Omeros Book by Walcot

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Omeros Book by Walcot
Omeros prominently employs the use of symbolism to capture the reality of the original themes in the poem. A character such as Philoctetes does not feature much in the poem but have a significant role in articulating the hidden message in the literature. Philoctetes experience degradation from sailor to a gardener in a yonder land and there he contemplates of his own death as he tends his yam garden. The passage in chapter five in book 1, the sheep repeating his name and the yam leaves in his orchard bending like a flame of candles. The part is difficult to comprehend as he says that the candle’s thought triggers him into thinking about his death and the appearance of the maps of Africa and the white veins bringing the confusion in understanding the passage. However, there is substantive information after reading the passage about his knee described as a radiant iron. ‘His knee was a radiant iron, his chest was a sack of ice, and behind the bars of his rusted teeth, like a mongoose in a cage’CITATION Wal14 p “p. 21” l 1033 (Walcott p. 21).
The suffering and condemnation of Philoctetes from an angler to poor small farmer sheds lights as the poet earlier mentions it the, ‘he believed the swelling came from the chained ankles of his grandfathers’CITATION Wal14 p “p. 19” l 1033 (Walcott p. 19). The thought of his death reflects back to the enslaved African during colonization and the suffering they went through. The alienation and farming that Philoctetes does in pain and toil are symbolic to the Biblical Adam’s suffering.

Though his suffering is in connection with the colonial history, where slaves and the lower classes work on behalf of the kings and capitalists, he suffers because of the overreaching desires of Achille and Hector. He is there to bear the burden of the sin that is not his own. The naming conditions of black enslavement using words such as ‘iron,’ ‘bars,’ ‘rusted’ and ‘cage’ represents the pain of the wound as colonizing Philoctetes entire body. The idea surfaces in the memorization of the atrocity of the New World African slavery.
Walcott’s radiant metaphor of the wound is dramatizing the foreshadowing of the postcolonial glimpse of light to civilization. The passage becomes clear with the connection of the Africa maps appearing and the wounded Philoctetes reflecting onto the trauma of slavery and configuration of hell as compulsive repetition of the past. In this context, Walcott takes up the postcolonial poetics of affliction he condemned, dramatizing the wounded body of Caribbean history using the physical body of Philoctetes, injured by a rusted anchor. The glimpse of light is shed when the Philoctetes pain undergoes treatment by the combination of ‘Sibyl’ and ‘Obeah woman’ Ma Kilman illustrating the joining of Greece, Africa, and the Caribbean against colonization. Philoctetes un-healing wound, his physical body anguish, and anger of his celebrated West Indian counterparts articulate the theme of Caribbean suffering and anti-colonialism.
It is evident that Walcott capitalizes on using Philoctetes condition to keep the ironies in the passage acute. He successfully uses Philoctetes as a self-standing character to indicate the work of the postcolonial reestablishment from the skirmishes embodied in the colonial horrors perpetrated by the Whites. The struggles he makes to detach himself from the physical pain stands for the efforts by the enslaved Caribbean and Africans to establish themselves as independently without the influence of the West even after colonization. The transformation he went through from an angler to poverty and the psychological load of the entire race reflects on the quick understanding of the impoverished nations by colonizers anchored in their soil.
Work Cited
BIBLIOGRAPHY l 1033 Walcott, D. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014.