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

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

Victor Figueroa

When the Martinican poet Aime Cesaire, one of the founding figures of the negritude movement in Caribbean letters, asked in his now-classic Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, "Qui et quel nous sommes? [Who and what are we?] Admirable question!" (12), he helped establish the framework that would dominate the work of many colonial and postcolonial writers to come. That framework is certainly central for Derek Walcott, whose work through his middle period (1) was guided by such questions as: Who and what are we, the peoples of the Caribbean? What have we lost in the experience of colonialism? Is it possible to recuperate our roots? Who will we be(come) after colonialism? Walcott, however, has consistently resisted many of the traditional answers to such questions. He has been particularly opposed to attempts to locate Caribbean identity in exclusively African roots, a position much in vogue during his early career as a poet. Rather than privileging a nostalgia for a lost Africa, or for that matter an unquestioning acceptance of Europe, Walcott has remained in agonistic balance between the diverse elements that inform his Caribbean experience and identity.

In his explorations of identity politics, Walcott has highlighted the tensions that pervade his colonial (and postcolonial) condition as experienced in his native Caribbean and as inherited from his mixed African and European descent. Thus, in what are probably his most often quoted lines, we are reminded:

    I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
    Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
    I who have cursed
    The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
    Between this Africa, and the English tongue I love?
    Betray them both, or give back what they give?
    How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
    How can I turn from Africa and live? (Collected Poems 18)

Walcott's oeuvre is a sustained attempt to incorporate and come to terms with these tensions. Where Walcott differs from many other postcolonial writers is in his refusal to respond with bitterness to the Caribbean's colonial legacy of dispossession, diaspora, and humiliation, and in declining to make his work a quarrel with history: "We owe the past revenge, or nothing, and revenge is uncreative" ("Caribbean" 57). In "The Muse of History," Walcott addresses colonial tensions with an Adamic vision of the New World, beginning anew not by cutting the ties to a suffocating past but rather by transforming the value of that past from the perspective offered by the potentialities of the present. In the work of "the great poets of the New World, from Whitman to Neruda,"

    history is fiction, subject to a fitful muse, memory. Their
    philosophy, based on a contempt for historic time, is revolutionary,
    for what they repeat to the New World is its simultaneity with the
    Old.[...] The tough aesthetic of the New World neither explains nor
    forgives history. It refuses to recognize it as a creative or
    culpable force.[...] The death of a gaucho does not merely repeat,
    but is, the death of Caesar. Fact evaporates into myth. This is not
    the jaded cynicism which sees nothing new under the sun, it is an
    elation which sees everything as renewed.
    (What the Twilight Says 37-38)

Walcott distances himself from writers such as V. S. Naipaul, who attacks the Caribbean's uncreative mimicry of European models, but also from the enthusiastic search for "true" single roots that characterizes movements such as negritude. (2) For Walcott, the New World is original not because it breaks away from the Old but because of its "simultaneity" with it. As a result, the New World is Adamic because in its mimicry we are, in Derrida's terms, "faced then with mimicry imitating nothing; faced, so to speak, with a double that doubles no simple, a double that nothing anticipates, nothing at least that is not itself already double" (206).

Walcott's Adamic mimicry is ultimately an attempt to defend the integrity and creativity of Caribbean cultures against the dismissive attacks of (neo)colonial judges like Naipaul. (3) However, in his earlier works Walcott's defense remains essentially ontological: it attempts to answer the question "qui et quel nous sommes," to define the reality of the Caribbean by creating it.

By the time Walcott publishes Omeros in 1990, there is a fundamental twist in his approach. The ontological question remains important, but the emphasis has shifted toward a different kind of question, one that could be described as ethical. (4) Thus, while some of the characters in the poem are still engaged with questions of identity, (5) Walcott seems more interested in examining the possibility of alliances between different ethnicities and cultures, and in questioning unequal and unjust relations within power structures, than in articulating identity. This is clearly shown by the important roles played by Major Plunkett and Omeros's autobiographical first-person narrator. Plunkett, a retired British army officer living in St. Lucia, must articulate a new sense of his life's meaning in postindependence St. Lucia. The narrator is a writer who divides his time between the island and a teaching position in the US. For both, the main dilemma as the poem progresses is not trying to sort out the diverse aspects of their postcolonial selves but rather honestly determining whether they can relate to other islanders in an equitable manner that relinquishes the privileges of old colonial authority or social advantage. In other words, Walcott shifts the emphasis from Who am I? to How do I relate to my neighbor, to the other facing me?

