72 pages • 2-hour read
Omeros
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Symbols & Motifs
Birds
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, substance use, and racism.
The most important bird in Omeros is the ocean-crossing sea swift. Its flight symbolizes a specific kind of healing—one that occurs after reconnection with heritage and the past. Achille’s hallucinatory vision of his ancestral village begins when a sea swift guides him across the Atlantic Ocean to the “other shore” (42), rewinding the journey of the Middle Passage that brought his ancestors to the Caribbean. This reverse migration is healing—Achille meets the ghost of his father in his homeland and learns about the cultures and traditions that were left behind. Symbolically, the flight of the sea swift stitches together Achille’s past and future and his African ancestry and his life on Saint Lucia. Later, another sea swift carries from Africa to the Caribbean the seed that grows into the plant that cures Philoctete’s wound. Derek describes the symbolic significance of the sea swift as a way to adhere together disparate parts of his poem like a “hyphen stitched its seam” (319). The sea swift represents how arduous journeys—both physical and mental—can heal.
After being rescued at sea, Achille spots a black frigate bird taking mackerel from a rival. To him, the sight is rife with symbolism—which is fitting since studying bird behavior for signs of divine intention or omens is an important part of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Achille finds meaning in the fact that the frigate bird, like a colonial power, exists by stealing. However, the frigate bird is black while the seabirds are white, inverting the racial dynamic that Achille associates with colonialism—a “beautiful” and righteous inversion of Achille’s ancestors’ suffering (158). If the sea swift represents the opportunity to heal, then the “black king” bird symbolizes vengeance (158), the visceral thrill of the old order being inverted.
Embroidered birds of many species feature on Maud’s quilt. Increasingly lonely and isolated from her husband, Maud pines for Ireland. She feels trapped on Saint Lucia and expresses this feeling of imprisonment through her “homesick” embroidery (89). These sewn birds represent the curtailing of Maud’s freedom; instead of soaring above the island or migrate further, they are stitched onto the quilt. Maud, too, has been fixed into a specific time and place by a force outside of her control. By describing her quilt as a “shroud” (88), Walcott links Maud’s craft to the woven funeral shroud created by Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, in The Odyssey. For both women, death heralds escape—Penelope must wait for Odysseus to slaughter her suitors, while Maud must die to leave Saint Lucia.
The Sea
The ocean is important in Saint Lucia’s island culture in many ways. Physically, the water defines Saint Lucia, separating it from the mainland. The small town in which the poem takes place is a fishing village; people orientate their lives around the sea’s bounty and its dangers.
Symbolically, the sea stands for tradition, heritage, and union. For Achille, being a fisherman is a way of life that he can never betray; so specific is his knowledge of his corner of the sea that fishing anywhere else seems strange. When Hector gives up fishing and moves inland to start his taxi business, he feels alienated and alone. Cutting himself off from the water is a mistake. The vast body of water connects Saint Lucia to its residents’ ancestral past—countries in Africa.
The sea also links Derek’s vision of the island with its epic literary forebears in Greece and Ireland. These cultures have their own literature about the sea, which Derek invokes to position his poem against the Western canon. Whether referencing Homer or James Joyce, Derek uses the sea to divide and unite in “the surf’s benedictions” (283). The symbolism of the sea thus contains within it the message that whatever may seem divided (such as Achille’s relationship with his ancestry) can be united.
At the same time, the sea is how the colonial powers that subjugated the island arrived there. Post-independence, the sea brings the tourism trade—a neocolonial force that again threatens the town and its traditions. Saint Lucia’s new hotels rob the island of its unique identity, commodifying the sea. Moreover, commercial trawling operations undercut the personal relationship between fishermen like Achille and the sea, slowly eradicating his way of life. These new encroaching outside forces may be less violent than the warships of the European empires, but they still inflict suffering.
Finally, the sea is a graveyard; it brings hurricanes and underwater dangers. When travelling south, Achilles and his mate are almost capsized by a breeching whale; this near disaster actually steers them away from a deadly coral reef. The seabed is littered with the relics of the past and the skeletons of the dead. Achille tries to search for a sunken treasure but renounces his plan when he senses the dead that haunt the waters. The body of Midshipman Plunkett decomposes beneath the “ghostly fleet” that waged war (288); it joins the bodies of captured and enslaved people thrown overboard during the Middle Passage.
The poem ends on a version of the ocean that is an unstoppable and indomitable natural force that is “still going on” no matter what humans do on, around, or within it (325).
Wounds
Walcott states directly that “affliction is one theme / of this work, this fiction” (28); wounds, both physical and emotional, symbolize this affliction.
Philoctete has an open wound on his ankle that refuses to heal. This injury is debilitating, preventing him from working as a fisherman and forcing him to spend his days drinking anesthetizing rum. For Philoctete, the wound is more than physical, however—it is symbol of the manacles placed on the “chained ankles of his grandfathers” during the Middle Passage (19). He feels their enslavement as his own, suggesting that the wound is a symptom of the generational trauma of colonialism and slavery. The wound’s eventual cure emphasizes this. Ma Kilman begins as a would-be healer whose only medicine is the rum she supplies to Philoctete. She only knows the Western names for plants—though their true, traditional names would explain their medicinal function. This inaccessible knowledge represents the harm caused by ruptured ancestral bonds. Magically, with the help of a line of ants, she finds a plant that was carried to Saint Lucia from Africa by a sea swift. She spontaneously gains knowledge of the plant’s name, mixes a medicine, and prays to the “unburied gods” in a language she has not spoken until now (242). Philoctete is thus healed via the symbolic reunification with his heritage.
Achille also has a wound—a deep psychological pain that he struggles to explain. Much like Philoctete’s open sore, Achille’s emotional damage is linked to the violent severing of his ancestral bonds. After a hallucinatory journey to meet his father and experience life in the African village of his ancestors, Achille recovers some of his well-being. Although the vision is healing, it is not wholly positive; Achille’s father is dismayed by his son’s seemingly meaningless name, and Achille helplessly stands by while the village is plundered by enslavers. Nevertheless, simply touching his roots is enough to create a psychological salve; Achille emerges from the experience ready to raise Helen’s child with a knowledge of the past that goes beyond the traumas of colonial oppression.
Because Saint Lucia itself is still affected by the pain of colonialism, and because not everyone can rely on magical seeds or hallucinations, Derek wants his poem to be another kind of balm for the symbolic wounds of colonialism’s aftermath.
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