Helen2.0010_Walcott

Helen2.0010_Walcott

Derek Walcott, Omeros, character of Helen (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990).

Walcott's Helen seems an allegorical persona representing the island of St. Lucia. She, the island, is known in common parlance by her nickname in the West Indies as Helen — the loveliest of islands, the one notoriously fought over by the French and the English imperialists through centuries of colonization. At occasional moments Walcott poetically blurs lines that might distinguish between the geological or the anatomical description of Helen's physique. But, still, Helen in the poem is also a woman of extraordinary beauty, a person for whose affections Achille and Hector spar throughout the narrative. Walcott shows us a lasting vision of Helen finally in chapter LXIV canto II. Helen's beauty stirs the creativity of Major Plunkett who decides to write the history of St. Lucia, the Helen of the West Indies, even as Walcott is moved by a geo-erotic impulse to recount in simultaneous terms both the beauty of the place and the beauty of its most bewitching occupant, "a name for a local wonder" (XL.III). Walcott's descriptions of Helen always have a show-stopping, breath-taking quality about them: See excerpt below images at right.

"... A girl was coming up the trace,
pausing for breath, and though the light was behind her
and the garden glaring, by the slow, pelvic pace

that made men rest on their shovels cleaning the pens
and the gardener pause from burning leaves on the lawn
a heap in his hands, Maud knew the gait was Helen's

but the almond eyes were hooded in the smooth face
of arrogant ebony. Maud tugged off a glove
finger by finger, prepared for the coming farce.

Slow as the liner she came up the stone-flagged walk
in her black church dress — a touch of the widow there —
then paused at the morning-glory to wrench a stalk

head-down, stripping its yellow petals tear by tear.
My bloody allamandas! Maud swore. And, naturally,
being you, you want me to leave the verandah,

or maybe I'll ask you up for a spot of tea.
Oh Mother of God, another allamanda!
She'll wreck the blooming garden if I don't come down. ...

... Those lissome calves,
that waist that swayed like a palm was her island's weather,

its clouded impulses of doing things by halves,
lowering her voice to match its muttering waves,
the deep sigh of night that came from its starlit leaves."
— Omeros chapter XXIII canto III.

Generally on Helen-rezeption:
J. Solomon (2007), IJSCT 14:482-534.
Bettany Hughes (2005), Helen of Troy: goddess, princess, whore (New York: Knopf).
N. Austin, Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom (Ithaca, 1994)
M. Gumpert, Grafting Helen: the abduction of the classical past (Madison, 2001)
M. Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen: authority, difference, and the epic (Ithaca, 1989)

Particularly on Helen2.0010_Walcott:
Restrepo, Luis Fernando. 1997. "Closure and Disclosure of the Caribbean Body: Gabriel García Márquez and Derek Walcott," in A History of Literature in the Caribbean, vol. 3: Cross-Cultural Studies, ed. A.J. Arnold, p.52 :

"The eyes that attempt to control Helen represent politics articulated through the female form as the object of desire. In this perspective, Walcott's poetics are an eroticization of politics. Thus, the story of Helen becomes the history of St. Lucia. The neocolonial predicament of St. Lucia (and of the West Indies) is expressed through Helen's story: After leaving her colonial employers, Helen has to serve as a waitress in a tourist bar. ... The stor[y of Walcott's Helen is] primarily male produced and dominated discourse on the human body."