CHAPTER THIRTY

Reframing the Homeric: Images of the Odyssey in the Art of Derek

Walcott and Romare Bearden

Gregson Davis

Prodigal, what were your wanderings about) The smoke of homecoming, the smoke of departure.

From Derek Walcott: The Prodigal

The sea speaks the same language around the world's shores. From Derek vValcott: The Odyssey: A Stage Version

The primary focus of this exploration of the postcolonial reception of Homer's Odyssey is on the poetry and poetic drama of the Caribbean Nobel laureate, Derek ·walcott. Since his creative oeuvre encompasses both verbal and visual media, and his poetic diction is manifestly 'pictorial' in texture, the scope of the exploration ,vill include a brief comparison between the modalities of reception discernible in his poetic corpus and those of the visual artist with whom he has expressed a deep aesthetic affinity - the great African-American painter, Romare Bearden (Walcott 1997: 222-35 ). An important point of convergence between the artistic principles professed by both artists is their interest in Homeric archetypes, and our discussion will there­fore conclude with a glance at a fnv, specifically Odyssean, narrative motifs that recur in their ,vorks.

Our point of departure is Walcott's long-standing and fecund obsession with the Homeric heritage. In delineating the ramifications of this obsession it is worth clarifying at the outset the extent of his knowledge of the Homeric texts. Since his linguistic repertoire does not include ancient Greek, his acquaintance with the Homeric original is therefore indirect, though far from superficial. In addition to his familiarity with these canonical works through English translations, he is thoroughly conversant with the later European epic tradition that derives its inspiration from Homer. The secondary school educational curriculum that he absorbed as a

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precocious student in the classrooms of the former British island colony of St Lucia in the Caribbean archipelago equipped him with a basic proficiency in Latin, which enabled him to read Vergil's Aeneid in the original (cp. Greenwood 2005). As a voracious reader with unusually cosmopolitan tastes, he eventually went well beyond the standard school curriculum to familiarize himself with other major epic poems, such as Dante's Divine Comedy, which function, in part, as intermediaries in the trans­mission of the archetypal Homeric material. His creative assimilation of the epic tra­dition in both oblique and direct forms is exquisitely encapsulated in the short inaugural segment, labelled 'Archipelagoes', from the poem, 'Map of the New World' which appeared in the collection, 'The Fortunate Traveller' (Walcott 1980):

[I] ARCHIPELAGO ES At the end of this sentence, rain will begin. At the rain's edge, a sail.

Slowly the sail will lose sight of islands; into a mist will go the belief in harbors of an entire race.

The ten-years war is finished. Helen's hair, a gray cloud Troy, a white ashpit by the drizzling sea.

The drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp. A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain and plucks the first line of the Odyssey.

Like the enlightened Keats of the ode, 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' (1817), Walcott's 'fortunate traveller' here undergoes an epiphanic experience in his encounter with the Homeric text that engenders new poetic horizons. The harp picked up by the modern bard in the final line announces an idiosyncratic incorporation and, at the same time, reframing of the Odyssey narrative.

Given the pervasiveness of the Homeric influence throughout his work as a whole, our analytic lens will be restricted to scrutinizing a few selected passages that may be regarded as representative of key aspects of his assimilative strategy. Thus his crown­ing masterpiece, the 'pseudo-epic' poem, Omeros ( 1990 ), will constitute a major point of reference for the discussion that follows. Some attention will also be devoted to kindred ideas conveyed in the dialogue of the play, The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1993a), as well as to a few passages in shorter lyric poems that allude explicitly to Homeric prototypes, such as 'Menelaus' and 'Homecoming: Anse La Raye'.

In an important talk inspired by a Romare Bearden exhibit, Walcott has elucidated his views on the most profound approach to imitating Homer (Walcott 1997). He holds up Joyce's Ulysses as the supreme embodiment of a non-trivial imitative strat­egy, because it ingeniously transposes central narrative episodes of the Odyssey into a contemporary cultural setting. In the Joycean reframing, psychological insight into character trumps adherence to generic norms and to the elevated style of the archaic heroic narrative. Walcott's own parallel strategy in Omeros is to endow humble fisher-

Homeric I mag es in Walcott and Bearden 403

men on the island of St Lucia with attributes of character that recall the heroes of Homeric saga. Thus fishermen bearing French Creole names such as 'Achille' and 'Hector' become protagonists of a creative re-enactment of key motifs in the Iliad and Odyssey.

