Derek Walcott: "Omeros," the Caribbean Nobel Prize winner's masterpiece, is being reissued.

“I think of myself as a carpenter, as someone who makes structures,” Derek Walcott said of his work as a poet . Omeros , the narrative poem that preceded his Nobel Prize in Literature , is the most eloquent example of this, and also of a poetics characterized by the fusion of Asian, African, and European influences and by the constant presence of the Caribbean landscape and history. An assemblage of deceptive simplicity, “where the structure becomes more important than the carpenter,” according to the author.

Walcott was born in 1930 in Saint Lucia, one of the Lesser Antilles . Educated in English and in a Methodist school, he grew up in an environment where French and Creole dialects were also spoken, and where religion coexisted with a strong presence of African rituals. “He comes from a genetic Babel,” said the great Russian writer Joseph Brodsky.

That legacy was enriched by his own creations. Walcott studied in Jamaica, published his first book at 18 with borrowed money, and in 1953 moved to Trinidad, where he worked as a theater critic and consolidated his work around the exploration of Caribbean identity and landscape, and the poet's responsibility in the transition from colonial order to independence of the countries of the region.

“I am first and foremost a Caribbean writer,” Walcott declared in an interview with the prestigious magazine The Paris Review . But that identification led to him being disparaged and considered a sort of regional poet.

The Nobel Prize for Literature she received in 1992, and the praise she received from Brodsky and Seamus Heaney, settled the matter. Two years earlier, Walcott had published Omeros , a work that Editorial Anagrama is now republishing in a bilingual edition with a translation by the Mexican poet José Luis Rivas.

“The attempt to reduce this man to a regional writer can perhaps be explained by the refusal of professional critics to accept that the great poet of the English language is a Black man,” wrote Brodsky, who singled out Walcott as “the man through whom the English language lives.”

Omeros is a poem composed of seven books and seventy-four chapters. The verses are written in a variant of the so-called terza rima, three-line stanzas with interlocking rhymes. The form was popularized by Dante Alighieri in the Divine Comedy.

However, Walcott's main reference is Homer, the poet of uncertain existence to whom the Iliad and the Odyssey are attributed, evoked already in the title by his Ionic name. Achilles and Hector, the protagonists of the classic poem, return as Antillean fishermen , and instead of the Trojan War, the poem constructs a frieze of Caribbean history that encompasses the extermination of the aboriginal population, the slave trade, the prolonged dispute between France and Great Britain over the occupation of the territory, and the conflicts of the 20th century.

Walcott clarified on more than one occasion that the concept of epic seemed too grandiose for his work and that the Homeric names are references, not representations of classical characters. There's also Helen, the icon of beauty in Greek mythology, who is now a pregnant servant, unaware of whose name; and the name simultaneously alludes to Saint Lucy, known as the Helen of the West Indies for the beauty of her landscape.

But the beauty of the landscape is above all a problem. Walcott deplores the stereotypical image of the Caribbean and the tourist focus restricted to beaches, traditional music, and local cuisine. The writer's duty, in his opinion, is to break down commonplaces and focus on the "real Caribbean," found in the past and in the integration of different cultures.

In the opening lines of Omeros , a character smiles like this for tourists who "try to steal his soul" with a camera. Antillean culture emerges in the poem as a detachment from Western culture, interfered with by the African roots brought by slaves. According to Walcott, it is based on the loss of a language, that of the Arawaks, the original population of the islands displaced by European colonization.

That language, Walcott said, persisted in speech “with an ancient, ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by slavery or indenture.” The author of Omeros found in that process of recreation an image of his own work as a poet: “I am only a sea-loving black mulatto,/ I possess a good colonial education,/ I carry within me a Dutchman, a Negro, an Englishman,” he wrote ironically.

“ Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories , our fragments of vocabulary, our archipelago made synonymous with pieces torn from the original continent,” Walcott said in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature. “And this is the exact process of the creation of poetry, or what should be called not its creation but its reconstruction.”

The narrator of Omeros states that “the way to strengthen character/ was through language and observation,” and it is precisely this language that combines multiple traditions that constitutes Caribbean identity.

In “Recovering Derek Walcott,” the essay that drew attention to the Caribbean poet, Brodsky warned: “What saves civilizations from disintegration is not armies but language. This was the case with Rome and, before it, with Hellenistic Greece. The task of holding the center in such times is often undertaken by men from the provinces, from the outskirts.” This would have been Walcott's space, with the clarification that “the outskirts are not where the world ends, but precisely where it begins to spread.”

Walcott also had a distinguished career as a playwright and university professor in the United States and Great Britain. He died in Saint Lucia in 2017. “For every poet, it is always morning in the world,” he said upon receiving the Nobel Prize. “History and elemental wonder are always our early beginning, for the destiny of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of history.” Omeros is a dazzling testament to that conviction.

Omeros , by Derek Walcott (Anagrama).