In The Daily, there is an op-ed called The Cost of Tourism by Diana McCaulay about how tourism has destroyed Jamaica.  Is this anything new? Jamaica is one of seniors when it comes to having become a tourist trap.  Jamaica and Hawaii are the elder statesmen of tourist exploitation and the defilement of nature.

Can’t put the genie back in the bottle. The horse is out of the barn.  Insert your cliche of choice.

I grew up in Hawaii and this is the same thing. Truth is, tourism is the worst thing for any economy and the worst thing for any ecology. Even eco-tourism opens delicate and sensitive areas to way more traffic — and even considerate traffic is traffic.

OK, but tourism is also like organ transplant. In Hawaii, agriculture gave way to tourism; trade gave way to tourism. Pineapple and cane sugar were industries of the islands — some might say just as exploitative, if not more so.

But once the transplant occurs, not only are you committed to the new organ but there is a whole host of associated new problems.  Call them unintended consequences.  Once you get the new organ, you have to commit to taking all the anti-rejection drugs forever.  Tourism is like that. Yes, it saved your life and the life of your economy in a time of need, but at what cost?  Additionally, tourism is fickle — both in terms of where people go as well as whether they go at all. Maybe it isn’t ‘not Jamaica’, but it can always be ‘not anywhere’ as the 2007/8 crash proved: people weren’t going anywhere, even if they had the money. (It just looks bad).  And, when they were, they were going someplace super-exclusive where nobody would see them, as in ‘not Jamaica’.

Jamaica and the rest of the islands — including Hawaii — around the world have very little hope of reforming unless they pull a Cuba.

Myself? I guess I have never thought of Jamaica as anything but someplace completely ravaged already by tourism and exploitation. A lost cause, in much the same way that many people see Hawaii. In many ways, Jamaica has already been lost to addiction. I doubt the economy could survive the loss of tourism. Hasn’t it already?

Back in the 80s, Hawaii became addicted to Japanese money. When Japan coughed, Hawaii got the plague. When I was growing up, we realized that the Hawaiian islands were forever going to be a service economy — serving tourism and serving the military.

And then there’s the drugs. Hawaii and Jamaica have quite a few things in common:their own native animist cultures and a love of marijuana. But that’s another story for another time – the ravages of the war between drug-producers, drug-buyers, and state & federal law in the context of marijuana being illegal. Oh, what a terrible tale.

Oh, and Diana McCaulay: stop being so bloody nostalgic.  Are you serious?  D’you only want the travelers, and the people who engage with the culture, who engage with the people, who are interested and curious?  And if we American travelers are not up to snuff — if we only want a sunny place with warmth, booze, relaxation, entertainment, some Reggae, and the ocean — then shouldn’t we just stay within our own borders?

Not bloody likely – but guess what?  I guarantee you that that is the best idea anyone has had: spend vacation money at home, in our own economy, putting it into our own businesses!  Now, that’s what I like to hear.  Unfortunately, American travelers won’t even consider Jamaica any more.  The elite 1% that you’re so hungry for has moved on to Cambodia and deep Asia and is hot and bothered for Cuba.  What gentle 1% elite traveler is going to Jamaica any more?

In Hawaii, we called to the 99% of Americans that were left — the Americans who go to Hawaii and Jamaica on package tours, and are exactly like the 99% of Britons who go to Majorca and fight with the 99% of the Germans over sun beds at their all-inclusive package holidays.

You’re not being terribly realistic, Ms McCaulay but I forgive you — as I beg you to forgive me — because I grew up in the paradise known as Hawaii, on Oahu, and I can tell your heart is broken.  I have not been back to Hawaii since 1998, partly because I cannot bear the sort of heartbreak that comes from seeing the reefs I dove on destroyed, or the fish I swam with gone, or the paths to the waterfalls I used to walk with bare feet cursed with bottles and cans.

I can see that your naivete was just the result of the little girl remembering Negril coming out, and that I understand. I am so sorry and my heart breaks for you. The state motto of Hawaii speaks to the land, the defilement of which breaks our heart:

Ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono — The Life of the Land is Perpetuated in Righteousness

I hate to admit it but when it comes to the general health and wealth of the people, one often pushes to the side the land, the other beings, the pride of the native people and culture. I have seen Hawaii nei with loads of tourists from around the world and I have seen the opposite and I prefer the tourism with a caveat that will drive you nuts, Diana. I want a contained tourism in Hawaii.  I want the tourists in Waikiki or on the Kohala Coast or safely contained in the tourist traps of Maui than have them tramping the rest of the land.