For Walcott's poetic muse, then, the Homeric model is seminal in so far as it furnishes an archive of character types and patterns of human relationships that transcend time and place, culture and geography. In articulating this point of view he has referred to such transcultural figures as 'iconic emblems' and, by way of illus­tration, adduces the Homeric Odysseus in whom he sees the paradigm of the Wanderer. As a visual emblem of this figure he fastens on 'the moving sail' - an image that is prominent in a Romare Bearden canvass on the Odysseus theme:

What we have because of Homer, permanently because of Homer [ ... ] are two emblems, at least. One is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World: Helen. That's indestructible, iconic, permanent for all cultures that share this part of history. The other emblem, of course, is the moving sail, alone on the ocean, not a ship but something small on a large expanse of water, trying to get somewhere -the image of the ,vanderer ( call him Odysseus) made emblematic by the great poet.

The Wanderer, in this important formulation, is a complex figure that is worth unpack­ing in part, since it reappears in many guises throughout Walcott's poetic corpus. A notable recurrence in the lyric volume, The Prodigal, has provided one of the two epigraphs affixed to this essay (Walcott 2004):

Prodigal, what were your wanderings about? The smoke of homecoming, the smoke of departure.

As the repetition of the word 'smoke' suggests (smoke is a key recurrent image in Walcott's poetry) the Wanderer often manifests a clouded vision of the experience of homecoming, which conceals a latent ambivalence. Among its other connotations, the wanderer figure signifies the cosmopolitan poet, ever on the move, who is haunted by a lingering sense of having betrayed his ancestral culture. Of the many poems devoted to the theme of 'Homecoming' that we find in Walcott's work, 'The Light of the World' is perhaps the most translucent vector of the returning poet's tran­sient sentiment of having abandoned his people, or at least that unsung segment of the people embodied in the black population descended from slave ancestors. As the poet is being conveyed back to his hotel in a local bus while 'Marley was rocking on the transport's stereo', he is moved almost to tears at the sight of an old woman at the roadside (Walcott 1987: 49-50):

An old woman with a straw hat over her headkerchief hobbled towards us with a basket; somewhere, some distance off, was a heavier basket

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that she couldn't carry. She was in a panic. She said to the driver: 'Pas quittez moi a terre', which is, in her patois: 'Don't leave me stranded', which is, in her history and that of her people: 'Don't leave me on earth' [ ... ]

As the bus fills up with more passengers, the poet muses on the idea of abandon­ment, which he then personalizes:

Abandonment was something they had grown used to.

And I had abandoned them, I knew that there sitting in the transport, in the sea-quiet dusk, with men hunched in canoes, and the orange lights from the Vigie headland, black boats on the water [ ... ]

The idea of abandonment is interlinked with the implicit notion of a neglected poetic theme, and it is plausible to read the later poem, Omeros, as making amends, in the fullest measure, for that earlier neglect. Along with the speaker's sentiment of betrayal, which can be read as a latent subtext of the Homeric paradigm, there is, in Walcott's lyric narratives on the homecoming theme, an accompanying feeling of apprehension about his poetic reception in his native island.

The poem that, in my view, best exemplifies this particular anxiety on the part of the morally self-conscious wanderer/artist is 'Homecoming; Anse La Raye', which recounts a return marred by the pain of rejection (Walcott 1984). In this iteration of the homecoming motif the speaker observes wryly:

there are no rites for those who have returned, only, ,vhen her looms fade, drilled in our skulls, the doom­surge-haunted nights, only this well-known passage [ ... ]

The twin metaphorical coordinates of Penelope's loom and the dangerous ocean surge here re-inscribe the Odyssean model in the mind of the returning poet and sef\'e to prepare the reader for the disheartening encounter to come later in the poem, in which children playing on a St Lucian beach fail to recognize him as a native:

only this fish-gut-reeking beach whose frigates tack like buzzards overhead, whose spindly, sugar-covered children race pelting up from the shallows because your clothes, your posture

seem a tourist's. They swarm like flies round your heart's sore.

Homeric Images in Walcott and Bearden 405

The internal ambinlence of the wanderer/poet towards the bitter-sweet experience of homecoming comes to the surface, as we have seen, in the imagery of 'smoke', and is also expressed, metonymically, in the alternating rhythm of arrival and depar­ture from the insular destination ('the smoke of arrival, the smoke of departure'). ·whereas the ambivalence is virtually occluded in the original Homeric version of the warrior's protracted return, the image of an Odysseus whose deep urge to wander does not come to a close with his return to Ithaca becomes a powerful strand in later elaborations and permutations of the Odysseus myth. For instance, in Dante's famous transformation of the Ulysses figure in Canto 26 of the Inferno, the hero is represented as the type of the obsessive wanderer who is driven by a fatal hubristic craving for total knowledge of good and evil. In this medieval refashioning of the figure, the ineluctable impulse to depart finally takes precedence over the homing instinct in the mind of the ageing sailor/adventurer; in Walcott's remodelling, however, the two poles of arrival and departure that define the wanderer/poet's existence (what W.B. Stanford famously refers to as 'centrifugal' and 'centripetal' tendencies) remain equipotent in their magnetic attraction (Stanford 1954: 89). What is 'permanent', for Walcott, is the underlying emotional ambivalence, revealed in each iteration of the arrival/ departure syndrome, that yields painfully acquired insight into the experiential paradox which beclouds all 'homecomings' - the perception that the very notion of 'homecoming' may be, at bottom, an oxymoron. As the disillusioned speaker of 'Homecoming: Anse La Raye' comes to understand, 'there are home­comings without home'. Given the transforming mirror of time, 'home' cannot be recuperated, and despite nostalgic desire for a pristine wholeness, it remains an unstable, if not destabilizing, concept that is constantly challenged by the shadow of memory.

