Charlotte S. McClure HELEN OF THE ‘WEST INDIES’: HISTORY OR POETRY OF A CARIBBEAN REALM -+ Oh the two of us [Paris and Helen]! Zeus planted a killing doom within us both, so even for generations still unborn we will live in song. —Hliad, V1, 423-26 Why not see Helen as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow . . the echo in the throat, insisting, “Omeros”; when would he enter that light beyond metaphor? —Walcott, Omeros 271 Derek Walcott’s Omeros is a late twentieth-century fulfillment of Homer’s promise to Helen of Troy in the /liad that her story would be endlessly sung. In transporting Helen from the Aegean archipelago to the island environment of the Caribbean Sea, Walcott not only enriches the mythic meaning of Helen— now Helen of the Caribbean—but also fulfills his own artistic goal of giving the people of his island realm an identity expressed in their own words rather than words from European and African predecessors. The first people of the Carib- bean had emigrated, around the time of Columbus's arrival, from the Amazon basin and the Orinoco Valley. After that period, the native population decreased. The need for slaves from Africa expanded because of the growth of the sugar industry and the political purposes of the British, French, and Spanish in the area. Taking into account these historical events, Walcott’s narrative focuses on Omeros (Greek for Homer) and an ebony Helen. He conjures the poetic design of an epic at the same time that he aims to infuse something of the new world People into the old and the old world into the new (White 35). Derek Walcott, a native of Castries, capital of St. Lucia, an island among the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Sea, and an American in one geographical sense, has a classical and European education. Possessing such a heritage,’ he wishes that his Caribbean people will name their own experience in the western hemisphere free of the shadow of their previous existence as colonial slaves of European powers, As their poet, awarded the 1992 Nobel prize for literature, he yearns to help them understand who they are, where they have come from, and what they as inhabitants of an American archipelago can create (White 17). In his long poem Omeros, Walcott asks both historical and. poetical questions as to 7how one ought to explain the whole Caribbean experience. Homer's mythic figures such as Helen of Troy, Achilles, Hector, and Philoctetes help him to address such questions. By reimagining Helen and the Homeric heroes as in effect naming the West Indian experience on its own terms, Walcott wrestles with the radical artistic problem of mimicry and originality? Should he elect to mimic either the form and content of Homer's epic or the Homeric metaphor of the blind poet, he might defeat his own poetic intention of originating the nouns that could reveal the true history of his non-Homeric people. In an interview, Walcott remarked to J. P. White: ‘The connection is, we wore brought up to believe that the Helen of the West Indies is St, Lucia, because it [the island} was fought over 13 times [by the British and the French). And there’s Elena, a Black woman, much like the one on the bus in “The Light of the World”. . . I'm taking these people {Helen, Achille, Hector, among others] as if they were fragments or shards washed up on this shore and looking at them for the first time. (White 35) ‘The metaphor “looking at them for the first time” adequately conveys Walcott’s poetic mingling of mimicry and originality. As Robert Hamner ob- serves, “Walcott sees mimicry as part of the process of beginning anew” (105). The figure of Helen of Troy has stimulated the imaginations of writers, art- ists, and composers of the western world for more than 2500 years. For Walcott as playwright and poet, “the name of Helen had gripped [his) wrist in its vise / to plunge it onto the foaming page” (Omeros 32-33). He thought about and reimagined her in his earlier works as a concept of beauty, what the Greeks named order, a beauty of identity and destiny which he desired to give to his people through his art. Helene appears in his early play, /one, a drama of con- flict between pride and revenge in which Helen, wife of Achille, cavorting with her husband’s rival, triggers a plot of revenge: in a cameo appearance as “the town’s one clear-complexioned whore” in Another Life (19); and, as an un- named black beauty in “The Light of the World,” the light being Walcott’s de- sire to give identity and order to Caribbean people without using mimicry or metaphors of other people’s historic or poetic existence. Walcott’s poetic strategy in Omeros is to join mimicry of the first