1Derek Walcott’s view of Caribbean history is replete with contradictions, discrepancies that complicate any notions of historical progress and linearity. History does not move steadily forward; the past does not necessarily precede the future, with the present hovering somewhere between the two. Throughout Walcott’s 1990 poem Omeros, the profusion of flashbacks, historical hallucinations, and even time-travelling, can be read as a constant reminder that time is a fragile construct, whose unfolding may at any time be disturbed. This resonates with the history of the “New World,” and of the Caribbean in particular, where the European conquest inaugurated a series of catastrophic fractures. While the Old Continent experienced its own “Renaissance” in the sixteenth century, the peoples of the Caribbean were all but exterminated, the history of the region thenceforth largely dictated by the imperial powers vying for hegemony in the area.
2Yet Walcott’s distinctive elaboration of a “nonlinear temporality” (Seeger 2018, 67) relies on tropes such as rebirth, renaissance, or revivalism, themselves predicated on the belief that the past is not altogether inaccessible to us. The programmes of cultural renaissance or revival presume that it is indeed possible to resurrect bygone traditions, give new life to old motifs, and translate the archive of the past in a language that is meaningful for the present. To this triad of rebirth, renaissance, and revivalism, I would add the ambivalent notion of recovery, with its two meanings of recovering, or retrieving, something — and recovering from something. The polysemy evokes a trajectory that moves at once toward and from a given point in time, especially a traumatic one. Thereby, the past may become simultaneous with the present; the flow of time may branch into unexpected directions, and the dead weight of History may be refashioned in imaginative ways.
3This article intends to examine Walcott’s engagement with the complementary tropes of loss and recovery. The tension between the two is central in Walcott’s articulation of a specific West Indian culture, a vision that is at once paradoxical and utopian. I will begin with a discussion of cultural revivalism, a paradigm which exposes the discontinuities at the heart of Walcott’s singular historiography. To this end, I will venture a comparison with the revivalism which flourished in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Against a backdrop of anticolonial unrest, the Irish Revival was underpinned by “a discourse of cultural redemption that strove both to represent and to invent Irish culture” (Castle 2001, 10). As Walcott negotiates the fractured historiography of the Caribbean, he draws on the Irish precedent, but is nonetheless careful to distance himself from it. I will then attempt to move beyond the opposition between loss and recovery, towards the metaphor of translation. My claim is that translation, which played a significant part in the Irish Revival, also encapsulates the creative potential of a displaced rebirth or resurrection, which may deliver on the utopian promise contained in Walcott’s poetics of simultaneity.
4The tension between loss and recovery is compellingly dramatised in Walcott’s poem “The Sea is History,” published in the 1979 collection The Star-Apple Kingdom. The poem stages a confrontational dialogue, which pits an aggressive crowd of intruders against a defensive West Indian voice:
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History. (1992, 364)
When asked to produce a History in the shape of monuments and authenticated records, the voice responds with an awkward stammer, hindered by the punctuation as well as the line-break (“The sea. The sea /”). The poem thwarts the search for a tangible, monumentalised history; instead, the voice directs us to an alternative version of it, one that is not captured in solid artifacts, but concealed in the elusive depths of the sea. The retort is challenging in at least two ways. Presumably, a seascape has not a lot to offer in terms of monuments or recorded archives — at least on the surface. Besides, “the sea” drastically expands the frame of historical investigation, to include the oceanic routes that have linked the Caribbean to the rest of the world. Yet, the reply is also disquieting in another way. “The sea is History” can be read as the affirmation of a problematic kind of history, fluid and ungraspable, but also as a dismissal of History altogether. The sea may be the vault where history is “locked up,” but it also is history, in the sense that it is both obsolete and irrelevant, maybe because it has been forgotten.
