The Wound of History: Walcott's Omeros and the Postcolonial Poetics of Affliction

The figure of the wound is central to Derek Walcott's Omeros, one of the most ambitious works of postcolonial poetry. Walcott grants a European name to the primary bearer of the wound, the black fisherman Philoctete, who allegorizes African Caribbean suffering under European colonialism and slavery. This surprisingly hybrid character exemplifies the cross-cultural fabric of postcolonial poetry but contravenes the assumption that postcolonial literature develops by sloughing off Eurocentrism for indigeneity. Rejecting a separatist aesthetic of affliction, Walcott frees the metaphoric possibilities of the wound as a site of interethnic connection. By metaphorizing pain, he vivifies the black Caribbean inheritance of colonial injury and at the same time deconstructs the experiential uniqueness of suffering. Knitting together different histories of affliction, Walcott's polyvalent metaphor of the wound reveals the undervalued promise of postcolonial poetry.