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

The silencing logic of Gorgias's Encomium is pertinent to Walcott's Omeros, itself a kind of encomium of Helen. The poem's repetition of the colonial gesture in its choice of feminine metaphors betrays the fact that both "accusers" (the colonial metropolis) and "defenders" (the poet-narrator and Plunkett) share a fundamental set of presuppositions. This is not to deny that Walcott, as a poet and intellectual, takes his commitment to St. Lucia seriously. But, to evoke an allegory dear to Caribbean and postcolonial studies, it seems that while Prospero can easily be accused of colonizing both Caliban and Miranda, Caliban's response is all too often assumed to be limited to seizing Miranda so he can "people this isle with Calibans" (Shakespeare 120). The imagined alternatives to Prospero's authoritarian control of Miranda, that is, also objectify her. While the poet and the colonial metropolis remain firmly in tension, the feminized Caribbean and the Caribbean woman remain mostly mute objects of their discourses and possession.

My observations may appear unfair to a reader less interested in how epistemic violence can be implicated in the rhetorical dimension of language than in any discourse's explicitly thematized contents. Images such as the feminization of the land, that reader might suggest, may be unfortunate, but do not necessarily detract from the poem's genuinely emancipating thrust, and they reveal as much as they conceal. At the least, however, this is not a position that the poem itself supports. It deals precisely with resistance to the epistemic violence of a metropolitan gaze and discourse. And the narrator quite explicitly critiques his own chosen set of images and tropes. He makes clear how the figure of this "metaphorical woman," the mythical Helen, becomes the St. Lucian woman, who then remains trapped in this suspect image superimposed on her. In the poem, Helen has to struggle not only against an oppressive social order but also against an oppressive emancipating rhetoric. While it is true that rhetoric itself cannot be avoided, and while the Homeric parallels might be said to illuminate at least as much as they obscure the lives of the islanders, it is the strength of the poem that it follows the less-taken road of questioning its own rhetorical strategies. In this, it illuminates an aspect of emancipatory discourse that is often obscured.

As I have suggested, such illumination makes the final slip into objectifying traditional rhetoric all the more problematic. Indeed, Omeros could be regarded in the end as the chronicle of a failure, at least with regard to the problem that it most urgently poses. Either the narrator remains unwilling to yield before the opacity of otherness--to stop before capturing and exhibiting the other in the confines of his rhetorical figures--or he is simply unable to stop, much though he tries. In either case, however, we are able to recognize this failure because the poem itself has made it discernible, largely by alerting us to another possibility: the possibility of liberating the other from our story line, of remaining in the darkness that all alterity exudes. Again, articulating this challenge may not be a sufficient step, but it remains a necessary one for the overcoming of the epistemic violence on which colonialism itself is predicated. Omeros's success, then, is to clarify the terms of its failure.