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

ODYSSEUS

That's a strange dialect. What island are you from?

DEMODOCUS [Billy Blue]

A far archipelago. Blue seas. Just like yours.

ODYSSEUS

So you pick up various stories and you stitch them?

DEMODOCUS [Billy Blue]

The sea speaks the same language around the world's shores. (122)

Despite the assertion of common experience and narrative impulse in this exchange, Walcott's language tends to be more playful than the original. His text is marked with low puns, innuendo, and witticisms more in keeping with calypsonian picong (from French piquant or pique: insulting, often risque repartee with a social or personal thrust) and Shakespearean legerdemain than Homer's kind of word play. (1)

The tenor of the language is in keeping, of course, with Walcott's speakers. In addition to the modern Caribbean every-poet Billy Blue, who plays the part of both Homer's poets Demodocus and Phemius, various minor characters and Odysseus himself occasionally speak in patois and allude to sources that are conspicuously non-Greek. In this regard, treatment of the faithful old nurse Eurycleia is especially pertinent. Classicist Peter Burian reminds us of Homer's interest in ancient Egyptian wisdom as well as parallels with Walcott's Ma Kilman, the obeah woman from Omeros. Eurycleia's African-Caribbean vernacular echoes the typical nurse-mammy while both she and Ma Kilman hark back to African tribal lore for wisdom and healing ("You Can Build" 72). Walcott's Eurycleia serves the same functions as Homer's, but Walcott makes of her birthplace in Egypt (9) an essential African component of his revision. As an intimate of Ithaca's royal family for two generations, Eurycleia has used the nursery to shape the developin g minds of Odysseus and his son Telemachus.

Her influence on Telemachus is explicit in the scene where she expresses doubts about his having received assurance from a swallow that his father is alive and will be returning. Her creole frame of reference involves her conflation of African and Greek myth as well as the decidedly West Indian patois of her speech. Although she had taught both her young pupils that Athena comes from Egypt, the cradle of Greece, and that this goddess is capable of assuming various forms, she doubts Telemachus when he insists he has heard a swallow speak.

EURYCLEIA

Nancy stories me tell you and Hodysseus.

TELEMACHUS

I believe them now. My faith has caught a fever.

EURYCLEIA

Launching your lickle cradles into dreaming seas.

TELEMACHUS

What were those stories? An old slave's superstition?

EURYCLEIA

People don't credit them now. Them too civilize. (8)

Eurycleia's attaching an H to Odysseus's name may be her personal quirk, but her truncation of Anansi to "Nancy" sounding k for the tt in little, using the objective "them" instead of the required subjective case, and dropping the linking verb altogether before leaving off the tense marker in civilize[d]," are all common to West Indian vernacular.

Menelaus informs Telemachus in scene 4 that he must be eternally indebted to his old nurse's tales because they opened his "gates of imagination" [35]. Walcott's having Menelaus make this specific point initiates an incremental motif in his play and taps the same popular West Indian lore that has inspired writers from Louise Bennett of Jamaica to Edward Kamau Brathwaite of Barbados. Leonard Barrett's research finds Anansi, a trickster of African origins, to be a central figure in "tales told by West Indian Nanas and Dadas to their children born in exile" [33]. According to Barrett,