To Africa and Back Again: Space, Place, and Travel in Derek Walcott’s Omeros
Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros examines questions of Caribbean identity as its characters attempt to find their own identity among the diverse and complex cultures, geographical features, and colonial past of the region. The poem employs a variety of techniques and methodologies in doing so, as much of the existing scholarship has analyzed. To this date, however, scholars have yet to borrow from philosophical theories of “space” and “place” in order to examine how, in its quest for a sense of Caribbean identity, the text emphasizes the greater value of place over space, with place being depicted as more authentic and true to one’s identity and space being imperialistic and inhuman.
In Omeros, mere recognition of place—of the unique experience of a location like St. Lucia, where the majority of the poem’s action takes place—is not enough. Instead, through a handful of carefully crafted sequences, Omeros emphasizes that it is the act of travel that brings about understanding of identity—the sort of travel that focuses on crossing barriers, moving through the landscape, and maintaining a sense of place at all times, not beholden to the bounded, imperialist travel of maps and history books. Specifically, Achille, the chief protagonist of Omeros, finds his own self-identity as a Caribbean resident through his own imagined journey from his home of St. Lucia to Africa. In his travels, despite their imaginative quality, Achille always sees his locations as place rather than space; he crosses boundaries and leaves his nominal home, but finds his own home in this very act. Indeed, he finds home, place, wherever he goes, and so discovers that ever-elusive Caribbean identity which other characters lack, an identity that embraces the postcolonial nature of the region.
If we are to look at Omeros under the framework of space, place, and travel, such terms must first be defined. In doing so, it is all too easy to fall down a philosophical rabbit-hole (to use very “place”-like language) from which escape is difficult, to say the least. Philosophers, geographers, sociologists, literary theorists, and academics from many more fields have written (and continue to write) a vast body of literature on the subject. I will endeavor, therefore, to provide as succinct and precise definitions as possible, communicating their full range of meanings, characteristics, and implications while avoiding what popular travel writer Philip Marsden calls, in his own discussion of space and place, “scholarly argy-bargy” (23). After all, if we cannot properly orient ourselves in terms of space and place, how can we orient ourselves in anything?
First, let us consider what I believe to be the more difficult concept to fully grasp, space. It is an inherently unintuitive and more “abstract” than place, as the influential geographer Yi-Fu Tuan puts it in his seminal work, Space and Place (6). Due to its abstract nature, space “is amorphous and intangible and not an entity that can be directly described and analysed” (Relph 8). It is, in other words, wholly immaterial and imperceptible. Yet, at the same time, it is part of the essential fabric of our very universe. Space is that dimension which all material things occupy, that measurable, inherent quality of the universe itself. All material things and places occupy space, and yet it is impersonal, abstract, and idealized.
What follows from these characteristics is a quality of space which I will call “imperialistic,” an association which, I argue, I am not alone in making, even if that term is not commonly used to describe it (indeed, as I argue below, Omeros seems to make the same association). Given its role as, to use my earlier wording, an essential fabric of the universe, space is thus an “infinite extension” (Casey, The Fate of Place x). The “extending” characteristic of space calls to mind the expansionary policies of empires throughout human history. But whereas human empires inevitably contract over the course of time, space does no such thing. It is the ultimate empire which cannot be stopped or slowed. It is all around us at all times.
Perhaps this inherent expansionist quality explains why space has played the role it has in modern Western society, culture, and philosophical thought. The philosopher Edward S. Casey has long been concerned with space’s dominance in Western philosophy at the expense of place. Echoes of space’s imperialism can be seen in Casey’s alliterative and rather colorful characterization of space as “a cosmic and extracosmic Moloch that consumes every corpuscle of place to be found [in philosophy] within its greedy reach” (The Fate of Place x). Space’s expansionism, according to Casey, has resulted in a “discourse . . . whose exclusive cosmological foci are Time and Space” (Getting Back into Place xiv), and in this discourse, place has become “submerged in space” (The Fate of Place 197). Casey’s description shines a spotlight on space’s imperialism, revealing how it has dominated and conquered Western philosophy, subjugating place at the same time.
