The South Wing

Tempting though it is, I promised myself this would not be an article about Greek puns. Omeros (Greek for the “Homer” credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey), an epic poem by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, is full of Greek puns, and they range from intriguing to incognito; not knowing Greek is hardly a burden, though, because this poem reads like a novel that happens to rhyme.  The story is by turns captivating and bewildering, the characters are interesting and cleverly painted, and the scenery is sumptuous. Like a good fugue, there are many things worth noticing, and they cannot all be noticed at once, unless examined very slowly or very many times.

The plot concerns three fishermen of the island of St. Lucia: Achille, Hector, and Philoctete.  The latter, true to his name, cannot go seafaring anymore because of a wound in his leg, caused by an anchor, but unable to heal, he believes, because of the remembered pain of his ancestors’ shackles.  Hector has hocked his boat for a taxicab, an opportunistic career-move that has embittered his relationship with Achille, to say nothing of their mutual affection for Helen.  Helen, an employee of the Plunketts (a pair of moneyed British retirees), is with child, but whose child she cannot say—Hector’s or Achille’s; meanwhile, her boss, Dennis Plunkett, a retired British Navy officer, is also in love with her.  Thus much for the emotional interrelationships of the characters.  The poem is divided into seven books, several of which are devoted to the main characters’ imaginings of their pasts.  Achille makes a spiritual journey back to Africa and talks with his father.  He is also transported by Bob Marley’s song “Buffalo Soldier” to the American great plains, where his fellow descendents of the Middle Passage were set against the Sioux—and other Indian peoples—in a brutal example, not of killing two birds with one stone, but of setting the two birds against each other.

But back to the puns, some of the recognizable Greek characters in Omeros in which the Caribbean islands are recreated as a complex mirror-image of the Greek islands that figure in the epics of Homer and Virgil, are Achille [a-SHIL], Hector, Philoctete [phi-lock-TET], Helen, and Ma Kilman. Wait—Ma Kilman?  Well, it’s an approximate translation of the Greek name of Andromache, Hektor’s wife.  Andro = man; mache = kill or fight. Kill man… Kilman.  Wait: it gets better.  In The Iliad, Hektor and Akhilleus fight, and the latter wins, ending Hektor’s life.  The name Akhilleus breaks down into “akhe” or “ache” and leos”—“the pain of the people.”  Ma Kilman runs a tavern called “No Pain.”  Seems she doesn’t like him no matter what language he’s in.

So it’s understandably difficult not to look at Derek Walcott’s work simply as a retelling of the poems that helped to found Western Civilization as we know it, with some clever word-play the author threw in for smug-points.  In some ways, it is just that—but not in others.  In Walcott’s poem, Ma Kilman is not Hector’s wife; Hector is embroiled with Achille in a fight over Helen; but the fight is centered on personal disagreements and the disputed fatherhood, not some political struggle.  The pieces of the millennia-old works are there, but shattered, like old pottery shards mixed together.

It’s fairly useful to note that Philoctetes (the Homeric character, “s” still attached) does not make an appearance in either the Iliad or the Odyssey, whether as a cripple or as a newly healed powerhouse warrior.  In the Odyssey, the title character talks about the healing of Philoctetes and his central role in the sacking of high-walled Ilion—Troy, more commonly—but again, he does not physically make an appearance.  The two poems ignore many other central aspects of the story: the “Wandering Rocks” that nearly  destroy Odysseus, his ship, and his crew; the horse that would cause the undoing of the Teucrian peoples, the rape of Cassandra, and, of course, the burning of Ilion itself.  So it is Philoctetes’s healing, most particularly, and other moments in the epics that would otherwise slip between the cracks, on which Walcott seizes when he crafts his own epic.  The idea of an irreparable wound being incurred in the course of a sea-journey (Philoctetes was injured that way, and was left out of Agamemnon’s raiding party as a result) must hold great mystique for one such as Walcott whose fathers and mothers were forcibly brought to the Americas by ship. And the idea that something huge and magnificent hinges on that healing and can only be effected if that healing occurs?  Part and parcel.  But what is that event for which Philoctetes must be made whole?  The sacking of another city? The continuation of the cycle of grudge and slavery?  Surely we can do better.

So a large part of this epic is about what we can learn from Helen and her Homeric epics; what we can learn about the past; about Africa, St. Lucia, the Great Plains; and ultimately, about the rule of the stronger.  We are searching for something that will finally break the cycle, replacing the vulgar combat-surgery (that heals Philoctetes only to send him back into the business of killing-or-being-killed) with something as substantial, but more spiritual as well.

Along the way, we meet blind old Seven Seas, who is meant to evoke Omeros himself—Homer, more commonly.  Much later in the book, the “phantom narrator” describes—or rather creates—the relationship between Seven Seas and Omeros thus:

So once changed from marble with a dripping chiton
in the early morning on that harp-wired sand
to a foam-headed fisherman in his white, torn

undershirt, but both of them had the look of men
whose skins are preserved in salt, whose accents were born
from guttural shoal, whose vision was wide as rain

sweeping over the sand, clouding the hills in gauze.
[page 281]

The whole poem, all three hundred pages, reads like that: each chapter, divided into three sections, is further divided, with one exception, into tersets of coiled-up thoughts that sometimes dart out like springs when prodded, but, more often, remain coiled, ominous as ever.  It’s not a book to be read quickly, and it’s not a book to be read only once. And reading it once or twice through is no guarantee of understanding, or even remembering, central aspects of the work.  So you go back; you start the first chapter again; make it to the second; feel the early reward, in chapter 2 section II of the belated, but Earth-shakingly beautiful, proem:

O open this day with the conch’s moan, Omeros
as you did in my boyhood, when I was a noun,
gently exhaled from the palate of the sunrise.

A lizard on the sea-wall darted its question
at the waking sea and a net of golden moss
brightened the reef, which the sails of their far canoes

avoided.  Only in you across the centuries
of the sea’s parchment atlas, can I catch the noise
of the surf lines wandering like the shambling fleece

of the lighthouse rock, that cyclops whose blind eye
shut from sunlight.  Then the canoes were galleys,
over which a frigate sawed its scythed wings slowly.

During this, my third or fourth time around (I can’t remember), the words “as you did in my boyhood” caught my eye.  I imagine that Walcott, as a boy, reading The Iliad and the other Greek poems, saw the truth of them everywhere but saw that truth to be incomplete: yes, there were flashes of similarity between the ancient characters of those books and the living characters of his island home.  The ancient Greeks lived on islands; the modern Caribbeans live on islands; the ancient Greeks floated a navy that destroyed a civilization in Asia Minor; the modern English and Spanish floated a navy that destroyed civilizations on the Slave Coast of Africa.  The ancient Greeks fought over a woman; modern men fight over women all the time.  Aeneas founded a civilization in exile; so to have Americans of countless origins.  So reading Homer may help one to understand part-truths about the problems, but not about their solutions, because the ancient Greeks no more understood how to stop fighting that we do now.  So the fabrics cross and the symbols jumble and fall apart, but there is no permanent healing. Walcott sets out to imagine one.