epics with his own originality in order (o create “‘the names of things and people in their own context” (White 35). Incidents and thoughts of the characters in Omeros revolve intensely around the figure of Helen; hence, characters and events both parallel and contradict Homeric allusions. By using the figure of Helen, famil- iar to his people as an island and to poetry-reading audiences as a woman at ‘once beautiful and desired, Walcott tries to create “a fine local woman” (Omeros 322), described with “real Caribbean nouns” (White 35); these would reflect the reality of St. Lucian life as well as of the whole Caribbean experience. He remarks to White:‘You see maybe the whole West Indian experience is not itself—it is trans- lated. There is a film over the name, Caribbean. You can see the object, but between the object and you there is some experience, some artifice. We look through a glass in which the noun on the other side has not yet been named, It’s the origin of the real Caribbean nouns that I’m after. (35) This essay describes Walcott's attempt to create something uniquely Carib- bean by engaging the reader in his poetic effort to name the Caribbean Helen, Hence, the historic and poetic fact of Helen, along with other narratives of African, American, and British events, serves Walcott’s artistic purpose. A]- though the figure of Helen is usefial to him in his poetic endeavor and although he is not the first poet to bring her into the poetic present, he radically questions and thus enriches his own analogy of a contemporary Caribbean Helen to Homer's much as Hart Crane did in 1923 and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) did in 1961. I will come back to these poets later. Walcott’s first maneuver to create authentic Caribbean nouns for Helen is to portray her externally from the viewpoints of other characters, the narrator, and Walcott himself. The nouns of these external views dominate those used when Helen infrequently speaks and acts for herself. Ina detailed analysis of Walcott’s analogies and parallels to Helen and others in Omeros (183-211), Rei Terada observes that Helen is seen from the outside and as a desirable woman on three levels: Achille and Hector compete for her “sexual attentions” (Omeros 16-17; Terada 188-89); British Major Plunkett and Walcott as persona discuss her as an historic and poetic figure; and Plunkett interprets St. Lucian history as a British and French competition for St. Lucia (originally named Helen) to pos- sess “the Helen of the West Indies” (Terada 188). In Helen's plotline, the reader first sees her as a “proud” ebony beauty, like a “padding panther” (Omeros 23~ 24), who is looking for work as a waitress because she no longer works as a housemaid for the British ex-colonists Dennis and Maud Plunkett; living with Achille, a fisherman, and then with Hector, a tourist bus driver, Helen becomes Pregnant, unsure as to who might be the father of her unborn child (34), After Hector’s death in the crash of his bus, she lives with Achille, who wishes to give the baby an African name to which Helen objects (318). He also wishes to have the healed Philoctete be “godfather” (Omeros 318; Terada 189). The reader’s last glimpses of Helen are described in scenes with Caribbean words that con- vey the awesome effect she produces, one in Ma Kilman’s cafe and another on the diners at the Halcyon Hotel where she is a waitress. Helen came into the shop, and she had that sfow feline smile of a pregnant woman, the slow grace that can go with it. Sometimes the gods will hallow all of a race’s beauty in a single face. She wanted some margarine . . then she paid Ma Kilman and left. The dividing air 9closed in her wake, and the shop went into shadow, with the map om the floor, as if she were the sun ‘You can see Helen at the Halcyon. She is dressed in the national costume: white, low-cut bodice, with filled lace atthe collar, just a cleft of breast for the customers when she places their orders on the shields of the tables. They can guess the rest under the madras skirt with its golden borders and the flirtatious knot of the madras head-tie. She pauses between the tables, holding the tray over her stomach to hide the wave-rounded sigh of her pregnancy. There is something too remote about her stillness. Women study her beauty, but turn their faces away if their eyes should meet. (318, 322; emphasis on nouns and adjectives added) In the verses following those just quoted, where Helen is seen externally, the narrator asks the reader to dismiss the classical associations of Helen with Troy, Menelaus, and Agamemnon as well as with the British-French battle for St. Lucia and to think