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

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while the latter applies the ―place logic‖ of island culture to the context of U.S.
environmentalism in the mid-1970s. As Walcott argues of Perse and Césaire, the division
of Caribbean and Californian poets by sociological difference denies each his full poetic
range and power for coastal communities on the North American continent and
archipelago cultures generally. Gary Snyder, as a white American and Pacific sea-farer,
and Derek Walcott, as a mixed-race St, Lucian who did not leave the West Indies until he
was near fifty (Burnett 38), are sociologically distinct. Walcott has famously described
his subject position of mixed ancestry as ―divided to the vein‖ (―A Far Cry from Africa‖).
Similarly, U.S. ―settlement‖ of the continent traces a colonial history in which Snyder
finds himself divided between a native Coyote culture and an antithetical America of
―The Maverick Bar‖ he could almost love again. Yet, as ecocritical poets writing in the
postcolonial Americas, they write from the same muse: a sense of the past as a ―timeless,
yet habitable moment‖ (Walcott, ―Muse‖ 36). They distill a Medusa-like moment of
historical ambivalence between an Old and New World to a simultaneous embrace of
both.
Despite the strong thematic thread of being divided, both self-reflexive works are
at home in a chosen place because of their bioregionalism. The cultural sources central to
Omeros can be found along the Atlantic‘s circulating currents: the music of Arawak
flutes, the songs of enslaved and displaced West Africans during the Middle Passage and
the poems of Britons and Continental Europeans. Turtle Island’s sources can be found
along the Pacific Rim from the sutras of Mahāyāna Buddhists to the Coyote trickster and
Bear Mother stories of Native Americans. Both Walcott‘s and Snyder‘s poetry and prose
attempt to reinitiate a composite culture of place, based on the interconnected structure of