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). What the fullest measure, for that earlier neglect. Along with the speaker's sentiment of is 'permanent', for Walcott, is the underlying emotional ambivalence, revealed in each betrayal, which can be read as a latent subtext of the Homeric paradigm, there is, iteration of the arrival/departure syndrome, that yields painfully acquired insight into in Walcott's lyric narratives on the homecoming theme, an accompanying feeling the experiential paradox which beclouds all 'homecomings' - the perception that the of apprehension about his poetic reception in his native island. very notion of 'homecoming' may be, at bottom, an oxymoron. As the disillusioned The poem that, in my view, best exemplifies this particular anxiety on the part of speaker of 'Homecoming: Anse La Raye' comes to understand, 'there are home­ the morally self-conscious wanderer/artist is 'Homecoming; Anse La Raye', which comings without home'. Given the transforming mirror of time, 'home' cannot be recounts a return marred by the pain of rejection (Walcott 1984). In this iteration recuperated, and despite nostalgic desire for a pristine wholeness, it remains an of the homecoming motif the speaker observes wryly: unstable, if not destabilizing, concept that is constantly challenged by the shadow of memory. there are no rites In Walcott's lyric universe, then, the figure of the Wanderer retains a core, for those who have returned, metapoetic dimension - a dimension that is omnipresent in the pages of Omeros, only, ,vhen her looms fade, where 'Homer' is signifier for the universal bard and is continually re-incarnated as drilled in our skulls, the doom­ such in a variety of personae (e.g. Seven Seas). In the play, The Odyssey: A Stage surge-haunted nights, the figure of Blind Billy Blue performs a homologous role, as do the other only this well-known passage [ ... ] Version, singers that appear on the stage who bear the original Homeric names of Phemius The twin metaphorical coordinates of Penelope's loom and the dangerous ocean surge and Demodokos. One important rhetorical function of these variants is, at the meta­ here re-inscribe the Odyssean model in the mind of the returning poet and sef\'e to poetic level, to validate the Joycean (and by extension, Walcottian) move of prepare the reader for the disheartening encounter to come later in the poem, in jettisoning the high epic scaffolding employed by Homer. Nowhere is this function which children playing on a St Lucian beach fail to recognize him as a native: more transparent than in the dialogue between the sandalled bard of Chios and the composer of Omeros, in which the latter is told to ignore the divine apparatus: only this fish-gut-reeking beach 'Forget the gods', Omeros growled, 'and read the rest' (Walcott 1990: 283). whose frigates tack like buzzards overhead, In terms of an implied reading of the Homeric epics, the injunction to the inter­ whose spindly, sugar-covered children race locutor to discard the Olympian scaffolding confirms the very aesthetic path being pelting up from the shallows taken by the St Lucian bard in the course of the poem. because your clothes, In the ensemble of emblematic figures that ultimately derive from the matrix of your posture Homeric verse, a special place of honour is reserved for the trope of the bird. As in seem a tourist's. the case of the Wanderer, the bird acts as the vector of multiple significations that They swarm like flies are mutually reinforcing. ln both the Odyssey play and Omeros the bird, represented round your heart's sore. either on the wing or simply emitting a song, is a recurrent discursive image. As a 406 Gregson Davis Homeric Images in Walcott and Bearden 407 preliminary approximation to outlining the polysemous range of the bird emblem, of the revenge to be meted out by his father on the suitors: 'The whirr of one swal­ it will be useful to examine some its occurrences in the verse drama. low starts destruction's engine'. Athena's impersonation of a bird in the Homeric The form that the emblem consistently assumes in the play is the swallow, as we narrative is here transposed and elaborated into the intermittent signalling swallow learn immediately from the Prologue as pronounced by the choral bard, Billy Blue: that is audible to the ear of the privileged protagonist. Walcott's Nestor in a later scene from the drama ( act I, scene III) makes even more explicit the analogy bet\veen When you hear this chord the emblematic bird of the Greek Athena and the ubiquitous swallow in the stage [Chord] version when he remarks to Mentes, in a notable inversion of the impersonation, Look for a swallow's wings, 'Athena was that swallow's inhabitant'. The Odysseus