Creolizing Homer for the stage: Walcott's The Odyssey - Derek Walcott - The Odyssey: A Stage Version - Critical Essay

With The Odyssey, as with his Omeros, Walcott exploits a classical model not to romanticize some ideal but rather to dramatize the extensive ordinariness of heroism. His Homer is the itinerant bard who entertained the Greeks of his day before he and they were idealized by historical and artistic canonization. Comparing his New World archipelago with an Aegean counterpart, Walcott insists that the ancient

Greeks were the niggers of the Mediterranean. If we looked at them now, we would say that the Greeks had Puerto Rican tastes....Because the stones were painted brightly. They were not these bleached stones....People who praised classical Greece, if they were there then, would consider the Greeks' tastes vulgar, lurid. (qtd. in Brown 216-17)

He detects in the Makaks of the West Indies marginalized men living their essence, not reduced to artistic metaphors or icons. "It is a fantastic privilege," he tells D. J. R. Bruckner, "to be in a place in which limbs, features, smells, the lineaments and presence of the people are so powerful;" however, he feels "it is wrong to try to ennoble people....And just to write history is wrong. History makes similes of people, but these people are their own nouns" (13).

In the end, creolization of The Odyssey presents the audience with mixed voices and a world of hybridized culture--African, British, Caribbean, and Greek. Characters are out of place--dislocated geographically, displaced socially, shifted chronologically. Walcott's Creole drama is an assemblage of fragments, a collage that calls into question the ostensible purity of linguistic and racial roots. In this it is one of the most telling expressions of New World experience.

Notes

(1.) Ino teases the storm--tossed traveler with "Poor Odysseus! You're odd-I-see, true to your name!" (emphasis mine; Rouse 69). Odysseus, ever verbally adept, is not above punning to himself: "I know the Earthshaker has an odd dislike for Odysseus" (emphasis mine; 71). He overcomes Polyphemos with his "Noman" ruse (107-08).

A precis of this essay was presented at the 25th anniversary Caribbean Studies Association conference, St. Lucia, 31 May 2000.

Works cited

Barrett, Leonard E. The Sun and the Drum: African Roots in Jamaican Folk Traditions. Kingston: Heinemann, 1976.

Bones, Jah. "Language and Rastafari." The Language of the Black Experience. Ed. David Sutcliffe and Ansel Wong. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.37-51.

Brown, Robert, and Cheryl Johnson. "An Interview with Derek Walcott." Cream City Review 14.2 (Winter 1990): 209-23.

Bruckner, D.J.R. "A Poem in Homage to an Unwanted Man." Review of Omeros. New York Times 9 Oct. 1990. 13,17.

Burian, Peter. "'All That Greek Manure under the Green Bananas': Derek Walcott's Odyssey." South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (Spring 1997): 359-77.

-----"'You Can Build a Heavy-Beamed Poem out of This': Derek Walcott's Odyssey." Hofmeister 71-81.

Carrington, Lawrence D. St. Lucian Creole: A Descriptive Analysis of Its Phonology and Morpho-Syntax. Hamburg: Buske, 1984.