In Walcott's lyric universe, then, the figure of the Wanderer retains a core, metapoetic dimension - a dimension that is omnipresent in the pages of Omeros, where 'Homer' is signifier for the universal bard and is continually re-incarnated as such in a variety of personae (e.g. Seven Seas). In the play, The Odyssey: A Stage Version, the figure of Blind Billy Blue performs a homologous role, as do the other singers that appear on the stage who bear the original Homeric names of Phemius and Demodokos. One important rhetorical function of these variants is, at the meta­poetic level, to validate the Joycean (and by extension, Walcottian) move of jettisoning the high epic scaffolding employed by Homer. Nowhere is this function more transparent than in the dialogue between the sandalled bard of Chios and the composer of Omeros, in which the latter is told to ignore the divine apparatus: 'Forget the gods', Omeros growled, 'and read the rest' (Walcott 1990: 283). In terms of an implied reading of the Homeric epics, the injunction to the inter­locutor to discard the Olympian scaffolding confirms the very aesthetic path being taken by the St Lucian bard in the course of the poem.

In the ensemble of emblematic figures that ultimately derive from the matrix of Homeric verse, a special place of honour is reserved for the trope of the bird. As in the case of the Wanderer, the bird acts as the vector of multiple significations that are mutually reinforcing. ln both the Odyssey play and Omeros the bird, represented either on the wing or simply emitting a song, is a recurrent discursive image. As a

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preliminary approximation to outlining the polysemous range of the bird emblem, it will be useful to examine some its occurrences in the verse drama.

The form that the emblem consistently assumes in the play is the swallow, as we learn immediately from the Prologue as pronounced by the choral bard, Billy Blue:

When you hear this chord [Chord]

Look for a swallow's wings, A swallow arrowing seaward like a messenger

Passing smoke-blue islands, happy that kings ofTroy are going home and its ten years' siege is over.

So my blues drifts like smoke from the fire of that war, Cause once Achilles was ashes, things sure fell apart.

Slow-striding Achilles, who put the hex on Hector. A swallow twitters in Troy. That's where we start.

The swallow of this prologue appears in at least two of its prominent rhetorical aspects. On the wing it is 'like a messenger;' in other words, it delivers the news that con­stitutes the story or mythos as it enfolds in time. In addition to this primary narrato­logical function of enunciating stages in the enactment of the plot, the swallow has the dramaturgical role of providing cues to the action and accompanying dia­logue with its 'twitter'. The two functions - the 'seaward' direction of the narrative and the prompting t\vitter - are closely allied in the inaugural song of Billy Blue.

How does the swallow trope relate to Homeric paradigmatic motifs? In the first instance, the bird's association with bardic utterance links up with a common for­mulaic Homeric expression that describes the flow of epic dialogue, 'winged words'. ·words on the wing, within the performative frame of Homeric verse carry the story along with their rhythmic pulse. With a swiftness that is endemic to Homer's dactylic hexameters the twitter serves to set the play's dialogue in motion. Walcott multi­plies the role of the twittering swallow at many junctures in the rapid course of the play. Without attempting to account for each and every instance of the polysemous emblem, I shall concentrate on a few of the more salient manifestations.

Like Athena's theriomorph, the owl, Walcott's officious swallow performs the role of divine protector and premonitory counsellor of the wandering hero as well as of his maturing son, Telemachus. Thus in an exchange with Odysseus' loyal nurse, Eury­cleia (act I, scene II) Telemachus receives privileged communication from a s,vallow:

TELEMACHUS: EURYCLEIA: TELEMACHUS: EURY CLE IA: TELEMACHUS:

A swallow spoke to me from the wrist of that chair. You send for wine? what happened to your sea captain? The elect can take natural shapes, Eurycleia. Lord, bird t'ief this boy's wits. It t\vittered, 'He'll return'.