I believe that the unintended consequences of eco-tourism and the curious footprints of the 1% traveler — the sort of which you approve — is unbearable.  For it is this traveler who brings his photos and experiences back home and conveys the true beauty of the land to his friends, thereby ruining it for real.  At least in Hawaii we can hide the most beautiful bits from the 99% tourists — it is in the bold 1% that absconds with the true gems and true secrets.

I hate those people.

When I heard about the devastating earthquake in Haiti in January 12th, I reached out to our friends over at International Medical Corps to offer a hand.

They agreed so I started planning a very quick blogger public affairs informational outreach to let bloggers around the world know about IMC’s good works and their mission to get doctors in-country to physically put medicine to use on the injured, hungry, and dehydrated residents of Port au Prince and Haiti in general.

Well, I got onto our Abraham Harrison weekly management team meeting on January 18 and initiated a campaign to craft a one email outreach to over 9,700 English-speaking bloggers with a very short pitch and a simple plea: please post or tweet about IMC’s mission, here’s a widget if you like, we would love your readers to help.  Here’s the email we used on our January 20th outreach and here’s the email I received:

From: Ellie Brown <ellie@imc-haiti.org>
Subject: Haiti still needs help

Dear Chris

International Medical Corps is a global, humanitarian, nonprofit organization, founded by volunteer doctors and nurses and dedicated to saving lives and relieving suffering through relief and development programs. Our emergency response team is in Haiti responding in force and I would like to ask for your help to get the word out to the readers of Because the Medium is the Message. There are still thousands of patients seeking treatment of which approximately 80% are in need of surgery and are running out of time – especially with the tremendous aftershocks still devastating this country. The team is treating crush injuries, trauma, substantial wound care, shock and other critical cases with the few available supplies – And they’re in it for the long haul.  I would love your help spreading the word by blogging or tweeting about IMC’s rescue efforts. We’ve put up a blogger friendly widget here on our site:

http://www.imcworldwide.org/haiti

With the widget it’s really easy to let your readers know that donating $10 to help the people of Haiti is as simple as sending a text message of the word “haiti” to 85944. If you have any questions just let me know and I will do my best to help you out. If you are able to post the widget or tweet, I would appreciate it if you could send me the link.

Thanks so much,

Ellie

–
Ellie Brown
International Medical Corps
ellie@imc-haiti.org

If you’ll notice, we were very explicit with what we asked, what we needed.  We also reached out with Ellie Brown’s real name — as we do in all of our campaigns, no false name for us, ever –  but as representing International Medical Corps.

We act as consultants for our clients so we feel comfortable reaching out as our clients on these client-blessed campaigns.  Also, the sole link we included usually goes to our own bespoke Social Media News Release — see USOC, FAF, OLX, MotionBox, BrandsClub, etc — but in the rush around doing this pro bono rush outreach, we were happy that IMC already had a landing page / microsite already developed for the campaign,  http://www.imcworldwide.org/haiti, which is perfectly useful and meets all of our outreach campaign needs.

While we generally do a three wave campaign with two follow-ups on the initial ask, in this case time was of the essence, so we just made one single request outreach.

Also, we generally don’t do outreaches as aggressive as the 9,700+ strong outreach we did in this case for IMC — generally closer to 2,000-per-outreach — but I was willing to risk a little because IMC’s mission in Haiti is such a good, meaningful, generally-understood, and timely event and I really wanted the largest and broadest impact possible.

So far in this unique campaign we have been able to log 171 earned media mentions that could be directly connected to our outreach, not secondary or tertiary “echoes.”

Next week, I will post all of the blogs and tweets — 171 — that we have received between the initial outreach on January 20th, when we sent out the request, the ask, and January 26th, when the campaign organically concluded.

Our hearts and prayers go out to the residents of Haiti and to all of those noble folks who are doing good works down there and will continue working on rebuilding Haiti and helping Haitians well past the media moves on to something else.  We love International Medical Corps because they always invest in communities long term and that’s what Haiti needs right now: commitment.

