How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Page)
Quote #1
The bearded elders endured the decimation/of their tribe without uttering a syllable/of that language they had uttered as one nation,/the speech taught their saplings: from the towering babble of the cedar to the green vowels of bois-campêche. (I.ii.6)
You're not hallucinating: The trees are the ones talking here. The loss of the trees' photosynthetic language can be compared with the loss of language and culture suffered by the enslaved African people who settled on St. Lucia. The cycle continues on both levels.
Quote #2
and O was the conch-shell's invocation, mer was/both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,/os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes/and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore. (II.iii.14)
The narrator gets a Greek lesson from his ex-love about Homer's "true name." He runs with the word, parsing it out in his own native language. This appropriation and mixing of two very different languages encourages the narrator to see his homeland and its people through the lens of epic poetry.
Quote #3
A name means something. The qualities desired in a son,/and even a girl-child; so even the shadows who called/you expected one virtue, since every name is a blessing,/since I am remembering the hope I had for you as a child./Unless the sound means nothing. Then you would be nothing. (XXV.iii.137)
Afolabe schools his son about the dignity that comes with a name—especially one given by your own parents, in their native tongue. Achille has lost the understanding of this importance and, in a sense, has lost the dignity of identity once known by his ancestors. Language is cultural inheritance, and Afolabe is ready to chuck his son if he can't bring himself to care about meanings.
Quote #4
[…] he learned to chew/in the ritual of the kola nut, drain gourds of palm-wine,/to listen to the moan of the tribe's triumphal sorrow/in a white-eyed storyteller to a balaphon's whine,/who perished in what battle, who was swift with the arrow,/who mated with a crocodile (XXVI.i.139)
Achille's time with his ancestors restores to him an important ritual that had been lost: passing on cultural history through storytelling. Oral traditions are critical to any culture, but also fragile—as Ma Kilman learns, the memory of traditional knowledge can easily be obscured by transplantation and absorption into another culture.
Quote #5
Their whole world was moving,/or a large part of the world, and what began dissolving/was the fading sound of their tribal name for the rain,/the bright sound for the sun, a hissing noun for the river,/and always the word "never," and never the word "again." (XXVIII.iii.151-152)
As the narrator takes us on the journey through the Middle Passage, we can see how quickly tribal bonds and identity dissolve in the face of unthinkable brutality. Walcott once again emphasizes the importance of naming and the use of a mother tongue in the preservation of identity, something that is deliberately taken from the enslaved people as they are stripped of their independence and will.
Quote #6
I stood/in a village whose fires flickered in my head/with tongues of speech I no longer understood,/but where my flesh did not need to be translated;/then I heard patois again, as my ears unclogged. (XXXII.ii.167)
The narrator returns to St. Lucia and feels the awkwardness of a stranger, even though he is a native son. Although he feels kinship to the people of the island because of his appearance, he has to fight past his loss of language before he can truly feel part of things again.
Quote #7
He mutters its fluent alphabet, the peaked A of a spire,/the half-vowels of bridges, down to the crumpled Z/of his overcoat draping a bench in midsummer's fire./He read the inverted names of boats in their element (XXXVIII.ii.195)
Omeros-as-bargeman watches life around modern-day London and learns about its history through an "alphabet" of the landscape. This is an unspoken language, as if the city had a body that could send out non-verbal signals to the visitor.
Quote #8
The child-voiced brook repeated History's lesson/as an elder clapped its leaves in approbation/until others swayed to the old self-possession/for which faith is know; but which faith, in a nation/split by a glottal scream, by a sparrow's chirrup/from a sniper's bolt? (XXXIX.i.199)
The narrator is visiting Glendalough, Ireland, and hearing the history of violence in the "voices" of the landscape. His knowledge of history helps him to read the silent languages of the place—and yes, this makes the trip way less fun, since he has to bear the burden of history as he travels through Europe.
Quote #9
[…] her mossed skull heard/the ants talking the language of her great-grandmother,/the gossip of a distant market, and she understood,/the way we follow our thoughts without any language,/why the ants sent her this message to come to the wood/where the wound of the flower, its gangrene, its rage/festering for centuries, reeked with corrupted blood (XLVIII.ii.243-244)
Ma Kilman has a reversion experience as she leaves the Christian church to follow the voices of the ants. Yes, ants. Remember that Walcott compares the women who carried coal to the oceanliners to ants (we might even call them ant-cestors… you know, if we were into cheesy puns…). Ma Kilman's journey is painful, since she recalls ancestral suffering, but she does find a cure for Philoctete's wound.
Quote #10
That comfortable,/common, familiar apparition of my death/spoke my own language, the one for which I had died,/his cracked soles braced against the rib of the gunwale,/not the marble tongue of the bust I sat beside,/and what was dying but the shadow of a sail/crossing this page or her face? (LVII.ii.287)
Walcott reiterates the importance of a home language as he sets off on his death-journey with Seven Seas/Omeros. While his literary self might prefer a poet to guide him, his true identity demands a guide that can talk the talk. Note also that he claims to have died for his language. The big question: What is his language? Poetry or patois?