instead of this Helen as “a fine local woman” and as a “black. pearl” (322, 323). Yet the overall effect of this Helen as an individual woman is that of an abstraction, a powerful force of physical beauty dressed in native clothes, that seduces and awes the onlooker. In this respect she still closely resembles classical Helen. Walcott’s examination of these parallels between Helen of Troy and Helen of the West Indies through the eyes of the narrator, the other characters, and himself, leads to the conclusion that to be “a fine local woman” Helen must remain an aloof physical force—an ideal woman—in her world. Inthe few scenes in which Walcott “freshly” (271) portrays Helen’s thinking and feeling as a Caribbean woman, the Caribbean nouns provide Helen with a more spirited, independent personality. The image of the “padding panther” attached to Helen by the narrating “I” who first sees her adds individualizing dimensions to Caribbean Helen’s reaction to her world. Gossiping with two women about finding work as a waitress at the “Chine” restaurant, Helen tells them why she left her job at the hotel restaurant and also that she is pregnant but does not know by whom: What the white manager man to say was she was too rude. ‘cause she dint take no shit from white people and some of them tourist—the men 10only out to touch local girls; every minute— was brushing their hand from her backside so one day she get fed up with all their nastiness so she tell the cashier that wan't part of her focking pay, take off her costume, and walk straight out the hotel naked as God make me, when | pass by the pool, people nearly drown, not naked completely, I stilt had panty and bra, a man shout out, “Beautifool. More.” So I show him my ass. People nearly die. (34) Helen’s disdain of and frustration at this treatment by tourists are expressed in the nouns and verbs employed in the speech patterns of St. Lucians. and.shr sees “no sense at all / spending change on transport” [bus] to look for work elsewhere (34). This frustration of her desire for independence, for escape from reliance on male support and identity, is the “pause,” the narrator says, in which “white Helen died” (34), Deprived of satisfying and supportive work, vexed with both Achille and Hector, one of whom is probably the father of her unbom child (124), ebony Helen has to choose between accepting her association with “the smoke of Troy,” in which she is “bounty” (32) and “property” (41), or taking charge of her self. Temporarily choosing the latter and setting up a shop where she braided tourists’ hair and sold them beads and hair-picks, she establishes one mark of her identity: with a “rage” and a “chill of a panther hidden in the dark of its cage” (36), she shows her autonomy and an indifference to the world, even to Walcott as persona, who watches her performance. This kind of anger, a kind of madness that some critics have identified as a response to cultural oppression (Gilbert and Gubar), breaks out in her altercation with Achille over carrying a basket from the market (38); Helen shows herself’ capable of sarcastic indepen- dence, even from someone like Achille who has a genuine feeling for her: . + «she stopped, and in her deranged fury screamed, “Leave me, little boy.” Achilerammetier against a van. He had startled a panther. Claws raked his face in a flash; when he gripped an arm, her fine teeth sawed his knuckles, she clawed at his good clothes, 50 he, in turn, ripped the yellow dress in his rage. (38-39) The yellow dress provides an image that links Helen to Dennis and Maud Plunkett, the British exiles living in Castries, who also sympathetically try to understand and improve Helen,Although Maud Plunkett accuses Helen of stealing the yellow dress which Helen claims Maud gave her, a special but contradictory relationship had grown. up between Maud and her former housemaid. Dennis, as amateur historian at- tempting to research Helen’s past, uses this relationship to guide his research toward a connection between classical Helen and Caribbean Helen (64). .. Helen had kept the house as if it were her own, and that’s when it all begins: when the maid tums into the mistress and destroys her own possibilities. They [workers] start to behave as if they owned you, Maud said. This was the distress of the pale lemon frock, which Helen claimed Maud gave her but forgot... . So Plunkett decided that what the place [St. Lucia] needed vwas its true place in history. ... . . Helen needed a history... Not his, but her story. Not theirs, but Helen's war. (64, 30) As the Plunketts and the yellow dress represent the historical colonist-native relationship that sometimes affects both