Omeros Slavery Quotes
How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Page)
Quote #1
But if I could read between the lines of her floor/like a white-hot deck uncaulked by Antillean heat,/to the shadows in its hold, its nostrils might flare/at the stench from manacled ankles, the coffled feet/scraping like leaves, and perhaps the inculpable marble/would have turned its white seeds away, to widen/the bow of its mouth at the horror under the table...to do what the past always does: suffer, and stare (II.ii.15)
The narrator maps the geography and past onto his ex-lover's body and home, and sees the horrors of an enslaved past peeking out from hidden places. He sees the "inculpable marble" (i.e., the bust of Homer)—which represents the romanticized version of history art prefers—as gawking in horror at true images of slavery.
Quote #2
He believed the swelling came from the chained ankles/of his grandfathers. Or else why was there no cure?/That the cross he carried was not only the anchor's/but that of his race, for a village black and poor/as the pigs that rooted in its burning garbage,/then were hooked on the anchors of the abattoir (III.iii.19)
Here we learn that Philoctete's wound is not simply a bad case of tetanus—it never heals because it's connected with the perpetual wound of a past that can't be changed. He imagines that he's inherited the wound from his ancestors who were chained, and that it is sustained by the poverty that keeps Philoctete and his fellows from participating in society.
Quote #3
A skeletal warrior/stood up straight in the stern and guided his shoulders,/clamped his neck in cold iron, and altered the oar./Achille wanted to scream, he wanted the brown water to harden into a road, but the river widened ahead/and closed behind him. (XXV.i.133-134)
Although Achille is returning to the settlement of his ancestors, the images of his transport are those of captivity. He is clamped in "cold iron" and forced away from his home, which, ironically, houses part of the African diaspora.
Quote #4
The sadness sank into him slowly that he was home—/that dawn-sadness which ghosts have for their graves,/because the future reversed itself in him./He was his own memory, the shadow under the pier./His nausea increased, he walked down to the cold river/with the other shadows, saying, "Make me happier,/make me forget the future." (XXVI.ii.141)
Achille knows that this spirit journey will not have a happy ending, and that his return journey to his ancestral home won't be a sweet homecoming. He's melancholy because he knows what will happen to his people in the future, which is the past that he and everyone else on St. Lucia tries to suppress.
Quote #5
"We were the colour of shadows when we came down/with tinkling leg-irons to join the chains of the sea,/for the silver coins multiplying on the sold horizon,/and these shadows are reprinted on the white sand/of antipodal coasts, your ashen ancestors from the Bight of Benin, from the margin of Guinea." (XXVIII.i.149)
Here, the griot is singing a song after being taken into slavery. After Achille witnesses the enslavement of his ancestors, he hears the griot singing of their fate. The poet sets the lyrics for this catastrophe so that Achille will remember (as if he could forget), like a personal soundtrack to his existence.
Quote #6
So there went the Ashanti one way, the Mandingo another,/the Ibo another, the Guinea. Now each man was a nation/unto himself, without mother, father, brother. (XXVIII.i.150)
Walcott speaks here of the breaking of tribal bonds, something done by slavers on the Middle Passage to subjugate the people they captured. Ugh.
Quote #7
So now they were coals, firewood, dismembered/branches, not men. They had left their remembered/shadows to the firelight. Scratching a board/they made the signs for their fading names on the wood,/and their former shapes returned absently; each carried the nameless freight of himself to the other world. (XXVIII.ii.150)
This is the violent re-shaping of individual identity that took place on the journey from Africa to the New World. The idea of namelessness is particularly poignant for Achille and many others, who never knew the true names of their parents or anything of the lives they left behind them in Africa. Note that without their names, their language, or the tribal units intact, these people become "freight," a lifeless version of their former selves.
Quote #8
[…] and I thought of the Greek revival/carried past the names of towns with columned porches,/and how Greek it was, the necessary evil/of slavery, in the catalogue of Georgia's/marble past, the Jeffersonian ideal in/plantations with its Hectors and Achilleses,/its foam in the dogwood's spray, past towns named Helen,/Athens, Sparta, Troy. (XXXV.i.177)
The narrator travels through the southern U.S. on his search for another dispossessed people—Native American Indians. It is a double sorrow to him to note that slavery has scarred the landscape and left its mark in obvious ways (poverty and remnants of the Antebellum past) and not-so-obvious ones (the Greek connection).
Quote #9
[…] Negro shacks/moved like a running wound, like the rusty anchor/that scabbed Philoctete's shin, I imagined the backs/moving through the foam of pods, one arm for an oar,/one for the gunny sack. Brown streams tinkled in chains./Bridges arched their spines. (XXXV.i.178)
The narrator's journey through the southern U.S. reveals to him a landscape decimated by slavery. He sees the suffering endured by the slaves etched on the environment and buildings around him—clearly, something that can't be erased by the passage of time.
Quote #10
Privileges did not separate me, instead/they linked me closer to them by that mental chain/whose eyes interlocked with mine, as if we all stood/at a lectern or auction block. Their condition/the same, without manacles. The chains were subtler,/but they were still hammered out of the white-hot forge/that made every captor a blacksmith. (XLI.iii.210)
The narrator reflects on the statue of a New England benefactor and concludes that there are different types of captivity and various forms of surrender. This thought connects him to white figures of authority rather than alienating him.