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

Robert D. Hamner

[W]hat is needed is not new names for old things, or old names for old things, but the faith of using the old names anew, so that mongrel as I am, something prickles in me when I see the word Ashanti as with the word Warwickshire, ... both baptising ... this hybrid, this West Indian.

Walcott, "What the Twilight Says" (10)

Derek Walcott, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992, has regularly undertaken the re-envisioning of other writers' works throughout his career. Notable examples include The Sea at Dauphin (1954), based on Synge's Riders to the Sea; The Joker of Seville (1974), after Tirso de Molina's El Burlador de Sevilla; and his epic Omeros (1990), drawn from Homeric epic tradition. Whatever vestiges of original sources may be retained through Walcott's process of adaptation, each original is strategically altered by his West Indian Creole aesthetic. In his 1974 essay "The Muse of History," Walcott separates himself from African-Caribbean nationalists whose sympathetic anger regarding their degraded ancestors forces them to reject the language and art of imperialist slave masters. Walcott complains:

They cannot separate the rage of Caliban from the beauty of his speech when the speeches of Caliban are equal in their elemental power to those of his tutor. The language of the torturer mastered by the victim. This is viewed as servitude, not as victory. (4).

As a New World poet of mixed blood, Walcott asserts proprietary rights over his multivalent legacy.

One rich vein of Western literature fascinates Walcott particularly because he perceives cogent similarities between the geography of the Aegean, "That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne" (Keats 44), and his own Caribbean sea. Given the classically based British curriculum in which students were educated throughout the West Indies, Walcott had a rich storehouse from which to draw. His native St. Lucia earned the sobriquet "Helen of the West" due to its natural beauty and because European powers fought so many years over possession of the island. By 1970, he can be found arguing "that an archipelago, whether Greek or West Indian, is bound to be a fertile area, particularly if it is a bridge between continents, and a variety of people settle there" ("Meanings" 49). In the decade of the 1990s alone, Walcott has revisited the Odyssey twice: first to launch his version of a West Indian epic in Omeros, then to reconfigure Homer's epic for the stage in The Odyssey (1993). The Homeric correspondences are obvious and have been addressed at length, numerous times in the case of Omeros (Burian, "All That"; Hamner, Epic; Hofmeister; and Terada) and The Odyssey (Burian, "You Can Build"; Davis; Hamner, "Odyssey"). That subject having been covered, the focus of my present comparative analysis is Walcott's creolization process: specific alterations that give Caribbean meaning to The Odyssey on stage.

Lawrence Carrington's St. Lucian Creole is a valuable handbook for anyone interested in the phonetic and morphological structure of Creole speech. For purposes of the present study, John Figueroa offers a few more immediately cogent observations regarding the potential of vernacular in poetry for a writer with Walcott's colonial background. He argues against the use of nonstandard dialogue for the sake of local color or to make the social point that provincials can have literary status. Then he sets out to demonstrate that "the use of non-standard varieties as a part of texture, and structuring, rather than simply as a slice of life, can be significant and uniquely communicating" (156-57).

Physical restraints of stage production limit the narrative range that would be available within a purely verbal medium such as the epic. Nevertheless, preserving elements that can be represented by word and action, Walcott retains truncated versions of both the Telemachus and the Odysseus plots. Respecting the oral tradition behind the tales eventually drawn together by the Homeric scribe around 800 BC, Walcott introduces the singer Billy Blue to act as a "chorus" for editorializing and providing transitions. Billy Blue's idiom and rhythm--his is the first voice heard in the play--provide the initial Caribbean inflection of the work:

Gone sing 'bout that man because his stories please us, Who saw trials and tempests for ten years after Troy.

I'm Blind Billy Blue, my main man's sea-smart Odysseus, Who the God of the Sea drove crazy and tried to destroy. (1)

He begins with dialectic elisions for "I'm going to" ("Gone") and "about" ("'bout"). His introduction of the hero then combines the epic epithet ("sea--smart" Odysseus) with the African--American influenced colloquialism "my main man."