Even with philosophy under its thumb, space, like any good empire, is not satisfied. Its privileged status seeps into all facets of Western society. The archaeologist Christopher Tilley puts it best when he writes, revealingly, that
landscapes, buildings, places and localities in contemporary society seem to have lost, or be in the process of losing, their value and significance. The space created by market forces must, above all, be a useful and rational place. Once stripped of sedimented human meanings, considered to be purely epiphenomenal and irrelevant, the landscape becomes a surface or volume like any other, open for exploitation and everywhere homogeneous in its potential exchange value for any particular project. It becomes desanctified, set apart from people, myth and history, something to be controlled and used… (21)
A number of qualities of space are apparent in this passage. Tilley states that it is “created by market forces,” associating it with modern Western capitalist economies. Furthermore, it is “useful and rational,” calling to mind common tenets of Western philosophy. In the modern world space has transformed landscapes, places, into “homogeneous” areas, “open for exploitation,” “to be controlled and used.” Tilley draws a clear link between space and the exploitative economic practices of the free-market West, practices which few would argue are not extensions of historical imperialism. Imperial activity goes hand-in-hand with the primacy of space, that “homogeneous,” “infinite extension” which “submerges” and “desanctifies” place. This association makes perfect sense, as imperialism and capitalism complement each other. Industrial capitalist societies need uniform, controlled, and ever-expanding markets, and so they must work with (and work to spread) unchanging, blank, infinite space.
A sense of what “place” is has probably emerged in this discussion on space, but it is still worth defining here as we attempt to recover it from its “submerged” state. Place and space are intimately linked. All places, at first, begin as space. “What begins as undifferentiated space,” writes Tuan, “becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (6). “Places have meaning,” concurs Edward Relph; “they are characterised by the beliefs of man.” In the simplest sense, place is space given meaning by people. There are several implications of this definition, some simple, some surprisingly profound. The first is that every place is a “unique entity”—a far cry from homogeneous space! Furthermore, places are “localized,” in contrast to the infinite expanse of space. They are, as Relph words it, “location at it relates to other things and places,” that is to say, a place is a location that can be distinguished and distinct from other locations. Finally, place “involves an integration of elements of nature and culture . . . A place is not just the ‘where’ of something; it is the location plus everything that occupies that location seen as an integrated and meaningful phenomenon” (3). These final features are integral to place. It is not just a physical location—it is the culture, the perception, and the lived-in experience of anyone looking at it, passing through it, or living in it.
I would go further, however, and qualify place as having varying “tiers.” It is one thing to, say, call a building like a church or library a “place” in light of society’s perception of it. Such places are given a particular meaning by a wide range of people (e.g., this space is for worship, this for education, etc.). But while that is one way of giving meaning to empty space (and thus making place), it is reasonable for an individual to see such places as closer to space in one’s eyes when compared to those places which are significant for unique, personal reasons to said individual. Of course, these two categories overlap—those places with unique, personal meaning are almost certainly also places with public, social meaning—but in a work of art or expression (like, say, Omeros) in which one point of view dominates, the more personal places mean more to an audience.
Our last stop in this tour of terms comes at “travel.” This word is commonly used in writing of all kinds, from popular to academic, with little thought given to its exact meaning. We can all, I would wager, agree that it involves moving to and from different locations in space. For the purposes of this discussion, I will add two clarifying details. One, travel is intimately linked to place. “When I take a journey,” writes Casey, “I move from place to place” (Getting Back into Place 275; emphasis his). Any act of travel, a journey, involves motion from one place to another. Recall that space is infinite and thus boundless. Any demarcation of boundaries in space would instill meaning onto it, creating place. But without boundaries, there is no sense of “travel,” only “occupation.” Moving from, or to, or between points requires that those points possess boundaries, meaning that those points must be places. There’s another implication, too: travel must require crossing boundaries. This attribute allows us to distinguish travel from more localized movement. In Omeros terms, it lets us distinguish movement between, for example, St. Lucia and Africa from movement like Hector driving his taxi cab around the island. In the first example, significant boundaries are crossed, while in the second, that is less the case.
How do we see space, place, and travel depicted in Omeros? Consider first the question of space. At first, space does not seem like a likely candidate for depiction in the poem. Of course, given space’s nature, it cannot actually be directly shown. Given Omeros’s penchant for exploring themes of postcolonialism, however, space does rear its imperialist head by proxy. Space primarily appears in Omeros in the form of maps.
