"We Shall All Heal": Ma Kilman, the Obeah Woman, as Mother-Healer in Derek Walcott's Omeros

But who in the New World does not have a horror of the past, whether his ancestor was torturer or victim? Who, in the depth of conscience, is not silently screaming for pardon or for revenge? The pulse of New World history is the racing pulse beat of fear, the tiring cycles of stupidity and greed. The tongues above our prayers utter the pain of entire races to the darkness of a Manichean God.

—Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History” ¹

Ma Kilman, Bon Dieu kai punir’ous, Pou qui raison parcequ’ous entrer trop religion. Oui, l’autre coté, Bon Dieu kai benir’ ous, Bon Dieu kai benir ‘ous parcequi parcequi ‘ous faire charité l’argent.

Ma Kilman, God will punish you, for the reason that you’ve got too much religion. On the other hand, God will bless you, God will bless you because of your charity.

—Derek Walcott, “Sainte Lucie” ²

In “The Muse of History,” written nearly two decades before his 325-page poem, Omeros, Derek Walcott complained that most Caribbean poets of the “‘new Aegean,’ of the Isles of the Blest,” know only that the Old World visions of island paradise are shipwrecked in the New World. The brutalities of the Middle Passage, the “filth-ridden gut” of the slave ships, the slave codes of colonial sugar plantations, and the four-hundred-year battle between European empires for control in the Caribbean embitter, enrage, or shame the New World poet, who in turn produces “a literature of recrimination and despair.” ³ Although Walcott acknowledges postcolonial despair in Omeros, he desires most to pay tribute to the numinous beauty of the New World and heal post-Empire wounds. A descendant of both the colonizer and colonized himself, Walcott provides a poetic vision of Caribbean history as the ultimate healing force. In the process of composing a Caribbean epic, the poet heals himself as well.

Omeros uses the Greek stories attributed to Homer in the Odyssey and The Illiad and Caribbean myths to rewrite the history of the island of St. Lucia, Derek Walcott’s birthplace. The hieroglyphs of Arawaks and Caribs, the historical records of French and British sea battles over St. Lucia, and a trance-like return to Africa provide a palimpsest through which Walcott reconsiders colonial tensions and works for a syncretic vision of Caribbean history and destiny. Through Homeric associations and multiple ironies, Walcott launches both Afro- and Anglo-Caribbean characters on an odyssey of confrontation and reconciliation. Among the former are Achille and Philoctete, both fishermen. Achille is a suitor of the beautiful Helen, who works for the Anglo-Caribbean couple, Dennis and Maud Plunkett, pig farmers. Each character in his or her own way has been wounded by the diaspora and colonial rule.

These characters will all be healed in part by Ma Kilman, the obeah woman, who runs the No Pain Café. Given relatively few lines and seemingly assigned minor status in the poem, Ma Kilman plays, nonetheless, the major role in diagnosing and treating the wounded spirits and fragmented polity of St. Lucia. Through divination, an intuitive connection to African spirituality, the material practice of obeah, trancework, and a maternal desire to comfort the pained St. Lucians, Ma Kilman helps the descendants of both the colonized and colonizers heal their wounds. Obeah is an Afro-Caribbean practice that utilizes herbal remedies, possession by ancestral spirits or African-based deities, and diagnosis or divination through trancework. This practice is used not only to cure physical illnesses or wounds but also to work out (or intensify) social problems.

As a magic-spiritual means of altering economic, biological, or socio-cultural relations, obeah is an ideal medium for the cultural, historical, and individual healing in Omeros. Western medicine, with its frequent emphasis on reading physical symptoms, responds inadequately to Walcott’s expression of cultural pain. As David B. Morris points out:

Western medicine has attributed a distinctive legibility to pain, as if pain were a more or less readable inscription that the skilled physician might interpret...