5Unable to write an historical narrative in agreement with exogenous norms, the voice in the poem instead plays on the chasm which divides the history of the colony from that of the metropole. Throughout the poem, the West Indian voice takes us on a submarine trail to encounter allegories of Caribbean history, from the Middle Passage through Emancipation to post-independence disillusionment. In a desperate search for scriptural correspondences, each chapter of that history is made to correspond to a book in the Bible (Exodus for the Middle Passage, for instance). The conclusion, however, is that the passion for allegory does not qualify as History. When the outsiders ask “but where is your Renaissance?” (Walcott 1992, 365), the injunction to conform to European periodisation is once more frustrated, as nothing worthy of the name can be produced. Only at the end does the poem suggest the possibility of a history in the future tense:
and then in the dark ears of ferns
and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo
of History, really beginning. (367)
Thus, the poem moves from a denial of the non-history that is the West Indian past, to the utopian glimpse of a new beginning yet to come, a shift which indeed underpins Walcott’s poetics at large. Taking my cue from Walcott’s poem, I would like to argue that the dynamic at work in “The Sea is History” can be read as a hint towards a utopian version of a New World (re)birth. That possibility relies precisely on the experience of loss, but also on the redeeming dialectics of translation as a metaphor for renaissance.
6To get a better understanding of Walcott’s singular elaboration of the dialectics of renaissance, a transatlantic detour may be useful. In the 1970s, Walcott compared the situation of West Indian literature with that of Ireland on the threshold of the twentieth century, at the time of the Irish Revival. He described the Irish influence as “a very intimate one” for him:
I’ve always felt some kind of intimacy with the Irish poets because one realized that they were also colonials with the same kind of problems that existed in the Caribbean. They were the niggers [sic] of Britain. Now, with all of that, to have those astounding achievements of genius, whether by Joyce or Yeats or Beckett, illustrated that one could come out of a depressed, deprived, oppressed situation and be defiant and creative at the same time. (Walcott 1996b, 59)
Walcott draws an interesting parallel between the two colonial situations, and the difficulties surrounding aspiring writers from the peripheries of empire. One of Walcott’s earliest plays, The Sea at Dauphin (1954) was modelled after Synge’s 1903 Riders to the Sea, from which it borrowed heavily in terms of plot as well as vernacular diction (Breslin 2001, 83–90). Yet, although Walcott felt a kinship with writers such as Yeats, Joyce, and Synge, on account of the colonial predicament of Ireland, he was sensitive to the differences between his own condition and theirs. Thus, Michael Malouf has stressed the extent to which The Sea at Dauphin departs from Riders to the Sea in key respects, such as issues of gender or nationalism (Malouf 2010). The heart of Walcott’s argument is that while Irish writers had “a metaphor called Ireland” to work from, the West Indian writer had no comparable mythical substratum to rely on:
The only historical legends that one individual writer would have are ethnic legends of sorts. Each one of them is separate because the Indian would have India, the African would have Africa. But the point is that all of these have been erased from the memory or experience of the writer. So, what has not yet been created or is actually being created by its absence, by the chaos, by the necessity for it to be created — is a West Indies, a West Indian literature. Now that is being made out of the very knowledge that there is not one. (Walcott 1996a, 28)
Walcott’s point is that the myth of revivalism is untenable in the Caribbean. The archipelago’s history of extermination, rapid migration, enforced displacement, as well as the diverse origins of the population, result in “absence” and “chaos.” As opposed to the situation prevailing in Ireland, no monuments, textual or otherwise, are there to be unearthed; no continuity can be restored with a distant past — be it that of indentured workers from Asia, slaves from Africa, or native inhabitants.
7The essence of revivalism is precisely to seek roots that may serve as origins for a national literature or culture. In turn-of-the-century Ireland, the revivalist intelligentsia became fascinated by the peasantry, which supposedly embodied the unpolluted essence of Ireland, as opposed to the corrupting influence of British bourgeois civilisation. The antiquarian passion for the folk, with their language, mores and traditions, was part of a project that sought to redeem a waning national culture in order to avert the threat of dissolution. As Douglas Hyde memorably cautioned, “We will become what, I fear, we are largely at present, a nation of imitators, the Japanese of Western Europe, lost to the power of native initiative and alive only to second-hand assimilation” (2015, 45). The fear of identity loss was a powerful trope in the rhetoric of cultural nationalism. The agenda of revivalism was then to recover, or keep alive, a tradition in danger of extinction.