Maps can be argued to depict both space and place. To be sure, they intend and aim to depict place. They show boundaries of locations, a hallmark of place, and they communicate names and other information. If, however, they depict place, they depict the lowest “tier,” to return to the classification system mentioned earlier, possible. Maps are often impersonal, not meant to communicate the individual meaning of place. They are targeted toward a wide audience and are meant to be read and understood by everyone (with the exception of those who do not speak the same language, though even then, the basic shapes and images still function as normal). They inevitably flatten the diverse and varied shapes of the places they depict, transforming mountains, valleys, rivers, and seas into one texture, imposing its standards of depiction upon them. All places are uniform on a map; as Elizabeth Bishop writes in her 1927 poem, “The Map,” “Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.” Ultimately, maps cannot reveal what that land means to people, therefore, they belong to the realm of space more than place.
The references to maps in Omeros are revealing. Maps, and thus, space, are undoubtedly associated with the imperialist past that shaped the modern Caribbean. Maps are first referenced toward the beginning of the epic. In Chapter IV of Book One, the character Philoctete, a resident of St. Lucia of black descent, finds himself on an abandoned plantation:
North of the village is a logwood grove whose thorns
litter its dry shade. The broken road has boulders,
and quartz that glistens like rain. The logwoods were once
part of an estate with its windmill as old as
the village below it. The abandoned road runs
past huge rusted cauldrons, vats for boiling sugar,
and blackened pillars. These are the only ruins
left here by history, if history is what they are.
[…]
Philoctete limped to his yam garden there. . . (20)
In this passage, Walcott sets the stage by reminding us of the colonial past of St. Lucia. The logwood grove is not flowering, but is instead “littered” or infested with thorns, signaling its decay. The road to the grove is both “broken” and “abandoned” as it passes “ruins left here by history.” These are the ruins of colonialism, of the imperialist past, now long gone.
Or is it gone? That final line in the description quoted above deserves closer examination: “These are the only ruins left here by history, if history is what they are” (emphasis mine). This line could be disparaging the significance of the plantation ruins—they are not history, they are shameful, they are meaningless. But it could also be taken to mean that the ruins are not part of the past, that imperialism continues to have an impact on the Caribbean’s residents like Philoctete. This reading is strengthened by what comes next. As Philoctete makes his way among yam trees, the sore on his leg begins to ache, causing Philoctete to lash out at the surrounding yams:
. . . He edged the razor-sharp steel
through pleading finger and thumb. The yam leaves recoiled
in a cold sweat. He hacked every root at the heel.
He hacked them at the heel, noticing how they curled,
head-down without their roots. He cursed the yams:
“Salope!
You all see what it’s like without roots in this world?”
Then sobbed, his face down in the slaughtered leaves. (21)
Here, the remains of the plantation are not mere history. They are here and now, the roots of the trees providing a stark contrast in Philoctete’s eyes to, in light of his racial and economic status, the absence of his own roots. And so, Philoctete “slaughters” them with his machete, a reversal of the slaughter of indigenous peoples often brought on by imperialist expansion.
It is telling, in this anti-imperialist moment, that maps are referenced. Prior to Philoctete’s “massacre” of the yams, their leaves are compared to “maps of Africa” (20). When Philoctete lashes out at the yams, then, he could be said to be lashing out at maps of his ancestral homeland, maps which he finds in the ruins of imperialism. These maps, with all their space, bring him no closer to his roots, to his identity. Instead, they belong to the plantation, a relic of colonialism. The place Philoctete to which needs to return cannot be found among them.
The association of maps with the colonial “past-present” (history not being what the ruins of imperialism are) appears again later in the poem. Major Plunkett is an Englishman who has moved from Great Britain to St. Lucia. Like the other characters in the work, he, too, is searching for his identity as a resident of the Caribbean; unlike them, however, he is a living, breathing manifestation of past imperialism, a white man from another land come to the Caribbean on his own whims. Plunkett is certainly not going to find his identity in “maps of Africa.” Instead, his mind turns elsewhere, to the historical battles of mighty European navies long ago:
Now, whenever his mind drifted in detachment
like catatonic noon on the Caribbean Sea,
Plunkett recited every billet, regiment,
of the battle’s numerological poetry;
he learnt eighty ships of the line, he knew the drift
of the channel that day, and when the trade wind caught
the British topsails, and a deep-draught sigh would lift
his memory clear. . . (91)
When Plunkett daydreams, this battle is what he thinks about. He knows it so well that he can “recite every billet, regiment” and learned the names of “eighty ships of the line”! His sense of self is caught-up in these historical events—“if history is what they are.”
The importance of these events to Plunkett’s sense of identity is emphasized soon after Plunkett begins his daydreams, when the audience finds out that Plunkett is poring through historical records in order to find one of his ancestors who fought and died in the Caribbean. When he finds the man, however, he does not come any closer to understanding himself:
. . . Then he found the entry
in pale lilac ink. Plunkett. One for the lacy trough.
Plunkett? His veins went cold. From what shire was he?
On what hill did he pause to watch gulls follow a plough,
seabag on one shoulder, with his apple-cheeked sheen?
This was his search’s end. He had come far enough
to find a namesake and a son. Aetat xix.
Nineteen. Midshipman. From the horned sea, at sunrise
in the first breeze of landfall, drowned! (92–4)
Instead, he is left with more questions. They arise as soon as he finds his name. Plunkett? Where was he from? Where was he when he discovered his desire to go to sea? The ledger does not say. Perhaps the answers to those questions met the same fate as past-Plunkett: drowned long ago, along with present-Plunkett’s identity. He “struggles against the marginalizing forces of ‘History’ and heredity to authenticate New World roots,” but this approach fails (Hamner 73).
It is worth considering Plunkett’s sources for all of this rumination. We are told that he references a “pamphlet from a museum” (Walcott 91). Plunkett lives in a world of text and history. But, Omeros tells us, this world is incomplete and fails to depict everything he needs. Indeed, this is the world of impersonal, imperialist space—the world of maps:
. . . The factual fiction
of textbooks, pamphlets, brochures, which he had loaded
in a ziggurat from the library, had the affliction
of impartiality; skirting emotion
as a ship avoids a reef, they followed one chart
dryly with pen and compass, flattening an ocean
to paper diagrams . . . (95)
The “chart” referred to here is simply another word for map, as the references to a “pen and compass” and “flattening” make clear. Notice that Plunkett’s sources, then, are said to have all the “space” qualities of maps. They possess the “affliction of impartiality,” Walcott says, as if impartiality were a kind of disease! They deliberately steer clear of emotion, that human quality which imbues space with meaning, transforming it into place. Oceans are flattened, turned into mere “paper diagrams.”
Plunkett, it appears, can only consider his identity in imperialistic terms. His sources are said to be kept in, or perhaps come from, a “ziggurat,” a distinctly Mesopotamian, Old World building, the sort of monument about which a young, twentieth-century Englishman like Plunkett would have learned in his school’s history classes, classes which almost certainly would have taught him about “Western Civilization.” But Plunkett is living in the New World now, and so is it any wonder that his Old World lens fails him? His attempt at projecting and imposing his old way of thinking cannot work. It becomes “factual fiction.”
Even when contemplating his worldview’s failure, he cannot break free from its terms. “It will be rewritten by black pamphleteers,” he proclaims to a lizard, a true native of the island, “History will be revised, and we’ll be its villains, fading from the map” (92). Plunkett clings to his space-related way of thinking, the thinking of maps and uniformity, of Western colonizers, of ziggurats and pamphlets. He never considers that perhaps his “fading from the map” is a result of the map itself being flawed. He never stops to consider St. Lucia and the whole Caribbean as place.
Amidst these struggles for identity, only one character appears to find it: Achille, a local fisherman of St. Lucia. If Omeros has a central protagonist, Achille is the best candidate for the role. Although much of the poem is focused on Achille’s romantic entanglements with Helen and rivalry with Hector, it is another sequence of events featuring him that, under the framework of space, place, and travel, stands out: his imagined journey to Africa in Books Two and Three. Omeros features many other scenes of travel too, of course; for example, Book Five is almost exclusively a travel narrative, told from the Narrator’s point of view. In light of these more conventional travel scenes, it might seem odd to focus on as strange a section of the poem as Achille’s travel-dream. After all, Achille does not actually travel at this moment, he merely imagines doing so. All the same, the poem’s language and description here is so vivid and rich, it would be a mistake to overlook it simply because it is imagined. Achille may not have physically traveled in these chapters, but in the medium of a poem, his journey is no less real than the Narrator’s. Achille’s African journey also depicts something the Narrator’s journeys do not: Achille’s discovery of his “home”—his identity.
