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

In conjunction with bacchanalian carnival and the spirited patois double entendre, associations with the sorceress Circe and the nymph Calypso in these lines evoke Trinidad more than any of the Odyssey's legendary islands.

Walcott's cultural melange continues in 1.13 as he invents a voodoo ceremony through which to transport Odysseus from Circe's Aeaea into his version of the underworld. Circe introduces Odysseus among celebrants of Shango, the Yoruba god of thunder and lightning. As is typical of Haitian and other New World religious practices, these Shango priests and their devotees call upon a pantheon of gods regardless of cultural boundaries. According to Eugene Genovese,

African practices did not reappear in the New World in their traditional forms. Many of them, including the cult of the dead, the worship of certain gods, and the use of particular charms and potions, fused somewhat incoherently into new and much less structured patterns of belief and ritual. (172)

Consequently, summoned along with Shango and Erzulie (insatiable goddess of love) are Zeus and Athena (to the latter, Circe and the celebrants apply the Creole epithet "Maman d'l'Eau / River Daughter" (84, 87). Ritually empowered and assured by Circe that his crewmen are returned to their human form, Odysseus is prepared for the next stage of his journey, descent into the underworld.

Walcott's descent to Hades entails shifts in time and geography as well as a change from earthly existence to the realm of death. It is as though Odysseus anticipates the third leg of the Atlantic slave-trade route. On one shore of this vast Acheron, he leaves the voodoo rites of the New World to arrive in London's Underground. There he encounters an "alphabet of souls, Ajax to Zeus" (92) that resembles Walcott's earlier catalogue of heroes, also beginning with Ajax, in Another Life (16-22).Taking a cue from Dante, as he does for the inferno scene in Omeros (289-94), here Walcott has his ghostly figures assigned their individual stations along the underground's endless tracks. From Billy Blue, his mother Anticlea, and the prophet Tiresias, Odysseus learns his future. As in Homer, after further tribulation, he will eventually reach Ithaca, kill Penelope's suitors, and live with wife and son until a peaceful death in old age.

Walcott makes as much as Homer does of Odysseus's definitive dexterity. In having Billy Blue introduce the play by quoting Homer's opening line in Greek, he invites consideration of his hero's epithet "polutropon," and his Odysseus exemplifies the word's many meanings in his adventures. The prefix polu (poly-) basically means many, much or varied. Tropon, on the other hand, embodies a range of meanings: literally--devices, ways, means, or skills; but metaphorically--versatile, changeable, or fickle, as of the mind; and in its passive form--being acted upon, moved, or tossed about as by accident, fortune, or the gods (Liddell 1444-45). In his struggle to return home, Odysseus is capable of acting decisively and violently, but when occasion demands, this favorite of Athena is equally adept at lying, assuming a pseudonym or disguise, and patiently biding his time.