Elsa Luciano Feal- Helen: History that Heals in "Omeros"

In writing Omeros Walcott never intended a direct parallelism between his poem and Homer’s tale. Although some of the characters of the Iliad are present in this tale many are created by the poet. The poem, despite its length, is not really an epic either; as Walcott himself has pointed out for it includes no wars and no warriors.² Omeros is a narrative poem about the sea and the people who live near its shores. Its main character is Achille who rivals Hector in his love for the stunningly beautiful Helen. But its main theme is not romantic love, but the quest for history, the need for reconciliation and redemption.

Helen, the black beauty of Omeros has a problematic role in the poem. First, she is that “larger-than-life shadowy female figure who inhabits our [the male] imagination, informs our emotions and indirectly gives shape to many of our actions” (Harris 5). Secondly, her name with its multiple associations “defines her essence”(Harris 6). She is Helen of Troy, the betrayer of Menelaus, the cause of the destruction of Troy, and the face that launched a thousand ships of Greek mythology. She is also the St. Lucian island, the arrogant untamed maid, the panther-like seductress, and the historyless islander.

Our first sighting of the Helen of the West Indies is through the gaze of the narrator. On first catching a glimpse of Helen, the narrator describes her as “a woman with a madras head tie,/but the head proud, although it was looking for work/I felt like standing in homage to a beauty”(Omeros 23). Three characteristics of the West Indian Helen are pointed out in these lines she is of African descent, she is proud and beautiful, and a member of the working class. From this point on, she is followed by the male gaze that traps and determines the direction of her life. Charles Lock who argues in “Derek Walcott’s Omeros: Echoes from a White-Throated Vase” that “to depict the woman without representing her voice, is for the poet to exercise his descriptive powers, and to render the woman an object, whose silence is matched by her passivity”(9). Certainly, it is within the poet’s prerogative to choose the direction of the character’s life, but by setting her up as an ideal of womanhood, he traps and silences her. It is through language, after all, that Walcott chooses to control the reader’s perception of Helen. She is “an idea created by others’ desires, who moves others but herself remains detached”(Zoppi 520).

Maud, the Other woman in this poem is also trapped by an image. She is a cliché: the gentle white foreigner who sits in the verandah and fans herself, or tends her garden. Unlike Helen whose servitude is coerced, Maud plays nurse to Plunkett during his illness, and is his support and “helpmate.” Middle-aged and barren, she envies Helen’s beauty, youth and fertility. Her life is pregnant with silences, “years of self-examining silence”(24).

Helen of Troy, who is often linked in Omeros to the Greek woman who has an affair with the narrator, is set off in obvious juxtaposition to the Helen of the islands. One is white, the other black. One has “Asian cheeks” while the other wears “an unimaginable ebony mask.” One is associated with ivory, cold stone, “smoke obscuring soldiers fallen in battle” and ancient history; the other is ebony, heat, dueling fishermen and “historylessness”. Like the Helen of history, the black Helen is the object of desire, the cause of ruined loyalties and lives. Both are sexualized beings. However, Plunkett’s obvious sexual desire for her rather than for his wife is also meant to point out the historical role of black women in colonial/Caribbean history.³

Achille (the Caribbean Menelaus), Hector, Plunkett and the narrator himself lust for Helen. For Achille, Helen is an object that can be bought and controlled. He goes out on an illegal fishing expedition hoping that with money he will be able to buy her back. “Money will change her. Is this bad living that make her come wicked”(44). Because the real Helen remains unknown to us, her identity depends on arbitrary and biased descriptions provided by other characters. According to Lock because “the one who represents has been normatively male” there is a “division between the one who represents and the one who is represented”(9).

The narrator himself, who through the power of words can save or destroy Helen, limits himself to stereotypes. “I saw the rage of her measuring eyes, and felt the chill of a panther hidden in the dark of a cage”(36). The black female body is being relegated to the instinctual, the savage, the primitive.

Helen exerts a mesmerizing hold on Plunkett, so much so that he decides to create a history for her in hopes of freeing himself of his guilty attraction toward her. His guilt is twofold: it is linked to colonization and the exploitation of the black woman’s body as well as the island’s, and, of course, there is Maud. Yet, the history that Plunkett vows to “create” for Helen is problematic. How true can Plunkett, representative of the colonizing forces and the history that long claimed that nothing existed in the Caribbean, be to the “truth,” to Helen, to the island?

