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

―intertextuality has been seen as a trope for the Caribbean predicament itself‖ (James 4).
Walcott‘s fusion of West-African, Middle Passage, and West Indian literary forms with
Graeco-Roman mythology and Western literature has earned him recognition despite the
skepticism of more traditionalist critics, earning him the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1992. Walcott navigates these treacherous waters through his artistic embrace of both
sides. Similarly, Snyder argues for ―composite beings‖ of Old and New World histories
to come together on the continent of Turtle Island (189). Despite a global market that
penalizes attachment to any one place, Snyder urges his readers to work against
modernity, ―turn back to the land‖ (190), and reinhabit an Old New World.
Charles Pollard argues that the closest parallel in modern literature for
understanding Walcott‘s poetics of ―discrepant cosmopolitan modernism‖ is James
Joyce‘s Ulysses. Pollard argues for Walcott‘s and Joyce‘s ―biographical convergence‖
(197) by observing that both were born on an island controlled by the Catholic Church
and British Empire. Both were educated in the colonial system, growing to resent English
rule and paradoxically love the language and its literary tradition. Both were accused of
forsaking their ethnic heritage for imperial currency, and both consistently defended the
view that the experience of island life, be it in Ireland or St. Lucia, should be articulated
within the ―originating myths‖ (198) of the patrician tradition. Walcott supplements the
story of Odysseus with St. Lucia‘s patios, the tropical sea almond, the fishermen‘s
canoes, and the volcanic Pitons to introduce a sense of ―‗secondariness‘ or belatedness
into the structure of the [supposedly] original‖ form of ―social and textual affiliation‖
(Bhabha 305, 292). Maria McGarrity observes that the modern epic is a common
―cultural paradigm‖ for both Irish and Caribbean writers. Walcott actually makes this
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