Omeros

Among the various avatars that the legendary aura of Homer and his work have known throughout the history of English letters, perhaps the two most astonishing are Joyce's Ulysses and Walcott's Omeros. As in the Iliad ("Omeros" is Homer's name "in the ancient language of the islands"), invoked by a Greek girl, Antigone, exiled in America), the story begins with the rivalry for the love of a woman. She is not a princess but a black Antillean maid, and those who fight for her are not kings but fishermen, but Helena's face is one of those in which the gods "consecrate all the beauty of a race." She loves Achilles but leaves him for Hector, and one day when the town is preparing for a party, the spurned lover sets sail from Santa Lucía and in an initiatory dream and a journey through centuries, is returned to the land of his ancestors, on the west coast of Africa. And while Achilles goes after his roots, another key character in the play, Dennis Plunkett, the white man, the colonizer, the eternal marginal in a town he loves, also completes his personal odyssey: after succumbing to the charm of Helena (once the island was named after the girl), he becomes, out of love for her, an expert on the history of the place, as well as its battles. The narrator, Homer's sorcerer's apprentice, Walcott himself, was born there but lives in Boston, has traveled the world and returns to visit his widowed mother, and he too is carried along by the currents and countercurrents that unite and They separate the characters of the poem, and he is also fascinated by Helena.