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

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psychological‖ (Elder 110) answer to the question of home. While Snyder‘s and
Walcott‘s ancient islands may ultimately be illusions, the pragmatic value of these islands
equates with religious belief.
The articulation of place in an archipelago shifts the colonial, modern imagination
of aqua nullius (empty water) to a biocentric view of the ocean. Turtle Island translates
and revises the Pacific Rim‘s eclectic mythology of the California Maidu, Salish, Uto-
Aztecan, Iroquois, American, Japanese, Chinese, and Hindu traditions. The book
constructs a literary persona at home in an ecologically open world, structured by
watershed river systems and ocean currents. As a poet and activist, Snyder writes and
lives as a citizen of the Pacific, and in his oeuvre, island life on the Banyan Ashram
signifies a post-war, environmentalist Bodhi tree. Snyder went home after Banyan, hence
Turtle Island’s applied Suwanose ―place logic‖ to North American reinhabitation.
Omeros deals with the West Indian panoply of Carib, Arawak, West African, British,
Greek, and Roman traditions. Walcott‘s biocentric view of the ocean can be read in his
poem ―The Sea is History‖ (Collected Poems 364), in which his strategy of tracing
Biblical, European, and West Indian history in natural imagery is relatively
straightforward. The poem excels in its biocentric juxtaposition of nature and civilization:
―then came the synod of flies / then came the secretarial heron / then came the bullfrog
bellowing for a vote‖ (Collected Poems 367). This historical rendering of ocean biomes is
tantamount to the Pacific geographer Epeli Hau‘ofa‘s thesis in We Are the Ocean that
islands are not isolated landmasses surrounded by a watery desert of abysmal depth, but
interconnected nodes in archipelagos of seafaring communities with as much culture and
history as continental nations. Island colonists assumed the former in order to justify the