Omeros

by Derek Walcott

  you expected one virtue, since every name is a blessing,

  since I am remembering the hope I had for you as a child.

  Unless the sound means nothing. Then you would be nothing.

  Did they think you were nothing in that other kingdom?

  ACHILLE

  I do not know what the name means. It means something,

  maybe. What’s the difference? In the world I come from

  we accept the sounds we were given. Men, trees, water.

  AFOLABE

  And therefore, Achille, if I pointed and I said, There

  is the name of that man, that tree, and this father,

  would every sound be a shadow that crossed your ear,

  without the shape of a man or a tree? What would it be?

  (And just as branches sway in the dusk from their fear

  of amnesia, of oblivion, the tribe began to grieve.)

  ACHILLE

  What would it be? I can only tell you what I believe,

  or had to believe. It was prediction, and memory,

  to bear myself back, to be carried here by a swift,

  or the shadow of a swift making its cross on water,

  with the same sign I was blessed with, with the gift

  of this sound whose meaning I still do not care to know.

  AFOLABE

  No man loses his shadow except it is in the night,

  and even then his shadow is hidden, not lost. At the glow

  of sunrise, he stands on his own name in that light.

  When he walks down to the river with the other fishermen

  his shadow stretches in the morning, and yawns, but you,

  if you’re content with not knowing what our names mean,

  then I am not Afolabe, your father, and you look through

  my body as the light looks through a leaf. I am not here

  or a shadow. And you, nameless son, are only the ghost

  of a name. Why did I never miss you until you returned?

  Why haven’t I missed you, my son, until you were lost?

  Are you the smoke from a fire that never burned?

  There was no answer to this, as in life. Achille nodded,

  the tears glazing his eyes, where the past was reflected

  as well as the future. The white foam lowered its head.

  Chapter XXVI

  I

  In a language as brown and leisurely as the river,

  they muttered about a future Achille already knew

  but which he could not reveal even to his breath-giver

  or in the council of elders. But he learned to chew

  in the ritual of the kola nut, drain gourds of palm-wine,

  to listen to the moan of the tribe’s triumphal sorrow

  in a white-eyed storyteller to a balaphon’s whine,

  who perished in what battle, who was swift with the arrow,

  who mated with a crocodile, who entered a river-horse

  and lived in its belly, who was the thunder’s favourite,

  who the serpent-god conducted miles off his course

  for some blasphemous offence and how he would pay for it

  by forgetting his parents, his tribe, and his own spirit

  for an albino god, and how that warrior was scarred

  for innumerable moons so badly that he would disinherit

  himself. And every night the seed-eyed, tree-wrinkled bard,

  the crooked tree who carried the genealogical leaves

  of the tribe in his cave-throated moaning,

  traced the interlacing branches of their river-rooted lives

  as intricately as the mangrove roots. Until morning

  he sang, till the river was the only one to hear it.

  Achille did not go down to the fishing stakes one dawn,

  but left the hut door open, the hut he had been given

  for himself and any woman he chose as his companion,

  and he climbed a track of huge yams, to find that heaven

  of soaring trees, that sacred circle of clear ground

  where the gods assembled. He stood in the clearing

  and recited the gods’ names. The trees within hearing

  ignored his incantation. He heard only the cool sound

  of the river. He saw a tree-hole, raw in the uprooted ground.

  II

  Achille, among those voluble leaves, his people,

  estranged from their chattering, withdrew in discontent.

  He brooded on the river. The canoe at its pole,

  doubled by its stillness, looked no different

  from its reflection, nor the pier stakes, nor the thick

  trees inverted at their riverline, but the shadow face

  swayed by the ochre ripples seemed homesick

  for the history ahead, as if its proper place

  lay in unsettlement. So, to Achille, it appeared

  they were not one reflection but separate men—

  one crouching at the edge of the spindly pierhead,

  one drowned under it, featureless in mien.

  Even night was not the same. Some surrounding sorrow

  with other stars that had no noise of waves

  thickened in silence. At dawn, he heard a cock crow

  in his head, and woke, not knowing where he was.

  The sadness sank into him slowly that he was home—

  that dawn-sadness which ghosts have for their graves,

  because the future reversed itself in him.

  He was his own memory, the shadow under the pier.

  His nausea increased, he walked down to the cold river

  with the other shadows, saying, “Make me happier,

  make me forget the future.” He laughed whenever

  the men laughed in their language which was his

  also. They entered the river, waist-deep. They spread

  in a half-circle, with the looped net. There was peace

  on the waveless river, but the surf roared in his head.

  So loaded with his thoughts, like a net with the clear

  and tasteless to him river-fish, was Achille—so dark

  that the fishermen avoided him. They brewed a beer

  which they fermented from a familiar bark

  and got drunk on it, but the moment Achille wet

  his memory with it, tears stung his eyes. The taste

  of the bitter drink showed him Philoctete

  standing in green seawater up to his waist,

  hauling the canoe in, slowly, fist over fist.

  III

  He walked the ribbed sand under the flat keels of whales,

  under the translucent belly of the snaking current,

  the tiny shadows of tankers passed over him like snails

  as he breathed water, a walking fish in its element.

  He floated in stride, his own shadow over his eyes

  like a grazing shark, through vast meadows of coral,

  over barnacled cannons whose hulks sprouted anemones

  like Philoctete’s shin; he walked for three hundred years

  in the silken wake like a ribbon of the galleons,

  their bubbles fading like the transparent men-o’-wars

  with their lilac dangling tendrils, bursting like aeons,

  like phosphorous galaxies; he saw the huge cemeteries

  of bone and the huge crossbows of the rusted anchors,

  and groves of coral with hands as massive as trees

  like calcified ferns and the greening gold ingots of bars

  whose value had outlasted that of the privateers.

  Then, one afternoon, the ocean lowered and clarified

  its ceiling, its emerald net, and after three centuries

  of walking, he thought he could hear the distant quarrel

  of breaker with shore; then his head broke clear, and

  his neck; then he could see his own shadow in the coral

  grove, ribbed and rippling
with light on the clear sand,

  as his fins spread their toes, and he saw the leaf

  of his own canoe far out, the life he had left behind

  and the white line of surf around low Barrel of Beef

  with its dead lantern. The salt glare left him blind

  for a minute, then the shoreline returned in relief.

  He woke to the sound of sunlight scratching at the door

  of the hut, and he smelt not salt but the sluggish odour

  of river. Fingers of light rethatched the roof’s straw.

  On the day of his feast they wore the same plantain trash

  like Philoctete at Christmas. A bannered mitre

  of bamboo was placed on his head, a calabash

  mask, and skirts that made him both woman and fighter.

  That was how they danced at home, to fifes and tambours,

  the same berries round their necks and the small mirrors

  flashing from their stuffed breasts. One of the warriors

  mounted on stilts walked like lightning over the thatch

  of the peaked village. Achille saw the same dances

  that the mitred warriors did with their bamboo stick

  as they scuttered around him, lifting, dipping their lances

  like divining rods turning the earth to music,

  the same chac-chac and ra-ra, the drumming the same,

  and the chant of the seed-eyed prophet to the same

  response from the blurring ankles. The same, the same.

  Chapter XXVII

  I

  He could hear the same echoes made by their stone axes

  in the heights over the tied sticks of the settlement,

  and the echoes were prediction and memory, the crossing X’s

  of the sidewise strokes, but here in their element

  the trees and the spirits that they uttered were

  rooted, and Achille looked at the map in his hand

  rivered as numerously as this, his coast. Then war

  came. One day a drizzle of shafts arched and fanned

  over the screaming huts, and the archers with blurred stride

  ran through the kitchen gardens, trampling the yams,

  and the dogs whirled, barking. Achille could not hide

  or fight. He stood in their centre, with useless arms.

  The raid was swift. It was done before he knew it.

  Its accomplishment lay in its strategy of surprise.

  It had caught the village in the flung arc of a net

  with its mesh of whirling archers whose baboon cries

  terrified the dogs, had stumbling mothers shrieking for

  their standing children. Noise was as much its weapon.

  The fishermen, hearing the cries from the ochre shore

  of the river, dropped their vines, woven with grass

  and reeds, and ran as if they themselves were a race

  of river sprats, entered the mouth of the ambush

  where a new brace of archers rose, and another brace

  erect from the reeds, suddenly grown from the bush.

  The raid was profitable. It yielded fifteen slaves

  to the slavers waiting up the coast. The brown river

  in the silence rippled under the settlement in waves

  of forgetful light. Swifts crossbowed across it, a quiver

  of arrowheads. Achille walked in the dusty street

  of the barren village. The doors were like open graves.

  II

  Achille climbed a ridge. He counted the chain of men

  linked by their wrists with vines; he watched until

  the line was a line of ants. He let out a soft moan

  as the last ant disappeared. Then he went downhill.

  He paused at the thorn barrier surrounding the village.

  Then he entered it. Dust hazed the path. A mongrel

  and a child sat in the street, the child with a clay

  bowl in its hands, squatting in the dust. The fanged growl

  backed away from his shadow. Achille turned away

  down another street. Then another, to more and more

  silence. There were arrow shafts lying in the dust

  around the thatched houses. He creaked open a door.

  Achille saw Seven Seas foaming with grief. He must

  be deaf as well as blind, Achille thought. The head

  never turned but it widened its mouth to the river,

  the same list of battles the river had already heard.

