Classical Myth

In his allusions to Homeric and Virgilian myth, Walcott does not adopt story-lines wholesale. He said, ‘[critics want] a sort ofIliadin blackface. Writers won’t do that.

What’s new about a classic is that it stays new. You have your debts to your

2

Eileen Pollack,Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull

predecessors; your acknowledgement is a votive acknowledgement.’3InSea Grapes

he says, ‘The classics can console. But not enough.’4, writing there of the conflict between calling and family but equally applicable to serving St Lucia’s need for a myth of place. A reworking ofThe Odyssey,The IliadorThe Aeneidwould have

meant distorting modern St Lucian concerns, characterisations and motivations in order to maintain antique parallels that would have seemed increasingly artificial as the poem unfolded. More importantly, he would have had to adopt the ancient myths themselves, whereas his intent inOmerosis to build a new myth for a nation only just

identifying itself.

Another reason for rejecting a closer mirroring of the old tales is that they have become identified with the North’s cultural genealogy. The body of Western

literature is not just weighted with allusions to the ancients, it is seen as inheriting an unbroken tradition that goes back to Homer and Virgil. The beliefs, metaphors and values that exist in Homer form a foundation of Western thought and have been the stuff of Western education for the last thousand years. Walcott himself was taught in a system that was a late phase of that development and which was also a tool for the maintenance of the North’s cultural imperium over its colonial subjects. Homeret al,

properly taught, would produce little black or brown clones who would be useful citizens of the Empire and would not dream of leaving it. He wished to deconstruct the North’s cultural dominance, or at least avoid the charge from more militant Africanist writers that he was writing within a discredited tradition and betraying his people in the process.

3 _{Derek Walcott, interviewed by Nancy Schoenberger 1983, reprinted inConversations with Derek}

Walcott, p. 92.

4

Derek Walcott,Sea Grapes(London: Jonathan Cape, 1976) andCollected Poems(London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 297.

Walcott’s borrowings from Homer are therefore peripheral to his narratives and serve largely to provide resonance and depth to some of the characters. We are able to see in Achille some of Achilles’ good and bad qualities, Helen’s dark beauty is the more so because of that earlier, fairer Helen, Hector’s pride is familiar and so on.

However, Walcott telescopes and recombines myth to suit his purpose and no allusion is purely Homeric. Had he done no more than this, the Homeric aspects of his poem would have been of passing interest.

Walcott went further, when he introduced Homer himself into the poem. By allowing Homer his own voice, he was able to reinvent the poet as his own man, timeless, demotic, a man from the margins and separate from the corrupt and oppressive culture that has over the millennia come to appropriate him as its own.

He takes the traditional Eurocentric myth of St Lucia (‘the Helen of the West’) and dismisses that as a means of showing what the island is today. He does so both explicitly (‘These Helens are different creatures’ LXII/11/9) and implicitly, by showing how multi-faceted are his characters’ resemblances to mythical ones. Helen is not Helen of Troy, nor Mary Mother of God, but shows aspects of both. Hector is also Phaeton. Achille is Achilles but also Bloom in his gentleness. These myths are just metaphors for aspects of their characters, no more. If we had not read Homer, or Joyce, or the Bible, Helen, Hector and Achille would still live in Gros Îlet and be themselves and do their thing. As Terada says, ‘The validity of similitude [between

the Caribbean and Greek Helens] falls into doubt’.5 It is, in fact, shown to be irrelevant.

Walcott showed that the ‘Helen of The West’ myth, far from being homage to the island’s beauty, was in fact a tragic story: ‘She had changed hands thirteen times. She had been regularly violated.’6 Burnett points to the need for a countermyth and sees Walcott’s Helen inOmerosas a powerful positive. She also sees a lunar triad, ‘with

the triple aspects of the goddess figured as aged, mature, and immature woman. Maud, the old moon, whose cycle (of white domination) is done, yields place to Helen, who is taking over, coming into her inheritance […] while the third figure, the nymph, is just coming into view as the girl, Christine, who arrives to help Ma Kilman […].’7 Christine is described in LXIII/i/3 as ‘like a new Helen’.

Walcott, writing of another myth, that of the noble savage, said, ‘The great poetry of the New World does not pretend to such innocence, its vision is not naïve. [It has] the tartness of experience. In such poetry there is a bitter memory and it is the bitterness that dries last on the tongue. It is the acidulous that supplies its energy.’ His solution is therefore not the amnesia he has previously described as ‘the true history of the New World.’ What happened is to be remembered and used to energise the islands and their poetry.8

5 _{Rei Terada,Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry, p. 184.}

6 _{Derek Walcott, ‘Leaving School’, reprinted inCritical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, p. 24.} 7

Paula Burnett,Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics, p. 113.