Dualism, not Binarism

Burnett argues that in these binary links between personae, within and across gender and racial groups, Walcott offers an alternative to the Western emphasis on

individualism and difference.6 In Achille’s and Philoctete’s androgynous Christmas masquerade (LV/iii/1-11), Walcott offers a heroic model that is an alternative to the

5

Natalie King-Pedroso,Journal of Caribbean Studies Vol 15, 1 and 2(Fall 2000), p. 79.

strict binarism of phallic violence or emasculation. In doing so he brings a new option to the colonial/neocolonial problem of constructing a masculine subject- position.7 Freudian alienation and the suppression of difference within groups, better to delineate boundaries, are replaced by an embracing of difference as the thing that is shared, a new basis for nationhood and human-ness. Rather than negritude’s attempt to move privilege from one pole to the other, polarisation is rejected altogether.

This is in sympathy with theI-an-Iconcept of Rastafarianism, where the pronoun

includes both singularIand pluralwe, rejecting the boundary between the individual

and the other. Walcott sympathises with all of his characters. There are no villains in

Omeros, only people coping.

He reflects this in the closing stanzas of XXXIII/iii, where, by letting in his fears as guests and seeing their humanity, he finds room for pity and turns the house into a home. This passage embodies his method. It offers an inclusive solution, set in binary metre in the middle of the poem, contradictory in its form to the accepted hexameter and symbolic in its position. From this point on he will begin to resolve the conflicts and argue with the positions set up in the first half of the poem.

In this transformation of house to home, he is speaking both of himself and of his nation. This transformation, what Burnett calls ‘metamorphic magic’, is at the core of Walcott’s dualist strategy for the Caribbean.8 Instead of joining the negritude debate, he contradicts the negative implications of both sides in that debate by reversing the ‘back-to-Africa’ theme and making the migrant position one of opportunity. When, at

7

Paula Burnett,Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics, p. 23.

the end of ‘The Muse of History’,9he thanks his African and English ancestors who

conspired in slavery for delivering him to this new Eden, Fumagalli says it is if he had drunk from Lethe and Eunoè, Dante’s rivers of oblivion and good remembrance.10 Burnett says, ‘He understands his task as to make the rhetoric of affirmation – the praise song – outdo in appeal the rhetoric of grief.’11

In doing so, he is content to draw on both sides of his inheritance. Ma Kilman’s cure (XLIX/i-ii) for Philoctete’s wound (which represents the loss of identity suffered by all transported to the Caribbean) is both African, a shamanistic cure using a herbal bath, and a Christian baptism. The ‘font’, symbolically, is a rusting relic of colonial times, made new by being scraped and scoured. When Ma Kilman washes

Philoctete’s face, it is Virgil purifying Dante after his journey through hell by washing his face in dew.12 His rebirth as Adam in Eden is Biblical, not African, but we are reminded by his standing upright in his bath ofAustralopithecus afarensis, the bipedal

hominid skeleton called Lucy (happy coincidence of name and an Eve-equivalent), an African creature.

Burnett sees in Walcott’s recurrent symbol, the swift, a doubling of Greek mythology with Christian symbolism, an oracular bird representing Athena’s owl and the dove of Christian revelation, one of several such doublings in Walcott’s creation of a cross- cultural mythology.13

By using Plunkett as a colonialist alter ego, Walcott is allowed to argue for Art while Plunkett argues for History. Though Art must win in Walcott’s book, the argument is

9 _{Derek Walcott,What the Twilight Says: Essays, p. 64.}

10 _{Maria Cristina Fumagalli,The Flight of the Vernacular,p. 57.} 11 _{Paula Burnett,Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics, p. 79.} 12

Maria Cristina Fumagalli,The Flight of the Vernacular, p. 200.

more even handed than straight polemic would have allowed and he concedes that ‘There, in her head of ebony,/there was no real need for the historian’s/remorse, nor for literature’s. Why not see Helen/as the sun saw her’ (LIV/ii/8-9).

Dualism, what Burnett calls ‘simultaneous difference and similitude’,14operates in Walcott’s work at the personal and at the geo-political level. His people are individuals and members of one another, his islands are separate and part of an archipelago, Africa and the West Indies are separated by and joined by the Atlantic. His vision allows him to see past and present both simultaneously and separately, as when he writes inOmeros, (XLIV/iii/1-2):

Ah, twin-headed January, seeing either tense: a past, they assured us, born in degradation, and a present that lifted us up with the wind’s

noise in the breadfruit leaves with such an elation that it contradicts what is past!

It allows him to escape the victim-complex that looks back to the suffering under slavery but is trapped thereby into apathy or a desire to turn back the clock.

It also allows him to occupy two contradictory positions on European culture, to see it as a valid and vital source of artistic example and archetypes, and as a place of

oppression and degeneracy. He sees Brixton whitewashed by the moon, ‘dark future

down darker street’ (XXXVIII/iii/13) and is able to set himself the task of reinventing language and to set the Caribbean to becoming a new moral force. Burnett thinks Walcott’s dark future may be a fine place to be.15

Finally, Walcott’s philosophy allows him to come to terms with his own situation. His intense sense of ‘home’ in St Lucia demands he never leave, whereas a successful career as a poet demands he live in exile, an Odyssean binarism. He is able to have his dualistic cake and eat it by representing his St Lucian home to the world and creating a myth of ‘home’ for the St Lucians.