figure himself expounds his A swallow arrowing seaward like a messenger intimate relationship with the swallow to the circumspect Penelope, who has just Passing smoke-blue islands, happy that kings told him about her famous trick of stitching and unstitching the shroud for Laertes ofTroy are going home and its ten years' siege is over. (act II, scene IV): So my blues drifts like smoke from the fire of that war, Cause once Achilles was ashes, things sure fell apart. PENELOPE: I'd unstitch it like a swallow's beak picking straw. ODYSSEUS: Swallows are my friends. Slow-striding Achilles, who put the hex on Hector. PENELOPE: There's a nest in this house. A swallow twitters in Troy. That's where we start. In these pregnant exchanges the swallow's twitter re-enacts a talismanic role that The swallow of this prologue appears in at least two of its prominent rhetorical aspects. supports the more strictly dramaturgic one of marking stages in the forward progress On the wing it is 'like a messenger;' in other words, it delivers the news that con­ of the story. stitutes the story or mythos as it enfolds in time. In addition to this primary narrato­ In Walcott's fluid theatrical adaptation, the bird may occasionally be emblematic logical function of enunciating stages in the enactment of the plot, the swallow not only of the advancing storyline, but of its connection with the broader mythos has the dramaturgical role of providing cues to the action and accompanying dia­ residing in the memory of the heroes, and thereby works as a metaphor for the bardic logue with its 'twitter'. The two functions - the 'seaward' direction of the narrative transmission of the tales from one audience to the next. This intermediate function and the prompting t\vitter - are closely allied in the inaugural song of Billy Blue. of disclosing the interconnection between past and present episodes in the Trojan How does the swallow trope relate to Homeric paradigmatic motifs? In the first macro-saga is succinctly illustrated in the following brief exchange between Nestor instance, the bird's association with bardic utterance links up with a common for­ and an attendant at his court at Pylos. As the visiting Telemachus tries to elicit clues mulaic Homeric expression that describes the flow of epic dialogue, 'winged words'. as to his father's fate from the aged warrior who, as in the Homeric prototype, is ·words on the wing, within the performative frame of Homeric verse carry the story the custodian of epic memory, the latter is made to recall the earlier momentous along with their rhythmic pulse. With a swiftness that is endemic to Homer's dactylic twitter of a swallow as he conjures up the past destiny of the doomed city ( act I, hexameters the twitter serves to set the play's dialogue in motion. Walcott multi­ scene III): plies the role of the twittering swallow at many junctures in the rapid course of the play. Without attempting to account for each and every instance of the polysemous FIRST ATTENDANT: All of Troy's sorrow is borne in a swallow's flight emblem, I shall concentrate on a few of the more salient manifestations. NESTOR: Ten years! And my heart is stabbed by a bird's t\vitter. Like Athena's theriomorph, the owl, Walcott's officious swallow performs the role of divine protector and premonitory counsellor of the wandering hero as well as of his The foregoing adumbration of the semantic range traversed by Walcott's bird-sign maturing son, Telemachus. Thus in an exchange with Odysseus' loyal nurse, Eury­ would not be adequate without reference to its major significance as omen - a cleia (act I, scene II) Telemachus receives privileged communication from a s,vallow: significance it conspicuously held in many ancient Mediterranean societies, includ­ TELEMACHUS: A swallow spoke to me from the wrist of that chair. ing Egyptian, Hellenic, Etruscan and Roman. In the form of augury - the ritual EURYCLEIA: You send for wine? what happened to your sea captain? praxis of predicting the future from the examination of the flight of birds - atten­ TELEMACHUS: The elect can take natural shapes, Eurycleia. tion to winged creatures as celestial agents of communication was a prominent EURYCLE IA: Lord, bird t'ief this boy's wits. feature of Greco-roman lore and mythographic traditions. In the Homeric poems, TELEMACHUS: It t\vittered, 'He'll return'. no less than in Classical Greek drama, dream visions interpreted as prophecies of future events often contain bird allegories. In a highly condensed variant of the motif Whereas Eurycleia downplays the significance of Telemachus' epiphanic experience, of the bird-portent, the sound of a swallow's whirring wings is taken as a pre­ the young man interprets the swallow's telltale whirr as a celestial prognostication monitory sign of the bloody denouement of the epic saga. It is with the reassurance 408 Gregson Davis Homeric Images in Walcott and Bearden 409 conveyed by this ominous sound that Odysseus warns the suitors, in a less oblique terns, royal and bridled, wild ducks, migrating teal, mode than heretofore, of their dire fate ( act II, scene VI): pipers ( their fledgling beaks), wild waterfowl, widgeon. Cypseloides Niger, Fhirondelle des Antilles ODYSSEUS: vVhat I endure will be suffered again. (their name for the sea-swift). [A swallow passes] EURYMACHUS: What was that noise? The parenthetical gloss explaining the nomenclature seals the purely symbolic iden­ POLYBUS: Nothing. A swallow. tification of the 'swallow of the Antilles' with the 'swallow' of the Mediterranean. ODYSSEUS: Say your prayers. An ancillary effect of the interconnected names is to underline the Homeric sub­ text that weaves together the two narratives embodied in the genres of poetic drama The long poem, Omeros, which preceded the stage version of the Odyssey by approx­ and poem. At a very early stage of Omeros ( chapter I.ii) the protagonist, Achille, has imately three years, is similarly replete with a bird imagery that is semantically dense an inaugural sighting of the sea-swift soon after he and his fellow-fishermen have in ways that are paralleled in the account ,ve ha,·e given of the swallow's plural, inter­ uprooted the laurel tree that they will use as material for building their canoe: locking roles. In the poetic narrative, however, Walcott employs a species of bird that is native to the New vVorld, the sea-swift. As an equally complex emblem, the Achille looked up at the hole the laurel had left. swift permeates the sea-scape of the quasi-epic narrative poem, Omeros. By virtue of He saw the hole silently healing with the foam its frequent recurrence, the bird and its watery habitat share a primary metonymic of a cloud like a breaker. Then he saw the swift signification, in view of the central symbolic role of the sea in the life of the Odysseus figure. In explicating some of the swallow's figurative transmigrations I shall inter­ crossing the cloud-surf, a small thing, far from its home [ ... ] sperse my analysis with frequent textual citations because, in the case of a poetic dic­ tion that is metaphorically dense, such as Walcott's, it is impossible to due justice The swift is thus assimilated, at a programmatic juncture of the poem, to the image to a nuanced order of 'intertextuality' (in the non-trivial sense) without recourse to of the wanderer 'far from its home' and, in this particular incarnation, operates moment­ concrete scrutiny of select loci. arily as a kind of surrogate for the Odysseus figure. Elsewhere in his poetry Walcott A thorough exegesis of the overlapping meanings attributable to the sea-swift in avails himself of a visual pun that is crucial to understanding the symbolic complex Walcott's verse would take us too far away from our main theme. Suffice it to note, of bird, sails, and sailor. The V shape formed by the wings of a bird in flight is made in passing, that the poet indulges in programmatic wordplay that foregrounds the to fuse, diagrammatically, with the spread sails of a ship and, by a simple metonymic centrality of the vocable, 'mer' ('sea'), in the syllabic breakdown of the poem's title extension, the sailor-wanderer who is 'far from home' and 'alone in a large expanse (0-mer-os), and that the sea is often the figurative locus of past human experience of ocean' becomes essential to the equation. (Walcott 1990: 14). The repeated appearances of the swift in its oceanic haunt are In Omeros the chief Homeric prototype among the cast of characters is not - at associated, at one level, with the rapid progress of the poem itself; but the germane least on the surface of the plot - a contemporary version of Odysseus, but the hero interpretative levels are, as I have indicated, multiple. All the roles ,ve have illus­ of the Iliad, the redoubtable Achilles. Such an ostensible distinction, however, obscures trated above in relation to the swallow emblem are fully documentable in the 'chap­ the fact that Walcott's transformative muse deliberately conflates the two figures. The ters' into which the poem is segmented, e.g. metteur-en-scene, bearer of tradition, conflation was, of course, already a structural feature of the Vergilian imitation of protector of the wandering hero, intermediary narrator/messenger linking past and Homer, which scholars of the Roman poet have long since noted (the Aeneid dis­ present, divine epiphany, augur. Rather than engaging in a point for point com­ plays a clearly hybrid structure: the first half of the epic is dominated by 'Odyssean' parison of the interchangeable roles of swallow and swift in both texts, let us focus wanderings at sea in the quest for a home, while the latter half narrates conflicts on instead on a few passages from Omeros that complement and further refine observa­ land that call upon the Trojan hero's military prowess - his 'Achillean' side). Thus tions made above in respect to the play. in so far as 'Achille', the local counterpart of the Greek warrior, is a humble fisher­ As prelude to this complementary analysis, it is important to note that the man by vocation, he is also ipso facto a sailor whose existence is compassed by, and poet provides the reader of the poem with a gloss that affirms the notional link, derives meaning from, close, habitual interaction with sea. In view of the divergent even symbolic identity, between swallow and swift. The gloss is made apropos of fates of Achilles and Odysseus in the tradition of the Trojan cycle epics, however, the description, or ecphrasis, of the embroidered work being stitched by Maud, the premonitory role of the Antillean hirondelle acquires a darker shade in the poem a character in Omeros who is the wife of the expatriate Briton, Major Plunkett. In than in the refashioned Odyssey play. In both Walcott texts, as we have seen, the creating her 'immense quilt' Maud portrays a veritable ornithological guide which, birds' appearances, in many instances, foreshadow pivotal episodes in the narrative; in the poet's catalogue of its contents, comes to a climax with mention of the but as far as the St Lucian Achille is concerned, the sad fate to which he is beck­ sea-swift (88): oned by the swift is a foregone conclusion that is irreversible. 410 Gregson Davis Homeric Images in Walcott and Bearden 411

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Walcott's heroic fisherman who is in love I followed a sea-swift to both sides of this text; with the beautiful maid, 'Helen', and who is doomed to a premature death, has a her hyphen stitched its seam, like the interlocking less than felicitous relationship with the sacred bird that punctuates the stages of his basins of a globe in which one half fits the next life. For him, the swift presages loss and, ultimately, death. Thus when he has an into an equator, both shores neatly clicking intuition that Helen is about to abandon him for his erotic rival, Hector, the reader into a globe; except that its meridian is made to follow his ruminations (125): was not North and South but East and West [ ... ] Her wing-beat carries these islands to Africa, From his heart's depth he knew she was never coming she snved the Atlantic rift ,vith a needle's line, back, as he followed the skipping of a sea-swift the rift in the soul. over the waves' changing hills, as if the humming In this envoi the Caribbean 'rhapsode' ( etymologically, 'stitcher of songs') rounds horizon-bow had made Africa the target ofits tiny arrow. When he saw the swift flail out his project of reinventing a common substratum for old and new versions of the and vanish in a trough he knew he'd lost Helen. epic tradition that finds its original matrix in the Homeric poems. What is claimed for the artistic 'swift' in this recapitulation is nothing less than the ambitious aim of the poem itself - a redemptive reintegration of Old and New Worlds that imaginat­ A few lines later, in the closing sub-chapter of the verse, Achille arrives at the unset­ ively bridges the 'rift' in the cultural soul of the postcolonial populace. tling insight that not all swallows are benign (125): In what remains I hope to illuminate further the poet's transcultural compass by reconsidering a few of these major themes in relation to the visual art of Romare Steadily she kept her distance. He said the name Bearden (1911-1988). My principal frame of reference for the juxtaposition will be that he knew her by - l)hirondelle des Antilles, Bearden's acclaimed cycle of collages depicting episodes from the Odyssey that he the tag on Maud's quilt. The mate jigged the bamboo rods created in 1977. (Fine 2003: 88-91). from which the baits trawled. Then it frightened Achille The transcultural dimension of his visualizations of these episodes is most starkly that this was no swallow but the bait of the gods, epitomized in the skin pigment that he uniformly imparts to the legendary actors. that she had seen the god's body torn from its hill. The mythic universe that he projects in his brightly coloured collages is populated by black-skinned males and females. Crucial to his reconstruction of a cultural seascape The reference to the violence done to the body of the god reinvokes the uproot­ that is beyond history is the circumstance that dark pigmentation is not confined to ing of the laurier-canelles in the construction of the canoe - the inaugural episode mortals: even the powerful god of the sea, Poseidon, who is the inveterate enemy of Omeros that is cast as an offence to the tree divinity. The cursed fisherman of Odysseus, is portrayed as black, as is his emblem, the formidable trident, that figure baited by the gods is emblematic, among other things, of the subaltern post­ he wields with such vehemence against the returning Greek heroes. What is the colonial black inhabitants of the Caribbean island, and in the course of the poem ulterior significance of this blackness for the artist's idiosyncratic rendition and Achille makes a dream-like submarine journey back to his ancestral home in West assimilation of the Odyssey story? Africa. The inner journey is a variant on the motif of katabasis ( the descent of First and foremost, it exposes the fundamental irrelevance of racial identities ( of the hero to the nether world that is such a common feature of Ancient Medi­ which skin pigment is but one of the full panoply of superficial elements) for a deeper terranean epics) (Davis 2007; Hardwick 2002: 236-56). In Walcott's reading of understanding of what it means to be a human being. That racial categorization leads the old sagas, the underworld passage motif has a psychic correlate in the quest for to the invention of what Erik Erikson has accurately termed 'pseudo-species' is an self-knowledge ('he asked himself who he was': p.130). In this quest the accom­ insight that is nmv being amply validated by the new science of genomics. There is, panying swift attains to the stature of divine psychopomp ('leader of souls') who however, an additional layer of literary-historical rationale to the portrayal of black guides the hero towards the shores of his dead father - a sea journey that maps bodies in a Homeric context. Bearden was no philologist, of course, but he appears onto the mythological lore of many New World black diaspora peoples for whom to manifest an awareness of the Homeric type-scene that features the visit of the 'Africa' is the name for the final resting-place to which the souls of the dead eventually Olympian gods to the land of the Ethiopians. In Homer's worldview, as is well known return, travelling in a reverse direction from the catastrophic Middle Passage. to readers of the epics, the distant 'Ethiopians' ( the word is derived from the Greek As a concluding observation on the nuanced treatment of the sea-swift in the imagery for 'people of burnt face') are conceived as leading a paradisiacal lifestyle and, what of Omeros, we may cite a passage that occurs in the final pages of the text, which is even more remarkable from the perspective of modern racialist culturally engen­ retrospectively ascribes to the swift the all-encompassing function of guide to the dered stereotypes, they enjoy a footing of social equality with the blessed gods who narrative as a whole (319): are their grateful guests at fabulous feasts. As Bearden is reputed to have observed 412 Gregson Davis Homeric Images in Walcott and Bearden 413 to an interviewer who questioned him about the black pigment he bestowed on Soon the sand is circled with uglv his figures, Poseidon 'always has to come up from Africa, where he wants to be ash. Well, there were days with his friends there. And it is universal' (Fine 2003: 261, n.178; see frontispiece: \\·hen, through her smoke-grey eves, I saw the white trash that was figure O.1). Clearly the artist is attempting to recover a rudimentary order of human Helen [ ... ] experience that transcends time, race and culture. His concept of a 'universal' sub­ strate inherent in Poseidon's desire to be with his black friends is at bottom verv closely akin to Walcott's views, discussed above, on the subject' of the ti~eles~, As a final illustration of the lines of convergence benveen Walcott's and Bearden's transcendent iconic emblem. remodellings of Homeric paradigms, we may adduce their similar depictions of the The depiction of protagonists of an immemorial mythos as black is also a salient type of the female magician/witchdoctor. The type is, of course, abundantly repres­ feature of Walcott's poetics, as we have seen in the context of the characters that ented in the folk traditions of many cultures, ancient and modern. As portrayed in are woven into the embroidery of Omeros. The stage version of the Odyssey contains the works of Bearden the avatar of the temale magician ofren takes the form of the analogous references to the black pigment of some of its dramatis personae. In a contemporary 'conjure-woman' of African diasporic subcultures, corresponding to poetic drama that reconstructs a legendary cosmos the explicit references to skin colour the 'obeah-woman' in the Anglophone Caribbean (Powell et al. 2006 ). The inter­ are made in a deliberately casual way. The enchantress Circe, for example, proudly section between these potent New vVorld sorcerers and characters in the Homeric draws attention to her lustrous epidermis during her seduction of Odysseus: 'Rest portrait gallery resides in the portrayal of the figure of Circe, and, to a lesser extent, your head on the length of this ebony arm'. Long ebony arms are certainly very that of Calypso - the nymphs who detain the wandering hero and retard his return prominent in the female lovers in Bearden's Odyssey series, with which Walcott was to Ithaca. The ancillary motif of erotic desire is deeply interwoven into the fabric of intimately familiar. Among the black characters who appear in the Walcott play are the story as it is developed by both artists, whereas in Homer, Eros and witchcrafr the fickle maidservant, Melantha (the root of whose Greek name registers her black­ are unevenly distributed benveen the Circe and Calypso episodes. ness) and the loyal nurse, Eurycleia, as we learn somewhat brusquely from Mel­ In the iconography of Bearden's famous collages in the Odysseus series, the antha's bitter outburst in response to an unwelcome order from her aged supervisor contrapuntal relationship benveen male vVanderer and female Enchantress is a ( act II, scene IV): paramount structural feature. For instance in his work, 'Odysseus leaves Circe' (fron­ tispiece, figure 0.2 ), what vValcott has labelled the iconic emblem of 'the moving EURYCLEIA: Melantha, get back inside and clear the table. sail' is partly visible through an open window in Circe's bedroom, while the nude MELANTHO: No, you crooked black bitch! I'm engaged to a prince. body of the black-skinned magician lies outstretched on the couch (Fine et al. 2003: 8a). Bearden's choice of focusing on the moment of the hero's triumphant depar­ In coming to terms with the ideational basis for the deployment of dark-skinned ture is a window into his interpretation of the story, for it foregrounds the failure figures on the part of both visual artist and poet, it is essential to grasp that neither of the enchantress to keep her lover forever under her spell. In Greek and Roman is primarily concerned with a revisionist pseudo-historical agenda ( e.g. 'Eurydice and mythography powerful female magicians, like Medea and Circe, conspicuously fail Circe were really black'), but rather with promulgating an image of an ancient to prevail by magical means in their efforts to control the sexual loyalty of favoured Mediterranean world that existed 'before color prejudice' (Snowden 1983). Even more male heroes, and uncontrollable Eros proves to be the cas-limite of the efiicacy of important to their common universalist perspective is the underlying paradox that love potions (Prince 2003). the pigment of the figures is not, at bottom, germane to the story. The root idea The paradox of the powerful temale magician who experiences the frustration of the interchangeability (and hence triviality) of skin pigmentation is graphically of unreciprocated love is also a feature of Walcott's dramatization of the Circe and evident in Walcott's two contrasting representations in verse of the iconic emblem Calypso episodes. In this respect he adheres to the Homeric plot; but like Bearden, that he labels 'The Most Beautiful Woman in the World'. 'Helen' in this generic he transposes the witchcrafr practices of the Greek magicians into Afro-Caribbean sense may be a black or white avatar, and it is no contradiction of this ahistorical equivalents. Even the goddess Athena resorts to Afro-Haitian Vodun instruments, conceptualization for Walcott to portray her as a stunning black maid in the pages such as the scattering of flour in Veve patterns, in executing her timely and sup­ of Omeros, on the one hand, and as a promiscuous white lover in a short lyric elegy, remely efiective counter-magic in order to neutralize Circe's wiles: on the other. The latter incarnation occurs in the poem, 'Menelaus', (from the collec­ tion, The Arkansas Testament) where the voice of first person speaker is overheard CIRCE: Someone was here. ruefully reflecting on the past as he is wading in the sea (Walcott 1987: 101): [ She rises, paces, distracted] ODYSSEUS: The sheets are all soaked with your sweat. Wood smoke smudges the sea. CIRCE: I heard: 'You're a monstrous bitch. You'll pay in the end.' A bonfire lowers its gaze. ODYSSEUS: Who? 414 Gregson Davis

CIRCE: A green-eyed goddess. You're her favorite. ODYSSEUS: Who was she? CIRCE: She sprinkled it round this bed. White sand. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE ODYSSEUS [ Tasting it]: It's not sand, it's flour.

