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Reframing the Homeric: Images of the Odyssey in the Art of Derek Walcott and Romare Bearden

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Reframing the Homeric: Images of the Odyssey in the Art of Derek Walcott and Romare Bearden CHAPTER THIRTY Reframing the Homeric: Images of the Odyssey in the Art of Derek Walcott and Romare Bearden Gregson Davis Prodigal, what were your wanderings about) The smoke of homecoming, the smoke of departure. From Derek Walcott: The Prodigal The sea speaks the same language around the world's shores. From Derek vValcott: The Odyssey: A Stage Version The primary focus of this exploration of the postcolonial reception of Homer's Odyssey is on the poetry and poetic drama of the Caribbean Nobel laureate, Derek ·walcott. Since his creative oeuvre encompasses both verbal and visual media, and his poetic diction is manifestly 'pictorial' in texture, the scope of the exploration ,vill include a brief comparison between the modalities of reception discernible in his poetic corpus and those of the visual artist with whom he has expressed a deep aesthetic affinity - the great African-American painter, Romare Bearden (Walcott 1997: 222-35 ). An important point of convergence between the artistic principles professed by both artists is their interest in Homeric archetypes, and our discussion will there­ fore conclude with a glance at a fnv, specifically Odyssean, narrative motifs that recur in their ,vorks. Our point of departure is Walcott's long-standing and fecund obsession with the Homeric heritage. In delineating the ramifications of this obsession it is worth clarifying at the outset the extent of his knowledge of the Homeric texts. Since his linguistic repertoire does not include ancient Greek, his acquaintance with the Homeric original is therefore indirect, though far from superficial. In addition to his familiarity with these canonical works through English translations, he is thoroughly conversant with the later European epic tradition that derives its inspiration from Homer. The secondary school educational curriculum that he absorbed as a 402 Gregson Davis Homeric I mages in Walcott and Bearden 403 precocious student in the classrooms of the former British island colony of St Lucia men on the island of St Lucia with attributes of character that recall the heroes of Homeric in the Caribbean archipelago equipped him with a basic proficiency in Latin, which saga. Thus fishermen bearing French Creole names such as 'Achille' and 'Hector' enabled him to read Vergil's Aeneid in the original (cp. Greenwood 2005). As a become protagonists of a creative re-enactment of key motifs in the Iliad and Odyssey. voracious reader with unusually cosmopolitan tastes, he eventually went well beyond For Walcott's poetic muse, then, the Homeric model is seminal in so far as it the standard school curriculum to familiarize himself with other major epic poems, furnishes an archive of character types and patterns of human relationships that such as Dante's Divine Comedy, which function, in part, as intermediaries in the trans­ transcend time and place, culture and geography. In articulating this point of view mission of the archetypal Homeric material. His creative assimilation of the epic tra­ he has referred to such transcultural figures as 'iconic emblems' and, by way of illus­ dition in both oblique and direct forms is exquisitely encapsulated in the short inaugural tration, adduces the Homeric Odysseus in whom he sees the paradigm of the Wanderer. segment, labelled 'Archipelagoes', from the poem, 'Map of the New World' which As a visual emblem of this figure he fastens on 'the moving sail' - an image that is appeared in the collection, 'The Fortunate Traveller' (Walcott 1980): prominent in a Romare Bearden canvass on the Odysseus theme: [I] ARCHIPELAGO ES What we have because of Homer, permanently At the end of this sentence, rain will begin. because of Homer [ ... ] are two emblems, at least. At the rain's edge, a sail. One is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World: Slowly the sail will lose sight of islands; Helen. That's indestructible, iconic, permanent into a mist will go the belief in harbors for all cultures that share this part of history. The of an entire race. other emblem, of course, is the moving sail, alone on the ocean, not a ship but something small on The ten-years war is finished. a large expanse of water, trying to get somewhere - Helen's hair, a gray cloud the image of the ,vanderer (call him Odysseus) Troy, a white ashpit made emblematic by the great poet. by the drizzling sea. The drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp. The Wanderer, in this important formulation, is a complex figure that is worth unpack­ A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain ing in part, since it reappears in many guises throughout Walcott's poetic corpus. A and plucks the first line of the Odyssey. notable recurrence in the lyric volume, The Prodigal, has provided one of the two epigraphs