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

of initiation into the songs and prayers of a place‘s native people .31 Philoctete is unable to
join Hector and the other men fishing because he wounded his leg on a rusty anchor. So
he goes to see the obeah woman Ma Kilman, owner of NO PAIN CAFÉ, who applies her
―sibylline cure‖ by eventually bathing him in waters infused with various homeopathic
herbs and a noxious flower ―rooted in bitterness‖ (238). The flower with bitter roots,
which she finds up a hill in the woods by following ant trails, alludes to the tree on the
Stygian shore from which Aeneas plucks the golden bough in order to gain entrance to
the underworld from the Cumean Sibyl (Virgil, bk. 6, card 124). Ma Kilman, the ―spidery
sibyl‖ (245), takes an active role in facilitating Philoctete‘s recovery by following the
―line of ants . . . signaling a language she could not understand‖ (238) to find the ―cure
that precedes every wound‖ (239). She demonstrates a strength and tenacity the Cumaean
Sibyl lacks. The modernist anthropologist Sir James Frazier titled his comparative study
of mythology, The Golden Bough, after the eponymous Graeco-Roman symbol to signify
the deep-seeded myth of kingly succession rites he found throughout a myriad of ancient
cultures. Walcott borrows these connotations of Aeneas‘ key, which Frazier drew on, to
reinterpret it as the flower Ma Kilman finds growing from the damp roots of a cedar tree.
He leaves it unnamed to signify the subtle grandmotherly wisdom of place beyond the
ken of language.
Just as Ma Kilman follows the ants to the root for Philoctete‘s ceremonial bath,
Achille must encounter the region‘s history through the process of a heroic quest for ―his
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31 An analogue for Walcott‘s healing can be found in Leslie Marmon Silko‘s Ceremony.
After cursing the torrential rain in the jungle, the psychologically damaged Tayo leaves
the Pacific theater for WWII to return to U.S. hospitals and a drought stricken New
Mexico. In Tayo‘s mind the drought and his personal haunting can only be healed
through the ceremony of his grandmother‘s medicine man.