Omeros

Omeros (1990) by Derek Walcott is an epic poem that reimagines The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer on the island of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean. Walcott explores themes of post-colonial identity and trauma while linking life on the island to Homer’s legendary characters, such as Achilles, Helen, and Hector. Omeros has been celebrated as a foundational work of post-colonial fiction and has won numerous awards.

This guide refers to the 1992 Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of illness, death, substance use, and racism. In particular, they discuss enslavement and colonialism.

Plot Summary

Omeros weaves multiple narratives about the Indigenous and colonized peoples of the island of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean Sea, using characters loosely based on Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. Most of the poem takes place during the 20th century, but certain narrative threads detail scenes from the past: One takes place in 1782 during the Battle of the Saints, and another follows National Indian Defense Association rights activist Caroline Weldon in the 19th century.

The first narrative opens with several fishermen beginning their day. Fisherman Philoctete discusses the art of making canoes with tourists. Then, he retrieves medicine for the rotting leg wound he got from an anchor. He believes that it continues to fester as a reminder of his ancestors’ enslavement. Ma Kilman runs the No Pain Cafe where Philoctete buys the rum that he drinks for medicinal purposes. Later, Ma follows a line of ants into the forest and finds a plant that she gives to Philoctete. This medicinal plant connects him to his heritage, and his leg wound heals.

Two fishermen, Hector and Achille, argue over a bailing cup that Achille failed to return. They are also fighting over the affections of Helen, who, like Helen of Troy, is a local beauty. She functions as both a character and a representation of the island, with the narrator often blurring the line between these identities. Helen has a complicated work history. She was working as a waitress but quit; her manager claimed that she was too rude for the job, but she claims that he said this because she wouldn’t let male tourists fondle her. She also worked as a housemaid at Major Dennis Plunkett’s farm but was caught stealing his wife’s yellow dress.

Dennis has been married to Maud for 25 years. The two moved to the islands after Dennis sustained a head wound in World War II. Having lived on the island for so long, Dennis feels guilty for having been a colonizer in his military days. He does not want to return to Britain, as he feels that the British Empire is fading into irrelevance and will soon be recognized as a historical villain on the world stage.

Dennis is obsessed with Helen and the island, often conflating the two. He wants to discover the history of the place so that he may empower its Indigenous people. He discovers that an ancestor, Midshipman Plunkett, died when the British were defending Saint Lucia against the French navy during the Battle of the Saints. Having no children, Dennis begins to think of this dead 19-year-old ancestor as his son. After Maud dies of cancer, Dennis becomes more immersed in the Indigenous community.

Achille and Helen have a violent fight in the marketplace. Hector takes her into his taxi van, the Comet. Driving people is a job that he has taken up after giving up on fishing. Achille tries several money-making ventures to win Helen, believing that he must prove himself as financially worthy of her love. He illegally dives for conch shells to sell to tourists and even ties a cinder block to his feet to find sunken treasure, following an old legend about a sunken Spanish galleon full of silver coins and bottles of wine. Achille never finds the sunken galleon.

One day, while out on his boat, Achille gets severe sun exposure and dehydration. He hallucinates that he is following a swift back to his ancestral African homeland, arriving at a small settlement. There, he hears his original language and participates in rites before walking back to Saint Lucia on the ocean floor. This experience causes Achille to feel more connected to his ancestors and their traditional fishing methods. He awakens on the shore of Saint Lucia and resolves to get Helen back.

Hector is killed in a car accident when Comet flips when he is driving too fast. Many of the people from the island mourn his death, including Achille and Helen. Following Hector’s death, Helen returns to Achille, and they resume their relationship, navigating the pain and difficulty of their past.

Poet Derek Walcott appears as a character. His first-person interjections provide a different perspective since he was born and raised on Saint Lucia but left to pursue his literary career. Derek wants to write an epic like Homer (whose name is Omeros in Greek), but instead of telling the story of heroes, he will tell the story of fishermen.

The traditional figure of the blind bard that has come to symbolize Omeros here becomes fisherman Seven Seas. Seven Seas coaches Derek on how to view his world and the island in a different way.

Derek visits his childhood home and meets the ghost of his father, Warwick. They discuss old times and wander around the neighborhood. Warwick entreats Derek to write about Saint Lucia and his people. Derek pointedly does not ask his father about the afterlife. His feelings toward his father are very complicated. In another meeting, Warwick convinces Derek to travel to Europe and visit the great literary capitals.

Derek tries to understand how he can use Western literary tradition to describe Saint Lucia, an island colonized and controlled by the same Western cultures. In the 18th century, Saint Lucia was known as “the Helen of the West Indies” due to its fraught history. Because it is strategically located near North America, it was occupied by France and Britain. Derek reinterprets this colonial history through the lens of Homer, Seven Seas, and Omeros. He travels the world, visiting countries with different experiences of colonialism and learning how this pain and trauma have been expressed in literature.

The poem ends with a depiction of the changing nature of life on Saint Lucia. The rise of US tourism is turning its cultures and traditions into amusement for visitors.