.. What about your username ?

[SysTaMatIcS]

Originally Posted by Josee

ok i changed my nickname into my real name

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[Omeros]

Achille's Struggle with Hector in Omeros
Heather M. Bradley, Washington and Lee University

Walcott confirms the need for one's recognition of the duality in one's culture through Achille's struggle with Hector, another suitor, for the affection of Helen. The conflict between Achille and his adversary, Hector, signifies the battle between the traditional and modern. Achille lives according to the island custom and thrives on his African heritage, while Hector deviates from tradition and leaves the sea life to engage in commercialism. Hector represents the urbanization of the African culture:

The Comet, a sixteen-seater passenger van,
was the chariot that Hector bought. . . .
Each row was a divan

of furred leopardskin. . . .
the Space Age had come to the Island. Passengers...
were sliding into two worlds without switching gears. (Walcott 117)

Hector grasps at his African roots by decorating his van, the symbol of British influence, with a leopardskin. This relic, once significant of a warrior's prowess, now attests to the power of technology and becomes tacky at the same time.

Helen's role in the struggle suggests the superiority of a life that integrates two cultures. Helen in all her radiant beauty symbolizes St. Lucia, and, therefore, her oscillations between Achille and Hector parallel the island's adoption of a new culture. Helen deserts Achille for Hector, confirming Achille's belief that "Everything is money" (44). Achille aligns Africa with the spiritual, and views the imperial culture as superficial in its concentration on monetary pursuits. Although Helen "still love[s] Achille," her continued allegiance to Hector confirms her own desire, as well as St. Lucia's, to acknowledge her hybridity (Walcott 118). The aesthetic value of the rich African culture lacks the technological advancement necessary for survival in an urbanized society. St. Lucia and Helen represent for the British "a second Eden with its golden apple": "who many young Redcoats had died for her?" (Walcott 97, 93). "The vows of [the] empire" to improve, or rather, civilize African life encourages the acceptance of British culture. Helen, and ultimately St. Lucia, must recognize their British inheritance without regard to the loss of many African customs. Achille, "from his heart's depth knew [Helen] was never coming back" (Walcott 125). However, Achille acknowledges his loss of Helen as a consequence of Hector's riches, rather than an indication of Helen's desire for progress. This realization comments on the role of diversity in the progression of a society.

Walcott resolves his quandaries about this identity through the anouncement of Achille's battle for Helen, a metaphor for his own struggle with cultural hybridity. Through the quests of his characters, he illustrates the impossibility of returning to the past without compromising the future. Achille reaffirms his African heritage and shuns the changes wrought by the British--behavior which ends his relationship with Helen. Conversely, Helen celebrates he hybrid inheritance, as the roots of a new culture, rather than a suspension of two distinctly separate cultures. Walcott accepts his hybridism when he realizes he must create his own cultural identity: "I bear/ my house inside me, everywhere" (Walcott 176). The poet suggests that the definition for one's identity arises not from external influences, but from the individual's decisions about which aspects of each inheritance he/she would like to maintain. This idea combats Walcott's former feelings of isolation as he becomes self-dependent and therefore free from any connection to one particular society. Walcott pacifies his confusion about which culture he should recognize, by deciding to create a new version--a true hybrid with the best of each component.

Omeros narrates the individual quests of several characters; however, the contemplations of Achille most closely resemble Walcott's search for his identity. Walcott represents his thoughts through the "I" narrator. The "I" embarks on a grand tour of Europe, as well as the American West, to define the British aspects of his nature, similar to Achille who ventures back to Africa. In this sense, the "I" is the poet, and Achille symbolizes Walcott's alter-ego. It seems that Walcott already embraces his European ancestry, since the poem uses the imperial tongue, the English language. The figure of Achille provides Walcott with a recourse for his musings about the culture of his conquered ancestors. Despite the separate journeys of Achille and Walcott, the two figures share a common goal.



Helen: History that Heals in Omeros*

by Elsa Luciano Feal



Images exist solely to be admired, to be gazed at, to be the object of other people's fantasies, and to be used in the construction of other peopleís stories. [Maxine Harris]

The female body...an always silent/silenced conceptual placeholder in hysterical male discourse...her excessiveness threatens the very order of the system. [Anne Balsalmo]



Helen of Troy has long haunted the imagination of the West as both seductress and victim. In Omeros1 by the St. Lucian Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott, Helen maintains that dual nature. She becomes the Caribbean island that switches hands between the French and the British approximately thirteen times. She also becomes the seductress and adulteress of Greek mythology. However, unlike the Helen of Greek mythology, Helen of the Caribbean inasmuch as she represents the island has the power to heal by embracing her turbulent history. Because most of the characters in Omeros carry a wound, be it physical or spiritual that must be healed if there is to be any redemption or catharsis, I argue in this paper that all characters are healed to some extent when they finally come to terms with their history and that of the island as represented by Helen.

In writing Omeros Walcott never intended a direct parallelism between his poem and Homer’s tale. Although some of the characters of the Iliad are present in this tale many are created by the poet. The poem, despite its length, is not really an epic either; as Walcott himself has pointed out for it includes no wars and no warriors.2 Omeros is a narrative poem about the sea and the people who live near its shores. Its main character is Achille who rivals Hector in his love for the stunningly beautiful Helen. But its main theme is not romantic love, but the quest for history, the need for reconciliation and redemption.

Helen, the black beauty of Omeros has a problematic role in the poem. First, she is that “larger-than-life shadowy female figure who inhabits our [the male] imagination, informs our emotions and indirectly gives shape to many of our actions” (Harris 5). Secondly, her name with its multiple associations “defines her essence”(Harris 6). She is Helen of Troy, the betrayer of Menelaus, the cause of the destruction of Troy, and the face that launched a thousand ships of Greek mythology. She is also the St. Lucian island, the arrogant untamed maid, the panther-like seductress, and the historyless islander.