groups of people negatively, Helen shifts some blame for European-Caribbean conflict onto “forgetful” Maud. At the same time, the narrator claims that if the colonized take on the values of the colonizers, they “destroy” any “possibility” of defining themselves. In another episode, Helen reveals the continuing tensions between the two different world views. Still an “arrogant ebony” woman, softened somewhat with “sorrow in her old rudeness” because she does not have work to support herself, Helen tears off blossoms from Maud’s favorite vines when she goes to Maud’s house to ask for money; then, perversely, Helen refuses to take it (123-24). In this scene Walcott enables the reader to sce a difference between the predictably awesome effect of classical Helen’s beauty on a male spectator and the skeptical response to an independent-spirited West Indian Helen by local women. Maud, enraged but perceptive of Helen’s meaning, interprets her: ‘What was it in men that made such beauty evil? _. . Helen tured her back [on the offer of money) and stared out to sea. This is how all beauty ends. Their trumpets [Maud’s flowers] would bend and their glory pass. But she’d last forever, Helen. (125) 12Maud, representative of western protection and domestication of women, sympathizes with Helen's need to work and to clarify her own relationship to the men in her life. Walcott implies a criticism of a concept of beauty that requires an awed worship of beauty for beauty’s own sake. In Walcott’s parallel transformation of Achille, his Achille recognizes the problem that Helen’s un- deserved beauty causes Helen herself (115). Despite their estrangement from each other, Walcott shows Heien and Achille yearning for each other; hence Helen, like Penelope, waits for some sign to reconcile with Achille (153). Re- placing “white” Helen’s nouns in these episodes are Caribbean nouns that por- tray ebony Helen’s desire, vexation, rage, arrogance, and loneliness, a combi- nation of conflicting emotions that comprise the daily life of the “fine local woman” that Walcott wants to represent. For the most part, Walcott fulfills his desire for originality by looking freshly at Helen and other characters while attempting to represent the whole Carib- bean experience. Literary critics have begun to discuss themes and historic events in Caribbean history and literature that Walcott alludes to in Omeros. In Helen’s resistance to the traditional order of things and her attempt to live somewhat independently, Walcott in part echoes characterizations of Caribbean women in the fiction of other Caribbean authors, both men and women. Selwyn R. Cudjoe’s study of the revolts of natives and Africans in the region provides details, from 1500 to the present, of politica! resistance of Caribbean people in open rebel- lion as well as in passive ways, including suicide, voluntary abortion, and sabo- taging of crops (19-21). From a Marxist critical perspective, Cudjoe identifies such resistance as “that ideal content that is embodied in the artistic form, creating the political acs- thetic of Caribbean literature” (65). Walcott does not support a link between political-economic conditions and an aesthetic position, a stance that probably led to Cudjoe’s complaint that Walcott in his writings takes an anti-democratic and nihilistic view of the Caribbean experience, a reference to some criticism of Walcott's writing as elitist (272). In the nationalistic phase of Caribbean development, Cudjoe continues, Caribbean writers asserted themselves; in the nineteen-thirties, they went onto call for self-government and independence (144). Among the novels that use both critical realism and realism to induce socio-psychological realism is George Lamming’s Of Age and Innocence. At the psychological level, according to Cudjoe, Lamming enables people to perceive their opportunity to become in- dependent of colonizers. For instance, he spins out the characters’ inner worlds, revealing their purposes and weaving them into the social fabric of society. Ma Shepherd, representing the old way of seeing, passes on the history of San Cristobal to the youth of the next generation so that they can attain autonomy and shape a new nation out of the conflicting visions of the world (187-89). Lamming’s use of the Prospero and Caliban legend indicates that he too struggles with mimicry simply because the colonized have to use the language of the 13colonizer until new words for autonomy are invented.‘ If Helen must acknow!