8As Terry Eagleton puts it in his study of the “Archaic Avant-Garde,”
Since the recent past of British colonialism is a mere aberration, it forms an empty passage of time through which the past can return in all its plenitude, this time as the future. It is precisely the remote past, uncontaminated by recent time, which can provide the most stirring image of the future. (1996, 281)
In its quest for the genuine and the timeless, the revivalist imagination contrives ways to eclipse a present of colonial degradation in order to reactivate a distant past, “curving time back upon itself in a loop” (Eagleton 1996, 285). This endeavour implies the possibility of resuscitating the past, therefore of a sense of continuity between past and present. Declan Kiberd has probed the conflicting strands that made up the Irish cultural revival, and the difficult task of negotiating tradition to elaborate a viable future. He notes that cultural nationalism was always at risk of fetishising the past, succumbing to the lure of a petrified code, and credits the more progressive revivalists with the attempt “to build a future on the past without returning to it” (1995, 292).
9Both Eagleton and Kiberd emphasise the dialectical temporality which underpins the revivalist imagination, eschewing linearity in its relation to past and future alike. Its backward gaze is not a symptom of disinterested nostalgia, but a strategic detour to articulate an alternative future. In any case, the enterprise relies on the assumption that the past is indeed accessible, waiting to be activated for new purposes pertaining to the present and the future. For that reason, the revivalist project can be read in the light of what Fredric Jameson calls the utopian impulse. Careful to distinguish between utopia as a genre, on the one hand, and “an obscure yet omnipresent Utopian impulse finding its way to the surface in a variety of covert expressions and practices,” Jameson defines it as “governing everything future-oriented in life and culture” (2005, 2–3).
10Thus, although Walcott stresses the difference between the Irish and West Indian paradigms, both are concerned with the delicate task of imaginative recovery. The difficulty for Walcott lies in the emphasis on erasure, which he takes to be the defining trope of West Indian culture. There is a risk that such a state of affairs might hamper the utopian imagination. Returning to the issue of revivalism, Walcott states: “Where there’s a revival, there must have been a thing before. My work wasn’t a revival; it was total originality” (1996b, 60). The attempt to preserve or recover ancient traditions is dismissed altogether. Instead, the poet assumes the role of sole originator, fashioning a unique culture virtually ex nihilo. The claim is bold indeed. Ironically, Walcott is known for his insistence that he is indebted to the pantheon of literature written in English, and for his reverence for literary tradition. His claim to “total originality” sounds incongruous given his declaration in “The Muse of History” that “the great poets have no wish to be different, no time to be original” (1998, 62). In many instances, he has recalled his early years as a humble poet apprentice, filling notebook after notebook with copies and imitations of poems by Auden or T.S. Eliot — a practice very much in keeping with the Renaissance ethos and its devotion to the standards set by the ancient masters. This apparent contradiction springs from the realities of empire: while conquest was synonymous with disruption and erasure, colonialism subsequently imported its own traditions, asserting a cultural continuity with the literature from the metropole — or from other peripheries, as Walcott’s identification with Irish colonials indicates.
11The thrust of Walcott’s argument, however, lies in his celebration of the possibilities afforded by a pre-conquest history that is irretrievable, precisely because it is beyond words. The construction of the Caribbean as a clean slate — unpeopled, uncivilised — is itself a long-standing topos of colonialist rhetoric. Writing about the Caribbean at the end of the nineteenth century, the notorious advocate of British colonialism James Anthony Froude stated that “there are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own” (1888, 347), a statement Walcott used as an epigraph to his own poem “Air” (1992, 113). He avails himself of this demeaning trope precisely to articulate a New World poetics liberated from the revivalist impulse. As George Handley writes in his study of “New World poets,” “[r]ather than reifying the present into a position of perpetual nostalgia or regret about the past, the facts of violence and amnesia create the circumstances for a history that is dynamic, elusive, and never fixed” (2007, 56). Walcott, then, grounds his West Indian culture on a foundational amnesia which is enabling rather than debilitating, and which constitutes “the true history of the New World” (1998, 39). In the parable deployed in “The Muse of History,” erasure of memory is the precondition for “the possibility of a man and his language waking to wonder there” (1998, 53). Thus, while revivalism articulates the future in terms borrowed from the past, Walcott’s own utopian future embraces instead the openness afforded by an alleged lack of history.