Via Marketing Conversation

Via Autoblog via The Sun: “Nicolas Cage is suing his former manager Samuel Levin for $20 million for gross negligence of his finances and for lining his own pockets at the actor’s expense. Cage is moving to sue the former manager due to the actor’s sudden cash crunch, which includes a boat load of debt and over $7 million in back taxes. But Levin has a story of his own to tell, and it involves excess on a scale that we can hardly imagine. According to Levin, the actor purchased a scad of really expensive stuff. Like a $7.5 million island in the Bahamas, 15 mansions, four yachts, a Gulfstream, 47 pieces of art and even nine Rolls-Royce Phantoms.”

Episode 1: Lewis Black playing golf with Aruba’s Weatherman
Description: Lewis Black discovers that Aruba weathermen spend more time at Aruba golf clubs and less weather forecasting since the temperature is always perfect and predictable

Episode 2: Lewis Black in Aruba restaurants
Description: Aruba restaurants in Aruba make Lewis Black speechless by keeping his mouth stuffed.

Episode 3: Lewis Black – Windsurfing in Aruba
Description: Lewis Black gets a taste for what Aruba considers sport as he suits up for windsurfing, surfing and more.

Episode 4: Lewis Black – Massage in Aruba
Description: Lewis Black takes a break at the best spas in Aruba and indulges in a beachfront Massage.

Episode 5: Lewis Black – Wedding in Aruba
Description: Blue skies, beaches and romantic sunsets in Aruba are too much for Lewis Black.  Only he can find the downside to a picture perfect wedding in Aruba.

Episode 6: Lewis Black – Aruba weather
Description: Comedian Lewis Black takes a look at the forecast and ponders what to do with the perfect weather in Aruba.

Episode 7: Lewis Black – Aruba Time Share
Description: Lewis Black questions why people would want to come back to their perfect beachfront Aruba time share year after year.

Episode 8: Lewis Black – Video of Aruba
Description: Lewis Black is convinced the friendly nature of the people of Aruba makes them anything but human.

Episode 9: Lewis Black – Aruba songs and music
Description: Comedian Lewis Black examines why the people of Aruba are so friendly. He blames it on the lovely Aruba music.

Episode 10: Lewis Black – Political video humor
Description: Lewis Black explores the political culture of Aruba and their choice in ties.

Episode 11: Lewis Black – Aruba friendly people
Description: Lewis Black learns how to celebrate after you meet your 90,000 friends on an Aruba vacation.

Episode 12: Lewis Black – Making friends in Aruba
Description: Maybe it’s the weather that makes Aruba so friendly? Even Lewis Black can make 90,000 new pals at a friendly Aruba Resort.

Episode 13: Lewis Black – Aruba Donkey video
Description: Comedian Lewis Black finds out even the donkeys at the Donkey Sanctuary are contagiously friendly in Aruba.

Episode 14: Lewis Black – Ticket to Aruba
Description: Lewis Black inquires about what police are for on the friendly island of Aruba. Turns out the only tickets you’ll find in Aruba are the ones for the airplane.

Email missive from Mark Harrison from his Sailing passage from Charleston to LA — from Panama, before entering the canal:

I’m in Panama, on the east side and should be transiting in the next day or two. Things are probably being held up by the holidays. I don’t know if you got my last message as I sailed off of Key West, but here’s the general gist:

I’ve been sailing since the 8th of December. My crew and I hopped down the coast from Charleston to Florida and got stymied by harsh north winds from crossing the Gulfstream to the Bahamas. Instead, we sailed to Key West and did an 8-day straight passage between Cuban and the Yucatan, down past Belize, Guatemala, the Caymans, Honduras and Nicaraugua, to a small island in the west Caribbean called San Andres. The passage nearly killed my crew. Everyone was seasick for days, and we were always hundreds of miles and days of travel from the nearest safe port. The weather was benign, but the seas were short, high, and constantly crashing. A couple of the crew kind of lost their wits being sick and thrown about endlessly for days. In the end, I lost two crew – the actress went home out of sea and homesickeness, Kathe had to go home to her practice, but that was the plan all along. I’m suprised I kept the rest of the crew. The cook disappeared into his cabin for 4 days straight, one of the two Mormon guys was a complete wreck they whole time (though he stoically kept his watch every night), Laura another sailor nearly lost her mind for lack of sleep and having her 200+ pound frame thrown around violently for days on end. There was really no non-emergency place to stop – no place where it would not have been a greater risk to tuck in than to just sail by, barring a disaster – I think my crew considered mutiny a few times in their discomfort…

I had a great time – the seas were safe, no storms, no disasterous breakage, no close calls, no man-overboards, no injuries – just days of strong winds, tough currents, and cruelly choppy seas.

In the end, we traversed 1000 miles of open ocean and arrived Christmas morning safely behind the reef of a small idyllic western caribbean island called San Andres.

San Andres was a tropical island paradise, with gorgeous reefs, tropical rainforests, beautiful people, amazing fresh seafood – and a calm anchorage. We recovered for a few days, fixed all the things that broke in the bucking seas, and sailed to Panama over the last two days.

A friend of mine from New York grew up here, and the one marina is owned by her cousin. I visited her parents every day, ate with them – Kathe Ana joined me for a visit once, treated almost everyone in the family, and charming them all to within an inch of their lives.

Saturday evening, we set sail for Panama and arrived yesterday at dawn. An amazing sight, the breakwater at Panama…

Now we are in Colon, the eastern end of the Canal – it is a desolate pit of a slum, gutted 20 years ago by the departure of the American military. It should be an interesting, chaotic New Years here. We’ll transit the Canal in one, maximum two days and be in Panama City which is supposed to be beautiful. They we’ll make our way up to Costa Rica, Guatelama, Mexico and in four weeks, LA – God and the seas willing.

Right now, the streets are exploding with firecrackers and masses of people are crushing though the dark streets, taxis and busses blaring as they try to inch through.

It’s going to be an interesting night.

Have a great New Years. Give my love to everyone. I’ll be in touch again soon. Let me know if you want a phone call!

Love,

Mark

Cover of Omeros

One of the most successful, beguiling, and riveting novel I have ever read, and its not a novel, its an epic poem. Yes, an epic poem. Not just an epic poem, but also a retelling of Homer‘s Odyssey. Instead of the Mediterranean, though, this odyssey takes places in the Caribbean, where Walcott was brought up. Seen instead through the eyes of black islanders. The parallels are touching, brilliant, natural, tactile, and mesmerizing. Its been a while since I read it, but I fully intend to jump right back in and pleasure myself shamelessly with words, language, salty tropical brine, and poetry.

Omeros by Derek Walcott

Synopsis
In this epic poem, Helen “is the maid in a household of British colonialists called the Plunketts….Her husband, Achille, the hero of Omeros, is a fisherman….Her lover Hector has traded in his canoe for a taxi. While Achille lives in the older world of natural rhythms–wind, sand, surf, and stars–Hector has embraced the new world of tourism and speed. The quarrel between the two fisherman/warriors is also a quarrel between past and present, tradition and modernity, Africa and Europe.” — New Republic

Annotation
A poem in five books. The title is the Greek name for Homer, invoked by a Greek girl in exile beginning a long journey home.

Description from The Reader’s Catalog Derek Walcott’s masterpiece is an expansive vision of Caribbean history cast in the form of an astonishingly inventive long poem.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Creating an epic poem based on Homer and Odysseus seems a risky proposition for a modern poet, but Derek Walcott accomplishes the feat with stunning results in Omeros. The title, which is Homer’s name in Greek, nods to the wandering and exile of the great poet himself, who learned and suffered while traveling. From there, Walcott takes off to “see the cities of many men and to know their minds.” After an exhilarating exploration of tremendous proportions, we learn of the past and the present and ride along the rhythm of the words of Walcott in this amazing text.

The New York Times Book Review, Mary Lefkowitz
Mr. Walcott’s epic is a significant and timely reminder that the past is not the property of those who first created it; it always matters to all of us, no matter who we are or where we were born.

Ingram
“This massive, beguiling, sorrowful, triumphant poem is about the idea of Homer and the idea of poetry written on a Homeric scale. . . . What justifies the title of Omeros is a sense of unbridled imaginative scope, that feeling of amplitude and sensuous inclusion which we find in Homer.”–The Washington Post Book World.

