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Izabela Poręba

Title: “Every leaf defines its limits. All roots have their histories” : Colonial Violence Against Nature in Derek Walcott’s Omeros

Abstract: Although Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros (2014 [1990]) has received a great deal of critical attention, relatively little of that attention has been devoted to its new materialist reading. This is surprising, since the wound of colonialism, which affected both human and non-human bodies, is one of the main themes of the poem. From the first verses, Omeros problematizes the experience of colonial violence against nature and seeks a new language to describe the suffering of nature subjected to mutilation and injury.

The reception of Walcott’s poem to date has marginally (or not at all) mentioned this entanglement of nature and culture; Raj Kumar Baral and Heena Shrestha (2020) have written most insightfully about it, showing that colonial policies disrupted the ecological balance of the islands of the Caribbean Sea, and that late capitalist forms of urban management have only exacerbated the distortion and deformation of the environment. A convincing interpretation of several of the poem’s scenes from an ecocritical perspective was also formulated by Corentin Jégou (2023), who argued that the initial description of the felling of trees is an allegory of the colonial conquest of the island and an echo of the annihilation of the Caribs and Arawaks.

Nature is then a record of history marked by it as with wounds. Poetic descriptions express the suffering of felled forests and the emptiness of post-plantation areas, they note abandoned and rusted wheels sticking out of the ground, presumably parts of sugar-refining machinery, holes drilled in the ground or artificially made mounds in places where silver was sought or coal mined, they mourn the imbalance of marine species, resulting in lobsters and shrimp disappearing from the seabed for years to come. Nature in Walcott’s poem, however, not only witnesses suffering and harm, but also contains the possibility of healing colonial wounds. Both of these aspects of the representation of nature in Omeros would be the subject of my paper.

References:

Baral, Raj Kumar, Heena Shrestha. 2020. “What is behind Myth and History in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” Cogent Arts & Humanities 7: 1–18.

Jégou, Corentin. 2023. “Tangled Routes, Translation, and Adulteration in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” Leaves 15: 133–151.

Walcott, Derek. 2014 [1990]. Omeros. New York: Macmillan. Ebook.

Bio: Izabela Poręba, Master of Arts in Polish Philology and in Digital and Network Publishing; PhD candidate in literary studies at the University of Wrocław. She is currently finishing her doctoral thesis about postcolonial strategy of re-writing. She is an affiliate editor of an open-access journal „Praktyka Teoretyczna” and member of Olga Tokarczuk Ex-Center. Academic Research Centre. Her latest research was published in “The Polish Journal of the Arts and Culture. New Series”, “Academic Journal of Modern Philology,” and “Journal of Postcolonial Writing” (the article accepted for publication; https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2225136).