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

    I stopped, but it took me all the strength in the world to approach
    her stall, as it takes for a hunter to approach a branch where a
    pantheress lies curled with leaf-light on its black silk. (36-37)

Helen is animalized, and the poetic act of representing her is figured as an attempt to take her life.

The consistent attempt to erase otherness is registered in Helen's resistance to these attacks. Just before figuring her as a pantheress, the poet-narrator writes:

    I saw her once after that moment on the beach when her face shook my
    heart, and that incredible stare paralyzed me past any figure of
    speech. (36)

That this passage just precedes the poet's rendering Helen as a pantheress suggests the difficulty of dispensing with his entrapping simile. Since in the poem figures of speech operate as means of subsuming otherness, to be "paralyzed ... past any figure of speech" might constitute an ethical position. But this paralysis is not self-generated. It is produced by Helen's resistant "stare."

By examining how certain figures of speech enact an imperial gaze, I do not mean to imply the possibility of a representation that would somehow present Helen "as she really is," beyond figuration. All representation is figuration, and thus there is no space "past any figure of speech." But if there is no alternative to representation itself, there are alternatives to any specific form of representation. And the specific tropes with which both the narrator and Plunkett represent Helen function as attempts to dominate her. Plunkett and the narrator themselves understand this, themselves pass judgment on their own rhetorical performances, and both acknowledge Helen's resistance to their representations of her. Whether, having problematized its own modes of figuration, the poem has Plunkett and the narrator succeed at finding alternative modes is a question I will turn to in the last pages of this essay.

In a fundamental moment of Omeros, the narrator acknowledges his and Plunkett's appropriation of Helen:

      There, in her head of ebony, there was no real need for the
    historian's remorse, nor for literature's. Why not see Helen as the
    sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow, swinging her plastic sandals on
    that beach alone as fresh as the sea-wind? Why make the smoke a
    door? (271)

The "smoke" that both Plunkett and the narrator attempt to "make ... a door" evokes Glissant's concept of opacity. Making the smoke a door thus repeats the epistemic violence of colonialism. The next section of the poem makes this aggression explicit:

    All that Greek manure under the green bananas, under the indigo
    hills, the rain-rutted road, the galvanized village, the myth of
    rustic manners, glazed by the transparent page of what I had read.
    What I had read and rewritten till literature was guilty as History.
    When would the sails drop from my eyes, when would I not hear the
    Trojan War in two fishermen in Ma Kilman's shop?
    When would my head shake off its echoes like a horse shaking off a
    wreath of flies? When would it stop, the echo in the throat,
    insisting, "Omeros": when would I enter that light beyond
    metaphor? (271)