Omeros

“He believed the swelling came from the chained ankles of his grandfathers.”

Philoctete is aware of the symbolism of his open wound. The pain is overwhelming, but he takes some satisfaction from the way it connects him to the pain of his grandfathers. The violent separation caused by the slave trade is echoed in the use of enjambment, as “his grandfathers” are separated onto the next line, isolated and distanced from Philoctete and his interpretation of their pain.

“This wound I have stitched into Plunkett’s character.

He has to be wounded, affliction is one theme

of this work of fiction, since every ‘I’ is a

fiction finally.”

Dennis Plunkett is purposefully isolated from the other characters by his whiteness and affiliation with the British Army; however, the narrator makes sure to point out that Dennis has his own pains and sufferings that bind him to the community. He may have privilege and be seen (or see himself) as an outsider, but there is a community of wounded people to which he could potentially belong. Dennis’s integration and acceptance into this community is the arc of his character.

“By a stone breaker which the old slaves had built.”

The lingering horrors of Saint Lucia’s formerly enslaved people are present in everyday life. The physical geography of the island has been reshaped by forced labor, to the point where the current inhabitants have no way of knowing what is natural and what was assembled this way. The past haunts Saint Lucia’s residents not only psychologically also but physically.

“History was a fact,

History was a cannon, not a lizard.”

Dennis shouts at an iguana as he struggles to deconstruct his understanding of history. As an Englishman, he has grown up in a society experiencing imperial decline. To Dennis, who learned British history from a British perspective, the indubitable facts of the past are written by cannons and navies, while Indigenous life cannot be considered part of history. Dennis is angry because he is slowly beginning to suspect that he has been taught a deeply narrow perspective. History can be a lizard, he will come to realize, as much as it can be a cannon.

“The great events of the world would happen elsewhere.”

From the imperialist perspective, world events occur at the fringes of empire—“elsewhere” far from the metropole. The battles and wars that are the great events of the world involve much bloodshed, but by the time news returns to the imperial core, these events have been stripped of their human referents; the loss of life and the suffering are reduced to statistics in the support of empire. Dennis gradually comes to realize that his distance from these great events has made him numb to their human cost.

“He believed he smelt as badly as Philoctete

from the rotting loneliness that drew every glance

away from him.”

For Achille, the emotional pain of losing Helen can only be compared to an open, suppurating wound. It is more than just pain; it is a social embarrassment, one that he believes others can see and smell on him. He feels as though he is rotting away into nothingness without Helen, obliterating his social standing with his pathetic existence. For Achille, there is no difference between emotional and physical pain.

“Now each man was a nation

in himself, without mother, father, brother.”

Crossing the Atlantic to examine the roots of the Atlantic slave trade allows Walcott to describe how enslavement atomized and alienated African people by removing them from their cultural context. These individuals were taken from communities where they understood themselves as part of a heritage and legacy—where they had kinship with “mother, father, brother.” By forcibly being taken to Saint Lucia, enslaved people became one-person “nations,” disconnected in ways that create post-colonial trauma.

“What began dissolving

was the fading sound of their tribal name for rain,

the bright sound for the sun, a hissing noun for the river,

and always the word ‘never,’ and never the word ‘again.’”

Walcott further explores the atomizing effects of slavery through language. Taken from their homes, enslaved people lacked the language needed to describe their new environment. The old names did not fit and gradually faded from use—an example of the forced forgetting of ancestry that isolated and damaged people.

“It was another country, whose excitable

gestures I knew but could not connect with my mind

like my mother’s amnesia.”

Derek describes the end of his mother’s life. Her amnesia causes her to forget the world around her. This forgetting provides Derek with a mirror process to the cultural forgetting inflicted on enslaved people in the colonial past. The “excitable gestures” that once meant something have become unmoored, unable to “connect with [his] mind.”

“I lived like a Japanese soldiers in World War II.”

Derek’s journey into the literary past is a process of confronting difficult truths. He feels like Japanese soldiers who refused to stop fighting during World War II even after Japan’s surrender. Derek, like these soldiers, is fighting a losing battle against himself, but he is unwilling to quit. Eventually, he will acknowledge the scale of his task ahead as well as his own sins, but at this point, he is reluctant to accept reality.

“Empires practiced their abstract universals

of deceit: treaties signed with a wink of a pen’s

eye dipped in an inkhorn, but this was not Versailles.”

Derek notes the fickleness of the treaties signed by empires. The act of signing a treaty means very little, he acknowledges. By drawing attention to the act of writing and signing the treaty—isolating the line—he compares this kind of writing with his work. His action is similar in gesture to the signing of a treaty, but he hopes that it will be more productive and more honest.

“Art is immortal and weighs heavily on us.”

Derek feels the pressure of his writing, not least because his love of literature comes from his father. His father’s reverence for the classics of the Western canon imbues in Derek a desire to measure up to the weight of literature considered “world class” by the same powers that inflicted colonial oppression. Literature as an art form thus burdens future generations to measure up to previous greatness.

“Yet in its travelling all that the sea-swift does it does in a circular pattern.”

Omeros is a poem about journeys, both real and metaphysical. The sea swift is an important guide on several of these journeys. Walcott emphasizes the importance of the cyclical nature of the bird’s migration pattern. The traveler must return to their starting point, the example of the sea swift suggests; they must put into practice what they have learned while showing how much they have changed. The circular pattern is the key to the healing properties of the journey.

“For those to whom history is the presence

of ruins, there is green nothing.”

Walcott critiques the Eurocentric, colonialist view that reduces history to a specific set of criteria. Only physical ruins can be considered historically significant, this view suggests, while the verdant green lands of colonized countries contain “nothing.” Yet this “green nothing” has meaning to the people who live there and to the people who are forcibly taken there.

“The swans are royally protected.”

In his descriptions of Britain, Walcott notes the irony of an ancient law. Traditionally, all unmarked mute swans on open waters in England and Wales are the property of the Crown. This centuries-old claim is largely symbolic today, though it reinforces the birds’ protected status. In contrast, the colonial subjects and the people enslaved by the British Empire were afforded no such protection. Walcott wryly observes that swans had more legal rights than many people.

“That no house might come to meet us on our own shore,

and fishermen fear this as much as Ulysses.”

The deeper Walcott delves into his literary allusions, the more humanistic they become. The fear of returning home and not being welcomed or even recognized is part of The Odyssey, but Walcott extends the relatable sentiment to every fisherman in Saint Lucia. They are as worthy of recognition as Homer’s hero, especially since their fears are informed by post-colonial trauma.

“All colonies inherit their empire’s sin.”

The inherited sin of colonies marks a turning point in Derek’s examination of Colonial Guilt and Trauma. The people of Saint Lucia are flawed, but their mistakes often echo the colonial errors of the past. Awareness of this cyclical nature of sin is central to the healing that Walcott believes can remedy post-colonial trauma.

“Hadn’t I made poverty my paradise?”

Derek ventures far to inform his criticisms of colonialism; when he returns to Saint Lucia, he finds that the tourism industry is embarking on a neocolonial project that threatens to tear apart the island community. Yet he is self-aware enough to recognize that his motivations are not purely altruistic. He has used the lives of these people for his poetry, commodifying them just as the tourist trade does. Derek’s willingness to turn his critical eye on himself makes his critiques of colonialism more objective.

“The yoke of the wrong name lifted from his shoulders.”

Philoctete’s healing is physical, emotional, and communal. Without his wound, he feels like a changed man. In the process, Ma Kilman has learned the true, ancestral name of the curative plant; this reconnection with heritage in turns helps Philoctete name his own affliction. This open-eyed understanding of the right words and the removal of the “wrong name” is like taking an ill-fitting weight “from his shoulders”—he is no longer defined by his indescribable wound but has the agency to name everything anew.

“I haven’t spent

damned near twenty years on this godforsaken rock

to be cursed like a tourist.”

Dennis’s angry outburst is directed at Hector but speaks more to Dennis’s insecurities. In spite of two decades spent on Saint Lucia, Dennis feels like an outsider. He has tried to resolve this alienation through research, but Hector’s actions remind him that many see him as little more than a white tourist. Transcending this identity is his character arc.

“I was both there and not there. I was attending

the funeral of a character I’d created.”

Derek attends the funeral of Maud Plunkett, a character in his poem. In this metafictional episode, fiction and reality come together; can Derek—a stand-in for Walcott himself—mourn Maud, even if she is his own creation? The sincerity of his feelings remains, even if he recognizes her fictional nature. Acknowledging and accepting this dichotomy is key.

“Love is good, but the love of your own people is

greater.”

At the end of his poem, the Greek poet Omeros (the Greek name for Homer) opines that romantic love “is good” but that the respect and appreciation of and for one’s community is more important. This speaks to Derek’s aims in the poem, particularly his attempts to resolve the lingering trauma of colonialism on his people. He writes as an act of love to earn their belief in him.

“Seven Seas would talk

bewilderingly that man was an endangered

species now.”

Omeros decries the colonialism of the past and warns about the neocolonialism of the future, yet the ominous words of Seven Seas hint at a far more apocalyptic future for human beings. Climate change lingers on the horizon, threatening to destroy all societies. To Saint Lucia, this talk remains “bewildering,” yet Seven Seas’s prophetic voice is Walcott’s as well.