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

      Didn't I want the poor to stay in the same light so that I could
    Transfix them in amber, the afterglow of an empire, preferring a
    shed of palm-thatch with tilted sticks to that blue bus-stop? Didn't
    I prefer a road from which tracks climbed into the thickening syntax
    of colonial travelers, the measured prose I read as a schoolboy?...
      Had they waited for me to develop my craft? Why hallow that
    pretense of preserving what they left, the hypocrisy of loving them
    from hotels, a biscuit-tin fence smothered in love-vines, scenes to
    which I was attached as blindly as Plunkett with his remorseful
    research? Art is history's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to
    a concrete factory ...
    Hadn't I made their poverty my paradise? (227-28)

Playing on the problematic logic of the ideal of litterature engage, the poem knows that it feeds on the reality it is presumably trying to transform. The poem may not turn its back on the wretched of the earth, nor truly wish their deliverance.

What Omeros seems to suggest is that while this dilemma may not be fully resolvable, the poet is nevertheless bound to the dispossessed by his or her very position of privilege. If aesthetic disengagement is not an option, neither should fear of trespassing ethical boundaries lead to silence. If the poem demonstrates anything, it is precisely that in its attempt to engage an unjust social or political order, committed poetry may always betray its own ethical imperative--above all, respect of the other's opacity--but it must engage that injustice nonetheless. Our response to the other, to the ethical claim he or she makes on us, may never be entirely satisfactory. Yet respond we must.

While confronting the impossibility of doing full justice to the other carries the risk of passivity or cynicism, it can also function as a spur to strive even harder, like an ethical Sisyphus. It is the distinction between those two responses that the poetic performance of Omeros addresses. While the book never fully abandons the concern with vertical filiation (identity) for the sake of horizontal relation (ethics), and although it never quite abandons metaphorical appropriation for the sake of respect for opacity, it certainly thematizes these issues explicitly. By doing this, Omeros points to an ethical imperative and self-restriction that it does not completely fulfill, but whose necessity it powerfully makes clear. In this sense, Walcott's approach in this poem is very different from that of poets such as Neruda or Cesaire, always willing to lend their voice to those who have no voice. By explicitly exploring the dangers of that approach, Walcott obliquely subverts its authoritarianism, even though he cannot fully escape it.

Perhaps one could argue that this position, while commendable in its honesty, is too weak to address the problem of injustice, that--excused by the impossibility of doing full justice to the ethical imperative and by the poet's publicly expressed regret--it enables further epistemic violence. Indeed, this problem emerges at the end of Omeros. With very few pages left, the poem's voyage from ontology to ethics has been completed, and both Plunkett and the narrator have acknowledged the danger in how they have approached Helen. However, in a final comment on the fact that both the St. Lucian Helen and the Homeric Helen share the same name, the poem muses: