Omeros

by Derek Walcott

  Now he could roar out Breen’s encomium by rote

  because of his son’s sacrifice in a battle.

  The apple of his pride bobbed in his wattled throat,

  with a cannonade of a cough, something between a death-rattle

  and a wavering sob. He taught Maud to say it by heart:

  “When we consider the weighty interest involved in the issss …

  ue…” (there was always a spray of spittle with this part,

  as the sibilants reared with an adder’s warning hiss),

  “Whereby the mighty projects of the coalesced powers

  were annihilated and Britain’s dominion on the seas

  secured…” Maud recited it to the yellow allamandas

  as if they were fleurs-de-lys, as her clicking secateurs

  beheaded them into a basket and up the stone stairs.

  He found his Homeric coincidence.

  “Look, love, for instance,

  near sunset, on April 12, hear this, the Ville de Paris

  struck her colours to Rodney. Surrendered. Is this chance

  or an echo? Paris gives the golden apple, a war is

  fought for an island called Helen?”—clapping conclusive hands.

  He saw the boy’s freckled face, the forehead turning

  under the thatch of red hair, the blue eyes, plum lips,

  and, without the full cotton middy, the burning

  shoulders raw from the heat, and the other midships

  ranged on these iron steps. Some, inaudibly, laughed,

  facing the sun’s lens. They were buffing sword-handles

  with cleaning fluid, like the droppings of a swift

  on a statue’s head, or like Maud’s dinner-candles,

  all of them wondering how much time they had left

  in the sun near the shade of the tanks, each feature

  repeating the same half-naked, shadowy grin,

  in a sepia album; he crouched with them there,

  holding his Enfield, a tin basin to piss in

  under his raw knee and the grinning boy was where

  they all were now. In their stone waves, the home shire

  of the sun-crossed Armistices, where a bugler

  with a golden cord suddenly snaps its tassels

  under an arm. And Mortimer, and Glendower,

  and Tumbly and Scott, their sadly echoing souls

  faded over the desert with its finest hour,

  no longer privates, midshipmen, but grinning shells.

  O Christ have mercy on them all! Christ forgive him,

  for mockery of the midshipmen from whom home

  could never be drilled, courage was out of fashion,

  just as the faith had gone out from every hymn,

  till only rhythm remained; and what was rhythm

  if over their swinging arms there was not passion,

  not only for England, but some light that led them

  beyond their drill-patterns like rooks? For him, they shone

  the sword hilts with rags. Not honour, but service;

  the bugler’s summons not for brazen renown,

  but it threaded their veins, privates and officers,

  like Maud’s needles. For it, a young Plunkett would drown.

  II

  Since the house was on the very ground where buglers

  had stood on the steps of the barracks, summoning

  half-dressed soldiers from sleep, when frosted dew was

  silvering the grass, they all came shouting and running

  down the brick arches to the powder magazine,

  because French sails were sighted on the horizon,

  cries multiplied in Plunkett. Mute exclamations

  of memory! Assembled ranks shouting their name

  as they wriggled on braces, stamping “Sah!” Rations

  for the cannon’s mouth, the black iron lizard’s flame.

  Now, one of the longest barracks was the college.

  He’d park in the Rover, watching young Neds and Toms

  swinging their shadows but giggling at the rage

  of their soprano sergeant. Fathering phantoms

  like the name in the ledger, their numbers remained

  when dusk slanted the barracks’ echoing arches,

  with Scott’s cry and Tumbly’s, all the ones he had trained

  before these cadets. The mace, flung high in marches

  through the wooden streets, then flung higher overhead

  and caught like an exclamation! In the night wind

  the palms swayed like poplars along the Dutch marshes.

  III

  As the fever of History began to pass

  like the vision of the island’s luminous saint,

  he saw, through the Cyclops eye of the gliding glass,

  over wooden waves of a naval aquatint,

  a penile cannon emerge from its embrochure.

  Able semen, he smiled. He had gone far enough.

  He leant back, frowning, on the studded swivel chair;

  then, with one hand, he spun the crested paper-knife

  that stopped dead as a compass, making an old point—

  that the harder he worked, the more he betrayed his wife.

  So he edged the glass over the historic print,

  but it magnified the peaks of the island’s breasts

  and it buried stiff factions. He had come that far

  to learn that History earns its own tenderness

  in time; not for a navel victory, but for

  the V of a velvet back in a yellow dress.

  A moth hung from the beam, reversed, and the Major

  watched the eyed wing: watching him, a silent witness.

  He remembered the flash of illumination

  in the empty bar—that the island was Helen,

  and how it darkened the deep humiliation

  he suffered for her and the lemon frock. Back then,

  lightning could lance him with historic regret

  as he watched the island through the slanted monsoon

  that wrecked then refreshed her. Well, he had paid the debt.

  The breakers had threshed her name with the very sound

  the midshipman heard. He had given her a son.

  The great events of the world would happen elsewhere.

  There were those who thought his war had been the best war,

  that the issues were nobler then, the cause more clear,

  their nostalgia shone like the skin on his old scar.

  There were dead Germans, machine-gunned near the hotels.

  In History, he’d had a crypto-Fascist master

  who loved German culture above everything else,

  from the Royal House of Hanover to Kaiser

  Wilhelm; he had given, as one of his essays,

  “A few make History. The rest are witnesses.”

  Beethoven’s clouds enrapt him, and Hermann Hesse’s

  punctilious face. His essay had won first prize.

  Chapter XX

  I

  By the witness of flambeaux-bottles, by the sweat

  of distorted faces screaming for Workers’ Rights

  on the steps of the iron market, Philoctete

  peered at each candidate through the blinding arc-lights

  to cresting gusts of applause for an island torn

  by identical factions: one they called Marxist,

  led by the barber’s son, the other by Compton

  which Maljo, who took him there, called Capitalist.

  In the rumshop he asked Maljo which to support.

  “Me,” Maljo said, “them two men fighting for one bone.”

  He’d pay his deposit, he’d rent Hector’s transport

  and buy batteries for a hand-held megaphone.

  His party was launched at the depot. The ribbon

  was cut by the priest, its pieces saved for later

  Christmas presents. In the village where he was born,<
br />
  a tall cynic heckled: “Scissors can’t cut water!”

  “Ciseau pas ça couper del’eau!” meaning the campaign

  was a wasted effort; the candidate addressed

  his barefoot followers with a glass of champagne

  to toast their trust, and a megaphone which he pressed

  for its crackling echo, deafening those two feet

  away from him. Since every party cost money,

  he marched his constituents clapping up the street

  to the No Pain Café to start the ceremony.

  There Seven Seas sang for them, there his good compère

  Achille promised to canvas for him in the depot

  during domino games. A new age would begin.

  You could read its poster by the sodium glow

  of a lamppost at night. Its insomniac grin

  plastered on a moonlit wall with its cheering surf,

  while the charter yachts slept and crabs counted the sand,

  with his registered name: F. DIDIER, BORN TO SERVE,

  its sign: a broken chain dangling from a black hand.

  “Bananas shall raise their hands at the oppressor,

  through all our valleys!” he screamed, forgetting to press

  the megaphone button. They named him “Professor

  Static,” or “Statics,” for short, the short-circuit prose

  of his electrical syntax in which he mixed

  Yankee and patois as the lethargic Comet

  sputtered its sparked broadsides when the button was fixed.

  As Party Distributor he paid Philoctete,

  who limped in the vanguard with handouts while the crowd

  shouted “Statics!” and Maljo waved. He, who was once

  fisherman-mechanic, felt newly empowered

  to speak for those at the backs of streets, all the ones

  idling in breadfruit yards, or draping the bridges

  at dusk by the clogged drains, or hanging tired nets

  on tired bamboo, for shacks on twilight ridges

  in the wounding dusk. Their patience was Philoctete’s.

  By the Comet’s symbol he knew their time had come,

  and what Philo could contribute as a member

  was the limp that drove his political point home

  as he hopped to Maljo’s funereal timbre,

  haranguing the back streets, forgetting the button.

  “Ces mamailles-là!” Statics shouted, meaning “Children!”

  Then Hector would tap his knee with: “The mike not on.”

  “Shit!” said the Professor with usual acumen.

  II

  His cripple bounced ahead, distributing pamphlets,

  starching them to cars and government buildings marked:

  POST NO BILLS; then Philoctete sank in the Comet’s

  leopard upholstery. In the country, they parked

  by a rumshop. He’d lead the clapping while Statics

  shook hands, or gave a lollipop at a standpipe

  to a toothless sibyl; he was learning the tricks.

  To his black Lodge suit he added a corncob pipe

  and MacArthur’s vow as he left: “Moi shall return.”

  Power went to Statics’s head. He felt like the Pope

  in his bulletproof jeep; he learnt how to atone

  for their poverty, waving from the parted door

  of the gliding Comet, past neglected sections,

  nodding, dipping two fingers stuck with a power

  that parted the sea of their roaring affections.

  “This island of St. Lucia, quittez moin dire z’autres!

  let me tell you is heading for unqualified

  disaster, ces mamailles-là, pas blague, I am not

  joking. Every vote is your ticket, your free ride

  on the Titanic: a cruise back to slavery

  in liners like hotels you cannot sit inside

  except as waiters, maids. This chicanery!

  this fried chicanery! Tell me if I lying.

  Like that man hopping there, St. Lucia look healthy

  with bananas and tourists, but her soul crying,

  ’tends ça moin dire z’autres, tell me if I lying.

  I was a fisherman and it lancing my heart

  at neglection-election to see my footman

  wounded by factions that tearing him apart.

  The United Force will not be a third party

  between two parties, one Greek and the other Trojan,

  both fighting for Helen: LP and WWPP,

  only United Love can give you the answers!”

  They drove through Roseau. He said: “Are you hearing me?”

  “Yes,” Hector said. “I not sure ’bout the bananas,”

  pressing the button. The Comet trawled its echo

  through the emerald valleys and the indigo hills,

  up rutted shortcuts and their paradisal view

  of rain-weathered villages with cathedrals—

  the heaven of the priest’s and politician’s vow,

  and the blue sea burst his heart again and again

  as Philoctete sat, with the pamphlets in his lap,

  watching the island filing backwards through the pane

  of his wound and the window, from Vieuxfort to Cap.

  He was her footman. It was her burden he bore.

  Why couldn’t they love the place, same way, together,

  the way he always loved her, even with his sore?

  Love Helen like a wife in good and bad weather,

  in sickness and health, its beauty in being poor?

  The way the leaves loved her, not like a pink leaflet

  printed with slogans of black people fighting war?

  III

  The Comet stopped again to let off Philoctete.

  They were crawling through Castries, block by crowded block.

  He limped through the crowds, as the crackling megaphone

  moved past the market steps.

  “Ces mamailles-là, nous kai rock

  Gros Îlet, the United Force giving a block-

  orama till daybreak on Friday until cock

  put down his saxophone and violon en sac.

  All your contributions are welcome in aid of

  Professor Statics’s United Force. Peace and love!”

  The night of the Statics Convention Blocko it rained,

  it drenched out his faith in the American-style

  conviction that voters needed to be entertained.

  Statics toured the fête’s debris with a wounded smile.

  Beaded bouquets of balloons, soggy paper-hats,

  rain-corrugated posters, the banner across

  two balconies, the cardboard cartons of pamphlets,

  were history this Saturday. It was their loss,

  not his. A career prophesied by the Comet’s

  having a ball. He laughed. He rehired Philoctete

  to clean up the hall first, then distribute the wet

  balloons to the kids. Then he watched him disconnect

  the bunting’s wrinkling face from a stepladder

  with a pronged pole. It sagged like a kite to the street.

  That, from the candidate, was his final order,

  pointing a warm beer in his shorts and sandalled feet.

  He hugged Philoctete, who wept for their defeat.

  He left as a migrant-worker for Florida.

  Chapter XXI

  I

  The jukebox glowed in Atlantic City. Speakers

  bombarded the neon of the No Pain Café.

  The night flared with vendors’ coalpots, the dull week, as

  it died, exploded with Cadence, Country, Reggae.

  Stars burst from the barbecues of chicken and conch,

  singeing the vendors’ eyes. Round their kerosene lamp

  the children’s eyes widened like moons until they sank

  in the hills of their mothers’ laps. Frenetic DJs


  soared evangelically from the thudding vamp

  of the blockorama,

  “This here is Gros Îlet’s

  night, United Force, garçon, we go rock this village

  till cock wake up!”

  The rumshops, from Midnight Hour,

  Keep Cool, No Pain Café, to the high Second Stage,

  with its Christmas lights winking, with decibel power

  shattered the glass stars. Tourists, in seraphic white,

  floated through the crowding shadows, the cooking smells,

  the domino games by gas lanterns. Helen’s night.

  The night Achille dreaded above everything else.

  She sprinkled and ironed a dress.

  “Is the music,

  the people, I like.” Once the sun set on Fridays,

  he grew nauseous with jealousy, watching the thick

  breadfruit leaves viciously darken as the cafés

  switched their doors open, and the first policemen barred

  the street off with signs. After an early supper

  he sat in the frame of the back door to the yard

  watching her head, in the shower he’d built for her

  from brand-new galvanize, streaming from the white foam

  with expensive shampoo, and, when it disappeared,

  came back, the mouth parted, the eyes squeezed with delight.

  She stepped over the wet stones smiling, and she nodded

  to him silent on the back step with Plunkett’s towel

  holding her beaded nakedness. He said nothing.

  He watched the lathered stones, even they seemed to smell

  of her clean feet and her long arms’ self-anointing.

  In the bedroom, she started again—he should come,

  but she soon gave that up. The pipe was still trickling,

  so he got up and locked it. If Seven Seas was home

  he would sit with him in front of the pharmacy

  with its closed door, and describe some parts of the fête

  to Seven Seas, whom he envied, who couldn’t see

  what was happening to the village. At the bent gate

  he paused. No. He would go and sit with the canoes

  far up the beach and watch the star-crowned silhouette

  of the crouched island. Even there the DJ’s voice

  carried over the shallows’ phosphorescent noise.

  Or he watched her high head moving through the tourists,

  through flying stars from the coalpots, the painted mouth

  still eagerly parted. Murder throbbed in his wrists

  to the loudspeaker’s pelvic thud, her floating move.

  She was selling herself like the island, without

  any pain, and the village did not seem to care