affixed to this essay (Walcott 2004): Like the enlightened Keats of the ode, 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' (1817), Walcott's 'fortunate traveller' here undergoes an epiphanic experience in his Prodigal, what were your wanderings about? encounter with the Homeric text that engenders new poetic horizons. The harp picked The smoke of homecoming, the smoke of departure. up by the modern bard in the final line announces an idiosyncratic incorporation and, at the same time, reframing of the Odyssey narrative. As the repetition of the word 'smoke' suggests (smoke is a key recurrent image in Given the pervasiveness of the Homeric influence throughout his work as a whole, Walcott's poetry) the Wanderer often manifests a clouded vision of the experience our analytic lens will be restricted to scrutinizing a few selected passages that may of homecoming, which conceals a latent ambivalence. Among its other connotations, be regarded as representative of key aspects of his assimilative strategy. Thus his crown­ the wanderer figure signifies the cosmopolitan poet, ever on the move, who is haunted ing masterpiece, the 'pseudo-epic' poem, Omeros ( 1990 ), will constitute a major point by a lingering sense of having betrayed his ancestral culture. Of the many poems of reference for the discussion that follows. Some attention will also be devoted to devoted to the theme of 'Homecoming' that we find in Walcott's work, 'The Light kindred ideas conveyed in the dialogue of the play, The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1993a), of the World' is perhaps the most translucent vector of the returning poet's tran­ as well as to a few passages in shorter lyric poems that allude explicitly to Homeric sient sentiment of having abandoned his people, or at least that unsung segment of prototypes, such as 'Menelaus' and 'Homecoming: Anse La Raye'. the people embodied in the black population descended from slave ancestors. As the In an important talk inspired by a Romare Bearden exhibit, Walcott has elucidated poet is being conveyed back to his hotel in a local bus while 'Marley was rocking his views on the most profound approach to imitating Homer (Walcott 1997). He on the transport's stereo', he is moved almost to tears at the sight of an old woman holds up Joyce's Ulysses as the supreme embodiment of a non-trivial imitative strat­ at the roadside (Walcott 1987: 49-50): egy, because it ingeniously transposes central narrative episodes of the Odyssey into a contemporary cultural setting. In the Joycean reframing, psychological insight into An old woman with a straw hat over her headkerchief character trumps adherence to generic norms and to the elevated style of the archaic hobbled towards us with a basket; somewhere, heroic narrative. Walcott's own parallel strategy in Omeros is to endow humble fisher- some distance off, was a heavier basket 404 Gregson Davis Homeric Images in Walcott and Bearden 405 that she couldn't carry. She was in a panic. The internal ambinlence of the wanderer/poet towards the bitter-sweet experience She said to the driver: 'Pas quittez moi a terre', of homecoming comes to the surface, as we have seen, in the imagery of 'smoke', which is, in her patois: 'Don't leave me stranded', and is also expressed, metonymically, in the alternating rhythm of arrival and depar­ which is, in her history and that of her people: ture from the insular destination ('the smoke of arrival, the smoke of departure'). 'Don't leave me on earth' [ ... ] ·whereas the ambivalence is virtually occluded in the original Homeric version of the As the bus fills up with more passengers, the poet muses on the idea of abandon­ warrior's protracted return, the image of an Odysseus whose deep urge to wander ment, which he then personalizes: does not come to a close with his return to Ithaca becomes a powerful strand in later elaborations and permutations of the Odysseus myth. For instance, in Dante's Abandonment was something they had grown used to. famous transformation of the Ulysses figure in Canto 26 of the Inferno, the hero is represented as the type of the obsessive wanderer who is driven by a fatal hubristic And I had abandoned them, I knew that there sitting in the transport, in the sea-quiet dusk, craving for total knowledge of good and evil. In this medieval refashioning of the with men hunched in canoes, and the orange lights figure, the ineluctable impulse to depart finally takes precedence over the homing from the Vigie headland, black boats on the water [ ... ] instinct in the mind of the ageing sailor/adventurer; in Walcott's remodelling, however, the two poles of arrival and departure that define the wanderer/poet's The idea of abandonment is interlinked with the implicit notion of a neglected poetic existence (what W.B. Stanford famously refers to as 'centrifugal' and 'centripetal' theme, and it is plausible to read the later poem, Omeros, as making amends, in tendencies) remain equipotent in their magnetic attraction (Stanford 1954: 89).
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