A word must be said concerning “home.” Home is inherently a kind of place. It is the farthest point from impersonal, uncaring space as one can find. Furthermore, home does not have to be a house, as we so often assume. “Home is not just the house you happen to live in, it is not something that can be anywhere, that can be exchanged, but an irreplaceable centre of significance,” writes Relph (39). It is, “in its most profound form . . . an attachment to a particular setting, a particular environment, in comparison with which all other associations with place have only a limited significance” (40). To use Casey’s words, home is any kind of “ur-place.” Casey concurs with Relph, writing,
“Where are you from?” we ask a stranger whom we have just met, not reflecting on how acutely probing such a mundane question can be and how deeply revealing the answers to it often are. As the conversation proceeds, we rarely pause to consider how frequently people refer back to a certain place of origin as an exemplar against which all subsequent places are implicitly to be measured: to their birthplace, their childhood home, or any other place that has had a significant influence on their lives. Indeed, many human beings are enthusiastic or nostalgic, at home in the world or out of sorts there, in relation to just such an ur-place. To lack a primal place is to be “homeless”…. (Getting Back into Place xv; emphasis mine)
Home is that “exemplar” of a place, and if you do not have it, you are truly homeless. Philoctete and Plunkett, as demonstrated above, are homeless. They cannot break free of their space-centered worldview. If Achille is to find his home, he must adopt a place-oriented view. In finding his ur-place, his place “against which all subsequent places are implicitly to be measured,” the place he is “from,” he will find his identity.
Book Two, Chapter XXIV sets the scene. Achille is out on his boat, In God We Troust [sic], fishing in the Atlantic. Here, Achille is “at home” in “his garden” (126). This gentle affirmation is not so much setting the scene, however, as it is foreshadowing what Achille is to find. Indeed, this chapter is rife with foreshadowing. It begins with Achille following another boat whose “horizon-bow had made Africa the target of its tiny arrow” (125). Achille “said the name that he knew her by—l’hirondelle des Antilles” (126; emphasis mine). Soon after, Achille, “for the first time . . . asked who he truly was” (130). Achille is about to find to his home and his identity—his all-important name—by traveling to Africa.
It is not clear exactly when Achille’s daydreaming begins. Indeed, the poem gives no obvious indication that he is daydreaming—it is only the implausibility of the events that follow that clue the reader into what is going on. As he is out at sea, following the other swift, he eventually feels the other boat’s “ruddering break / towing In God We Troust so fast that he felt his feet / drumming on the ridged kneel-board, its shearing motion / whirred by the swift’s flywheel into open ocean,” and Achille feels that “he was headed home” (131). Of course, “home” here cannot mean St. Lucia. After all, Achille is now heading into open ocean! Meanwhile, the poem has also recently told us that Achille was already at home simply by virtue of being on the ocean.
At this moment, though, Achille’s dream must be beginning. He is in his home, on the ocean, while simultaneously heading to his ancestral home, Africa. Already, we see an association of home with the act of crossing boundaries. Not only is Achille traveling to Africa, leaving the boundaries of St. Lucia, he is doing so by crossing open ocean, that mightiest of natural boundaries. All the while, Achille is at home on the sea, on the most natural boundary of all. As Rosa Morillas Sánchez observes, the “ocean acts as the ‘barrier’ that separates the island from the continent (Europe)” (81). Morillas Sánchez, however, argues that, in Walcott’s poetry, “images of the island surrounded by the ocean . . . can be equated to the image of a house—intimacy—surrounded by external influences” (83). Omeros does not seem to fit in this equation (and, indeed, Morillas Sánchez does not appear to engage with it); instead, it is as though the very act of leaving the boundaries of St. Lucia brings Achille to his true identity, or to his home.
