Cultural traffic across the Atlantic involves people, texts, arts works, and ideas. The relationship between classical traditions and this cultural process has been characterized in various ways. The term ‘‘The Black Atlantic’’ has been used to define a double consciousness in which people of African-Caribbean origin recognize different aspects of their identity, both as members of a diaspora, forcibly transported as slaves, and as members of culturally and politically proactive communities in the Caribbean, in America, and, through further migrations, elsewhere (including both Europe and Africa; Gilroy 1993). The resulting engagement with Greek and Roman material has attracted labels such as ‘‘Black Dionysus,’’ used for African/American creative receptions of Greek drama (McDonald 2000; Wetmore 2003); ‘‘Black Athena,’’ used to suggest that Greek material was already in some sense African in origin (Bernal 1987, challenged in Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996); and ‘‘Black Orpheus,’’ a phrase used in various ways in scholarship and film to explore the relationship between emerging societies and their pasts (Wetmore 2003). All these labels draw not only on interactions between Greco-Roman and modern, but also on intersections between the histories and cultures of Africa, Europe, and America (north and south).
A central feature of this process is the contest between foundation myths and explanatory frameworks. Emily Greenwood has used the metaphor of the Atlantic
Triangle (more usually associated with economic history) to show how attempts to chart a unidirectional flow of ‘‘influences’’ are misleading. Although colonial education in the Caribbean embedded Greco-Roman culture in the ‘‘mythology of European superiority’’ (Greenwood 2004), classical material also provided countertexts that were used not only to critique colonialism but also, especially from the last quarter of the twentieth-century, to react against the use of a counter-mythology of the African origins of Caribbean culture. Greenwood proposes a triangular model of cultural relationships that recognizes the multidirectional dynamics and tensions between Caribbean, African, and European transactions in the history of the region. The languages and idioms through which classical texts have been refigured recognize the paradox that the languages imposed by colonialism also become educational and literary forces and even languages of liberation.
In the Caribbean Anglophone context, Kamau Brathwaite sought to establish a ‘‘nation language’’ that would provide a fresh start from the conflicting pressures of multiple identities and the dislocation of both African and European antecedents (Brathwaite 1984). Derek Walcott adopted a different approach, juxtaposing the resources of the Anglophone poetic tradition in which he was educated with the Creole idiom, patois, and dialects of the St. Lucia in which he lived. Walcott referred to his ability to lead two lives - the interior life of poetry and the outward life of action and dialect - that could both be assimilated into his writing (Walcott 1998). This double consciousness and writerly capacity was developed through a series of poems, starting with his early poetic odyssey ‘‘Epitaph for the Young’’ (1949) and culminating in his long poem Omeros (1990), in which the hinterland to that double consciousness is explored with irony and with a ruthless assertion of cultural independence. The names used for the poor in the poem (Achille, Hector, Philoctete) are redolent of the practice of slave owners in naming slaves after classical heroes. Yet these figures take the foreground in the new epic. An exploitative tradition mutates into one of empowerment, with implications for both classical and modern. Walcott’s ‘‘African Greeks’’ are emblems of his identification with the seafaring tradition of the ancient Mediterranean: ‘‘The Greeks were the niggers of the Mediterranean’’ (quoted in King 2000: 504). In Omeros, Philoctetes’ wound is caused not by a snakebite but by a rusty anchor, the symbol of the fleets of slavery and empire (1.1). Yet Walcott refuses to confine his perspective to that of slavery and victim status. He uses classical tropes to challenge what he regards as the tyranny of obsession with the past (Williams 2001). The possibility of a return to African roots is explored and rejected through a variation on the classicising device of katabasis (descent to the underworld; Omeros 3.25-28; Hardwick 2002). The fisherman Achille makes a delirious return to his psychological underworld in Africa and finds that his name is forgotten; it is as though he never existed. In his dream he witnesses the African slave raiders colluding with the Europeans in abducting his ancestors.
Reappropriation of classical material, however, does present some problems for Walcott. In his The Odyssey: A Stage Version (performed 1992, published text 1993), he uses as narrator the blind blues singer Billy Blue, whose language braids together both Homeric and twentieth-century discourses. Yet when Odysseus finally returns home, ancient and modern prove to be irreconcilable. Penelope does not retreat to the upper room. She attacks Odysseus for turning the house into ‘‘an abattoir’’ and actually prevents the hanging of the maid, Melantho, played by a black actress. The scene reverses the cultural and aesthetic force of an Homeric and classical tradition of texts embedded in slavery (Homer Odyssey 22.457-72). For Walcott, it was as impossible to accept the primacy of this literary genealogy as it was for him to accept the primacy of African ‘‘roots.’’ Thus his rewriting of classical material uses both classical literary devices to challenge the supremacy of African cultural foundation myths and Caribbean cultural forms to rewrite Homer and to challenge the aesthetic and moral force of classical traditions. Walcott brings together European, African, and Caribbean as strands in a new poetics, less concerned with the primacy of the genealogy of any one tradition than with creating a cultural identity that speaks in its own terms. A new classical tradition has been invented.
World History
