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

watersheds and ocean currents. The Yuba River feeds the Feather River, which flows into
the Sacramento River, and out into the North Pacific Gyre through the Sacramento-San-
Joaquin Delta. The North Atlantic Equatorial Current flows from West Africa through the
Lesser Antilles, of which St. Lucia is member, into the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of
Mexico, and north past the Dominican Republic into the Antilles Current and Gulf
Stream. Land-based theories of topological identity divide peoples inhabiting these rivers
and currents, but both Snyder‘s view of the Pacific and Walcott‘s understanding of the
Atlantic offer versions of water-based models of place; soil-based nationalism evolves
into a fluid globalism. Island isolation only holds if the surrounding seas and waterways
retain their traditional status as boundaries between nations and individuals. Water
cycles, in my reading, facilitate ecological, economic, and cultural exchanges between
the seemingly disparate island societies that Snyder‘s and Walcott‘s works unite in
bioregions.
One of the tools of analysis common to both of these poets‘ development of
bioregional reinhabitation is the postcolonial castaway narrative of Yann Martel‘s novel
in which Pi Patel, at the moment of breakdown, breaks through and gains awareness of
the ocean as a community he can join. As I argued in chapter two, Achille transforms
from castaway to pragmatic reinhabitant through his etak journey to ancestral Africa. In
the following section, I trace another of Achille‘s castaway awakenings that dovetails
with the poet Walcott‘s descent and return from Sulphur Springs in Soufrière (Omeros
299-303; chapter 60). Achille comes back to a post-Tsimtsum St. Lucia after his etak
journey to the cinematic Africa of his father Afolabe. He embarks on this journey with
Philoctete in the seventh book after Walcott‘s persona descends to the island‘s version of
58