WAR TROPES IN OMEROS BY DEREK WALCOTT
WAR TROPES IN OMEROS BY DEREK WALCOTT

Summary/Abstract: For his poetic endeavour, Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel prize in 1992 and the T. S. Eliot prize in 2010. Postcolonial literary critic Jahan Ramazani appreciates his longest work, the narrative poem “Omeros” (1990), as being “perhaps the most ambitious English-language poem of the decolonized Third World”. Although the critic believes it is based on the “radiant metaphor of the wound” as a “resonant site of interethnic connection”, the poet avoids advocating other Caribbean writers’ anchoring into a discourse of suffering. He proposes instead one of the most dramatic histories of the Caribbean by craftily employing war tropes from elsewhere – Europe, Africa, North America – to rewrite the inner war of the contemporary man who faces a multitude of cultural forces. His work was published when multiculturalism had already become a dominant paradigm in American universities and at the beginning of what James Hunter called the “culture wars” of the 1990s. Taking into consideration that the postcolonial concept of creolization proposed by the Barbadian poet and historian Edward K. Brathwaite was considered by Robert J. C. Young (1995) an unconscious, organic form of cultural hybridity, my argument is that Walcott’s epic poem has transformed the perspective upon creolization by revealing its intentionality. One of the reasons resides in the use of war tropes as sources of symbolic violence, which helps fleshing out a history predominantly characterized by plunder, absence and loss, a view which critics such as Paul Breslin hint at. This essay examines how some of these tropes appear in the poem and with what specific purposes.

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