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

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providing a spiritual context for environmentalism and an environmental context for
American Buddhism.
I cross the continent in chapter two to study Derek Walcott‘s Omeros, published
thirty years after Regarding Wave, as an equally important articulation of environmental
literature from the islands. It deals with the creole present of St. Lucia within the
―official‖ (Walcott ―Muse‖ 49) archetypes of Western literature, mainly but not limited to
Graeco-Roman mythology. Rather than assimilate St. Lucian culture into European
literary forms, it juxtaposes them for something new. Walcott formulates a cyclical view
of history through the post-Tsimtsum metaphor of a fallen or inherently wounded nature.
This wound is stitched into each character as a motif of Omeros in order to be healed by
mending the distance between imperial history and the region for a place in which the
poem‘s characters and the poet can reside. This healing process takes the forms of the
rituals and the ceremonies of ancestral peoples: Achille takes a canoe journey, Philoctete
sees St. Lucia‘s obeah woman, and Plunkett writes a history for Helen. Just as Gary
Snyder‘s return to the U.S. was motivated to mend the distance between our history and
the natural processes of the Pacific Northwest, Walcott‘s return to ancestral ceremonies
articulates a sense of place in history and the Lesser Antilles, demonstrating his
bioregional reinhabitation of the Caribbean New World.
I compare the two poets in chapter three through the New World poetic lens that
Walcott develops in ―The Muse of History.‖ Walcott‘s essay theorizes an Adamic
sensibility for the New World, which retains a sense of wonder alongside the memory of
past atrocities. The risk with the Adamic poet is that he forgets or represses the tough
history of indigenous peoples in order to retain a sense of wonder. Walcott and Snyder