- edge her African roots, as Ma Kilman, healer of Philoctete and obeah woman of St. Lucia predicts, then Helen’s offspring, like the youth that Ma Shepherd instructs, represent the generation that will have to heal the conflicts among the diverse people in the Caribbean (Omeros 318-19). While Cudjoe’s 1980 study of resistance and literature deals only with male activists and writers, in 1990 he edited a collection of essays on Caribbean women writers drawn from an April 1988 conference at Wellesley College. In this volume, Cudjoc identifies certain themes that Caribbean women in both nonfiction and novels have written about: the suffering of slaves under the plan- tation system, women’s persistent challenge to the system resulting in their being the primary shapers of Caribbean destiny, and Caribbean women’s con- struction of their own identities in the process of resistance (7-10). It is reason- able to assume that Walcott is aware of these writings by Caribbean women concerning a larger role for women (Women 25.-30).° Because Helen likes people and folk music, Walcott lets Helen take part in a local election campaign al- though Achille thinks that she is a whore, selling herself as the island has sold itself to the tourists (Omeros 110-111). In Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, Annie becomes the hero of her own life (Cudjoe, Women 248). This novel examines a sensibility that results in a Caribbean woman’s bildungsroman and that creates new myths of female development such as an understanding of mother~daugh- ter relations through the mother’s stories told to her daughter.‘ In addition, it offers a new definition of woman’s success (Cudjoe, Women 46). By contrast, Waicott’s Helen has no mother who would tell her stories of her background and the meaning of a woman’s life; Helen speaks to the women of Castries in the dialect of St. Lucia: “Girl, I pregnant, but I don’t know for who” (Omeros 34). Women characters are few and problematical in Omeros. Maud Plunkett es- pouses the British colonizers’ point of view but is sympathetic to Helen’s plight. Ma Kilman, the obeah woman who transforms Philoctete by healing his wound, in effect ignores Helen, explaining to the blind Seven Seas rather than to Helen that Helen “must learn where she from” (318). In her essay, “Initiation in Ja- maica Kincaid's Annie John,” Donna Perry reports that in many cultures, im- ages of strong, autonomous women abound. African tradition features women as tribal leaders and obeah women, and older women are storytellers. Women. could function in ways other than merely in relation to men (Perry 247). Ma Kilman does not impart any knowledge of women’s life to Helen but suggests that knowing one’s roots may heal psychological and social wounds. Walcott provides Helen with little female support in her effort to become autonomous as a wornan of the Caribbean, but he does free her eyes from “the spoil / of Troy,” eyes that never betrayed horned Menelaus / or netted Agamemnon in their irises” (323). Since Helen has no mother from whom to learn of her Afri- can past, and since Walcott does not show how Helen can tell her story as other 14Caribbean women writers’ characters tell theirs, Walcott signifies Helen’s free- dom from the classic past as his own escape from mimicry into originality. In Omeros, this escape is the light beyond metaphor that he desires to give to his people: “Why not see Helen / as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow?” Q71). Interestingly, two American poets’ use of Helen as historical metaphor shed light on Walcott’s attempt to link past and present. In “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” Hart Crane juxtaposes the Trojan War and World War I to transcend a fragmented postwar world with an imaginative vision that reaches beyond despair. Desiring to counter the common reaction of an “itch” to the image of Helen of Troy and to suggest instead a needed mythology for postwar America, Crane brings the classical Helen into the American present with a simple narrative line. In 1937, stating in “General Aims and Theories” his pure pose in writing “Faustus and Helen,” Crane wrote: So 1 found “Helen” sitting in a street car; the Dionysian revels of her court and her seduction were transferred to a Metropolitan roof garden with a Jazz orchestra; and the katharsis of the fall of Troy | saw approximated in the recent World War. (217) Like Walcott’s Helen, Crane’s Helen is an “absolute conception of beauty,” which, Crane hopes, would catalyze the average mind of Americans in the city to formulate a “mythology for classic poetic reference or for religious exploita- tion” (217). In Crane’s imagination, World War I, like the ancient war, and Helen, as idealized cause of the war as well as symbol of desire, become the agents of catharsis vis-4-vis American fragmentation