12Walcott’s long poem Omeros can be read as another reflection on the conflict between amnesia and the urge to unearth — or fabricate — a history. Rife with allusions to Homer’s Iliad, the poem follows a diverse array of characters in St Lucia: a trio of impoverished fishermen, a waitress named Helen, a British Army veteran, Colonel Plunkett, and his Irish wife Maud. The Caribbean-Irish paradigm, elaborated by Walcott in the interviews already cited, is dramatised in chapter xxxix of Omeros, as the poem travels to various sites in Ireland, and even features an encounter with James Joyce himself. As Michael Malouf has remarked in his perceptive reading of this episode, Walcott’s cosmopolitanism “relied upon an allegorical representation of Ireland as the Caribbean’s opposite and Joyce, the exiled artist, as its ironic counterpart” (2009, 125). In other words, Ireland appears as a place where the presence of history is overbearing while, by contrast, Walcott depicts the Caribbean as unfettered by any such obsession with the past; his strategic detour through Ireland thus heightens the distinctiveness of his own cosmopolitan poetics.
13I now want to assess the problematic status of revivalism in Omeros, as it pervades the poem well beyond the Irish chapter just evoked. The Plunketts moved to St Lucia after World War Two, during which the Colonel fought in the North African campaign. Early in the poem, Plunkett remembers wondering where to relocate for his retirement: “Where could this world renew the Mediterranean’s / innocence?” (Walcott 1990, 28). Looking for a destination “where what they called history could not happen” (28), he eventually chooses the Caribbean. The allusion to the Mediterranean suggests Greek Antiquity, but is also tainted by his memories of the war, which undermine the fantasised “innocence” of the sea. The relationship between Walcott’s text and its Homeric intertext is therefore contentious from the outset. Plunkett’s vision of the Caribbean as a place without history recalls Froude’s rhetoric again. As if to echo “The Sea is History” the chapter closes with “the village Olympiad”:
It wasn’t Aegean. They climbed no Parthenon
to be laurelled. The depot faced their arena,
the sea’s amphitheatre. When one wore a crown—
victor ludorum—no one knew what it meant, or
cared to be told. (32)
The emphasis in these lines is on the unbridgeable distance that separates the New World from the Old in the eyes of the Major: the classical allusions do not match the West Indian reality, the token Latin phrase “victor ludorum” has become estranged beyond intelligibility, and the passage concludes with the Latin words drowning “in the clapping dialect of the crowd” (32). The ambivalence of the sea is evident once again: it triggers historical associations, only to dismiss them as inadequate, rehearsing the tension that runs through the poem as a whole.
14Much later on in the poem, the Mediterranean resurfaces in the New World, although in a way that undermines the ideal of Renaissance humanism. In chapter xxxv, the Narrator visits the site where the Trail of Tears began, in Georgia. The episode, also known as the Indian Removal, evokes the enforced displacement of Native American peoples in the nineteenth century. The experience triggers a meditation on the appropriation, or usurpation, of Greek names to dignify the bleak reality of southern plantations:
and I thought of the Greek revival
[. . .]