This shift marks what I call an ethical twist to the traditional politics of identity in (post)colonial struggles for emancipation (of course, I mean a shift in emphasis, not an abandonment of one set of questions for the other). My understanding of ethics here is essentially Levinasian: the primacy of respect for alterity, the acknowledgment of the other's irreducible difference, what Edouard Glissant terms the other's "opacite" (203). (6) While for Levinas the other remains rather abstract, in the Argentinean philosopher Enrique Dussel's work the Levinasian other becomes identified with the concrete subaltern colonized masses that have been the exploited nuts and bolts in the imperial construction of a European modernity that also writes them out of existence. (7) It is those questions regarding the way alterity relates to power, as opposed to questions regarding true identity, that come to fore in Omeros.

Of course, this shift does complicate the poet's understanding of identity. As the poem progresses, the reader begins to realize that, with the questioning of the rhetoric of identity, the poem's narrator may discover himself as having more in common with the oppressors than with the oppressed. His role in the questioning of authoritarianism becomes increasingly unclear, and more often than not he realizes that, in spite of his critique of current power structures, he is securely on the side of authority. The poet finds himself writing lovingly about "his people," yes, but he also understands that he is "loving them from hotels" (228). (8) Caught between worlds, the Caribbean poet is forced to revaluate his alignment with subaltern populations that he often takes for granted. In Omeros the pretension that comes most powerfully under scrutiny is the claim that the poet can "speak for the subaltern," to echo Spivak's famous formulation, a claim that we can recognize in such foundational figures of committed poetry as Aime Cesaire and Pablo Neruda, and that often serves as the moral ground and justification for artistic/literary production in (post)colonial societies.

The narrator's dilemma in Omeros is that while as a Caribbean poet he does share at least some cultural background with the subaltern (the identity link), he finds himself differently positioned in the spectrum of power. He is both identified with the subaltern and forced to acknowledge the subaltern's alterity. (9) In fact, the poet is caught between the duty to question power and the subaltern's questioning of the poet's power. Before the metropolis, the poet must speak; before the subaltern, he should remain silent and listen, unless he wants to repeat a silencing gesture that is in fact intimately tied to colonial authoritarianism.

Nowhere is the ethical quandary of Omeros more clearly seen than in the poem's treatment of Helen, one of its main characters, whom both Plunkett and the narrator transform into an emblem of St. Lucia. Indeed, the reader is informed that because of its beauty and because many empires fought wars over it, historians have referred to St. Lucia as the Helen of the Caribbean. For both Plunkett and the narrator it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish among the ancient Helen of Troy, the island, and the actual St. Lucian woman who is Achille's lover and Plunkett's maid. Both of them decide to honor her: Plunkett by writing the history of the island and the narrator by writing the poem that we hold in our hands. But Helen remains too distant and proud throughout the whole poem for Plunkett ever to feel entirely comfortable with his own version of her. The major perpetually lusts after her, and his history buries Helen beneath layers of mythical parallels that allow for her vicarious possession. Like Plunkett, the narrator is endlessly fascinated by Helen's beauty and repeatedly paralyzed by her disdainful attitude. Both characters consistently try to counteract her alterity by clothing it with poetic imagery.

Writing his history of St. Lucia/Helen, Plunkett comes to realize that "the harder he worked, the more he betrayed his wife" (103).The reason comes as no surprise: as he examines his books through his "Cyclops eye" (his magnifying glass) he sees "over wooden waves of a naval aquatint, / a penile cannon emerge from its embrochure. / Able semen, he smiled" (102). Later still, his magnifying glass

      magnified the peaks of the island's breasts and it buried stiff
    factions. He had come that far to learn that History earns its own
    tenderness in time; not for a navel victory, but for the V of a
    velvet back in a yellow dress.
    ... the island was Helen. (103)

Plunkett's project inevitably involves both reifying Helen and sexualizing the island. Even if it represents an attempt at historical vindication of the colonized, Plunkett's history constitutes an act of epistemic violence that inserts Helen within a narrative that ultimately justifies her status as political or sexual possession. It remains within the rhetoric of colonialism because its aspirations are no different from those of the colonial enterprise. The island is a beautiful woman to be possessed, and the woman is a beautiful island to be inhabited.