But are his thoughts pure, pure enough to really help the Caribbean? Walcott mocks Plunkett’s pretensions at writing Helen’s story. The Empire can only write one version of history and that one has already been written; Omeros is the native version, the island’s autobiography in a way.

The yellow dress Helen wears which “becomes a motif for Helen in the poem”⁴ is also problematic. Helen marches through the village wearing the dress as a banner, her perceived arrogance a symbol of her independence from her former masters. Helen’s appropriation of the dress is significant because both Maud and Plunkett feel threatened by their former maid. Walcott never really lets the reader know how Helen becomes the owner of the dress. At times, it seems as though it was given to her, at others, it seems she has stolen it. Maud, the alleged owner of the dress, cannot help us settle the issue, for she actively dislikes Helen.

For Maud, Helen and her kind are the cause of the island’s problems. “’There’s our trouble,’ Maud muttered into her glass… /Plunkett saw the pride of Helen passing/ in the same yellow frock Maud had altered for her. / ‘She looks better in it—Maud smiled—but the girl lies/ so much and she stole…’”(29). Helen represents the island and its people’s for Maud. “Their future felt as sinister as/ that of the ebony girl in her yellow dress.” Much later in the narrative when Helen goes by the Plunketts to borrow money, Maud is furious. Helen plucks the flowers from Maud’s garden carelessly as she walks by them. She has only a veiled respect for Maud. She greets Maud with a curt greeting, “Morning” and Maud is stunned at the informality of her former servant. Nevertheless, she attempts civility:

Maud’s life also contrasts with Helen’s. She is the white colonial mistress. She devotes her life to mend and care for things. She nurses Plunkett after the war. She tends to her garden with loving care, and she is forever stitching a silk green quilt of birds. Maud resembles the Penelope of the Homeric tradition. In that tradition, “Helen is the woman for whom you leave home, Penelope the woman to whom you return, and male heroic activity (fighting, traveling, conquest, return) occurs in the space between these two women” Dougherty states in “Homer after Omeros: Reading a H/Omeric Text” (352).

Helen is fragile and elusive like a butterfly, dangerous and enigmatic like a panther and both loved and romanticized as the motherland. For Dougherty she “embodies what men have often characterized as the infinite mystery, ambiguity, or instability of female nature . . .[she] is the screen upon which others project their fears, needs and desires”, hence, her association with a butterfly, a panther and the island of St. Lucia, all objects of the male narrator’s gaze (347). Maud fears “the future [of the island] will be as sinister as that of the ebony girl in her yellow dress”(29). Whereas Plunkett only sees “the butterfly’s/ yellow-panelled wings that once belonged to his wife, / the black V of the velvet back…”(29). Helen is also a shadow: the shadow that falls between Hector and Achille, and the shadow that haunts Plunkett. “And in the shadow of her name lies the ghost of other battles, of another Helen, who throughout the poem haunts the figure of the servant girl loved by two fishermen”(Zoppi 520).

Walcott plays effectively in the first five parts of the poem with the opposing tensions confronted by Helen: Achille/Hector, Maud/Plunkett, butterfly/panther, Helen of the West Indies/Helen of Troy. Toward the end, Book 6, the narrator returns to the island once again. Change is in the air. The town has changed. Helen has changed. Hector has just died. As a widow, Helen, no longer wears her yellow banner of defiance. The narrator notices that grief has heightened her beauty; Ma Kilman claims it is her pregnancy. Helen although still described as proud, has become subdued. In Book 7, she is living with Achille once again. He wants to impose an African name on her unborn child. No longer independent with her braiding stand on the beach, she returns to the Halcyon to wait tables. “She is dressed/in the national costume: white, low-cut bodice, / with frilled lace at the collar, just a cleft of a breast/ for the customers when she places orders/on the shields of the tables . . .”(322). Her resistance lingers in her posture, her stare, her defiant walk.

