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

The poet-narrator, however, is faced with a more serious quandary. If he were to take his ethical insights seriously, we might not have the poem we are reading in our hands. Perhaps we would have a different poem, one that would deal exclusively with Helen, "a local wonder," and with the other characters, but would not attempt to impose on them the web of metaphors and Homeric parallels that pin them like exotic butterflies on the master frame of European history. It is difficult, of course, for literature to avoid the betrayal of reductionism, and the semantic disseminations of language itself can subvert the best of intentions--as Walcott is keenly aware. As a response, silence is not as far-fetched as it may at first appear, and indeed some writers have opted for it. Omeros, however, is already written, and one must consider to what degree the poem is able to overcome the specific figures and narrative that the characters themselves reveal as problematic.

As a St. Lucian, one of "them," the narrator's position with regard to characters like Helen and Achille is very different from that of Plunkett. Presumably his vocation as a poet and intellectual carries a responsibility with it, especially considering that the intellectual has a responsibility to his or her people--a pervasive notion in (post)colonial literatures, including Caribbean writing. In a recent work, for example, the Dominican critic Silvio Torres-Saillant critiques those Caribbean writers who

    pay little heed to the principle articulated by their fellow
    emigrant, Trinidadian novelist Samuel Selvon, who posited that the
    West Indian writer had no greater responsibility than "that of
    making his country and his people known accurately to the rest of
    the world." (42)

First among those chastised by Torres-Saillant for "paying little heed" (41) to that responsibility is Walcott himself, who in the past has often had to face the accusation of not being committed enough, of being too "difficult" or "literary."

It is certainly true that Walcott's works have often posed the problem of how, for the Caribbean intellectual, commitment serves both as a justification of his vocation and as a threat to it. He does not deny the writer's responsibility to his or her people, but his works do question any simple identity between the intellectual and the subaltern masses. For Walcott, the Caribbean writer is inevitably suspended, as he puts it in The Arkansas Testament, between "Here" (1) and "Elsewhere" (59), always in a position of relative privilege in societies that have endured, and continue to struggle with, the imperial designs of metropolitan interests.

But it is one thing for a postcolonial writer to accept the burden of responsibility, another to understand exactly what that responsibility is. To explicitly denounce oppression? Indeed, but then what is the right balance between aesthetics and politics? That some works succeed splendidly in achieving this balance, such as Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, confirms rather than denies the writer's dilemma, and it is not surprising that while Walcott has always remained a loyal admirer of Cesaire, some of his literary and critical assaults have been against less accomplished propagators of negritude. (14) In a key passage from Omeros, the tension between commitment and aesthetics becomes the poem's explicit subject: