RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

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CHAPTER TWO: O-MER-OS, SINGING THE SEA‘S QUIET CULTURE
The previous chapter analyzed Gary Snyder‘s poetry about his Pacific travels to
illustrate how the island culture of the Ryukyu archipelago provided him with the
experiences necessary to formulate a viable interpretation of bioregionalism for the home
he returned to on Turtle Island. In this chapter, I investigate further the richness of island
culture as a bioregional muse by switching the terms of analysis. Instead of a white poet
of the Pacific Rim, I look at the racially mixed Caribbean poet Derek Walcott and his
long poem Omeros. Walcott successfully depicts St. Lucia‘s reinhabitation through a
bioregional lens. Supposedly isolated geography requires the islander to find his or her
home in the midst of a turbulent sea. Walcott‘s work is further distinguished from
Snyder‘s because of how these poets‘ subject positions situate them in history. While
Snyder‘s work evinces an exuberant historiography of the timeless, Walcott‘s work
demonstrates overtly historicist aesthetics in order to integrate the Caribbean‘s bitter past.
In this chapter, I use Walcott‘s Omeros to explain how a Caribbean poet regains a sense
of membership in a bioregional community to illustrate the ways that island culture
requires a revised understanding of ocean geography. Ocean waves cease to separate and
shift into rhythms that transfer energy, transforming the island of St. Lucia from a
castaway‘s life raft to an etak canoe; 25 a place of exile becomes home.
25 Etak is a Pacific navigational system of ―moving islands‖ that differs from the
European abstraction of ―static charts‖ (Lewis184-85). The fixed portions of any travel
route are relative as can be seen in the difference between solar time, which measures the