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

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forward to a promised pig for next Christmas from the Plunketts, Ma Kilman exclaims,
―You see? / Standing, Philo, standing straight!‖ (318). She concludes that ―We shall all
heal‖ (319). The wound of history and its cures form the dominant motif of Omeros.
Each dramatic character enacts a healing process that represents Walcott‘s integration of
colonial and indigenous narratives of place.
When Walcott writes that New World poets need a ―truly tough‖ aesthetic in ―The
Muse of History,‖ he means that the postcolonial Caribbean requires the exuberance of
the New World poets Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda in spite of tough situations like
that of Helen and Achille. He argues that New World poets must be honest to history and
simultaneously retain a sense of wonder for the natural world. Feeling resentment toward
European colonists and slave traders is understandable, but according to Walcott, the
desire to eradicate modern white influences from the West Indies is impractical, and the
anger that motivates it is antithetical to the experience of elation for the elemental beauty
of the region. Elation in the context of Walcott‘s poetics essentially means ―the
possibility of man and his language waking to wonder here‖ in a chosen place, be it
Suwanose-Jima, the Sierra Nevadas, or the Lesser Antilles. Walcott is not asking anyone
to be thrilled about past crimes and present iniquities; he seeks a middle way between a
distant metropole and atavistic Africa. Eschewing the revolutionary impulse to purify the
region, Walcott urges New World poets to accept a bastardized region as if it were pure.
Analogously, Achille laudably accepts Helen‘s baby by Hector as if the child were his.
The title of Omeros refers to the Greek name for Homer, but the patrician title
does not mean that Walcott is transplanting the Western literary tradition to the
Caribbean. Instead, I contend that the title uses the Greek poet‘s original name to initiate