Our first sighting of the Helen of the West Indies is through the gaze of the narrator. On first catching a glimpse of Helen, the narrator describes her as “a woman with a madras head tie,/but the head proud, although it was looking for work/I felt like standing in homage to a beauty”(Omeros 23). Three characteristics of the West Indian Helen are pointed out in these lines she is of African descent, she is proud and beautiful, and a member of the working class. From this point on, she is followed by the male gaze that traps and determines the direction of her life. Charles Lock who argues in “Derek Walcott’s Omeros: Echoes from a White-Throated Vase” that “to depict the woman without representing her voice, is for the poet to exercise his descriptive powers, and to render the woman an object, whose silence is matched by her passivity”(9). Certainly, it is within the poet’s prerogative to choose the direction of the character’s life, but by setting her up as an ideal of womanhood, he traps and silences her. It is through language, after all, that Walcott chooses to control the reader’s perception of Helen. She is “an idea created by others’ desires, who moves others but herself remains detached”(Zoppi 520).

Maud, the Other woman in this poem is also trapped by an image. She is a cliché: the gentle white foreigner who sits in the verandah and fans herself, or tends her garden. Unlike Helen whose servitude is coerced, Maud plays nurse to Plunkett during his illness, and is his support and “helpmate.” Middle-aged and barren, she envies Helen’s beauty, youth and fertility. Her life is pregnant with silences, “years of self-examining silence”(24).

Helen of Troy, who is often linked in Omeros to the Greek woman who has an affair with the narrator, is set off in obvious juxtaposition to the Helen of the islands. One is white, the other black. One has “Asian cheeks” while the other wears “an unimaginable ebony mask.” One is associated with ivory, cold stone, “smoke obscuring soldiers fallen in battle” and ancient history; the other is ebony, heat, dueling fishermen and “historylessness”. Like the Helen of history, the black Helen is the object of desire, the cause of ruined loyalties and lives. Both are sexualized beings. However, Plunkett’s obvious sexual desire for her rather than for his wife is also meant to point out the historical role of black women in colonial/Caribbean history.3

Achille (the Caribbean Menelaus), Hector, Plunkett and the narrator himself lust for Helen. For Achille, Helen is an object that can be bought and controlled. He goes out on an illegal fishing expedition hoping that with money he will be able to buy her back. “Money will change her. Is this bad living that make her come wicked”(44). Because the real Helen remains unknown to us, her identity depends on arbitrary and biased descriptions provided by other characters. According to Lock because “the one who represents has been normatively male” there is a “division between the one who represents and the one who is represented”(9).

The narrator himself, who through the power of words can save or destroy Helen, limits himself to stereotypes. “I saw the rage of her measuring eyes, and felt the chill of a panther hidden in the dark of a cage”(36). The black female body is being relegated to the instinctual, the savage, the primitive.

Helen exerts a mesmerizing hold on Plunkett, so much so that he decides to create a history for her in hopes of freeing himself of his guilty attraction toward her. His guilt is twofold: it is linked to colonization and the exploitation of the black woman’s body as well as the island’s, and, of course, there is Maud. Yet, the history that Plunkett vows to “create” for Helen is problematic. How true can Plunkett, representative of the colonizing forces and the history that long claimed that nothing existed in the Caribbean, be to the “truth,” to Helen, to the island?

He was fixed by her glance
in the armoire’s full length mirror, where, one long arm,
its fist closed like a snake’s head, slipped through a bracelet
. . . he stood at the mercy of that beaked, black arm which with serpentine leisure
replaced the bangle . . .
He murmured to the mirror: No, my thoughts are pure.
They’re meant to help her people, ignorant and poor.
But these smiled the bracelet, are the vows of empire (96-97).

But are his thoughts pure, pure enough to really help the Caribbean? Walcott mocks Plunkett’s pretensions at writing Helen’s story. The Empire can only write one version of history and that one has already been written; Omeros is the native version, the island’s autobiography in a way.

The yellow dress Helen wears which “becomes a motif for Helen in the poem”4 is also problematic. Helen marches through the village wearing the dress as a banner, her perceived arrogance a symbol of her independence from her former masters. Helen’s appropriation of the dress is significant because both Maud and Plunkett feel threatened by their former maid. Walcott never really lets the reader know how Helen becomes the owner of the dress. At times, it seems as though it was given to her, at others, it seems she has stolen it. Maud, the alleged owner of the dress, cannot help us settle the issue, for she actively dislikes Helen.

[Malek]

Simply my name is Malek.

[AnGe|ic]

Malek ........
i love ur name
1st time i see u around
everyone that knows me know that my baby boy wil be named Malek nshalla

[Kasparov]

Kasparov, because i love his style in chess, and he is my favorite celebrity .

[Malek]

Originally Posted by AnGe|ic

Malek ........
i love ur name
1st time i see u around
everyone that knows me know that my baby boy wil be named Malek nshalla

thanks
hope the best 4 u and ur future son.

[RAM BÓY™]

RAM BÓY™
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[Kingroudy]

™>>(charika mousajala 3alamiyan "i think " )

charika mousajala 3alamiyan is CM3 :P
™ is 3alama tijariyya

[SysTaMatIcS]

oh , isnt TM a shortcut for team ?

[chaingang_100]

Originally Posted by SysTaMatIcS

oh , isnt TM a shortcut for team ?

No Systa, i think it's TradeMark