Whereas Eurycleia downplays the significance of Telemachus' epiphanic experience, the young man interprets the swallow's telltale whirr as a celestial prognostication

Homeric Images in Walcott and Bearden 407

of the revenge to be meted out by his father on the suitors: 'The whirr of one swal­low starts destruction's engine'. Athena's impersonation of a bird in the Homeric narrative is here transposed and elaborated into the intermittent signalling swallow that is audible to the ear of the privileged protagonist. Walcott's Nestor in a later scene from the drama ( act I, scene III) makes even more explicit the analogy bet\veen the emblematic bird of the Greek Athena and the ubiquitous swallow in the stage version when he remarks to Mentes, in a notable inversion of the impersonation, 'Athena was that swallow's inhabitant'. The Odysseus figure himself expounds his intimate relationship with the swallow to the circumspect Penelope, who has just told him about her famous trick of stitching and unstitching the shroud for Laertes (act II, scene IV):

PENELOPE: I'd unstitch it like a swallow's beak picking straw. ODYSSEUS: Swallows are my friends. PENELOPE: There's a nest in this house.

In these pregnant exchanges the swallow's twitter re-enacts a talismanic role that supports the more strictly dramaturgic one of marking stages in the forward progress of the story.

In Walcott's fluid theatrical adaptation, the bird may occasionally be emblematic not only of the advancing storyline, but of its connection with the broader mythos residing in the memory of the heroes, and thereby works as a metaphor for the bardic transmission of the tales from one audience to the next. This intermediate function of disclosing the interconnection between past and present episodes in the Trojan macro-saga is succinctly illustrated in the following brief exchange between Nestor and an attendant at his court at Pylos. As the visiting Telemachus tries to elicit clues as to his father's fate from the aged warrior who, as in the Homeric prototype, is the custodian of epic memory, the latter is made to recall the earlier momentous twitter of a swallow as he conjures up the past destiny of the doomed city ( act I, scene III):

FIRST ATTENDANT: All of Troy's sorrow is borne in a swallow's flight NESTOR: Ten years! And my heart is stabbed by a bird's t\vitter.

The foregoing adumbration of the semantic range traversed by Walcott's bird-sign would not be adequate without reference to its major significance as omen - a significance it conspicuously held in many ancient Mediterranean societies, includ­ing Egyptian, Hellenic, Etruscan and Roman. In the form of augury - the ritual praxis of predicting the future from the examination of the flight of birds - atten­tion to winged creatures as celestial agents of communication was a prominent feature of Greco-roman lore and mythographic traditions. In the Homeric poems, no less than in Classical Greek drama, dream visions interpreted as prophecies of future events often contain bird allegories. In a highly condensed variant of the motif of the bird-portent, the sound of a swallow's whirring wings is taken as a pre­monitory sign of the bloody denouement of the epic saga. It is with the reassurance

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conveyed by this ominous sound that Odysseus warns the suitors, in a less oblique mode than heretofore, of their dire fate ( act II, scene VI):

ODYSSEUS:

EURYMACHUS: POLYBUS: ODYSSEUS:

vVhat I endure will be suffered again. [A swallow passes] What was that noise? Nothing. A swallow. Say your prayers.

The long poem, Omeros, which preceded the stage version of the Odyssey by approx­imately three years, is similarly replete with a bird imagery that is semantically dense in ways that are paralleled in the account ,ve ha,·e given of the swallow's plural, inter­locking roles. In the poetic narrative, however, Walcott employs a species of bird that is native to the New vVorld, the sea-swift. As an equally complex emblem, the swift permeates the sea-scape of the quasi-epic narrative poem, Omeros. By virtue of its frequent recurrence, the bird and its watery habitat share a primary metonymic signification, in view of the central symbolic role of the sea in the life of the Odysseus figure. In explicating some of the swallow's figurative transmigrations I shall inter­sperse my analysis with frequent textual citations because, in the case of a poetic dic­tion that is metaphorically dense, such as Walcott's, it is impossible to due justice to a nuanced order of 'intertextuality' (in the non-trivial sense) without recourse to concrete scrutiny of select loci.

A thorough exegesis of the overlapping meanings attributable to the sea-swift in Walcott's verse would take us too far away from our main theme. Suffice it to note, in passing, that the poet indulges in programmatic wordplay that foregrounds the centrality of the vocable, 'mer' ('sea'), in the syllabic breakdown of the poem's title (0-mer-os), and that the sea is often the figurative locus of past human experience (Walcott 1990: 14). The repeated appearances of the swift in its oceanic haunt are associated, at one level, with the rapid progress of the poem itself; but the germane interpretative levels are, as I have indicated, multiple. All the roles ,ve have illus­trated above in relation to the swallow emblem are fully documentable in the 'chap­ters' into which the poem is segmented, e.g. metteur-en-scene, bearer of tradition, protector of the wandering hero, intermediary narrator/messenger linking past and present, divine epiphany, augur. Rather than engaging in a point for point com­parison of the interchangeable roles of swallow and swift in both texts, let us focus instead on a few passages from Omeros that complement and further refine observa­tions made above in respect to the play.

