The Tropic Bug in Paris: Paul Gauguin and Charles Laval in Martinique

In Omeros, the racism the poet confronts in Boston has deep historical roots and, as discussed in the previous chapter, Walcott experiences it right on the steps of an institution whose ‘leprous columns’, insisting on the value and primacy of chronology, would have eagerly dismissed his poem and its author as ‘derivative’ (O184). As Walcott explains when he addresses the Greek master in the poem, he considered himself instead ‘the freshest of all [his] readers’ because he grew up in a place where the absence of museums and ruins made him feel that reading a line of Homer was ‘as fresh as to look at a mango leaf’.

In the bleakness of a racist city and the metropolitan museum(s) he reluctantly enters, Walcott unexpectedly finds the fortifying promise of energising renewal in the work of another Homer, a painter he believed had both preserved and reproduced with astonishing exactness the colours, nature, weather and people of his native islands. The Gulf Stream, in fact, acts as a visual reminder not only of the sea-history of his people but also of the ‘fresh’, regenerative approaches to history, art and literature afforded by the Caribbean. Bearden, whose revisitations of the Aegean and Homer's poem Walcott found particularly striking, and whose example illuminates and reverberates in ‘The Schooner Flight’, Marie Laveau, The Odyssey: A Stage Version and Omeros, especially as far as Walcott's integration of the African legacy is concerned, also found irresistible the relationship one could establish with ‘the elemental forces of sky and sea’ in the Caribbean. For him too, as highlighted in Chapters 4 and 5, the region secreted an inspiring vitality and a daily sense of elation and renewed vigour (B&W210). Chapter 3, instead, shows how Walcott explores the consequences of some of his characters’ failure to situate themselves fully in this revitalising place, a failure which facilitates and sustains (and was facilitated and sustained by) both the pretension that one is inhabiting an imaginary, mythologised Trinidad-Cythera and a sterile fetishisation of tradition which results in the production of ‘dead’, non-transformative art.