“Nothing in that Other Kingdom”: Fashioning a Return to Africa in Omeros

What are we to make of Achille’s imaginary return to Africa in Derek Walcott’s Omeros? Is it a rejection of Walcott’s earlier theme of postcolonial nostalgia for lost origins? Does it lead to a different conception of postcolonial identity away from notions of new world hybridity and heterogeneity that Walcott had espoused earlier, or is it a complex figuring of racial identity for the Afro-Caribbean subject? My essay answers these questions through a reading of the specific intertextual moments in the poem’s return to Africa passage. The presence of allusions and textual fragments from Virgil’s Aeneid, Homer’s Odyssey, and James Joyce’s Ulysses in this particular passage of Omeros (Book 3) has not received much critical attention so far. Through the use of these modular texts, I argue that Omeros not only transforms the postcolonial genre of a curative return to origins and fashions a distinctive literary landscape but also imagines a postcolonial subjectivity that negotiates the polarity between origins and the absence of origins or a fragmented new world identity.