Walcott's primary signification of geographic displacement is underscored macaronically, however, in the fifth line's transliterated Greek: "Andra moi ennepe mousa polutropon hos mala polla ..." (1). In addition to Romanizing the Greek alphabet in this line, Billy Blue, against Greek poetic practice, is given to singing rhymed couplets, with Caribbean accentuation. This latter point emerges within the text as Billy Blue (doubling as Homer's Demodocus) is questioned by Odysseus:

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,

he symbolizes the possibility of the underdog emerging triumphantly in a world which pits the weak against the strong. His chicanery, therefore, had special significance to the slave who, in identifying with the Spiderman hero [Anansi], could turn the tables, so to speak, on the White oppressor. [34]

It has taken imagination for Eurycleia, a bond slave, to survive her transplantation to Ithaca, to assimilate the diverse cultures of her existence, and just as in the Caribbean, to instill the virtuosity of an Anansi figure in the minds of Telemachus and Odysseus.

With his alternating poetic identities, Billy Blue is another of Walcott's purveyors of creative imagination. Despite his physical blindness, the Homeric poet sees with the mind's eye and immortalizes himself along with the heroes in his tale; to this, Walcott's play adds occasional allusions to Blue's function as a poet. When Alcinous and his courtiers encourage Odysseus to recount his adventures for Phemius/Blue to formulate into song [54], they anticipate his tale's longevity and influence: it "will ride time to unknown archipelagos" [59]. Again, 100 pages later, when Odysseus exhibits madness after the slaughter of all his wife's suitors, he threatens to execute Billy Blue. Only Eumaeus's timely protest forestalls his death: "He's a homeless, wandering voice, Odysseus.... Kill him and you stain the fountain of poetry" [151-52]. Here lies motive for preservation of Homer's voice and material, stained with slightly less blood and altered befitting Walcott's dual heritage.

Largely due to his multiple masks and his itinerant status, Billy Blue provides the narrative with an African-Caribbean voice more frequently than the domestic servant Eurycleia. Leading up to Circe's seductive overtures to Odysseus, it is Billy Blue who supplies a prologue in West Indian dialetct. Whereas Homer's Athena slips Odysseus the potent Moly flower to counteract Circe's love potion, Billy Blue inventories a witch's brew spiced with thyme, coriander, basil, rosewater, and lavender, but he also lists ingredients familiar to the West Indian palate: "Man-you-must" and gooseberry wine. Circe, who is "sweeter than guava jam" (79-80), seduces Odysseus, but the classical Moly flower averts the fate that has befallen her other lovers: transformation into swine.

As Walcott has it, Billy Blue is just one element in a four-scene creolization of the entire Circe episode (act 1, scenes 10-13). Beginning with the stage set for scene 10, Walcott's Caribbeanized island of Aeaea is distinguished by its thick growth of wild plantain. By the time Circe puts in her appearance, the sailors are already reveling in a kaiso (calypso-styled) chorus:

The island of Calypso
Aeaea
Ai-ee-o
Bacchanal
And carnival
Is the place to go
O Lord have mercy
Before I dead
Let me lie down with Miss Circe
Stroking me head
Stroking me bald head
That have only one eye
When she stops
See me Cyclops
Falling down dead
O Lord have mercy
..................
But when Circe spell fell on me
I turn beast too. (75)

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.

What Walcott contributes to the original quest for home is the kind of insight gained from colonial experience. As the mixed descendant of white masters and black slaves, Walcott appreciates the complexity of establishing rather than returning "home." Menelaus's first lesson for Telemachus is to correct his assumption that home is a gift of God: "No. God's trial. We earn home, like everything else" (29). Thus, Walcott's creolization of Odysseus's homeward journey subtly alters the epic goal of reclaiming a kingdom.

The cyclops Walcott's Odysseus encounters becomes the embodiment of monolithic government a "thousand years" after Odysseus's time (60). The giant's eye is now identified with the singular pronoun I, a prominent trope in West Indian parlance. Although this cyclops I represents all the political and social depravity of "Babylon" rejected by Jamaica's nonconformist Rastafarians, Walcott plays on the complexity of their use of I. Rastafarian sociologist Jah Bones refers to the I as "the premier letter and sound as well as word." Moreover, he explains, for Rastafarian brethren the first-person singular pronoun or "I-man" also includes second-person "you-man" in so far as every person (playing on the sound) is simultaneously "hu-man" (46, 47). According to Ennis Edmonds, I (or plural I-an-I in the vernacular) represents "the divine principle that is in all humanity," as well as "rejection of subservience in Babylon culture and an affirmation of self as an active agent in the creation of one's own reality and iden tity" (33). Walcott's appreciation of such verbal implications is evident from his dramatization of the Rastafarian community in O Babylon! (1976). In The Odyssey, the eye/I conjunction underscores both Polyphemos's monomaniacal power and Odysseus's individual resistance--the assumption of solipsistic godhead on one hand, and the inner voice of reason, God, or social consciousness on the other.