Yet, an image of woman created by men has no choices, no voice.⁵ We assume that like Menelaus in Homer, Achille will have his way. Helen seems doomed to become a vessel, a vase into which the desires of the male are poured. “Presented with the figure of a vase, we are no longer surprised at the silence of Helen—a silence which does not exclude a capacity for echo”(Lock 14). The final silencing of Helen can be seen, in the “transgendered” Achille. In Book 6 Achille is seen dressing up for Boxing Day celebrations. “Today he was not the usual kingfish-fighter . . . He was someone else” (273). This scene’s meaning is twofold. For one, in becoming Helen, Achille also becomes the island. By appropriating Helen’s dress, he becomes the woman-island condemned to sell her body to the gazing tourists. Secondly, Achille’s performance during the Boxing Day festivities takes on a historical significance as well. It becomes a tribute to his ancestors in a way.

In invoking the patrilineal, patriarchal history of his African ancestors, Achille’s crossdressing is a performance meant to honor the past and reconcile with the history of bondage and slavery that forced his people across the Atlantic. In “Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” Walcott’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, the Nobel Laureate, stresses the importance of performance in the Caribbean—especially performance of ancient Hindi and African traditions—to heal. These performances are a way of reconnecting with origins, “Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed.” Walcott, refuses to yearn for the Caribbean’s alleged lack of history. In “Antilles” he calls for an acceptance of the Caribbean’s mongrel nature.

Most of the main characters in Omeros carry a wound, be it physical or spiritual that must be healed if there is to be any redemption or catharsis. The narrator makes the idea of the wound explicit in the following lines, the “He” being Plunkett. “He has to be wounded, affliction is one theme/ of this work, this fiction, . . .”(28). By doing this, Walcott “takes up the postcolonial poetics of affliction he once condemned . . .”(Ramazani 405).

Philoctete’s wound is the most conspicuous. It is “puckered like the corolla of a sea-urchin.” From the start, it is associated with history, and with the pain and humiliation of slavery. Plunkett has a head injury from his years in the military service. Achille has an identity crisis while Hector abandons his first love, the sea, to earn a better living. Ma Kilman, the obeah woman who finally cures Philoctete is herself in crisis. Having embraced Christianity, she finds herself unable to remember where the herb that can cure her patient grows. By rejecting her African roots, she has lost an essential part of herself she needs to recapture. Finally, there is the narrator himself.⁶ The narrator, who might be based on Auden’s⁷ translation of The Seafarer and whose main character is the wanderer of Anglo Saxon tradition that travels alone from one sea to another looking for a place to call home, is wounded by displacement, by exile.

However, Walcott’s use of the “wound motif” is not meant to be static.⁸ In Omeros, we want and expect redemption. To achieve this Achille must re-encounter his lost African heritage. He must learn the importance of names. When his ancestors ask him for the meaning of his name he answers, “Well I too have forgotten” (137). He has forgotten his name’s ties to slavery. He has been given a name the ancestors do not understand. He stands in shame before them. “The deaf sea has changed around every name that you gave/ us; trees, men, we yearn for a sound that is missing” (137).

Ma Kilman must also rediscover or re-embrace, her African roots. Ma Kilman’s religious syncretism is magnificently crafted into the poem. She is seen praying to the Lord and the mother of Christianity when she is distracted by “the weight of a different prayer.” The African gods begin to reclaim their space.

Ma Kilman’s ritual of healing can be seen as a performative act. Ma Kilman transforms into the prophetess from head to toe. The apotheosis is both physical and spiritual. “She bowed/ her bare head and unbuttoned the small buttons/ of her church dress . . .she rubbed dirt in her hair . . . she scraped the earth with her nails . . .her howl made the emerald lizard/ lift one clawed leg, remembering the sound”(245).

The narrator also needs to heal. Loretta Collins in “´We Shall All Heal’: Ma Kilman, the Obeah Woman as Mother-Healer in Derek Walcott’s Omeros” proposes that the narrator’s healing takes place when he realizes that the classics, Homer et al, are not essential to the creative process. “He begins to see the Caribbean as an intricate 'self-healing coral’”(Collins 160). The narrator acknowledges his debt to the Western literary tradition that formed him, but identifies with the Caribbean “culture… branching from the white ribs of each ancestor” (296).

