Booklover — Poetic Travel

Column Editor: Donna Jacobs (Retired, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC 29425) <donna.jacobs55@gmail.com>

Who can resist the sirens of an exotic tale, the blue green of the Caribbean Sea, the gentle ocean breeze swaying a palm tree, or the romance of island fishermen? Now deliver that in poetic verse with a twist of history and a look at social injustice. It makes for interesting, magical reading.

“O open this day with the conch’s moan, Omeros, as you did in my boyhood, when I was a noun gently exhaled from the palate of the sunrise.”

“Omeros,” an epic poem of seven books and 64 chapters, is considered Derek Walcott’s masterpiece. In “Omeros,” the reader easily feels the laissez faire of the islands, the gentle breezes and yet is quickly entranced with the complexity of the historical and geographic accents. Published in 1990 to great praise and critical review, the work was recognized as the literary achievement that garnered the attention of the Swedish Academy. Thus, Derek Walcott was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.”

“Now he heard the griot muttering his prophetic song of sorrow that would be the past. It was a note, long-drawn and endless in its winding like the brown river’s tongue:

‘We were the colour of shadows when we came down with tinkling leg-irons to join the chains of the sea, for the silver coins multiplying on the sold horizon, and these shadows are reprinted now on the white sand of antipodal coasts, your ashen ancestors from the Bight of Benin, from the margin of Guinea.”

Born on the island of St. Lucia, Walcott incorporated his Caribbean heritage into his works. When he passed away in 2017, I cut the article out of the newspaper. It has lived folded with the list of Nobel laureates. Reading the article again created awareness. There was juxtaposition with the easy breezy of the islands and Walcott’s struggle with race. Four illustrative items from the article: 1) Joseph Brodsky, a poet of Nobel renown, expressed criticism for the critics that regionally pigeonholed Walcott due to “an unwillingness…to admit that the great poet of the English language is a black man.”; 2) Walcott’s statement that: “The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the English poets.”; 3) He struggled early on with what he described as a “wrestling contradiction of being white in mind and black in body, as if the flesh were coal from which the spirit like tormented smoke writhed to escape.”; 4) He ultimately conquered the racial nature of this struggle stating — “Once we have lost our wish to be white, we develop a longing to become black.” All are very provocative perspectives in our current environment.

“‘Somewhere over there,’ said my guide, ‘the Trail of Tears started.’ I leant towards the crystalline creek. Pines shaded it. Then I made myself hear the water’s language around the rocks in its clear-running lines and its small shelving falls with their eddies, ‘Choctaws,’ ‘Creeks,’ ‘Choctaws’, and I thought of the Greek revival carried past the names of towns with columned porches, 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, its foam in the dogwood’s spray, past towns named Helen, Athens, Sparta, Troy. The slave shacks, the rolling peace Of the wave-rolling meadows, oak, pine, and pecan, and a creek like this one. From the window I saw

the bundles of women moving in ragged bands like those on the wharf, headed for Oklahoma; then I saw Seven Seas, a rattle in his hands.” {Sidebar: Achille is the protagonist in this story. Hector is his adversary. Seven Seas symbolically represents Homer. Besides the obvious ties to Homer — Helen is a city in Georgia and St Lucia is also referred to as Helen.}

Walcott was not only a poet defining and refining the language, he penned 40 plays, taught at Boston University, was the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, and worked as well with a paint brush as a pen. The cover of “Omeros” is one of Walcott’s watercolors — fishermen in a small craft navigating a green choppy sea with an island in the background.

In the isolation created by the pandemic one can immerse in “Omeros.” However, now that we are peeking out from a COVID closet and learning to navigate again, maybe Walcott’s poem entitled “Map of the New World” can give direction:

I Archipelagoes

At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.

At the rain’s edge, a sail.

Slowly the sail will lose sight of islands; into a mist will go the belief in harbours of an entire race.

“if we wonder often, the gift of knowledge will come.” — Arapaho

The ten-years war is finished. Helen’s hair, a grey cloud. Troy, a white ashpit by the drizzling sea. The drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp. A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain and plucks the first line of the Odyssey.