SOURCE: Ramazani, Jahan. “The Wound of Postcolonial History: Derek Walcott's Omeros.” In The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English, pp. 49-71. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Ramazani traces the theme of postcolonial Afro-Caribbean cultural identity in Walcott's Omeros.

From an early age Derek Walcott felt a special “intimacy with the Irish poets” as “colonials with the same kind of problems that existed in the Caribbean. They were the niggers of Britain.”¹ Passionately identifying with Yeats, Joyce, Synge, and other Irish writers, Walcott shared especially in their conflicted response to the cultural inheritances of the British empire—its literature, religion, and language. At school, Walcott recalls, Joyce's Stephen Dedalus was his “hero”: “Like him, I was a knot of paradoxes,” among other things “learning to hate England as I worshipped her language.”² His best known lyric, “A Far Cry from Africa” (1956), elaborates the poem of...