and despair. Interestingly, Crane does not attempt to characterize Helen as an American woman, In her long poem, Helen in Egypt,” based on variants of Helen’s story by Stesichorus and Euripides, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) takes the reader into the consciousness of Helen. The revisionist poet H. D. transforms the presumably static figures of Helen and Achilles, symbolizing beauty and force respectively. She invents different versions and circumstances of their relationship, which ancient writers hinted would include marriage. Hence, they become subjects rather than objects in a merely heroic world. They become questers for their own identity. Helen, once “hated of all Greece” and never described by H. D. as beautiful and golden-haired, is a reborn Psyche (self) who recognizes in herself a duality of love and death. She teaches this dual reality to Achilles, a tradi- tional symbol of death, but now a “new mortal” who can synthesize love and death (10).* It is important to note that H. D.’s Helen, by contrast with Crane’s, is invested with more internal questing and questioning of her own past and present. Significantly, both H. D. and Walcott radically question the Poetic effi- cacy of imposing the story of Helen on human experience. H. D. writes: 1ST call Achilles, but not even an echo answers, Achilles: Achilles, Achilles come back, you alone have the answer; ‘the dream? the veil? is it all a story? (88) One sees in both H. D.’s and Walcott’s Helen and Achilles a transformation that opens up possibilities of new and fresh identities and destinies for people in the present. Robert OBrien Hokanson evaluates H. D.'s questioning as her own critical self-awareness that “investigates the dilemmas of imposing form on experience and demonstrates the elusiveness of the ‘true’ story” (331). H. D. presents Helen’s struggle to comprehend her experience and reclaim her iden- tity in a questioning rather than in an affirming mode. Similarly, Terada demon- strates how Walcott questions his analogies between historical events, as when the war over St. Lucia is called the Battie of the Saints, as well as analogies involving Homeric events and other classical events (188). Terada emphasizes that Helen as an island and Helen as “a fine local woman” are too keenly sought by Plunkett and the character Walcott and therefore are “suspect” (188). These resemblances to Crane’s and H. D.’s poems do not detract from the originality of Walcott’s re-imagination of Helen but in fact underscore the modernist self- reflexiveness of all three poets. Walcott claims not to have read Homer's and Virgil’s epics all the way through; he refers to the classical poets as New England farmers whose gas station is guarded by a “winged horse” (Omeros 14). Hence, he can play variations on the epic design without seeming to mimic it, One can read Omeros as an essay on how to write a Caribbean epic. Unlike Homer, Walcott himself freely moves in and out of the poem: fitting Homer’s Greek name Omeros to the environ- ment of the Caribbean; transforming a classically irate Achilles to a gentler Achille, whose “soul of charity was more piercing than Helen's beauty” (265); discussing Helen with Plunkett concerning the role of historian and poet in apprehending reality; and, guided by Omeros, going on an epic underground journey where he avoids the malebolge of poets whose elevated language camed them their punishment. By Walcott’s invention, “Omeros” becomes indeed a Caribbean noun: ..O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer was, both mother and sea in our Antillean patois, os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore. Omeros was the crunch of dry leaves, and the washes that echoed from a cave-mouth when the tide has ebbed. (14) 16The “O” as elegiac sound and shape recurs throughout the poem, invoking moans of the sea and characters that continually reflect the island’s changing from a pristine condition to one marred by tourists and commercialism: “Bright Helen [i.e., the classical idea of beauty]... like a meteor... remained unknown in this backward place” (112). While Achille laments as he watches Helen, an ideal, participate in a worldly election campaign, in the carnival in Castries he dons Helen’s yellow dress and performs as a “warrior woman.” Walcott’s de- piction of a Bakhtinian carnival allows him to derange traditional thought and behavior in order to discover and name his people's true experiences (Hamner 63-64). Achille’s temporary loss of Helen to Hector serves as a catalyst for his dream-quest to his African home and his African father, Afolabe (Omeros 133- 48). Achille’s locating of his African origin