Encomium of Helen: Derek Walcott's ethical twist in Omeros

Writing his history of St. Lucia/Helen, Plunkett comes to realize that "the harder he worked, the more he betrayed his wife" (103).The reason comes as no surprise: as he examines his books through his "Cyclops eye" (his magnifying glass) he sees "over wooden waves of a naval aquatint, / a penile cannon emerge from its embrochure. / Able semen, he smiled" (102). Later still, his magnifying glass

      magnified the peaks of the island's breasts and it buried stiff
    factions. He had come that far to learn that History earns its own
    tenderness in time; not for a navel victory, but for the V of a
    velvet back in a yellow dress.
    ... the island was Helen. (103)

Plunkett's project inevitably involves both reifying Helen and sexualizing the island. Even if it represents an attempt at historical vindication of the colonized, Plunkett's history constitutes an act of epistemic violence that inserts Helen within a narrative that ultimately justifies her status as political or sexual possession. It remains within the rhetoric of colonialism because its aspirations are no different from those of the colonial enterprise. The island is a beautiful woman to be possessed, and the woman is a beautiful island to be inhabited.

While the conflation of the discourses of sexual and political possession is not uncommon in the language of colonialism, Plunkett at least claims to write out of regret about his privileged position and out of a desire to contribute to Helen's well-being. (10) If we accept his sincerity, his slippage into the tropes and attitudes of colonial discourse is even more significant, revealing colonialism as an all-pervasive structuring system. The individual (including the colonizer trying to abandon his role) cannot escape a semiotic system grounded on the colonial difference (the ostensibly inherent inferiority or reification of the subaltern). (11)

If the rhetoric of colonialism depends on such a semiotic system, then any anticolonial stand must acknowledge of what Glissant calls the colonized's "droit a l'opacite" (203), the subaltern's right not to be reduced to the colonizer's view of him or her: the colonial subject is always more and other than the imperial version of him or her. Although this acknowledgment is not sufficient for an emancipating project, it remains a necessary step. And Omeros seems to suggest that because the erasure of the subaltern's agency is so deeply ingrained in the colonial system, this necessary step becomes particularly important in the case of groups or individuals from the metropolitan centers (such as Plunkett) attempting to establish alliances with subaltern groups. Any such decolonizing gesture in fact paves the way to neocolonial authoritarianism unless the metropolitan, in Doris Sommer's phrase, proceeds with caution.

Like Plunkett's, the poem's narrator's attempts to portray Helen illustrate the difficulty of proceeding with sufficient caution. He attempts like Plunkett to celebrate Helen, a celebration that is part of his defense/vindication of her, and as a West Indian poet, he might seem even more justified than Plunkett in his commitment to Helen/St. Lucia: it seems to be his duty as a Caribbean intellectual. However, as we can see in the following description of their encounter, in his very celebration of Helen he finds it hard to stop himself from taking control of her: