Compassing Omeros

I'm late in helping you outfit your pirogues with these navigational aids, but you might find this guide to Omeros (more extensive and analytical than the student-created ones I've been distributing) quite useful, as well as this running index/glossary. You might also find worthwhile Hilton Als's 2004 profile of Walcott for the New Yorker, as well as this more recent piece by Adam Kirsch, also for the New Yorker. This interview (audio) of Walcott also has some good material, and if you advance to around the 27th minute you'll hear him discussing Omeros for a little bit.

I still find myself mulling over some of the questions that arose regarding Kincaid and A Small Place: e.g., the vague discomfort regarding Kincaid's positionality, the question about what it means to live in a "small place," etc. Regarding the former, maybe this issue would largely go away if it weren't for those couple of moments when her critique of everyday Antiguans becomes especially unvarnished. Still, Franz Fanon and others assert that the first step in the reclamation process for the abject and the colonized is anger, so maybe her call to arms, even in its more strident guises, has a kind of necessary and honest forcefulness to it. And what would we find, I wonder, if we rooted around the website for the Antigua and Barbuda Department of Tourism? I'm suddenly curious to read A Small Place again now, too, to see if there's more self-reflexivity than is immediately apparent, to see where Kincaid might subtly be negotiating her dual position as insider and outsider (I'm also inclined to wonder if there might somehow be some overlap between Kincaid's text and Ortiz's Cuban Counterpoint around the issue of invoking and then reversing polarizing binarisms).

Maybe, too, we can redirect some of these issues to Omeros, especially in those moments when the poet/narrator is in the position (nearly) of tourist (e.g., in the opening of Book Six when he rides in a taxi back to his St. Lucian Hotel after his sojourn in Europe and North America in the previous book). Walcott said once in an interview, in fact, that "I come down here so often that perhaps literally I'm a tourist myself coming from America." Anyway, there are plenty of other moments in Omeros when the discourses and lenses of tourism are present. There's probably a paper idea in there somewhere ...