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

Walcott's Odysseus is both colonizer and displaced native islander, and his Cyclops, while a "native" ruler, is also a totalitarian oppressor. Thus, as poles, Walcott's Odysseus and Cyclops are not pure opposites;... Rather than casting either the colonizer or the colonized native as racial or cultural "Other," Walcott has made his Cyclops an "Other" which can exist within a single, "intact" cultural milieu, or as an aspect of an individual personality. (36)

In singling out the same alienation factor within as well as between societies, Davis, Hardwick, and Peter Burian ("You Can Build" 80) all conclude that Walcott advocates interrelatedness and commonalities rather than difference in his creolized Odyssey.

If Odysseus's curiosity lured him into the barbarian's cave and his battle of wit and will symbolizes the contention between democracy and despotism, the dramatization of individual survival continues on the literal plane as well. Without the help of Homer's ram (although Polyphemos has a manservant with the East Indian name of Ram in Walcott's play), Odysseus escapes as in the original, blinding his adversary and benefiting from the trick of calling himself Nobody: Polyphemos cries "NOBODY HAS ESCAPED, NOBODY BLINDED ME!" (71). One last tenuous reference to Walcott's West Indian origins in this scene involves the oil barrel Polyphemos hurls after his tormentor, evoking the steel drums utilized by musicians in Trinidad carnival competitions.

Superficial as it may appear at first, the connection between African and Asian drums and self-taught West Indian percussionists involves virtues of perseverance and individual creativity that are worthy of Odysseus. Unable to afford traditional instruments, the disenfranchised had to manufacture their own means of expression with whatever materials came to hand. Racial and social divisions led colonial officials to impose rigid bans against black and East Indian drummers as far back as the 1880s. As Errol Hill points out in his study of the Trinidad Carnival,

The persistent playing of the drum for religious or secular entertainment, both before and after emancipation, was clearly a source of constant irritation and perhaps apprehension to the privileged classes. Most of them could find nothing pleasing or edifying in its use. (44)

By the turn of the century, miscellaneous metal objects had joined the traditional skin and bamboo percussion instruments. Then in the 1930s, in petroleum-rich Trinidad, abandoned oil barrels were being shaped, tempered, and hammered into tune (Hill 47, 48). However we understand the barrel, Walcott goes beyond Homer's text with the challenge that elicits Polyphemos's violent reaction. Walcott's Odysseus wants to do more than proclaim his true name:

MY NAME IS NOT NOBODY! IT'S ODYSSEUS! AND LEARN, YOU BLOODY TYRANTS, THAT MEN CAN STILL THINK! (72)

This episode, beginning and ending with a barrel, leads to Odysseus's assertion of identity and resistance to repression.

By emphasizing this resistance and the equivocal devices of Homer's archetypal wanderer, Walcott is delineating latent virtues in predecessors of his Creole protagonist. These include Ti-Jean from Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958), Makak from Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967), Jackson Philip from Pantomime (1978), Shabine from "The Schooner Flight" (in The Star-Apple Kingdom [1979]), and Achille from Omeros. Ti-Jean and Phillip share a natural cunning and irreverence toward authority; Makak and Achille have their ahistoric visions and the ability to adapt through experience; Shabine, in addition to the native wit and hard-earned insight of these others, has the wanderlust as well as the linguistic skill of Homer's Odysseus. In his essay "The Figure of Crusoe" (1965), Walcott redefines one other artistically inclined prototype, which he considers to be a truly New World Robinson Crusoe. He argues that this deracinated