72 pages • 2-hour read
Omeros
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Themes
The Cycle of Suffering
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and racism.
Omeros, a poem about suffering, appropriately begins with a depiction of pain. Philoctete has a wound on his ankle that refuses to heal. The wound is symbolic—a metaphor for the suffering caused by “the chained ankles / of his grandfathers” (19). Philoctete does not know how to heal, a dilemma faced by many other characters in the poem, who also feel profound trauma without resolution. This suffering is a cycle caused by post-colonial reality. The island has been shaped by colonialism: Contemporary buildings stand on the old outposts of colonial control, while the museum is filled with artifacts from shipwrecked galleons that narrow the history of Saint Lucia into of the “far too simple” story of colonization (43). Characters’ physical and emotional injuries point at a wound at the center of the community itself—it echoes across generations, is “still unhealed” (9), and stems from a failure to reconcile the past with the present.
As the narrator of the poem, Derek sets out to trace the history of the cycle of suffering. Using Homeric resonances, he calls this “a masochistic odyssey through the Empire” (90). The odyssey is also through his own personal history: his tense relationship with his late father and his vague guilt over the partners and children he has abandoned in the name of art. Like Odysseus tied to the mast, Derek feels the need to expose himself to the history of suffering to understand the writerly world he wants to join, the island he loves, and himself. In Europe, he traces the history of colonialism and finds his literary forebears. In America, he considers the hegemonic culture of neocolonialism. Upsettingly, no progress has been made: Instead, Derek worries that his work perpetuates the old cycles of suffering by making “their poverty [his] paradise” (228)—turning his countrymen’s hard lives into poetry that aspires to cultural relevance in the power centers of the former empire. Derek’s revelation mirrors that of Dennis Plunkett, the retired British soldier who throws himself obsessively into historical research to assuage his guilt. Neither find relief.
The poem, however, does end on a note of possibility, suggesting that the cycle of suffering can be disrupted by establishing connection to the erased past of Saint Lucia’s ancestors and by nurturing its future. Philoctete’s wound is healed by a plant that a sea swift has brought “across the Atlantic” (243)—a plant whose curative properties are revealed via ancestral vision to Ma Kilman, who spontaneously learns the plant’s true and defining name. Similarly, Achille goes on a spiritual journey to meet his dead father, crossing the wide gap between the past and the present with the help of the same sea swift. Meanwhile, Helen’s pregnancy points to the island’s potential—its next generation, raised with Ma and Achille’s restored sense of familial and language history, can finally escape the damage of generational trauma. Derek hopes that his poem contributes in the same way to easing “the incurable / wound of time” through education and awareness (319).
Situating Post-Colonial Pain in a Western Literary Context
Omeros repurposes the form of the epic poem—a foundational part of the Western literary canon—for a post-colonial setting. By writing the regular people of Saint Lucia through “Homeric association” (31), Walcott signifies that everyday lives should be viewed as worthy of elevation. At the same time, Walcott’s choice also illustrates the extent to which post-colonial states are shaped by colonizers. The island community cannot escape the intrusion of Western literature. For example, Achille is a name imposed on an enslaved person—a renaming that stripped him of his ancestral ties; he confesses to the spirit of his father that he has no idea of the name’s significance. Named for a literary allusion, Achille “yearn[s] for a sound that is missing” (137). While Walcott is consciously adapting the Western canon to craft meaning for his poem, his characters want to overthrow this cultural imposition on their lives. The modern epic thus both ennobles and imprisons those it describes.
Derek, the version of Walcott that is a character in Omeros, wrestles with how to compose his poem. The ghost of his father suggests traveling to the birthplaces of the literary context that Derek loves: He “must enter cities that open like The World’s Classics” to understand how to write about Saint Lucia via Western literary forms (187). However, this voyage does little for Derek. Much like Achille, who visits his ancestors’ village, only for it to be plundered and for him to be left alone, Derek feels only faint echoes of his writerly forebears in Greece and Ireland. The works of Homer and James Joyce remain, but the lives they depict are as distant as the ghosts that haunt Saint Lucia’s past. Instead, after internalizing the aesthetics of the art of the colonizer, Derek develops a literary identity that stands in opposition. Achille’s journey ends in embracing his present, rejoining his community, and letting go of his guilt about the past. Likewise, Derek feels that his writing is vindicated because he places the history and trauma of Saint Lucia into new context. This deliberate recontextualization of the Western literary canon works within and against the modes of communication that undergirded empire, creating a dichotomy of pain and healing that is expressed through self-aware literary allusion.
Although the epic form typically portrays enclosed, unchanging societies of a past that can never be accessed again, Walcott uses his post-colonial epic to depict a changing world. Classical empire has given way to the neocolonial pressures of tourism. Unlike Dennis Plunkett, who wants to write the history of Saint Lucia only for its residents, Walcott’s poem about the lives, culture, and language of these people is primarily for a readership of “pink tourists” (301). Walcott may be reorienting Western literature to admire the marginalized, but, in doing so, he profits from their pain. This dilemma, Walcott decides, is fundamentally worthwhile.
Colonial Guilt and Trauma
After centuries of being a colony fought over by rival European empires, Saint Lucia achieved independence from Britain in 1979. However, despite independence from colonial control, its aftermath continues to shape their lives. Many of the characters in Omeros are descended from people who were enslaved; they live in a village surrounded by structures “which the old slaves had built” (41). The Plunketts’ house stands on “the very ground” where the British barracks were located (101). The island is thus an example of pathetic fallacy, a poetic device in which the environment itself reflects the emotional state of its inhabitants. Being haunted by this history does not give these characters a past: Rather, characters are scarred by traumatic rupture from their ancestries. Achille’s profound emotional wound is the result of being “across an ocean” from his birthright (242). He longs for tradition and heritage—a yearning that undergirds his clinging to fishing rather than finding other work. Similarly, Ma Kilman, an aspiring healer, cannot access the ancestral knowledge of curative flora; she is reduced to offering the injured rum until she can learn the true and defining names of the plants around her. The trauma of the exploitation that turned Saint Lucia’s forebears into property thus extends into the present.
The forces that inflicted empire didn’t only damage those they subjugated. Europeans who were dispatched vast distances to exploit distant colonies through “profitable conflict” were also harmed (80). British Midshipman Plunkett died off the coast of Saint Lucia, a forgotten cog in the colonial machine. A century later, Major Dennis Plunkett, a white British man, feels deep guilt for what his predecessors did to the island. When he discovers his distant relation, Midshipman Plunkett, Dennis adopts the dead youngster; his imagined fatherhood longs to correct the mistakes of his ancestors. Dennis embarks on a research mission to single-handedly construct a shared historical narrative for the people of Saint Lucia. Ironically, he does this unilaterally; no one asks him to save them, but he feels that he has the authority to reshape their lives. His attempts are a failure. After the death of his wife, Maud, Dennis grieves so profoundly that his “wound” integrates him into the community more than his research ever did (309). The shared experience of trauma allows Dennis and the people of Saint Lucia to find empathy for one another.
There is no solution to the problem of historical colonial guilt and no erasing the generational trauma caused by empire. However, compassion can create community, and a shared knowledge of suffering may point the way to a different future.
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