Although Plunkett has a physical wound he suffered as a soldier, his existential wound is unlike any of the other characters because of his position as colonizer. He yearns to be a part of the island he has embraced as his own. However, the people reject him. He is seen as the oppressor, a stigma he must he must rid himself inorder to be accepted. He deicdes to assuage his guilt by writing a history for Helen. In his attempt to write her story, Plunkett reencounters his own in the character of the young Rodney who then becomes a namesake and a son. Much later after Maud’s death when again he finds himself in need of solace, he goes to Ma Kilman. Plunkett wants to talk to Maud, to apologize for past wrongs, but his role as colonizer or “civilized” European makes it difficult for him to accept the Obeah woman’s magic. He hates the smells, the heat, “the lace doilies, the beads, his doubt.” However, Ma Kilman eventually proves that her powers are authentic. She convinces him that Maud is in a green place, Heaven. It is then that he feels “bound for good to another race”(302). He finally feels a part of the people and the island that he long yearned to embrace as his own, but had often rejected him.

In Omeros, both the physical and the existential wounds that fester in the bodies of the characters heal as they reconcile with the history of colonization in the Caribbean. St Lucia—known as the Helen of the West Indies—needs to come to terms with the past not only to understand it, but also to move on. Helen, the pregnant woman, carries the new islander whose father has seen Africa and remembered the appalling conditions of his ancestors’ journey to the island. Certainly, Helen is not just a woman, as I have proven above. She is an island and all of the histories contained in it. She is also the obvious link to Greek literary and historical tradition that infuses the Caribbean poet’s writing. Moreover, she is the thread that stitches the stories together. However, the story of Helen, the West Indian woman remains unsatisfactory.

Despite her continuing resistance to being owned by Hector or Achille, her resistance to Achille’s attempt to christen her child with an African name, her refusal to submit to “her superiors,” she remains a vessel, a silent figure whose feline characteristics and the male gaze that fixes her mark the way she will go down in history. Certainly, in Helen of the West Indies, Walcott has created a character whose presence, silence and meaning will continue to provoke his readers’ imagination.

* The author wishes to acknowledge the help of Loretta Collins, who read and commented on this paper.

1. For Walcott's explanation on the process of creation and critical insights into the poem as epic, see essays contained in "The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives," South Atlantic Quarterly 96/2 (Spring 1997).

2. Derek Walcott, Omeros (New York:Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990). All quotations are from this edition.

3. Insight provided by Sally Everson, who read and commented on this paper.

4. James Torrens, "The Long Voyage with Omeros - Omeros by Derek Walcott," America 167/20 (December 19, 1992), 504-505.

5. My paraphrase of words by Maxine Harris in Down from the Pedestal: Moving Beyond Idealized Images of Womanhood (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1994).

6. Even the trees are wounded. The trees, or gods of old, are turned into canoes and forced to serve men whose language they cannot understand.

7. W.H. Auden, one of Walcott's favorite poets and acknowledged influences.

8. Jahan Ramazani, "The Wound of History: Walcott's Omeros and the Postcolonial Poetics of Affliction,"Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 112/3 (May 1997), 405-417.

Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham: Duke U P, 1997.

Collins, Loretta “´We Shall All Heal’: Ma Kilman, the Obeah Woman as Mother-Healer in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” Literature and Medicine. 14.1 (1995): 146-162.

Dougherty, Carol. “Homer after Omeros: Reading a H/Omeric Text.” Ed. Gregson Davies. The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives. Spec. issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly. 96.2 (Spring 1997) :335-358.

Harris, Maxine. Down from the Pedestal: Moving Beyond Idealized Images Of Womanhood. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1994.

Lock, Charles “Derek Walcott’s Omeros: Echoes from a White-Throated Vase.” The Massachusetts Review. 41.1 (Spring 2000): 9-31.

Torrens, James. “The Long Voyage with Omeros—Omeros by Derek Walcott” America. 167.20 (Dec 19, 1992): 504-505.

Ramazani, Jahan. “The Wound of History: Walcott’s Omeros and the Postcolonial Poetics of Affliction.” PMLA. 112.3 (May 1997): 405-417.

---.“Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” What the Twilight Says: Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1998.

Zoppi, Isabella María. “Omeros, Derek Walcott and the Contemporary Epic Poem.” Callaloo. 22.2 (1999): 509-528.