As prelude to this complementary analysis, it is important to note that the poet provides the reader of the poem with a gloss that affirms the notional link, even symbolic identity, between swallow and swift. The gloss is made apropos of the description, or ecphrasis, of the embroidered work being stitched by Maud, a character in Omeros who is the wife of the expatriate Briton, Major Plunkett. In creating her 'immense quilt' Maud portrays a veritable ornithological guide which, in the poet's catalogue of its contents, comes to a climax with mention of the sea-swift (88):

Homeric Images in Walcott and Bearden

terns, royal and bridled, wild ducks, migrating teal, pipers ( their fledgling beaks), wild waterfowl, widgeon. Cypseloides Niger, Fhirondelle des Antilles

(their name for the sea-swift).

409

The parenthetical gloss explaining the nomenclature seals the purely symbolic iden­tification of the 'swallow of the Antilles' with the 'swallow' of the Mediterranean. An ancillary effect of the interconnected names is to underline the Homeric sub­text that weaves together the two narratives embodied in the genres of poetic drama and poem. At a very early stage of Omeros ( chapter I.ii) the protagonist, Achille, has an inaugural sighting of the sea-swift soon after he and his fellow-fishermen have uprooted the laurel tree that they will use as material for building their canoe:

Achille looked up at the hole the laurel had left. He saw the hole silently healing with the foam of a cloud like a breaker. Then he saw the swift

crossing the cloud-surf, a small thing, far from its home [ ... ]

The swift is thus assimilated, at a programmatic juncture of the poem, to the image of the wanderer 'far from its home' and, in this particular incarnation, operates moment­arily as a kind of surrogate for the Odysseus figure. Elsewhere in his poetry Walcott avails himself of a visual pun that is crucial to understanding the symbolic complex of bird, sails, and sailor. The V shape formed by the wings of a bird in flight is made to fuse, diagrammatically, with the spread sails of a ship and, by a simple metonymic extension, the sailor-wanderer who is 'far from home' and 'alone in a large expanse of ocean' becomes essential to the equation.

In Omeros the chief Homeric prototype among the cast of characters is not - at least on the surface of the plot - a contemporary version of Odysseus, but the hero of the Iliad, the redoubtable Achilles. Such an ostensible distinction, however, obscures the fact that Walcott's transformative muse deliberately conflates the two figures. The conflation was, of course, already a structural feature of the Vergilian imitation of Homer, which scholars of the Roman poet have long since noted (the Aeneid dis­plays a clearly hybrid structure: the first half of the epic is dominated by 'Odyssean' wanderings at sea in the quest for a home, while the latter half narrates conflicts on land that call upon the Trojan hero's military prowess - his 'Achillean' side). Thus in so far as 'Achille', the local counterpart of the Greek warrior, is a humble fisher­man by vocation, he is also ipso facto a sailor whose existence is compassed by, and derives meaning from, close, habitual interaction with sea. In view of the divergent fates of Achilles and Odysseus in the tradition of the Trojan cycle epics, however, the premonitory role of the Antillean hirondelle acquires a darker shade in the poem than in the refashioned Odyssey play. In both Walcott texts, as we have seen, the birds' appearances, in many instances, foreshadow pivotal episodes in the narrative; but as far as the St Lucian Achille is concerned, the sad fate to which he is beck­oned by the swift is a foregone conclusion that is irreversible.

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It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Walcott's heroic fisherman who is in love with the beautiful maid, 'Helen', and who is doomed to a premature death, has a less than felicitous relationship with the sacred bird that punctuates the stages of his life. For him, the swift presages loss and, ultimately, death. Thus when he has an intuition that Helen is about to abandon him for his erotic rival, Hector, the reader is made to follow his ruminations (125):

From his heart's depth he knew she was never coming back, as he followed the skipping of a sea-swift over the waves' changing hills, as if the humming

horizon-bow had made Africa the target ofits tiny arrow. When he saw the swift flail and vanish in a trough he knew he'd lost Helen.

A few lines later, in the closing sub-chapter of the verse, Achille arrives at the unset­tling insight that not all swallows are benign (125):

Steadily she kept her distance. He said the name that he knew her by - l)hirondelle des Antilles, the tag on Maud's quilt. The mate jigged the bamboo rods

from which the baits trawled. Then it frightened Achille that this was no swallow but the bait of the gods, that she had seen the god's body torn from its hill.