A martial chorus prepares for the cynicism exploited in scenes 8 and 9 of the first act:

To die for the eye is best, it's the greatest glory:

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

There is no I after the eye, no more history, Except his own, Odysseus. (60)

When Walcott leaps a "thousand years," his reference to the "grey colonels" (62) makes explicit his focus on the years 1967--74, during which Greece suffered the brutal tyranny of Colonels George Papadopoulos, Nicholas Makarezos, and other right-wing officers (Clogg 186--99).The colonels' authoritarian grip on all areas of life is represented in the play through Polyphemos and his uniformed thugs. Under their rule history is forgotten, thought is forbidden, and in the cradle of democracy "There is no art, no theatre, no circuses" (61-63). Leading up to Odysseus's Nobody-is-my-name gambit, Walcott has his protagonist declare, despite his fame, "none of my virtues is nobler than all men's" (61). Then, when this "everyman" claiming to be nobody from nowhere in particular sees his life on the line, his Anansi training manifests itself in humorous black dialect. Odysseus dances before Polyphemos, teasing him about his looks, "Man, you so ugly nobody would believe it" (65).

In scene 9, their difference in appearance suggests a comparison between monocular and binary vision. The scene is set in a modern Greece oppressed by monolithic autocracy Polyphemos's monocular vision--and his cannibalism--suggest the oppression of individual humanity. Odysseus speaks on behalf of any group so oppressed: prisoners, slaves, minorities, colonials. He contends that mortals need two eyes "For balance. Proportion. Contrast.... Left, right. Good, bad. Heaven, hell" (68). Binocular vision affords depth perception, multiple dimensions, and the ability to appreciate opposites simultaneously.

According to Lorna Hardwick, the polarities structuring this cyclops episode are crucial to defining Walcott's postmodern perspective. It can be argued that Homer's emphasis on the cyclopes' incivility and their primitive lack of farming and shipbuilding makes them convenient representatives of the Other for the Greeks. The Greek-versus-barbarian social code valuing house over cave, cooked rather than raw food, citizen over alien, establishes a hierarchy that privileges Odysseus's rational sophistication. It is Hardwick's contention that Walcott dramatically undermines this hierarchy:

Walcott's redrawing of the Otherness of the Cyclops in terms of political tyranny and lack of human feeling both dissolves the distance between Homer and the twentieth century and denies that it is "natural" to exploit ethnic difference as a criterion for otherness." His incorporation of diaspora voices in the play emphasises a poetics of cultural fluidities and interaction rather than difference.... Walcott's concern is not with pluralism but rather with the forging of commonalities. (6-7)

Hardwick argues further that Walcott's

notion of simultaneity and the associated dramatic techniques recognise "difference" in gender, ethnicity, class, language and moral feeling but include these in an exploration of inter-relationships, an exploration which crosses time, space and culture. (9)

The "associated dramatic techniques" that Hardwick has in mind are the casting of the same actor as Polyphemos and the petty tyrant Arnaeus and the ruthless violence that connects the giant's bloody hands with Odysseus's ruthless dispatch of his wife's suitors.

Polyphemos has no monopoly on despotism. In fact no people has a monopoly on vice or virtue. This is the point Walcott makes in a 1990 interview regarding an often disregarded aspect of slavery: "Black people capturing black people and selling them to the white man. That is the real beginning;... We have to face that reality.... That is the history of the world" (qtd. in Brown 212-13). Seller, sold, and buyer are inevitably linked in a complicated brotherhood. Therein lies Hardwick's "commonality."