disconnects him from his classic namesake's “oversimplified” temperament (297); he becomes a local man who can forgive the former colonizer Plunkett. In this transformation, Walcott can rename Achille as a local man having a “charity of soul more piercing than Helen’s beauty” (265). Then, Achille becomes another of Walcott’s instruments for healing breaches between past and present, between history and art. ‘The complexity of Walcott’s dichotomy of history and poetry, dramatized in the discussion of historian Plunkett and poet Walcott, clarified by Rei Terada’s excellent analysis (200ff), is too intricate to be explained fully here, In “The Muse of History.” a speech at Columbia University, April 13, 1971, Walcott argues that history's linear mentality oversimplifies thinking about things and people, unlike poetry, which is anti-linear (Terada 190). Choosing Helen's his- tory and story as the focus of their argument, rather than, e.g., that of the British or French, Plunkett and Walcott direct their thinking along parallel lines in or- der to try to fuse the insights of their special attitudes toward Helen as if they want to oppose Aristotle's dichotomy of history as fact and Poetry as truth. Plunkett’s research into the British-French struggle to possess the Caribbean Helen leads him to “change History to a metaphor / in the name of a house- maid,” to make Helen the pride of the Battle of the Saints, and to place her yellow dress on its flagship (270). Walcott's poetic impulse sees “in her head of ebony, / there was no real need for the historian’s / remorse, nor for literature’s. Why not see Helen / as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow?” (271). Neither Plunkett nor Walcott can see Helen as the sun sees her, but they do invent seemingly nonmetaphoric Caribbean words for her: “a fine local woman” (322). Embodied within this phrase throughout the text are references to Helen’s body: “breasts as Pitons” (31); “the slanted almond eyes / of her ebony beauty” (62); “a wild wife” (286); “no bay parted its mouth / like Helen under him {Achille}” (301). Such references to her body as familiar object may indicate Walcott’s desire and belief that the figure and story of Helen of Troy may never vanish from western imagination, Support for such a desperate hope occurs in 7the imagination of William Butler Yeats, who in “Automatic Script” wrote: “Tt means that if Homer were abolished in every library & in every living mind the tale of Troy might still emerge as a vision” (479). It seems reasonable to speculate that the plain Caribbean words, “a fine local woman” or a “local wonder,” repeated several times in Omeros, portray Helen as finally disconnected like Achille from an honored but limiting past. Helen is absorbed within a traditional woman’s life, opportunities, and ancient myth, while Achille and Hector shed their warrior status and enjoy success as sailors and fishermen, Walcott sums up his complex effort to write an epic, paradoxi- cally both to honor it and to evade it, by using an epic trope: “I sing.” He sings ofthe elements that enable him to find Caribbean words for his people and their unique existence. He acknowledges that he “followed a sea-swift to both sides of [his] text”—the European classical side and the African-West Indian side 314). I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe’s son I sang of our wide country, the Caribbean Sea. G20) He continues to sing of Helen in her national costume, more African in her vigorous strides than Hellas in marble (322). He thinks of his Caribbean lan- guage asa cure, like that of Philoctete’s wound, for his previous writing above the heads of his people, a recognition he gained on his nightmare underground journey with Omeros, where he almost slid into the mire with the poets who “saw only surfaces / in nature and men and smiled at their similes” (293). He sings: ‘And that was where I had come from, Pride in my craft. Elevating myself. I slid, and kept falling... to that backbiting circle, mockers and self-loved. (293) Omeros’s rescue of Walcott restores Walcott's own belief in his art. Walcott’s portrayal of Helen of the Caribbean easily carries the weight of all his serious purposes in this long poem. He uses a language that places her se- curely in his scheme of openly questioning her presumed role as the sedu light beyond metaphor. Reconciliation of the contradictions in his major themes—past and present, history and art, aristocratic and common people, colonizer and colonials, European and native American peoples—becomes vis- ible in diverse ways through the image of Helen from her first appearance as a proud ebony beauty to the