and how Greek it was, the necessary evil
of slavery, in the catalogue of Georgia’s
marble past, the Jeffersonian ideal in
plantations with its Hectors and Achilleses (Walcott 1990, 177)
In retrospect, then, Plunkett’s search for a renewal of “the Mediterranean’s innocence” appears as a misguided fantasy. As the rhyme between revival and evil makes clear, the only substantial legacy from Greece to America is the institution of slavery, which was itself predicated on the displacement of the local population. The vision becomes nightmarish, as the following lines conjure up the horror of the Jim Crow Deep South:
Shadows escaped through the pines
and the pecan groves and hounds were closing in fast
deep into Georgia, where history happens
to be the baying echoes of brutality (178)
15In the following lines, the surrounding churches and clouds evoke Klansmen’s hoods, in stark contrast with “that pastoral / of brooks with leisurely accents.” The genre of the pastoral appears not merely irrelevant, but complicit with oppression, in its elision of the violence that underpins slave societies on both sides of the Atlantic. These lines come as a sharp rebuttal to Plunkett’s dream of a place “where history could not happen.” Precisely, the pause induced by the line-break after “happens” makes it possible to read the line as a characterisation of Georgia as the place “where history happens” par excellence. The enlistment of Greek revivalism in the service of modern slavery is disquieting indeed. It would seem that History is reduced to a cycle of oppression, an impression reinforced by the reverberating “echoes” which resonate through the centuries. The scene evokes Stephen Dedalus’s famous assertion that “History […] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (Joyce 2000, 42) — a pronouncement featured as an epigraph to Walcott’s 1974 essay “The Muse of History” (1998, 36). Walcott, however, attributes the pronouncement not to Stephen but to Joyce himself. Michael Malouf has shown that this conflation of author and character can be read as part of Walcott’s strategy to identify with the figure of Joyce as a cosmopolitan exile, breaking free from the shackles of a history that is synonymous with the most crippling aspects of nationalism (2009, 132–35). While revivalism aims at the empowering recovery of a cultural archive, what renaissance does occur here is limited to the dark underbelly of exploitative societies. The revivalist “loop” described by Eagleton becomes a synonym for entrapment, from which an escape must be sought. As Sean Seeger has remarked, Walcott is very much alert to the fact that “in the Caribbean […], the relationship between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ is one of dynamic simultaneity” (2018, 13), confounding the claims of linear progress.
16The fallacy of revivalism is also exposed in the person of the island barber, an original blend of anarchist and Garveyite. His shop is full of The World’s Great Classics, old photographs, and a rusted mirror “in which we would look back / on the world’s events” (Walcott 1990, 71). The barber’s Afrocentricism appears as backward-looking, nostalgic, and unable to relate to his immediate surroundings, a predicament captured in the following lines: “The rock he lived on was nothing. Not a nation / or a people […] His paradise / is a phantom Africa” (72). Thus, his vision oddly resonates with Froude’s egregious judgment, in that both fail to appreciate the specific quality of Caribbean existence.
17Metaphorically, the nightmare of factual history and nostalgia is made tangible by the many wounds which trouble the poem’s characters. As Jahan Ramazani has shown, Omeros is full of wounds and injuries, physical as well as mental, sustained by people and landscape alike (1997). One of the poem’s central plot lines is Philoctete’s effort to cure the festering wound on his leg, something he achieves only at the very end of the poem. Those wounds are themselves historical signs, bodily ruins; they can be read as a language of sorts. Conversely, language in its turn becomes a site where injuries can be inscribed. As Rei Terada has noted, besides the many wounds sustained by virtually all characters in Omeros — including the narrator — they suffer also as language users (1992, 199–200).
18Accordingly, I would like to turn to the ways in which language bears the imprint of the past and, like the sea, becomes a potential site for an alternative archaeology. In chapter x, Maud and Plunkett visit the forest and its “African villages,” in search of “old things to discover” (Walcott 1990, 57). Paradoxically, as they roam the island, they experience a sense of pastlessness, which is problematic because it is also a reflection of their status as “fortunate travellers” enthralled by the postcard landscapes and the picturesque folk speaking patois, the variety of Francophone creole spoken on St Lucia. With the “white amnesiac Atlantic” in the background (61), Maud says: “It’s like Adam and Eve all over” (63). The landscape, however, is an Eden only from the point of view of the sightseer, not to the villagers busy with their day’s work. Here, the adamic experience becomes suspicious, in its association with class privilege. The edenic epiphany is undercut by the conditions in which it occurs, and the positions occupied by the subjects. Besides, the recurrence of the adjective “African” in the passage, often paired with “old” — “African villages” (57), “an old African / doubt” (58), “old African signs” (61) — testifies to the presence of an alternative, “Black Atlantic,” which complicates the notion of a “white amnesiac Atlantic.” Likewise, when Achille returns from Africa, where he has failed to connect with his ancestral roots, he walks at the bottom of the Atlantic, with “the parchment overhead / of crinkling water [recording] three centuries / of the submerged archipelago” (155). When the Plunketts encounter a woodsman speaking patois, they are literally lost for words, as they do not speak the language. In a telling role reversal, their linguistic helplessness mirrors that of the crowd at the Olympiads in the face of Latin, when no one knew the meaning of the phrase “victor ludorum.”