From Publisher’s Weekly – Publishers Weekly
This magnificent modern epic by poet-playwright Walcott (The Arkansas Testament) follows the wanderings of a present-day Odysseus and the inconsolable sufferings of those who are displaced and traveling with trepidation toward their homes. Written in seven circling books and magically fluid tercets, the poem illuminates the classical past and its motifs through an extraordinary cast of contemporary characters from the island of Santa Lucia: humble fishermen Achilles, Philoctete and Hector; a feverishly beautiful house servant, Helen, who incites her own Trojan War; a local seer, Seven Seas; and the narrator himself, who wanders to the States, to Europe and back again although he knows, “the nearer home, the deeper our fears increase, / that no house might come to meet us on our own shore.” Singularly ambitious, and as moving as the works of its namesake, Omeros (Greek for “Homer”) remains accessible despite its complexity and divergent strains, which include the privations of Native Americans, African natives and exiled English colonials.

From Library Journal
If you can buy only one Walcott title, get this Caribbean epic.

From Library Journal
If you can buy only one Walcott title, get this Caribbean epic.

From The New Republic
To summarize the plot of Omeros would be tedious and misleading….The book is better read as a sort of fantasy on Homeric themes….Some of these imaginative journeys, it seems to me, are misguided….Omeros is a poem of great ambition, and yet it lacks the surefootedness and the verve of what remains Walcott’s masterpiece, The Schooner Flight. In trying to hold all the strands of his art in the palm of his hand, he has allowed some of them to slacken. Yet it’s possible that in singling out certain passages for praise, one runs the risk of missing the forest for the pleasure afforded by a few shade trees….Omeros has the sheer abundance and generosity one has come to expect of Walcott, and that is sufficient cause for celebration.

From Mary Lefkowitz – The New York Times Book Review
Omeros derives its extraordinary power not from suspense, for Mr. Walcott makes us aware in advance of what will happen, but from his ability to capture and express the thoughts of his characters and to recreate, with a remarkable clarity that compels the reader to follow and even to see them, the swift mutations of ideas and images in their minds….Throughout the poem, as in the mind, there are persistent reflections on the historical events that have directly and indirectly shaped the characters’ lives: the brutal attacks of the slavers on Achille’s African forebears, of Europeans on Native Americans…But Mr. Walcott recalls these scenes of death and suffering with the objective sympathy of a Homer….The narrative of Omeros is exciting and memorable, despite the absence of the chases, duels and descriptions of violent deaths in the Greek epics….In place of action there is an increasing awareness of other people’s suffering. Like Odysseus and the legendary Homer himself, everyone (including the narrator and reader) learns from his or her wandering and exile.

From John Lucas – New Statesman & Society
[This] must be one of the great poems of our time….The glory of Omeros lies in the manner of its telling, in Walcott’s masterly twining of the narrative threads, and also in the poem’s seemingly inexhaustible linguistic riches. Walcott has often and rightly been praised for his descriptive ability, especially of the Caribbean seas. Here, where the sea is the grandest of all the poem’s protagonists, he achieves the almost impossible task of again and again finding fresh images for it….The sea’s narrative is tragic: it ferries slaves across the Atlantic triangle, is the wrecker of ships, the site of wars. But it is also affirming: the source of life and a begetter of this great poem.

From G.E. Murray
Unlike many Caribbean writers of his generation, Walcott resisted for a long time the lure of emigration, preferring to help establish a strong Caribbean literary culture from within as both poet and dramatist. As such he is described as “a 20th century man with an Elizabethan sense of language. — Chicago Tribune

From Mary Lefkowitz
The narrative of Omeros is exciting and memorable….Mr. Walcott’s epic is a significant and timely reminder that the past is not the property of those who first created it; it always matters to all of us. — The New York Time Books of the Century, Oct. 7, 1990

From G.E. Murray – Chicago Tribune
Unlike many Caribbean writers of his generation, Walcott resisted for a long time the lure of emigration, preferring to help establish a strong Caribbean literary culture from within as both poet and dramatist. As such he is described as “a 20th century man with an Elizabethan sense of language.