In Book Three, Chapter XXV, Achille “arrives” in Africa. Omeros immediately launches into a description of the landscape entirely different than what we saw with Philoctete and Plunkett earlier:
Mangroves, their ankles in water, walked with the canoe.
[. . .]
. . . He feathered the paddle, steered
away from the groping mangroves, whose muddy shelves
slipped warted crocodiles, slitting the pods of their eyes;
then the horned river-horses rolling over themselves
could capsize the keel. It was like the African movies
he had yelped at in childhood. The endless river unreeled
those images that flickered into real mirages:
naked mangroves walking beside him, knotted logs
wriggling into the water, the wet, yawning boulders
of oven-mouthed hippopotami. . .
[. . .]
He remembered this sunburnt river with its spindly
stakes and the peaked huts platformed above the spindles . . . (133–135)
These lines clearly establish this location as a place and not just space. For one, Achille brings his own personal meaning to it by comparing it to “the African movies he had yelped at in childhood.” Those movies, along with Achille’s perception and memory of them, are unique to Achille, and when he compares a location to them, he is imparting significant meaning onto that location, transforming it into that highest tier of place.
The description of the natural landscape in these lines further reinforces the sense of place. The mangroves, “knotted logs,” and animals bring a primal feel to the scene, calling to mind Casey’s definition of home above, that “primal place.” These descriptors give the landscape a raw, authentic feel, especially when compared with the description of Philoctete’s yam grove, with its quiet ruins, or Plunkett’s battle images, framed by his pamphlets and ziggurats. The very act of focusing on the natural landscape is itself a place-making action. Landscapes are inherently space given meaning and definition, space which is interpreted by humans—“to be a landscape is to be a place . . . it is to be the more or less coherent setting of an embodied point of view (Casey, Representing Place xv). Landscapes can be said to be the building blocks of place, the first interpretation a person has of a particular space. As Tilley puts it, “The spirit of a place may be held to reside in a landscape” (26). It is no accident that Omeros launches into detailed landscape description upon Achille’s arrival in Africa, for the poem is trying to emphasize how Achille immediately sees the location as an authentic place.
Achille soon comes to a village where he meets his father, Afolabe. Immediately, they discuss names. Afolabe clearly sees his name as being an integral part of his identity. When he introduces himself, he “touch[es] his own heart.” This act is immediately contrasted with Achille’s introduction, during which he merely “tap[s] his chest.” These are not synonymous phrases. Achille does not see his own name as a crucial part of his identity, meaning he has not truly found his identity. When his father presses him for the meaning of “Achille,” since Afolabe has forgotten the name he gave his son and “[a] name means something” to him, Achille responds, “Well, I too have forgotten. / Everything was forgotten. You also. I do not know. / The deaf sea has changed around every name that you gave / us; trees, men, we yearn for a sound that is missing” (Walcott 137).
Forgetting names is disastrous for Achille and the Caribbean, for it has stripped them of their identity. As Tilley writes, “The naming and identification of particular topographical features, such as sand dunes, bays and inlets, mountain peaks, etc., settlements and sites is crucial for the establishment and maintenance of their identity. Through an act of naming and through the development of human and mythological associations such places become invested with meaning and significance” (18). It can also be said that the naming of not just topographical features but of people as well invests them with meaning, and so the connection between place-identity and self-identity begins to emerge. Walcott himself interprets the scene in this very way. In a 1992 interview with Rebekah Presson, he says,
I think the condition of colonialism, or of any first migration of people who were given another language, means the erosion of identity and the desperation to preserve their identity . . . But even deeper than that, in adjusting names, somebody from Europe comes over here and changes his name. Something goes into that, in the process of adapting to the name that you’ve been given . . . What happens in the process of that naming? If someone is called Achille, what is he? You have to go through a whole process of becoming a name that you have been given. (Baer 192)
Naturally, Achille feels distant and lost after his visit with his father, feeling “estranged from their chattering” (Walcott 140). He has, however, gained a sense of how to construct his own identity, though he has not yet realized it. In the next scene, Achille finds himself again, this time a more whole person, a person at home. Chapter XXVI, part III finds Achille suddenly walking along the ocean floor—the ultimate act of boundary-crossing! He passes the wrecks of galleons, remnants of imperialism. He walks for three hundred years and becomes a “walking fish” who “breathed water.” He has lost his identity completely, it seems. But, the poem tells us,
Then, one afternoon, the ocean lowered and clarified
its ceiling, its emerald net, and after three centuries
of walking, he thought he could hear the distant quarrel
of breaker with shore; then his head broke clear, and
his neck; then he could see his own shadow in the coral
grove, ribbed and rippling with light on the clear sand,
as his fins spread their toes, and he saw the leaf
of his own canoe far out, the life he had left behind . . .
