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

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Why waste lines on Achille, a shade on sea floor?
Because strong as self-healing coral, a quiet culture
is branching from the white ribs of each ancestor (296)
Homer invokes the muse and Virgil sings of Aeneas, whereas Walcott explains why he
―sang of quiet Achille‖ (320). Achilles, son of Peleus, and Aeneas, son of Anchises, are
both bellicose heroes with anger. According to Walcott, Omeros is more an homage to
the Caribbean people than an epic because he ―was thinking of Homer the poet of the
seven seas‖ (as qtd. in Bruckner 396). Achille is not a traditional hero, only a shadow of
the archetypal Achilles. He represents the quiet culture of fishermen ―using the old ways,
who believed [their] work was prayer, / who caught only enough, since the sea had to
live‖ (301). He is an ideal member of St. Lucia‘s bioregional community ―branching
from‖ the cultural bones of originating myths and ancient fragments, practicing a
sustainable economy in deference to the ecological health of the sea.
Speaking to potential objections to his Adamic poetics in his influential essay
―The Muse of History,‖ Walcott writes that New World poets like Whitman and Neruda,
who ―reject ethnic ancestry for faith in elemental man,‖ are not naïve in their elation (40).
He argues that elation is common to all great New World poets, whether they are drawing
on narratives of Prospero and Crusoe, or Friday and Caliban (40). The myth of the noble
savage is Old World nostalgia; New World poets draw their energy from the bitterness of
―salt fruit at the sea‘s edge‖ (41). The golden bough-like plant that Ma Kilman finds is
not a native species; its seed was transplanted to St. Lucia in the belly of a sea swift
(238), which means that in more ways than one, the root of synecdochic Philoctete‘s