From The Design of Derek Walcott’s Omeros
Omeros as a whole sets broad themes that return and vary in the manner of a musical design; love and strife, suffering and exile (the Diaspora so pervasive in Caribbean experience and often described in metaphors of forced travel or paradise lost). The poem swells to a glorious finale and ebbs into poignant codas. Multiple plots unfold in the form of quests variously thwarted or attained. The bitter-sweet cross-currents mingle countervailing themes of redemption and disappointment, imminent death and birth. Dialogues open with other voices–not only literary masters like Homer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Dante, Virgil, but modern poetry and popular speech and song. The present introduction has three parts: (I) a sketch of the main plots (their actions, characters, places, times, and emerging themes), (II) a glance at debate as to how all this relates to epic tradition, and (III) a closer look at traces of design in the whole work that emerge from dialogue with Virgil and Homer.

For its thematic range Omeros takes the twin Americas and the mirroring continents of the “Old World.” In a vast sweep through history, space and time it musters memories of the empires of Britain, Venice, and Rome, their fatal emblem Troy, and the almost obliterated early denizens of the “New World.” The prime focus falls on the middle seas, Mediterranean and Caribbean, which the minds of arriving Europeans identified through bold metaphors that get refashioned here. Metaphors and narrative traditions have shaped the struggle to grasp the geography outlined by the heavy brow of older islands running across from Cuba and Jamaica to Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, and by the descending archipelago of volcanic upstarts between the vast ocean and the encircled sea. These are the lesser Antilles, down from the so-called Leeward islands; Antigua, St Kitt’s, and Monserrat, with tiny Dutch Sint Eustatius–to the so-called Windwards: Guadeloupe, Dominica, and Martinique, or up from Trinidad, Grenada, St Vincent’s, in from Barbados, to St Lucia, which was singled out by two powerful Mediterranean metaphors, “Gibraltar of the Caribbean” and “Helen of the West Indies.” I. The Tissue of Plots & Themes

Omeros zeroes in on St Lucia’s northwest coast where, between the pounding Atlantic and the lapping sea, rise the two low humps of what colonists called the gros îlet (big little island). Although now itself joined by a causeway and renamed Pigeon Point, its former label has passed to the nearby village, commonly anglicized as Gros Islet. The older form with its circumflex persists in Omeros as one sign of the mixed and layered language that invites its own close reading. The village sprawls along a reef-guarded bay. Glossy sea almond trees shade the beach, where nets dry on racks, conch shells lie in heaps, and boats with peeling paint bear mottoes like “In God We Troust,” which appears in the poem.

The plot that unfolds in Gros Islet features descendants of slaves. The main characters are Achille and Hector and they compete for the same woman: “The duel of these fishermen | was over a shadow and its name was Helen” (17.6). Such names abound in St Lucia’s telephone bookÿ|Ätestimony to the colonial practice of naming slaves from mythology or religion. In the poem the names open a dialogue with prior epic that intensifies at the first sight of Helen ogled by tourists, among them the Narrator: (23.19-24.6)

That was when I turned with him towards the village, and saw, through the caging wires of the noon sky, a beach with its padding panther; now the mirage

dissolved into 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

that left, like a ship, widening eyes in its wake. “Who the hell is that?” a tourist near my table asked a waitress. The waitress said, “She? She too proud!”

As the carved lids of the unimaginable ebony mask unwrapped from its cotton-wool cloud, the waitress sneered, “Helen.” And all the rest followed. (1.IV.iii)

The allure is familiar, but the St Lucian madras and look of an African mask are new. They first caught my eye when I was checking to see if Omeros would be worth teaching. It was love at first sight. I must have intuited that any poet who could do this with the most famous of mythic paradigms would repay reading. Instinctively I began to read as I would any other telling innovation in epic. “And all the rest followed.” The phrase evokes not only my experience but, I suspect, the poet’s: once he gets this telling version of the key figure in epic tradition, the notorious “face that launched a thousand ships,” the rest will come. Helen in fact links three main plots.

As the village plot proceeds, Achille imagines buying Helen’s love by diving for mythic treasure beneath the sea. When that fails and Helen leaves him for Hector, Achille on the rebound makes a hallucinatory quest journeying back in time and across the Atlantic in search of his African ancestor and original name. Achille’s quest is represented by means of a cinematic flashback, which reveals a West African village, the sudden violence of the raid that enslaved Achille’s ancestor, and the new slaves’ loss of their old identities in the forced travel of the Middle Passage. Likewise vying for Helen, Hector quits the sea to drive a mini-van taxi, which St Lucians call transports. Hector’s attempt to change identity ends in a fatal crash, leaving Helen to rejoin Achille in her own sweet time although she rejects his ancestral African name for her expected child.

