Folks: we are now at our very last formal class day! I believe Donovan has volunteered to be our round-up respondent for this day. As before, reply-all!

Meanwhile, a number of you have a plan in place to reach your other 400 points of opt-in material; others should discuss with me soon your plans. Given the bit of disarray I experienced with shaky internet around Day 15, and also losing power a couple times yesterday, I plan to extend the window for submitting this material past the Thursday midnight/Friday July 1 timeframe I had earlier set. Please look for an email about evaluations and final projects tomorrow!

Meanwhile, Day 16: our final day, and also the second segment of our “journey to hell” subunit. We are looking at what many consider a modern classic: Derek Walcott’s Omeros, a postmodern, postcolonial epic poem that repurposes much of the epic tradition from Homer to Dante for a contemporary Caribbean setting.

Walcott garnered the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature largely for this novel in epic form (pub. 1990). The primary story line involves Achille (“uh-SHEEL”), a poor black fisherman from St. Lucia, an island in the Caribbean where Walcott himself grew up. St. Lucia is also known as the “Helen” of the Caribbean. Achille is in love with an actual Helen, who works as a maid for the Plunketts (the major and Maud), a British couple who have retired to the island. But Helen is in love with Hector, another fisherman, who is thus Achille’s biggest rival… Other characters include Seven Seas and Philoctete, who like his classical namesake has a persistent wound that just won’t heal…

The poem is arranged in 7 books with 64 sequentially Roman-numbered chapters, each subdivided into 3 sections. There is one nice online outline/summary that may help:

http://faculty.scf.edu/jonesj/lit2090/OmerosOutline.htm

Our assignment is mix and match: read the first and the last chapters (ch. I and LXIV), and at least 5 other chapters of your choice (7 total). You can read a sequential set, or jump around, and you can read in any order. Write up some commentary on your chosen chapters as your response! I have some likely choices below, with a bit of help, but feel free to go elsewhere with the above outline or any other online help as your guide.

A couple stylistic keys that you should catch onto right away: Walcott constantly alludes to, and puns upon, the epic tradition at every possible turn. Also, HE shows up in the poem; whenever you see “I,” this is Walcott! and, stay comfortable with the cutting back and forth in time from present to the historical/colonial past and back again, and between the fictive space of Achille and his world the “real” life of Walcott the author.

Three particular motifs that you will notice again and again are pigs (alluding to the Circe myth), and anything to do with T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”… and of course the swift, a bird that looks like a cross while in flight.

If you like, you can number things in the typical MLA way with Arabic numerals, so the second section in the first chapter (which is in book I) would be numbered as 1.1.2. The last section of the last chapter would be 7.64.3, and so on. But, I give the Roman numerals below to avoid any confusion in initially locating the chapters in question.

best,
Dr K

ch. I: Ceremonial cutting down of logs for canoes.

ch. VIII: “In God We Troust.” Achille hears the story of a shipwreck and dives for treasure.

ch. XIII: Story of the narrator’s father and the more immediate past of the Caribbean.

ch. XIV-XV: Story of Midshipman Plunkett at the historical Battle of the Saintes (1782).

ch. XVI and following: Plunkett researches his family tree; he has no heir but rediscovers his ancestor the midshipman.

ch. XXV-XXVI: A bad fever leads to a dream sequence. Achille journeys to Africa in his canoe and meets his ancestor. Achille grasps his separation from his roots, reincorporates, and returns underwater.

ch. XXXV: At New Echota State Park in Georgia, Walcott hears the story of the Trail of Tears, when the U.S. government forced the Cherokee nation to move from Georgia to Oklahoma in the winter of 1838-39.

ch. LII: after Maud’s death, Plunkett is sorting her things, and an entire catalog of the British empire ensues.

ch. LXIV: Walcott imagines his own burial in the Caribbean.