In Walcott's transcultural universe the interchangeabilitv of swallow and owl like a ' that of Afro-Caribbean Shango and Greek chthonic ritual, attests to the equation, 'Plato's Stepchildren': at a deeper level, of all forms of witchcraft and augury: SF and the Classics CIRCE: Let me trace your palm's rivers. Sit; open to me. ODYSSEUS: I don't believe in that hoodoo, or in this card. [ He shows his palm. Circe reads it] Sarah Annes Brown CIRCE: A cock to Shango or sombre Persephone.

As these theatrical excerpts make crystal clear, the parallel modalities by which Walcott and Bearden assimilate and reframe the heritage of 'iconic emblems' derivative of the Homeric tradition are rooted in their shared assumptions about the ability of the artist, verbal or visual, to penetrate to a universal substrate of human experience. Science fiction is an elastic term which may be applied to whimsical neo-medieval As Walcott phrases it in the second of our two epigraphs: fantasies and to projections of far-future technology alike, to action-packed advent­ ures in outer space and to more surreal and metaphysical explorations of inner space. The sea speaks the same language around the world's shores. Like anv other genre it can be done well or badly, though (in a somewhat unfair Catch 22 situation) the best SF tends to be assimilated to literary fiction, its generic alignment occluded or brushed aside. Although SF might seem a quintessentially FURTHER READING modem genre, classical themes have permeated a great many SF productions - includ­ ing the controversial 1968 Star Trek episode from which my chapter's title is derived A very useful and well-informed introduction to Walcott's intellectual and artistic formation - and some commentators have traced its origins back to the classical period. is the comprehensively annotated edition, by Baugh and Nepaulsingh (2004), of his long auto­ The chief candidate for this originary role is Lucian of Samosata, a second­ biographical poem, Another Life. For a broader and more copious survey of his life and poetic centurv CE satirist who was born in eastern Turkey but wrote in Greek. His fan­ career, consult the detailed biography by King (2000). tasticai True History certainly anticipates favourite science fictional devices, with its On Walcott's views on Homer as literarv model and its artistic implications his talk Walcott detailed description of wars in space and imaginative accounts of various alien (1997), is a succinct but precious source ~finsights into his aesthetics, and ~ttests t; his high species. One of these, a moon-dwelling race, is entirely male, although its members regard for the influential re-workings of the Ulysses themes by Dante and James Joyce. The marry each other and bear children which grow in the calves of their legs (Lucian special edition of the journal, South Atlantic Quarterly, in which the talk was published, also 1968: 1.22 ). Another species spends part of its lifecycle as a man, part as a tree. We contains useful short studies by an ensemble of international scholars on various aspects of can compare these speculative variations on humanity with similar visions of intrigu­ his craft ( Davis 1997b). There is a thoughtful discussion of his techniques of imitation in ing alterity in recent SF - the androgynous society depicted by Ursula K. Le Guin Terada 1992. The collection of articles by classical scholars that appeared in a special issue of in Left Hand of Darkness ( 1969) and the alien 'pequeninos' ,vho are reborn as trees Classical World (1999: 93.1. 71-81) focuses mainly on Walcott's remodelling of canonic lit­ erary texts from the Greco-Roman tradition. after death in Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead ( 1986) spring to mind. But Romare Bearden's artistic output is well illustrated and discussed in the substantial cata­ Lucian's playful picaresque whimsy lacks SF's hallmark verisimilitude and his explora­ logue to a major retrospective exhibition of his work at the National Gallery in Washington tions of extraterrestrial life remain undeveloped. Ursula K. Le Guin and Orson Scott (Fine et al. 2003 ). The catalogue includes excellent essavs bv Ruth Fine Darah Kennel Abdul Card think through the problems faced by humankind when it interacts with non Elleh and Jacqueline Francis on the cultural roots of his ~ajor them:s and his plac: in the humans. Lucian, on the other hand, presents us with an entertaining romp, a kind evolution of twentieth-century art. The Fine essay in that volume includes a well-illustrated of xenological raree show. section on the splendid series of collages that Bearden devoted to episodes from the Odyssey. But even if Lucian's status as the inventor of science fiction remains open to ques- tion classical literature has undoubtedlv been fused together with SF by countless late; writers - recent hybrids include ·the cult TV series Xena, Warrior Princess