A second plot set in the village features another fisherman with a name drawn from Greek mythology, Philoctete. Like his namesake, Philo suffers from a stinking wound, which in the poem acquires historical significance as a symbol of slavery’s pain. Philo hangs out at a rumshop endowed with the emblematic name No Pain Café and kept by Ma Kilman, embodying the tradition of the obeah woman as seer and healer, who ministers to his sore. At the climax of this plot, Ma Kilman also undertakes a quest. She leaves church and climbs to the forest where ants help her to rediscover her mothers’ herbal heritageÿ|Äa magical root to heal Philo. He emerges as a new Adam in Eden cleansed of slavery’s historical pain.

Also imagined hanging out at the No Pain Café is a blind old salt nicknamed Seven Seas, soon hailed as Omeros–the name for Homer in modern Greek. This figure confirms and focuses the other hints of dialogue with epic tradition: from Omeros, says the Narrator, he drew inspiration in boyhood (12.9): “Only in you, across centuries | of the sea’s parchment atlas, can I catch the noise | of the surf lines” (13.4-6).

Tracing his origins to Homer, the Narrator opens a plot of his own, although he later warns us to remember that “every ‘I’ is a || fiction finally” (28.3-4). The compound of autobiography with poetics develops into a quest for love and identity, both personal and poetic: what kind of epic is this going to be? The Narrator’s plot begins in a Boston studio where he makes love to a Greek girl. Her longing to return to her islands (14.19-21) triggers his for St Lucia and evokes the village. Even while making love, he thinks back to the suffering of enslavement, which Philo’s wound symbolized (15.4-7). After this that, returning as a tourist, the Narrator spots Helen (23.1-24.6). The Narrator’s plot regroups, takes stock and foreshadows further developments in a scene that closes Book One. He imagines visiting St Lucia’s capital Castries where his childhood home has been transformed into a frenetic printery spewing words. In this setting he projects a visitation by his Father’s Ghost, who declares that he left his son the “Will” of Shakespeare (68.21), the pun ascribing a powerful literary legacy to the poem. Another programmatic pun then directs the feet of the poem to emulate the rhythmic feet of the black women who once carried coal up ladders to refuel steamships in Castries harbor. The Narrator returns and claims another kind of authority at the close of Book Three, where he meets, now, his frail Mother. From her he receives a benediction linking father and son, both identified in her mind as “Nature’s gentleman” (166.24). Issuing from the light of her nursing home into the shadowy street, the Narrator portrays himself as feeling at home with black identity. He thus associates himself with the main thrust of Book Three, which was Achille’s quest for African roots. As Book Three ends the Narrator, still the Tourist, flies northward in a “minnow plane” watched by Achille from his canoe returning to Gros Islet (168.10-18). The scene wraps up not only Book Three but the whole first half of the poem, with its St Lucian focus, while setting the stage for the themes of displacement in the North that will occupy the fourth and fifth books. Looking both forward and back, the scene signals change, effecting a modulation, as in music, from major to minor keys.

Book Four opens with motifs of seasonal change and personal estrangement. Summer’s carnival is past, fall is verging towards winter. The Narrator represents himself as feeling out of place in New England, alone on a beach and bereft of love. He then closes Book Four on another lonely beach, where his grief attracts a second apparition by his Father’s Ghost, rather like the mother of Achilles consoling her son on the beach at Troy in book 18 of the Iliad. Again the Father conveys poetic directives: eventual return to St Lucia, but first the son must confront the pride of European cities the provincial parent never faced.