While the conflation of the discourses of sexual and political possession is not uncommon in the language of colonialism, Plunkett at least claims to write out of regret about his privileged position and out of a desire to contribute to Helen's well-being. (10) If we accept his sincerity, his slippage into the tropes and attitudes of colonial discourse is even more significant, revealing colonialism as an all-pervasive structuring system. The individual (including the colonizer trying to abandon his role) cannot escape a semiotic system grounded on the colonial difference (the ostensibly inherent inferiority or reification of the subaltern). (11)

If the rhetoric of colonialism depends on such a semiotic system, then any anticolonial stand must acknowledge of what Glissant calls the colonized's "droit a l'opacite" (203), the subaltern's right not to be reduced to the colonizer's view of him or her: the colonial subject is always more and other than the imperial version of him or her. Although this acknowledgment is not sufficient for an emancipating project, it remains a necessary step. And Omeros seems to suggest that because the erasure of the subaltern's agency is so deeply ingrained in the colonial system, this necessary step becomes particularly important in the case of groups or individuals from the metropolitan centers (such as Plunkett) attempting to establish alliances with subaltern groups. Any such decolonizing gesture in fact paves the way to neocolonial authoritarianism unless the metropolitan, in Doris Sommer's phrase, proceeds with caution.

Like Plunkett's, the poem's narrator's attempts to portray Helen illustrate the difficulty of proceeding with sufficient caution. He attempts like Plunkett to celebrate Helen, a celebration that is part of his defense/vindication of her, and as a West Indian poet, he might seem even more justified than Plunkett in his commitment to Helen/St. Lucia: it seems to be his duty as a Caribbean intellectual. However, as we can see in the following description of their encounter, in his very celebration of Helen he finds it hard to stop himself from taking control of her:

    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)

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).

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:

      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:

      Names are not oars that have to be laid side by side, nor are
    legends; slowly the foaming clouds have forgotten ours. You were
    never in Troy, and, between two Helens, yours is here and alive;
    their classic features were turned into silhouettes from the
    lighting bolt of a glance. These Helens are different creatures, one
    marble, one ebony. One unknots a belt of yellow cotton slowly from
    her shelving waist, one a cord of purple wool, the other one takes
    a bracelet of white cowries from a narrow wrist; one lies in a room
    with olive-eyed mosaics, another in a beach shack with its straw
    mattress, but each draws an elbow slowly over her face and offers
    the gift of her sculptured nakedness, parting her mouth. (312-13)

I can hardly read this passage as anything other than a slip back into the very rhetoric that the poem has arduously tried to leave behind. Although he begins by emphasizing once again that the two Helens cannot and should not be conflated, the poet seems unable to resist the temptation of elaborating once again on the attractions of each woman, until finally they are fused again into a single object of desire--an object, for that matter, that offers itself as a "gift" to the poet. Again, the poet's desire transforms Helen into a metaphor that defines her, not us, as responsible for her own objectification. It appears that at the very end, the aesthetic and erotic pleasures of his craft, in spite of the epistemic violence they exert on Helen (as revealed by the narrator himself), overcome the scruples of respect for opacity, and the poet does not pass by the opportunity to submit the other to his desire. This failure is especially revealing in light of the fact that it is the poem itself that has questioned the legitimacy of that erotic/aesthetic subjugation of Helen in particular and otherness in general.

The sophist philosopher Gorgias, best known from Plato's homonymous dialogue, left for posterity a fascinating text that remains one of the few extant examples of ancient Greek rhetoric: the Encomium of Helen. Gorgias's argument is that Helen could only have gone to Troy under the influence of one of four causes: the will of the gods, the power of Paris's speech, love, or force. In any of those cases, Gorgias argues, Helen should be exonerated from guilt, for she was under the influence of powers too mighty for any human will to resist.

