Two Healing Narratives: Suffering, Reintegration, and the Struggle of Language

Obviously, when you enter language
you enter a kind of choice which contains in it
the political history of the language,
the imperial width of the language,
the fact that you're either subjugated by the language
or you have had to dominate it.
So language is not a place of retreat,
it's not a place of escape,
it's not even a place of resolution.
It's a place of struggle.

—Derek Walcott¹

Following the devastating passage of Hurricane Ivan through the Caribbean in 2004, an e-mail inquiry to the H-Net Network on Caribbean Studies regarding popular songs about hurricanes was rebuffed as "displacing" and "crass" by outraged contributors. Readers were dramatically reminded of the "care we need to take not to internalise the implicit power imbalance in the relationship between centre and periphery, and to remain sensitive to the human reality which underpins our otherwise legitimate interest in the culture of the Caribbean."² As academics, we are well aware that, when dealing with literary works, especially when they are as powerful and rich in intertextuality as Derek Walcott's Omeros, one could easily forget ordinary life, one's commitment to social change, and one's duty to be sensitive to human reality, to what Walcott has called "the whole experience of the Caribbean."³ Walcott, for his part, has told D. J. R. Bruckner that Omeros "is a book for people, not a conundrum for scholars" and that he considers it "a fantastic privilege to be in a place in which limbs, features, smells, the lineaments and presence of the people are so powerful."⁴ Our reading of the representative experience of the spiritual sickness and healing of one of his main characters, the St. Lucian fisherman Philoctete, alongside Peter Patrick's 1992 oral, biographical account of the suffering and redemption of Coppa, a Jamaican cane-cutter, attempts to recapture some of these "smells" and "limbs" and to foreground the local intensity of Walcott's work.⁵ Most importantly, such comparative and interdisciplinary study allows us to ground Omeros firmly in its Caribbean reality, to go beyond generic abstractions (the dispossessed, the marginalized) which, albeit useful, inevitably end up being voided of political nuance and, ultimately, to disclose how both narratives are, borrowing Robert Hill's words, "dread[ed] up."⁶ Coppa's and Walcott's healing narratives, in fact, critically recontextualize bodily conflicts as social, political, and spiritual struggles that powerfully invoke an historical, cultural, and ultimately moral framework informed by the Rastafarian concept of sofrin. The struggle Walcott identifies with language is not restricted to literature, but permeates everyday oral experience. It is not only a matter of choice between distinct languages (English, Creole, "Antillean patois") but of choices within one's repertoire—itself the personal legacy of migrations, religious and artistic movements, education, the nurturing of generations—and their consequences in life: trust or betrayal, inclusion or rejection, healing or despair.

Philoctete the Fisherman

The whole of Walcott's Omeros can be seen as a healing narrative: the poem reenacts the same healing experience through different characters (the narrator, Achille, Philoctete) led by alternating guides (Walcott's father, the African Afolabe, Omeros himself, Seven Seas, a sea-swift, Ma Kilman, St. Lucia—both the poet's island and the saint).⁷ The narrator, a West Indian man, lives in Boston and is back home in St. Lucia to visit his mother (like Walcott himself, who actually lives for half the year in Boston and spends the other half in the Caribbean). As a first step in healing, he gets in a canoe and slowly departs from St. Lucia together with Omeros/Seven Seas. The narrator thus describes the island from a distance: "In the midst of the sea there is a horned island / . . . a volcano, stinking with sulphur, has made it a healing place."⁸ Many...