity. According to Paul Jay, “Walcott reopens the old critical wound caused by his indebtedness to European literature in order to heal it, creating a profoundly paradoxical poem that uses a classical Western poetic structure to argue against using classical Western poetic structures,” (546). In this moment, Walcott-the-poet becomes aware of the potentiality of this paradox and is able to embrace it as his mission, although doubt still lingers.
This doubt presents itself in Walcott-the-poet’s final dialogue with Homer, during which, in his despair, he is offered salvation, a comfort that he can fulfill his purpose, and this finalization is paralleled by Achille’s own solidifying of identity. Walcott-the-poet, in speaking with Homer (Omeros), reveals his insecurity in his ability to accomplish his mission, claiming he had not even read the Iliad and the Odyssey all the way through (Walcott, 283). This insecurity at his unworthiness for such a mission is assuaged by Homer, who says, “Love is good, but the love of your own people is / greater ….” (Walcott, 285). Now, Walcott-the-poet not only has his father’s charge but also the charge of his literary idol. Any sense of unworthiness, of ungrounded identity, is now gone. This is reflected in his refrain following his return to the island:
Why waste lines on Achille, a shade on the sea-floor?
Because strong as self-healing coral, a quiet culture
is branching from the white ribs of each ancestor,
deeper than it seems on the surface; slowly but sure,
it will change us with the fluent sculpture of time, (Walcott, 296)
Walcott-the-poet has found salvation in what previously felt like a hopeless struggle to fulfill his mission. This is evident in the language he uses to describe his writings about Achille and the subsequent purpose he provides for such writings. This is paralleled by Achille’s own journey, as he travels to Africa in a sun-stroke induced daze and meets his father. Once there, he is unrecognized by his ancestors, and recognizes that this place he had felt a longing toward is not his home, “Having experienced the unhomely sensem of home in his homeland along with the shame of amnesia, Achille comes to understand that Africa cannot be his home. Hence, Walcott sets the stage for his return to St. Lucia but with a renewed sense of identity, self, community, and home,” (Zargarzadeh, 834). Walcott-the-poet, much like Achille, has been given the opportunity to explore his longing and has been satisfied with the discovery that St. Lucia is his home. They have both achieved self-actualization: both become entirely sound in their identity. While Achille returns to his humble fishing job, Walcott-the poet is able to return to his task of being the voice of those women marching up the bluff. He now knows how it is possible to honor his own identity simultaneously with the literary traditions he is indebted to; he can answer Nkealah’s call for representation by crafting a work that is a portrayal of the people he claims to represent.
Walcott’s poetry couples with the question of representation presented in Nkealah’s article on West African Feminism, as Walcott-the-poet undergoes a series of self-discoveries which are surrounded by his inner cultural tensions and paralleled by Achille’s journey into his heritage as he learns his duty as a poet. His father’s charge, to be the voice of his own people, creates initial tension with Walcott-the-poet’s own ungrounded identity and desire to honor the traditions of literary greatness which are largely separated from his own culture. Through traveling the world, he is able to recognize the possibility of reconciling these tensions by honoring his culture while reshaping his duties toward tradition. Any insecurities in this possibility are assuaged by a dialogue with Homer himself, and Walcott-the-poet achieves self-actualization in a final recognition of his purpose which coincides with the creation of Omeros. Thus, Walcott-the-poet’s (and Achille’s paralleled) fulfillment of purpose is the driving theme behind the book, and Nkealah’s article sheds additional light on the issue of representation in the academic world that Walcott-the-poet is faced with.
Works Cited
Jay, Paul. “Fated to Unoriginality: The Politics of Mimicry in Derek Walcott's Omeros.” Callaloo, vol. 29, no. 2, 2006, pp. 545–559., https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2006.0101.
Nkealah, Naomi. “(West) African Feminisms and Their Challenges.” Journal of Literary Studies, vol. 32, no. 2, 2016, pp. 61–74., https://doi.org/10.1080/02564718.2016.1198156.
Tynan, Maeve. “Mapping Roots in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” The AnaChronisT, Jan. 2006, p. 233. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsglr&AN=edsglr.A225938513&site=eds-live.
Walcott, Derek. Omeros. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Zargarzadeh, H. “Achille and the Unhomely Pull of Atavistic Homeland in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities, vol. 24, 2016, pp. 825–838.
Jay, Paul. “Fated to Unoriginality: The Politics of Mimicry in Derek Walcott's Omeros.” Callaloo, vol. 29, no. 2, 2006, pp. 545–559., https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2006.0101.
Nkealah, Naomi. “(West) African Feminisms and Their Challenges.” Journal of Literary Studies, vol. 32, no. 2, 2016, pp. 61–74., https://doi.org/10.1080/02564718.2016.1198156.
Tynan, Maeve. “Mapping Roots in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” The AnaChronisT, Jan. 2006, p. 233. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsglr&AN=edsglr.A225938513&site=eds-live.
Walcott, Derek. Omeros. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Zargarzadeh, H. “Achille and the Unhomely Pull of Atavistic Homeland in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities, vol. 24, 2016, pp. 825–838.