Gorgias ends the Encomium by declaring that the text is a game composed for his own amusement. Some scholars have taken this statement literally, arguing that praise for someone as obviously immoral as Helen cannot be taken seriously. In this view, the text is an exercise designed to show the persuasive power of speech regardless of its veracity (a performance of what today we have come to associate with the term sophist). Other scholars see the Encomium as making a serious argument.15 Regardless of which side one takes, however, Helen's position remains quite precarious. Either she is guilty from the start, in which case any defense could only be a joke, or the defense is serious and she acted under the compulsion of external forces, in which case she lacks agency--she is not really acting but is acted upon. In fact, the possibility that Helen acted by her own will is equated with a moral lack, so she can only be innocent but powerless or willful but evil. In the tight logic of this narrative, Helen is a silenced subaltern. She is silenced both by her accusers and her defenders.

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.

Notes

1. Patricia Ismond has called this the "Caribbean phase" of Walcott's poetry. In my own view, the publication of Walcott's Collected Poems in 1984 is a more appropriate dividing moment, with 1987's The Arkansas Testament already moving toward the ethical twist that I argue becomes central in Omeros (1990).

2. Not surprisingly, he has been accused by some critics of not being "black enough." They persistently oppose Walcott's "humanist" poetry to Kamau Brathwaite's "folk" poetry. See Ismond's "Walcott Versus Brathwaite," Charles W Pollard (28-29), and Bruce King.

3. Walcott's observations on Caribbean mimicry are to a large extent a response to books such as Naipaul's The Middle Passage and The Mimic Men.

4. The shift of emphasis is gradual. For example, Walcott points to "The Light of the World," a poem in The Arkansas Testament, as a direct precursor of some of the preoccupations of Omeros (Conversations 174).

5. Achille, one of Omeros's protagonists, is a St. Lucian fisherman who travels back to Africa in a dream and on waking up comes to terms not only with his African ancestry but, equally important, with the fact that he cannot predicate his identity on that African past. For Achille and for some other characters in the poem it becomes necessary to acknowledge their ambiguous position in geography and history: while their selves certainly emerged from the experience of colonialism and the middle passage, their bodies and identities are now part of, and should come to fully inhabit, the Caribbean.

6. For Levinas on ethics and alterity, see Totality and Infinity, particularly section 1.

7. Dussel writes:

  Levinas habla siempre del otro como lo "absolutamente otro." Tiende
  entonces hacia la equivocidad. Por otra parte, nunca ha pensado que el
  otro pudiera ser un indio, un africano, un asiatico. El otro, para
  nosotros, es America Latina con respecto a la totalidad europea; es el
  pueblo pobre y oprimido latinoamericano con respecto a las oligarquias
  dominadoras y sin embargo dependientes. (Metodo 181-82)

My translation:

  Levinas always refers to the other as that which is "absolutely
  other." Then he tends to become ambiguous. On the other hand, he has
  never thought that the other could be an Indian, an African, an Asian.
  The other, for us, is Latin America with regards to the totality of
  Europe; it is the poor and oppressed Latin American people with
  regards to the oligarchies that dominate them, but that also remain
  dependent.

A systematic exposition of Dussel's thought can be found in his Philosophy of Liberation.

8. I often refer to the narrator as the poet because the narrative takes the form of a poem and the story presents the narrator character as a writer.

9.The narrator's ambiguous and at times tense relation to the surrounding St. Lucian characters reflects some elements from Walcott's biography, particularly his growing up in a Methodist, mulatto, middle-class family in a primarily Catholic, black, impoverished milieu. For more information on Walcott's childhood and youth in St. Lucia, see King.

10. June Scott offers valuable insights into the rhetorical use of gender categories in the articulation of historical discourse.

11. For the concept of colonial difference, see Mignolo.

12. Plunkett has the scar of a war wound; Philoctete has an open (but eventually healed) wound that represents the painful legacy of the Middle Passage; the narrator is fractured between the "here" of the island and the "elsewhere" of his overseas job.

13. For a thorough analysis of the significance of the trope of the wound in Omeros and Walcott's other works, see Ramazani.

14. See for example "The Muse of History," What the Twilight Says 36-64.

15. For divergent views on the seriousness of Gorgias's arguments, see Robert Wardy and the preface and notes to the Encomium by D. M. MacDowell.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC for permission to quote from Omeros [c] 1990 by Derek Walcott.

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