19One way to overcome the opacity of the signifier is to unfold a word’s etymology, to recover its ancient meaning. Although etymology is a journey without an actual homecoming — by definition, it can never reach a referent beyond language, but only successive derivations — it may still achieve a greater degree of intelligibility. When Seven Seas, one of the bard figures in the poem, explains to Achille the origin of the word “pomme-Arac,” he acts as a translator of sorts, interpreting the “dead language” spoken by the leaves of the tree:
“Aruac mean the race
that burning here like the leaves and pomme is the word
in patois for ‘apple.’ This used to be their place.” (Walcott 1990, 163)
The hyphenated compound “pomme-Arac” is broken down, its discrete elements traced back to their respective definitions and roots. This feat of etymology acts as a historical magnifying glass, as the explanation recapitulates the major epochs in the island’s history, from the pre-Columbian era (Aruac) to French colonisation (pomme). The link between language and history is further elaborated in the following lines:
It was
one of those Saturdays that contain centuries,
when the strata of history layered underheel,
which earth sometimes flashes with its mineral signs,
can lie in a quartz shard. Gradually, Achille
found History that morning. (163)
In typical Renaissance fashion, the imagery links philology to archaeology, both presented as possible gateways to History with a capital H. As James Turner has shown, philological investigation was integral to the antiquarianism which flourished in Renaissance Europe, as scholars struggled to ascertain textual authenticity and lexical accuracy in their study of ancient texts (2014, 53–58). Likewise, Achille finds himself engaged in a sort of hermeneutical activity; the “strata of history” in the shape of geological layers to be unearthed are an apt metaphor for the overlapping stories congealed in a word’s etymology, both converging as “mineral signs.”
20Right then, Achille precisely chances upon what appears to be an Aruac stone engraving (a pre-verbal form of inscription), a totem, disturbed after “centuries of repose” (Walcott 1990, 164). Awed by his finding, he immediately throws it away. Whatever its exact nature, the object belies the assumption that the Caribbean is by definition a cultural vacuum. What is striking in this passage is that the flash of History comes as another epiphany that upsets the linear flow of time. The past resurfaces with hallucinatory sharpness, centuries compacted inside one single day. Yet Achille’s bafflement implies that the encounter with History can be overwhelming, for lack of a correct interpretive code. These instances echo revivalist strategies deployed in Ireland also; archaeology, philology, and various practices inspired by ethnography, were instrumental in the recovery of an obliterated past (Deane 1995, 20–22). Yet, as the examples drawn from Omeros suggest, antiquarianism is not in itself satisfactory. The instances of revival surveyed thus far clearly indicate that the past is liable to remain a dead letter if it is not actively resuscitated.
21The central point is that the contact with History implies an act of translation, a linguistic detour which, by the same token, spells the possibility for regenerative creation. What translations aims for, indeed, is not so much the recovery of a lost archive, as the advent of the new and unpredictable through the confrontation of a variety of languages. In this, as Édouard Glissant has noted, translation closely resembles the process of creolisation itself, as it is an “art of the imaginary aspiring to the totalité-monde” (1995, 27; my translation). By anticipating as well as actively bringing into existence a common ground where the domestic and the foreign may come into contact, “translation projects a utopian community that is not yet realized” (Venuti 2013, 28). As such, it offers an alternative model to that of revivalism. Although Irish Revivalists such as Lady Gregory or Douglas Hyde produced translations from Gaelic into English, the practice advocated by Walcott seems less concerned with accuracy than with the sense of creative “possibility” celebrated in “The Muse of History” (1998, 53).