  Achille shut the thatch door. Where were all the dead?

  Where were the women? Then he returned to look for the

  child and the ribbed dog. Both had disappeared.

  Once, he thought he heard voices behind a thorn barrier,

  when a swivel of dust rose. He went down to the pier

  and saw the other dugouts nuzzling the crooked poles

  and his own canoe, and nothing was strange; it

  was sharply familiar. They’d vanished into their souls.

  He foresaw their future. He knew nothing could change it.

  The tinkle from coins of the river, the tinkle of irons.

  The son’s grief was the father’s, the father’s his son’s.

  He climbed down to the steps of the pier and undid

  the green mossed liana and towed it towards him

  gently. The canoe came like a dog. And then Achille died

  again. Thinking of the ants arriving at the sea’s rim,

  or climbing the pyramids of coal and entering inside

  the dark hold, far from this river and the griot’s hymn.

  III

  He walked slowly back to the peaked hut where the council

  was always held, where, until the last embers of starlight,

  the men sat with the griot, drinking from the bark bowl.

  The griot crouched there. Warm ashes made his skull white

  over eyes sore as embers, over a skin charred as coal,

  the core of his toothless mouth, groaning to the firelight,

  was like a felled cedar’s whose sorrow surrounds its bole.

  One hand clawed the pile of ashes, the other fist thudded on

  the drum of his chest, the ribs were like a caved-in canoe

  that rots for years under the changing leaves of an almond,

  while the boys who played war in it become grown men who

  work, marry, and die, until their own sons in turn

  rock the rotted hulk, or race in it, pretending to row,

  as Achille had done in the manchineel grove as a boy.

  Seven Seas was like that canoe, with the bilge of his prow

  choked with old leaves, old words, by a blue, silent bay.

  Achille looked round the hut. But what he looked for

  was not certain. A weapon. A lance with its stone leaf,

  or a shield stretched from pigskin, the mane of a warrior,

  or the earth-dyes whose streakings would mask his grief

  in their fury. There was one spear only. An oar.

  He ran down to the pier. In the nets were their eyes

  that seared through his skull; he cried his father’s name

  over the river. Then he swam to the opposite trees.

  He cut off their circle. He hid and felt the same

  mania that, in the arrows of drizzle, he felt for Hector.

  He let them pass. One was laggard; with a clenched roar

  he swung at the grinning laggard and the bladed oar

  cleft through his skull with a sound like a calabash,

  splattering his chest with brain; then the archer

  thudded in his death-throes like a spear-gaffed fish

  as Achille hammered and hammered him with the oar’s head,

  as the skull grinned up at him with skinned yellow teeth

  like a baboon mating; then Achille wrenched the bow

  from the locked hand, and then, sobbing with grief


  at the death of a brother, he shot like the brown arrow

  of the sea-swift through ferns, not shaking their leaves,

  brushing webbed vines from his face, and the leaf-shade

  freckled him like an ocelot, like the leopard loping,

  as he hurdled the roots, raking the way clear of the net

  of vines, till his palm was streaked with blood, unroping

  himself from their thorns, his eyes salted with sweat,

  and the one thought thudding in him was, I can deliver

  all of them by hiding in a half-circle, then I could

  change their whole future, even the course of the river

  would flow backwards, past the mangroves. Then a cord

  of thorned vine looped his tendon, encircling the heel

  with its own piercing chain. He fell hard. He saw

  the leaves pinned with stars. Ants crawled over Achille

  as his blind eyes stared from the mud, still as the archer

  he had brained, the bow beside him and the broken oar.

  Chapter XXVIII

  I

  Now he heard the griot muttering his prophetic song

  of sorrow that would be the past. It was a note, long-drawn

  and endless in its winding like the brown river’s tongue:

  “We were the colour of shadows when we came down

  with tinkling leg-irons to join the chains of the sea,

  for the silver coins multiplying on the sold horizon,

  and these shadows are reprinted now on the white sand

  of antipodal coasts, your ashen ancestors

  from the Bight of Benin, from the margin of Guinea.

  There were seeds in our stomachs, in the cracking pods

  of our skulls on the scorching decks, the tubers

  withered in no time. We watched as the river-gods

  changed from snakes into currents. When inspected,

  our eyes showed dried fronds in their brown irises,

  and from our curved spines, the rib-cages radiated

  like fronds from a palm-branch. Then, when the dead

  palms were heaved overside, the ribbed corpses

  floated, riding, to the white sand they remembered,

  to the Bight of Benin, to the margin of Guinea.

  So, when you see burnt branches riding the swell,

  trying to reclaim the surf through crooked fingers,

  after a night of rough wind by some stone-white hotel,

  past the bright triangular passage of the windsurfers,

  remember us to the black waiter bringing the bill.”