out-of-sight reference to her as she waits for Achille (23, 325). The image of the transformed Helen and Achille, apparently in har- mony with each other, concludes the poem: Achille put the wedge of dolphin that he'd saved for Helen in Hector’s rusty tin. 18A full moon shone like a slice of raw onion. ‘When he left the beach the sea was still going on, (325) Helen of the Caribbean and the sea itself—the true light beyond metaphor for his people—comprise Walcott's epilogue for his beleaguered compatriots, NOTES * Walcot is descended from a white grandfather and a black grandmother on both the paternal and maternal sides; hence, he knows “the divided loyalties and hatreds that keep his society suspended between two worlds” (Hamner 22). ? Mimiery is an act of the imagination; by its powers, argues Walcott as an American and a Caribbean native, his people create, hence originate, mass art forms that have never been seen before. By this observation, Walcott answers a criticism from V. S. Naipaul, an East Indian novel- ist from Trinidad, to the effect that the West indian culture has created nothing (7). Walcott teimagines the Greek name Achilles as a Caribbean name (noun) Achille, pronounced “A-sheel” (Walcott, “Caribbean” 6-7). * Tam indebted to Professor Terada for sharing with me the galley proofs of her chapter “Homeric Mimicry” prior to the publication of her book. * Cudjoe mentions Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdes as a novel which testifies “about the alter- nate use of the ‘word? and the ‘machete” as the political and ideological occasion demanded” (68), * Cudioe refers to Louise Bennett's elaboration upon “Jamaican female sensibility” by her draw: ing on Jamaican folktales (Women 29), Bennett uses dialect as literary language in Dialect Verse (1942-1962) to register the increase of female ‘oppression which resulted from male assertion and radical political power during the nationalistic movement of the 1940s and 1950s. * See Cudjoe's interview “Jamaica Kincaid and the Modemest Project” (Women 215-32); Helen Pyne Timothy, “Adolescent Rebellion and Gender Relations in At the Bottom of the River and. Annie John” (233-42); and Donna Perry, “Initiation in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John” (245-53), "Both H. D. and Wateott rely upon a variant of the classical myth that predicts Achilles will rise from the dead and marry Helen. “For a more complete discussion of Achilles and Heten in this poem, see McClure. * Note 79 reads: “A remarkable assessment of the power of creation, this statement illustrates ‘Yeats’s artistic belicfs—that a work of art exists as an atchetype in the Afnimay M(undi]"” I am indebted to my colleague, Dr. Margaret Harper, for this reference. WORKS CITED Crane, Hart. The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane. Ed. Brom We- ber. New York: Liveright, 1966. Cudjoe, Selwyn R. Resistance and Caribbean Literature. Athens: Ohio UP, 1980. ed. Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference. Wellesley, MA: Calaloux, 1990, “Jamaica Kincaid and the Modemist Project” Cudjoe, Women 215-32. Doolittle, Hilda (H.D,}. Helen in Egypt. 1961. New York: New Directions, 1974. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Hamner, Robert D. Derek Walcott, Boston; G. K. Hall, 1981. Hokanson, Robert O'Brien, “Is It Alla Story?"; Questioning Revision in Helen in Egypt” American Literature 64:2 (1992); 331-346. 19Lamming, George. Of Age and Innocence. London: Michael Joseph, 1958. McCture, Charlotte S. “Helen of Troy in America: From Ideal Beauty to Heroic Quester.” Classi- cal and Modern Literature \1:4 (1991): 325-36. Perry, Donna. “Initiation in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” Cudjoc, Women 245-253. Terada, Rei. The Poetry of Derek Walcott: American Mimicry. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1992. 183-221. Timothy, Helen Pyne. “Adolescent Rebellion and Gender Relations in Af the Bottom of the River and Annie John.” Cudjoe, Women 233-42. Villaverde, Cirilo, Cecitia Valdes. New York: Vantage, 1962. Walcott, Derek. Omeros. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999. “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” Journal of International Studies and World Af- ‘fairs \G:\ (February 1974): 3-13. ___. ‘The Light of the World.” The Arkansas Testament. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987, 48-51. White, J, P. “An Interview with Derek Walcott” Green Mountain Review 4:1 (Spring-Summer ‘Yeats, William Butler. Yeats’s Vision Papers (The Automatic Script: 25 June 1918-19 March 1920). Vol. 2. Ed. Steve L, Adams, Barbara J. Frieling, and Sandra Sprayberry, London: Macmillan, 1992. 20