A Trans-Atlantic Vandal: Omeros and the Ekphrastic Counter-monument

You are a tourist and you have not yet seen a school in Antigua, you have not yet seen the hospital in Antigua, you have not yet seen a public monument in Antigua. As your plane descends to land, you might say, What a beautiful island Antigua is . . .

—Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

A dialectical relationship exists between the human realm and the realm of inanimate objects, Walter Benjamin contends in his essay “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man.” Benjamin states that there “is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents” (62). While this statement may somewhat overstate the relationship between the silent inanimate realm with the human linguistic one, Benjamin’s assertion stresses the intimate interaction between persons and objects, especially with regard to artifacts created by human beings who imbue these works with an ideological “tongue.” This relationship is particularly relevant when considering the ekphrastic object, which is constructed from language to portray an expressive object in the physical realm. If, as Benjamin states, “[l]anguage communicates the linguistic being of things,” then the linguistic portrayal of dimensional, material artifacts not only carries with it an original ideological intent, but resonates with the poetic language that structures them (“On Language” 62–63).

The concept of the ekphrastic, largely due to its distinct origin, is often associated with epic poetry. This being the case, the term exhibits a novel significance when utilized as a lens to examine recent epic poetry emerging from the Americas. The ekphrastic object, in these poems, participates in a larger restructuring of the epic that operates in opposition to ingrained European ideals. As Joseph Farrell states in his essay, “Walcott’s Omeros: The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World,” “The epic . . . in the classical tradition of European literature . . . has been accorded a privileged place among the most elevated genres,” resulting in a history of literary dismissal of Caribbean artistic expression. This is particularly true since even in scholarship, assumptions of non-Western poetic “tone is seldom elevated, nor is much of its matter especially dignified” (Farrell 279–80). Of course, provisos such as “dignified” emerge from a colonial history that has been challenged and upended in postcolonial discourse. Paradigms of what characterize an “epic,” however, have still persistently adhered to ideas of “canon” and the tenets of Western education, which today have led to responses through literary subversion.¹ As the poet Derek Walcott states, “Through the self-consciousness of their literary engagements . . . [poems] are able to deploy epic form for postcolonial critique” (Walcott, “Muse” 59). These new and subversive epics, referred to as “counter-epics,” appropriate many of the elements that characterize epic poetry in order to destabilize the Western and colonial ideals that these poems perpetuate. This essay argues that the ekphrastic aspects of what many scholars refer to as the “counter-epic” is both crucial to imbuing these long poems with an epic quality, and simultaneously subvert the Western canonical ideals that epics have embodied. Further, what makes the analysis of the ekphrastic elements of these poems particularly remarkable is the implicit conflict between the graphic work of art in the form of a sculpture or monument and the textual literary epic poem, which produces a form of ekphrastically created “counter-monument.” Each of these works of art makes claims to permanence in national and collective memory. The analytical thrust of this essay is confined to the well-known epic Omeros by Derek Walcott, in which many ekphrastic portrayals of historical monuments and icons challenge the canonicity of the Western tradition that these objects traditionally embody and, further, provide a means for Walcott to critique and even subvert the presumptions of these three-dimensional gestures to permanence.

Ekphrasis and the Epic Poem

The literary employment of ekphrasis is not limited to epic poetry, although the literary device traces its origins to the Homeric epic the Iliad and its well-known illustrative depiction of Achilles’ shield...