Extract

I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe's son.

Fishermen quarrel over a woman named Helen while the ghost of Homer drifts through the narrative like trade-wind cloud, and the Trojan War replays itself in the harbours and rum shops of Saint Lucia. Derek Walcott published this epic poem in 1990, weaving Homeric parallels through a postcolonial landscape where history is a wound the sea both inflicts and heals. Philoctete's festering shin echoes the mythic archer's poisoned leg; Achille dives into the ocean and surfaces in an African village his ancestors were taken from. The verse moves in loose tercets shaped by English metre and Caribbean vernacular, its ambition to claim the epic as the birthright of the colonized, a poem about what survives empire: language, memory, the sea.