The reference to the violence done to the body of the god reinvokes the uproot­ing of the laurier-canelles in the construction of the canoe - the inaugural episode of Omeros that is cast as an offence to the tree divinity. The cursed fisherman figure baited by the gods is emblematic, among other things, of the subaltern post­colonial black inhabitants of the Caribbean island, and in the course of the poem Achille makes a dream-like submarine journey back to his ancestral home in West Africa. The inner journey is a variant on the motif of katabasis ( the descent of the hero to the nether world that is such a common feature of Ancient Medi­terranean epics) (Davis 2007; Hardwick 2002: 236-56). In Walcott's reading of the old sagas, the underworld passage motif has a psychic correlate in the quest for self-knowledge ('he asked himself who he was': p.130). In this quest the accom­panying swift attains to the stature of divine psychopomp ('leader of souls') who guides the hero towards the shores of his dead father - a sea journey that maps onto the mythological lore of many New World black diaspora peoples for whom 'Africa' is the name for the final resting-place to which the souls of the dead eventually return, travelling in a reverse direction from the catastrophic Middle Passage.

As a concluding observation on the nuanced treatment of the sea-swift in the imagery of Omeros, we may cite a passage that occurs in the final pages of the text, which retrospectively ascribes to the swift the all-encompassing function of guide to the narrative as a whole (319):

Homeric Images in Walcott and Bearden

I followed a sea-swift to both sides of this text; her hyphen stitched its seam, like the interlocking basins of a globe in which one half fits the next

into an equator, both shores neatly clicking into a globe; except that its meridian was not North and South but East and West [ ... ]

Her wing-beat carries these islands to Africa, she snved the Atlantic rift ,vith a needle's line, the rift in the soul.

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In this envoi the Caribbean 'rhapsode' ( etymologically, 'stitcher of songs') rounds out his project of reinventing a common substratum for old and new versions of the epic tradition that finds its original matrix in the Homeric poems. What is claimed for the artistic 'swift' in this recapitulation is nothing less than the ambitious aim of the poem itself - a redemptive reintegration of Old and New Worlds that imaginat­ively bridges the 'rift' in the cultural soul of the postcolonial populace.

In what remains I hope to illuminate further the poet's transcultural compass by reconsidering a few of these major themes in relation to the visual art of Romare Bearden (1911-1988). My principal frame of reference for the juxtaposition will be Bearden's acclaimed cycle of collages depicting episodes from the Odyssey that he created in 1977. (Fine 2003: 88-91).

The transcultural dimension of his visualizations of these episodes is most starkly epitomized in the skin pigment that he uniformly imparts to the legendary actors. The mythic universe that he projects in his brightly coloured collages is populated by black-skinned males and females. Crucial to his reconstruction of a cultural seascape that is beyond history is the circumstance that dark pigmentation is not confined to mortals: even the powerful god of the sea, Poseidon, who is the inveterate enemy of Odysseus, is portrayed as black, as is his emblem, the formidable trident, that he wields with such vehemence against the returning Greek heroes. What is the ulterior significance of this blackness for the artist's idiosyncratic rendition and assimilation of the Odyssey story?

First and foremost, it exposes the fundamental irrelevance of racial identities ( of which skin pigment is but one of the full panoply of superficial elements) for a deeper understanding of what it means to be a human being. That racial categorization leads to the invention of what Erik Erikson has accurately termed 'pseudo-species' is an insight that is nmv being amply validated by the new science of genomics. There is, however, an additional layer of literary-historical rationale to the portrayal of black bodies in a Homeric context. Bearden was no philologist, of course, but he appears to manifest an awareness of the Homeric type-scene that features the visit of the Olympian gods to the land of the Ethiopians. In Homer's worldview, as is well known to readers of the epics, the distant 'Ethiopians' ( the word is derived from the Greek for 'people of burnt face') are conceived as leading a paradisiacal lifestyle and, what is even more remarkable from the perspective of modern racialist culturally engen­dered stereotypes, they enjoy a footing of social equality with the blessed gods who are their grateful guests at fabulous feasts. As Bearden is reputed to have observed

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to an interviewer who questioned him about the black pigment he bestowed on his figures, Poseidon 'always has to come up from Africa, where he wants to be with his friends there. And it is universal' (Fine 2003: 261, n.178; see frontispiece: figure O .1). Clearly the artist is attempting to recover a rudimentary order of human experience that transcends time, race and culture. His concept of a 'universal' sub­strate inherent in Poseidon's desire to be with his black friends is at bottom verv closely akin to Walcott's views, discussed above, on the subject' of the ti~eles~, transcendent iconic emblem.

