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Walcott’s Omeros: Revitalization of Caribbean Wounds

 by

      Rahman Mostafiz

Key Words

 

Key Words:

 

Postcolonial Literature, Derek Walcott, Classical Epic in Modern Period, Multi-vocal Literature, Caribbean Literature.

Abstract

Abstract:

Emerging from over three hundred years of occidental oppression, the Caribbean people find themselves custodians of a culture inseparably cemented to an imperial history. Despite this oppression, or perhaps because of it, a uniquely West Indian consciousness has emerged, during the last decades of 20th century, which draws Walcott’s poetic attention. With a view to recovering the wounds of Caribbean culture, he attempts to delineate this West Indian spirit in his most ambitious work Omeros. Here he portrays some characters whose acts of healing of others’ wounds are actually nothing but symbols of healing the wounds of entire Caribbean culture. For example, Ma Kilman’s healing Philoctete is actually a symbolic healing of the entire community (elaborately shown in the main paper). My purpose of writing this paper, however, is to explore the concept of cultural healing in this poem through Walcott’s engagement with modernist epic poetry.

 

While writing this epic, Walcott adopts and transforms elements from Pound’s The Cantos, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Crane’s The Bridge. He uses pseudo-Dantean verse, Sapphic prosody, Homeric sensibility and Virgilian methodology, which does not show his inaptness of aesthetic purity of writing epic, but rather shows his attempt to set a new trend in literary modernism. I have defined this new trend as polyglossic epic which I will demonstrate in this paper.

 

I have organized my paper into two major issues focusing on the process of redefining the epic, and the process of cultural healing in Omeros.

Introduction

Introduction:

Once upon a time it was a very common idea among European scholars and critics that the Africans were incapable of producing epic literature. For example, in surveying the heroic poetry of world literature, C.M. Bowra, in his 1952 study Heroic Poetry, found a serious lack of heroic poetry in Africa (specifically in Uganda and Ethiopia) and he wrote about the African poetry "Though these poems, and many others like them, show a real admiration for active and generous manhood, they come from peoples who have no heroic poetry and have never advanced beyond panegyric and lament. The intellectual effort required for such an advance seems to have been beyond their powers."[1] But it is Derek Walcott who has made the tide to turn and has broken all Eurocentric scholars’ and critics’ humiliating impressions upon African/Caribbean poets and writers by his ironic handling of the generic conventions of classical epic poetry in Omeros.

Omeros: A Polyglossic Epic

Derek Walcott remakes and initiates a new epic tradition in literary modernism. He adapts Dante’s three-verse stanzas and thematic frame of the quest for paradise. Walcott has fabricated his most precious work Omeros in seven Books, totaling 64 chapters, of three sections each. The verse form of Omeros is carefully constructed. Walcott has chosen to craft this ostensibly Caribbean poem in hexametric terza rima^[2], one of the

Imprint

Publisher: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Text: Rahman Mostafiz
Publication Date: 03-14-2014
ISBN: 978-3-7309-9190-9

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
National Professor Dr Nurul Islam Founder Vice Chancellor University of Science & Technology Chittagong, USTC.