22For Walcott, translation is the secondary moment of a process which begins with, and is rendered possible by amnesia. The dialectics of memory loss and translational recovery is powerfully dramatised in chapter xxxii, as the narrator visits his aged mother in a care home, before returning to the United States where he now lives. His mother’s memory is deteriorating, and the encounter dramatises the issues of remembrance and amnesia. The narrator describes how he felt “transported, / […] to a place [he] had lost / in the open book of the street and could not find” (Walcott 1990, 167). The homegrown poet, now turned world-celebrity, experiences a form of estrangement due to his cosmopolitan success. The setting he once knew now feels distant,
It was another country, […]
like my mother’s amnesia; untranslatable
answers accompanied these actual spirits
who had forgotten me as much as I, too, had
forgotten a continent in the narrow streets. (167)
Like a stranger in his own home, the narrator identifies with his dementia-stricken mother. The inability to connect with one’s past is defined in terms of translational failure, as the narrator, assailed by “untranslatable / answers,” encounters a forgotten world from which he too has been erased.
23If we return to the beginning of the poem, we already encounter a suggestion of the possibilities afforded by translation. In a highly meta-poetic passage, the narrator glossed the title Omeros in a way that foregrounded the wayward possibilities afforded by an imaginative etymology that borders on translation:
I said, “Omeros,”
and O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer was
both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,
os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes
and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore. (Walcott 1990, 14)
Once again, we encounter the sea, which is literally inscribed in the name O-mer-os, and becomes the site of a utopian philology. The name Omeros is unmoored from its Greek etymology and goes through a process of displacement, or translation, which starts off the long list of parallels between the Caribbean and the Homeric Mediterranean that runs through the poem. The ambivalence of the signifier mer (“both mother and sea”) is compounded by the heteroglossia which allows the passage to switch between English and French Creole. Further, the etymological journey attempts to break through the bounds of language itself and connect with the materiality of the crashing surf, by means of the onomatopoeic syllable os. While Achille’s unwilling archaeological finding was overwhelming, the narrator’s translational flair yields an archaeology of the name Omeros which is playful and transformative. While the title of the poem gestures towards the tutelary figure of Homer, the philological gloss moves in a different direction: what comes to life here is not the Homeric intertext, but the materiality of the West Indian landscape. The bones (os) of Homer’s corpse are thus set adrift on a utopian sea, no longer haunted by the urge to recover a lost history. True to the promise of “really beginning” a regenerative history, the sea has become a metaphor for the sense of possibility afforded by the paradoxes of West Indian temporality, and an apt locus for Jameson’s utopian impulse. Thus, the serendipitous etymology of Omeros may disintegrate Homer but, in so doing, it gives life to the Caribbean reality which was latent in the name. Walcott’s “poetic knowledge,” then, applied to natural history as well as etymology,
is the result of a series of approximations and echoes that never arrive at the Ur-language of rooted meaning. This is not the condemnation of perpetual poetic exile but rather the poet’s procreational opportunity for generative metaphors that organize the broken roots of New World experience into new meanings. (Handley 2007, 305)
Starting from the fact of loss, Walcott performs acts of recovery that are transformative and open-ended, rather than nostalgic.
24A final example will show the congruence of translation and recovery, or rebirth. At the end of the poem, on Boxing Day, we witness an actual resurrection. As Achille prepares for his street performance with Philoctete, he dresses as a woman — fake breasts and all — in a way that is obscurely related to his African catabasis:
He was someone else
today, a warrior-woman, fierce and benign.
Today he was African, his own epitaph,
his own resurrection. (Walcott 1990, 273)
25Some form of recovery does happen after all, then. Achille’s journey to Africa may have ended in bafflement; nevertheless, he eventually undergoes a renaissance of sorts. Significantly, the performance involves cross-dressing, arguably a sartorial equivalent of translation. Thereby, he appears in a different guise, changed yet recognisable. The African experience — which, let us remember, was a dreamlike hallucination — is not disavowed; rather, it undergoes a metamorphosis which is the very condition for its retrieval. Thus, the episode encapsulates the peculiar nature of recovery in Walcott’s poetry. His resurrections differ from revivalism in that they imply a self-conscious practice of displacement, which eludes the search for authenticity. To the extent that a renaissance does occur, it is mediated by the act of translation, which provides the necessary detour through which history can be (re)articulated in the future tense.