The depiction of protagonists of an immemorial mythos as black is also a salient feature of Walcott's poetics, as we have seen in the context of the characters that are woven into the embroidery of Omeros. The stage version of the Odyssey contains analogous references to the black pigment of some of its dramatis personae. In a poetic drama that reconstructs a legendary cosmos the explicit references to skin colour are made in a deliberately casual way. The enchantress Circe, for example, proudly draws attention to her lustrous epidermis during her seduction of Odysseus: 'Rest your head on the length of this ebony arm'. Long ebony arms are certainly very prominent in the female lovers in Bearden's Odyssey series, with which Walcott was intimately familiar. Among the black characters who appear in the Walcott play are the fickle maidservant, Melantha (the root of whose Greek name registers her black­ness) and the loyal nurse, Eurycleia, as we learn somewhat brusquely from Mel­antha's bitter outburst in response to an unwelcome order from her aged supervisor ( act II, scene IV):

EURYCLEIA: Melantha, get back inside and clear the table. MELANTHO: No, you crooked black bitch! I'm engaged to a prince.

In coming to terms with the ideational basis for the deployment of dark-skinned figures on the part of both visual artist and poet, it is essential to grasp that neither is primarily concerned with a revisionist pseudo-historical agenda ( e.g. 'Eurydice and Circe were really black'), but rather with promulgating an image of an ancient Mediterranean world that existed 'before color prejudice' (Snowden 1983). Even more important to their common universalist perspective is the underlying paradox that the pigment of the figures is not, at bottom, germane to the story. The root idea of the interchangeability (and hence triviality) of skin pigmentation is graphically evident in Walcott's two contrasting representations in verse of the iconic emblem that he labels 'The Most Beautiful Woman in the World'. 'Helen' in this generic sense may be a black or white avatar, and it is no contradiction of this ahistorical conceptualization for Walcott to portray her as a stunning black maid in the pages of Omeros, on the one hand, and as a promiscuous white lover in a short lyric elegy, on the other. The latter incarnation occurs in the poem, 'Menelaus', (from the collec­tion, The Arkansas Testament) where the voice of first person speaker is overheard ruefully reflecting on the past as he is wading in the sea (Walcott 1987: 101):

Wood smoke smudges the sea. A bonfire lowers its gaze.

Homeric Images in Walcott and Bearden

Soon the sand is circled with uglv ash. Well, there were days \\·hen, through her smoke-grey eves, I saw the white trash that was Helen [ ... ]

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As a final illustration of the lines of convergence benveen Walcott's and Bearden's remodellings of Homeric paradigms, we may adduce their similar depictions of the type of the female magician/witchdoctor. The type is, of course, abundantly repres­ented in the folk traditions of many cultures, ancient and modern. As portrayed in the works of Bearden the avatar of the temale magician ofren takes the form of the contemporary 'conjure-woman' of African diasporic subcultures, corresponding to the 'obeah-woman' in the Anglophone Caribbean (Powell et al. 2006 ). The inter­section between these potent New vVorld sorcerers and characters in the Homeric portrait gallery resides in the portrayal of the figure of Circe, and, to a lesser extent, that of Calypso - the nymphs who detain the wandering hero and retard his return to Ithaca. The ancillary motif of erotic desire is deeply interwoven into the fabric of the story as it is developed by both artists, whereas in Homer, Eros and witchcrafr are unevenly distributed benveen the Circe and Calypso episodes.

In the iconography of Bearden's famous collages in the Odysseus series, the contrapuntal relationship benveen male vVanderer and female Enchantress is a paramount structural feature. For instance in his work, 'Odysseus leaves Circe' (fron­tispiece, figure 0.2 ), what vValcott has labelled the iconic emblem of 'the moving sail' is partly visible through an open window in Circe's bedroom, while the nude body of the black-skinned magician lies outstretched on the couch (Fine et al. 2003: 8a). Bearden's choice of focusing on the moment of the hero's triumphant depar­ture is a window into his interpretation of the story, for it foregrounds the failure of the enchantress to keep her lover forever under her spell. In Greek and Roman mythography powerful female magicians, like Medea and Circe, conspicuously fail to prevail by magical means in their efforts to control the sexual loyalty of favoured male heroes, and uncontrollable Eros proves to be the cas-limite of the efiicacy of love potions (Prince 2003).

The paradox of the powerful temale magician who experiences the frustration of unreciprocated love is also a feature of Walcott's dramatization of the Circe and Calypso episodes. In this respect he adheres to the Homeric plot; but like Bearden, he transposes the witchcrafr practices of the Greek magicians into Afro-Caribbean equivalents. Even the goddess Athena resorts to Afro-Haitian Vodun instruments, such as the scattering of flour in Veve patterns, in executing her timely and sup­remely efiective counter-magic in order to neutralize Circe's wiles:

CIRCE:

ODYSSEUS: CIRCE: ODYSSEUS:

Someone was here. [ She rises, paces, distracted] The sheets are all soaked with your sweat. I heard: 'You're a monstrous bitch. You'll pay in the end.' Who?