C.B. Davis is also impressed by the fact that Walcott later transforms Polyphemos into Arnaeus, "a huge swineherd with an eye patch, in a filthy sheepskin" (Odyssey 126). Davis interprets the overt linkage to mean that this cantankerous, lower--class, native Greek citizen is equally susceptible to the same monocular vision as the cyclops (albeit on a limited scale because of his subordinate status). The point is well taken, and it may be that Odysseus the dispossessed Ithacan king is himself guilty to some extent of an imperialist mind-set:

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

Crusoe's survival is not purely physical, not a question of the desolation of his environment, but a triumph of will. He is for us, today, the twentieth century symbol of artistic isolation and breakdown, of withdrawal, of the hermetic exercise that poetry has become, even in the New World, he is the embodiment of the schizophrenic Muse whose children are of all races. (40)

Walcott's comments on this prototype also illuminate his creolization of Odysseus. From his native St. Lucia, Walcott recalls "the cunning of certain types, representative of the slave outwitting his master, like Br'er Rabbit or Tar Baby, done in West Indian dialect' Yet, one figure was missing:

My Makak comes from my own childhood. But there was no king, no tribal chief, no warrior for a model in those stories. So the person I saw was this degraded, humble, lonely, isolated figure of the wood-cutter. I can see him for what he is now, a brawling, ruddy drunk who would come down the street on a Saturday when he got paid and let out an immense roar that would terrify all the children. ... He is still alive, and there is no terror anymore--except in the back of my mind. This was a degraded man, but he had some elemental force in him that is still terrifying; in another society he would have been a warrior. ("Meanings" 50)

Walcott's Odyssean protagonist is the shipwrecked, vagabond Crusoe/Makak, who shares with Homer's displaced royalty, Odysseus and Eumaeus, remarkable survival instincts, not just associations with distant thrones. Were it not for the assistance of Athena, Odysseus might well have suffered the fate of the faithful Eumaeus. Although Eumaeus is the son of a king and quite capable as a warrior, he now functions as a swineherd, a station from which he manifests no desire to rise. It is only by the materialistic suitors' estimation that his status might seem inferior. Before the returned Odysseus reveals his identity to him, Eumaeus remembers fondly his days of hunting wild boar and boasts of his herd and the revenge that he and his master will exact on the men besieging Penelope (112-14).

Walcott also introduces a slight modification in Odysseus's offenses against the gods. The Greek version has Tiresias specify two primary offenses. First, Odysseus blinds Polyphemos, and his father, Poseidon, vows unrelenting vengeance, even though Odysseus acted in defense of his men and himself. Second, Odysseus's starving men kill and eat cattle sacred to Helios on the island of Thrinacia, so they must die and he is condemned to reach Ithaca late, as a lone passenger in an alien vessel. Walcott keeps these original offenses, but from them he derives a third. Athena appears in a dream shortly after Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca: "You mocked the immortal ones" and were "The first to discount each omen!" (119). Through having Athena see human acts of self-preservation as offensive to the gods, Walcott creates an opening in the narrative to interrogate the supernatural machinery.

In the passage that finally deposits the sleeping Odysseus on his native shore, the exhausted adventurer experiences a surreal flashback that includes mermaids, phantoms of his drowned companions, and a childhood dream. The episode gives Odysseus reason to distrust the boundaries between imagination and reality. While he suspects he is suffering from hallucinations about the Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis, his spectral crewmen insist that his exploits "aren't just sailors' stories that swirl round shipwrecks" (105). Their insistence on the tale's foundation in truth, however, is complicated immediately with the appearance of his old nurse Eurycleia alternating with Billy Blue in a nursery lullaby:

EURYCLEIA (Sings)
   So, cradled in him comfort, a child see what grows
   From his shadow to shapes on a nursery wall.
(ODYSSEUS cowers, whining.)
BILLY BLUE (Sings)
   Doubt foams into dark forms feeding on phosphorus,
   The waves sound like jaws chewing the night.

   Sometimes friendly faces turn to fiendish horrors.
   Scylla soared on one side, Charybdis on his right....
EURYCLEIA (Sings)
   Are all of these monsters a child's imagination? ...
BILLY BLUE (Sings)
   Or the madness of a mariner too long alone? (106)

These kinds of reservations, spurred by unsettling dreams, underlie Athena's later charge that Odysseus is guilty of mockery in questioning the gods and their omens (119).