[. . .]
. . . The salt glare left him blind
for a minute, then the shoreline returned in relief. (142–3)
He regains his human identity as his fins turn back into toes, as he sees his Caribbean life, and as he regains his sight while back on the shore. He has undergone a transformation here, and although he returns to the African village upon reaching dry land again, he returns a changed man, a man who can incorporate his Caribbean and African lives, a man not submerged but uncovered (recalling Casey’s observation of the submergence of place in space) and a man who can see. The poem does not refer to him as “estranged” again in this sequence, and when he observes that the rituals of the African villagers at the next feast are “the same, the same” as those back in St. Lucia, it is because he now recognizes them as familiar, not distant and foreign. They have been integrated into his own identity. As Robert Hamner puts it, “he is comforted by the discovery of common roots” (78).
Throughout these events, Achille could be said to be away from home. Of course, he is always “at home,” as the poem tells us, because he is imagining this journey while he is out on the ocean. Perhaps that is the very message: it is possible to be at home even while not, so long as one maintains a sense of place while traveling across boundaries. As the Narrator himself interjects during Achille’s journey, “Half of me was with him. One half with the midshipman [i.e., Plunkett] by a Dutch canal. But now, neither was happier or unhappier than the other” (Walcott 135). The Narrator himself undergoes a kind of mental travel, but he finds a sort of wholeness in it, with neither half dominating the other. It seems counterintuitive, however, for Achille (and the Narrator) to find himself at home in different places. Home is a unique place, is it not? How can travel bring it everywhere? But by always seeing place rather than space, this act becomes possible. “Journeys. . . not only take us to places but embroil us in them,” and “being-in-place brings with it actualities and virtualities of motion that have . . . everything to do with exploration and inhabitation, with depth instead of distance, horizon rather than border, arc and not perimeter,” writes Casey in Getting Back into Place (276, 289). Traveling itself, crossing boundaries, brings with it a sense of place, and thus, a sense of home and identity.
“The normal unconscious knows how to make itself at home everywhere,” according to Gaston Bachelard in the now-classic book The Poetics of Space, as “all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home” (10, 5). Achille’s unconscious can be said to have accomplished this home-making, as he is able to see everywhere he goes for the place it truly is. He walks through the wreckage of colonial ships, past the boundaries of maps, even over (and under) the boundaries of the oceans themselves, and always allows himself to see place rather than space. Philoctete and Plunkett remain frustrated by the disconnect which they find in the imposition of imperialist space. They find no solace in maps, books, pamphlets, or ruins. Space has seized their minds and they cannot escape. An “authentic attitude to place is . . . understood to be a direct and genuine experience of the entire complex of the identity of places—not mediated and distorted through a series of quite arbitrary social and intellectual fashions about how that experience should be, nor following stereotyped conventions,” but they refuse to let go of the “conventions of space” and the “arbitrary fashions” of past imperialist society (Relph 64). Achille, meanwhile, rejects space. In doing so, he rejects the Caribbean’s colonial past, returning to his ancestral roots, while still remaining on St. Lucia ultimately.
Bachelard would call Achille’s unconscious “normal,” but Omeros disagrees. The other characters, striving to find their identities in a region with a checkered past and present, fail to catch on to his successful method of being-in-place while traveling. Their ignorance can best be summarized in three lines, spoken between Achille and his shipmate after Achille’s imagined travel: “‘Where your mind was whole night?’ / ‘Africa.’ / ‘Oh? You walk?’” (Walcott 157) This is why Achille emerges as the true hero of Omeros, and why, in the end, Walcott can say, “I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe’s son,” who “had no passport, since the horizon needs none” (320).
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