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

If "literature / was guilty as History," the poem's approach to Helen as an embodiment of St. Lucia is complicit in the violence of colonial discourse. Precisely for this reason, the poet's question, "when would I enter that light beyond metaphor?" is an ethical one. In the "light beyond metaphor" the smoke would appear as smoke, and one would "proceed with caution" when engaged by alterity, lest one repeat, even with the best intentions, the epistemic violence that characterizes the colonial enterprise.

To really acknowledge alterity, however, exposes the extent to which the (imperial) self's presumed self-contained unity was always illusory. It is not surprising that both Plunkett and the narrator, like other characters in the poem, end up wounded, limping, or fractured. (12) But it is from the precariousness of those broken selves that a real acknowledgment of the other might emerge, once the obsession with filiation (the primacy of ancestral roots as a source of stable identity) and master narratives is subordinated to the uncertainties of mutuality (the ethical twist). (13)

A similar point could be made about the poem itself. Although it is in one sense an epic about the Caribbean, one whole book (book 4) focuses on Native North Americans, and another (book 5) on important historical centers of European colonialism, including ancient Greece. While these books interrupt the flow of the action, they play an important role when one considers that Omeros is not exclusively about the Caribbean in the conventional sense of trying to articulate a Caribbean identity. The poem can be read also as an inquiry into a series of ethical questions: Can metropolitan centers and subaltern groups move past the epistemic violence that has governed their relations? Is it possible to find grounds for emancipation and solidarity beyond the enclosing models of pure identity, national or otherwise, that have traditionally governed such efforts? Can the privileged speak in favor of the subaltern without subsuming the subaltern's agency? Such questions shift attention from the rhetoric of identity to issues of relation and power, and the interruption of the book's narrative unity makes perfect sense in this context, since, as I have argued, the epistemic violence par excellence is to imagine the other as adequately defined by a closed, faultless narrative or the perfect metaphor. The opacity of the other--interrupting coherent narration, ancestral filiation, and self-enclosed selfhood--may need to be asserted aggressively, as in the case of Helen, the character about whom, tellingly, we end up knowing the least. But out of this resistance, and out of a fragmented self open (and vulnerable) to the voice of the other, the possibility of an ethical relation may arise.

After the death of his wife, whom he has "betrayed" through his vicarious possession of Helen, Major Plunkett has an ethical awakening of sorts and decides to abandon his history of St. Lucia. From then on, he sees in Helen "not a cause or a cloud, only a name for a local wonder" (309). The result is literary silence: he permanently interrupts his historical project. For Plunkett, such silence does not really constitute a great dilemma, inasmuch as he is, after all, only an amateur historian. His main field of action is his business, and it is there that his ethical awakening may assert itself (though every sphere of action has its particular difficulties, and it would be interesting to know how the privileged, white Plunkett finally does apply his ethical insights in his impoverished, black context).