Walcott's creolized protagonist doubts authority whether it be theological, governmental, or literary In keeping with this iconoclastic tendency, his narrative continually reflects on itself. Devices such as shadow play (22), mime (28, 36), and characters taking dual roles function as Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt does to highlight the intertextuality of theatrical art. Rather than have Odysseus outline once again some of his key adventures for Penelope and Laertes as Homer does, Walcott relies on a comic sequence of doubled characters: mermaids who teased Odysseus on his raft before he washed ashore in Phaeacia become flirtatious kitchen servants in Ithaca; Nausicaa reappears as Penelope's insolent maid Melantho; Polyphemos turns up again as the troublesome swineherd Arnaeus, to whom Odysseus gives the one-fingered "Cyclops salute" (124-27).

In Walcott's hands, Penelope's independence is also enhanced. She still craftily unravels her tapestry night after night to forestall obstreperous suitors, but she also holds her own against threats brought by the suitor Antinuous, asserting her power of independent choice: "My patience wasn't slavery, it was pure trust" (20). In other words, her protracted refusal of other lovers comes from her heart, unfettered by domestic obligation, convention, or tradition. She has waited faithfully the full 20 years for her husband's return; nevertheless, in addition to the bed test by which she forces Odysseus to prove his identity, she is not afraid to assert her disapproval when his bloody vengeance turns her house into a slaughterhouse. She demands an accounting: "IT'S FOR THIS I KEPT MY THIGHS CROSSED FOR TWENTYYEARS?...To make this a second Troy! When will men learn?" (153, 154). In a departure from Homer, her intervention also saves the life of Melantho. Then, only after she rejects several proffered tokens of Od ysseus's identity, does she give him the chance to prove that he knows the secret of their immovable bed.

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.

Clogg, Richard. A Short History of Modern Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979.

Davis, C. B. "'There Is No "I" after the "Eye"'--The Cyclops as Dramatized by Euripides and Derek Walcott." Text and Presentation: Journal of the Comparative Drama Conference 16 (1995): 32-38.

Edmonds, Ennis B. "Dread 'I' In-a-Babylon: Ideological Resistance and Cultural Revitalization." Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader. Ed. Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, William David Spencer, and Adrian Anthony McFarlane. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1998. 23-35.

Figueroa, John. "Creole in Literature: Beyond Verisimilitude: Texture and Varieties: Derek Walcott." The Yearbook of English Studies 25 (1995):156--62.

Genovese, Eugene. Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974.

Hamner, Robert D. Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott's Omeros. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1997.

-----. "The Odyssey: Derek Walcott's Dramatization of Homer's Odyssey." Ariel 24.4 (Oct. 1993): 101--08.

Hardwick, Lorna. "A Daidalos in the Late Modern Age? Transplanting Homer into Derek Walcott's The Odyssey: A Stage Version." The Reception of Classical Texts and Images. Paper delivered at the Classics Conference, Open University, 1996. 1--12. <www.open.ac.uk/Arts/CC96/hardwick.htm>

Hill, Errol. The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre. Austin: U of Texas P, 1972.

Hofmeister, Timothy, ed. From Homer to Omeros: Derek Walcott's Omeros and Odyssey. Spec. issue of Classical World 93.1 (Sept./Oct. 1999).

Keats, John "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Keats: Poems and Selected Letters. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribners, 1962.

Liddell, George, and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. Ed. Henry Stuart Jones. 9th ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1961.

Rouse, W.H.D., trans. Homer: The Odyssey. New York: Mentor, 1937.

Terada, Rei. Derek Walcott's Poetry: American Mimicry. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1992.

Walcott, Derek. Another Life. New York: Farrar 1973.

-----. "The Figure of Crusoe." Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Ed. Robert Hamner. Washington: Three Continents, 1993.33--40.

-----. "Meanings." Savacou 2 (1970):45--51.

-----. "The Muse of History: An Essay." Is Massa Day Dead? Ed. Orde Coombs. Garden City: Doubleday, 1974. 1--28.

-----. O Babylon! The Joker of Seville and O Babylon! New York: Farrar, 1978.

-----. The Odyssey: A Stage Version. New York: Farrar, 1993.

-----. Omeros. New York: Farrar, 1990.

-----. "What the Twilight Says: An Overture." Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, 1970. 1--40.

Robert D. Hamner is senior professor of English and Humanities at Hardin-Simmons University. He has written or edited books on Joseph Conrad, V S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott. He and Paul Breslin are coediting a Festschrift honoring Derek Walcott's 75th birthday for 2005.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Hofstra University
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group