The resulting tour finds the Narrator in Book Five crossing between the New World and the Old. With acutely self-reflexive irony, he represents Omeros as a blind drifter in London, unable to peddle a dog-eared Odyssey. The ragged vagabond gets expelled from the monumental center–Trafalgar Square and the Church of St Martin’s in the Fields–back to the scruffy wharves that teem with the human jetsam of empire. The next scene finds the Narrator more at ease in an Ireland long victimized by empire. When he hails James Joyce as “our age’s Omeros, undimmed Master” (200.617, he openly acknowledges a dialogue that has run throughout the poem. His choice of words also reflects another on-going dialogue, for he echoes another poet’s salute to his master: Dante’s greeting to Virgilio, “Tu se’ lo mio maestro e’l mio autore” (you are my master and my author, Inf. I.85). The tales of displacement in the North close in motifs of wintery discontent: Book Five ends with the Narrator’s attempt to navigate Boston’s ice in a futile quest for lost love. Back home at last in Book Six, the Narrator finds a “green January” (223.2). He links his personal plot with the cure of Philoctete and imagines “the wrong love leaving me” (249.1) In Book Seven he hallucinates a climactic journey down St Lucia’s west coast. He makes the real volcano at Soufrière into his metaphoric equivalent of the underworlds in Dante and Virgil. His guide for this climactic transport is the blind Omeros, who redeems the poem from aesthetic damnation. With a final crossing of plots, the Narrator imagines his own coffin as a canoe stayed by the hand of the Caribbean, which he personifies as a steady and strong character like Achille (320.16-321.3).

I had sketched the plots of the fishermen and the Narrator only to realize how much remained and that it shared a third thematic ground: neither village nor city, but farm. Early in Book One, Walcott introduces a pig farm that seems to be located some miles south of Gros Islet near Castries. He mentions views of white liners in the harbor (122.10) and “orange villas and military barracks” (223.2-3), which suggest the old colonial structures that dot the surrounding heights, their arched platforms making a very distant echo of the public architecture of the Roman empire. In the farmer’s role, Walcott gives us Sergeant Major Dennis Plunkett, Retired: a lower class Englishman wounded while fighting Rommel in North Africa and never since quite right in the head. Walcott provides the Major with an Irish wife, Maud, represented as torn between two green places. She suffers incurable nostalgia for her roots in northern Ireland by the two lakes of Glen-da-lough, yet she also gardens on St Lucia, growing orchids; and she busies herself stitching the birds of the Antilles into a marvelous quilt. As the coverlet grows, it comes to suggest a shroud. All told, says the Narrator, it was “a fine marriage. Only a son was missing.” (29.3) The plot-lines of farm and village intertwine through Helen, represented as formerly employed by the Plunketts. In domestic service she proved arrogant, ambiguously thievish, and certainly seductive. A sudden passion for Helen drove the Major to desire to give her a history. Her story becomes in the Major’s war-damaged mind a history of the island of St Lucia through its metaphorical identity as the “Helen of the West Indies.” By crossing the two Helens in metaphor Walcott manages to incorporate into his work a sketch of colonial warfare between the British and French. He devotes a good part of Book Two to the Battle of the Saints (1782), in which the British admiral Rodney sailed from St Lucia to defeat the French Comte de Grasse. It had been de Grasse who just a year earlier off Yorktown kept a British fleet at bay, forcing Cornwallis to surrender to Washington and assuring success to the American revolution. Walcott also cooks up a British midshipman named Plunkett, killed in the Battle of the Saints, whom the Major adopts in his mind to take the place of the son never born to Maud. Looking back on the Plunketts after his return home in Book Six, the Narrator links them to his personal plot, likening them to his own parents and himself to a missing son (“a changing shadow of Telemachus | in me” 263.22). Also in Book Six in another crossing of plots, Ma Kilman’s powers heal the Major’s pain from the war and loss of Maud.

Once I had noticed how the farm served as a thematic ground in Books One and Two, it dawned on me that another farm plays a comparable part in Books Four and Five, where it is cross-linked to the Narrator’s discomfiture in the north. A Great Plains farm becomes the setting for a neglected figure from history, Catherine Weldon, whom Walcott takes over and remakes for his own designs. He portrays her as a widow sympathizing with the plight of the native peoples and bereft of her son (like the Plunketts as opposed to the enigmatic fecundity of Helen). Metaphorically Walcott identifies the native peoples with the New England autumn. The colored leaves attract tourists and drop off, to be burned in suburban bonfires, just as the natives were displaced by encroaching white civilization: a new and ironic twist to the nostalgic image of Indian summer. After the bitter metaphors of autumn comes a flashback to the Indians’ winter, with U. S. cavalrymen slashing women and children, leaving bodies stiff in the snow at Wounded Knee. All this the Narrator crosses with the plot of his own wound in love, using the themes of their greater loss to place his own in perspective, before his final return to “green January” and the closing fantasy of his redemption and death.