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CIRCE: ODYSSEUS: CIRCE: ODYSSEUS [ Tasting it]:

Gregson Davis

A green-eyed goddess. You're her favorite. Who was she? She sprinkled it round this bed. White sand. It's not sand, it's flour.

In Walcott's transcultural universe the interchangeabilitv of swallow and owl like a '

that of Afro-Caribbean Shango and Greek chthonic ritual, attests to the equation, at a deeper level, of all forms of witchcraft and augury:

CIRCE: Let me trace your palm's rivers. Sit; open to me. ODYSSEUS: I don't believe in that hoodoo, or in this card.

[ He shows his palm. Circe reads it] CIRCE: A cock to Shango or sombre Persephone.

As these theatrical excerpts make crystal clear, the parallel modalities by which Walcott and Bearden assimilate and reframe the heritage of 'iconic emblems' derivative of the Homeric tradition are rooted in their shared assumptions about the ability of the artist, verbal or visual, to penetrate to a universal substrate of human experience. As Walcott phrases it in the second of our two epigraphs:

The sea speaks the same language around the world's shores.

FURTHER READING

A very useful and well-informed introduction to Walcott's intellectual and artistic formation is the comprehensively annotated edition, by Baugh and Nepaulsingh (2004), of his long auto­biographical poem, Another Life. For a broader and more copious survey of his life and poetic career, consult the detailed biography by King (2000).

On Walcott's views on Homer as literarv model and its artistic implications his talk Walcott (1997), is a succinct but precious source ~finsights into his aesthetics, and ~ttests t; his high regard for the influential re-workings of the Ulysses themes by Dante and James Joyce. The special edition of the journal, South Atlantic Quarterly, in which the talk was published, also contains useful short studies by an ensemble of international scholars on various aspects of his craft ( Davis 1997b). There is a thoughtful discussion of his techniques of imitation in Terada 1992. The collection of articles by classical scholars that appeared in a special issue of Classical World (1999: 93.1. 71-81) focuses mainly on Walcott's remodelling of canonic lit­erary texts from the Greco-Roman tradition.

Romare Bearden's artistic output is well illustrated and discussed in the substantial cata­logue to a major retrospective exhibition of his work at the National Gallery in Washington (Fine et al. 2003 ). The catalogue includes excellent essavs bv Ruth Fine Darah Kennel Abdul Elleh and Jacqueline Francis on the cultural roots of his ~ajor them:s and his plac: in the evolution of twentieth-century art. The Fine essay in that volume includes a well-illustrated section on the splendid series of collages that Bearden devoted to episodes from the Odyssey.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

'Plato's Stepchildren': SF and the Classics

Sarah Annes Brown

Science fiction is an elastic term which may be applied to whimsical neo-medieval fantasies and to projections of far-future technology alike, to action-packed advent­ures in outer space and to more surreal and metaphysical explorations of inner space. Like anv other genre it can be done well or badly, though (in a somewhat unfair Catch 22 situation) the best SF tends to be assimilated to literary fiction, its generic alignment occluded or brushed aside. Although SF might seem a quintessentially modem genre, classical themes have permeated a great many SF productions - includ­ing the controversial 1968 Star Trek episode from which my chapter's title is derived - and some commentators have traced its origins back to the classical period.

The chief candidate for this originary role is Lucian of Samosata, a second­centurv CE satirist who was born in eastern Turkey but wrote in Greek. His fan­tasticai True History certainly anticipates favourite science fictional devices, with its detailed description of wars in space and imaginative accounts of various alien species. One of these, a moon-dwelling race, is entirely male, although its members marry each other and bear children which grow in the calves of their legs (Lucian 1968: 1.22 ). Another species spends part of its lifecycle as a man, part as a tree. We can compare these speculative variations on humanity with similar visions of intrigu­ing alterity in recent SF - the androgynous society depicted by Ursula K. Le Guin in Left Hand of Darkness ( 1969) and the alien 'pequeninos' ,vho are reborn as trees after death in Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead ( 1986) spring to mind. But Lucian's playful picaresque whimsy lacks SF's hallmark verisimilitude and his explora­tions of extraterrestrial life remain undeveloped. Ursula K. Le Guin and Orson Scott Card think through the problems faced by humankind when it interacts with non humans. Lucian, on the other hand, presents us with an entertaining romp, a kind

of xenological raree show. But even if Lucian's status as the inventor of science fiction remains open to ques-

tion classical literature has undoubtedlv been fused together with SF by countless late; writers - recent hybrids include ·the cult TV series Xena, Warrior Princess