How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Page)
Quote #1
What the white manager mean/to say was she was too rude, 'cause she dint take no shit/from white people and some of them tourist—the men/only out to touch local girls; every minute--/was brushing their hand from her backside so one day/she get fed up with all their nastiness so she tell/the cashier that wasn't part of her focking pay (VI.i.33-34)
In mythic terms, Helen is caught between a rock and a hard place. She faces workplace harassment on two fronts as a black woman, and she's pretty sure that her sense of personal dignity is what others call "too proud."
Quote #2
Passengers/crammed next to each other on its animal hide/were sliding into two worlds without switching gears./One, atavistic, with its African emblem/that slid on the plastic seats, wrinkling in a roll/when the cloth bunched, and the other world that shot them/to an Icarian future they could not control. (XXII.i.117)
Hector's Comet is a creeptastic ride—the animal print seat covers and the maniacal driver really do put passengers in an awkward situation. But the transport is also an outward sign of the struggle for Hector's soul. Dramatic? Perhaps. Consider, however, that Hector really wants to return to a traditional lifestyle but can't because of his desire to move forward.
Quote #3
Everything that was once theirs/was given to us now to ruin it as we chose,/but in the bugle of twilight also, something unexpected./A government that made no difference to Philoctete,/to Achille. That did not buy a bottle of white kerosene/from Ma Kilman, a dusk that had no historical regret/for the fishermen beating mackerel in their seine,/only for Plunkett, in the pale orange glow of the wharf […] this town he had come to love. (XXII.iii.119-120)
Although colonial rule of the island has effectively ended, the residents don't perceive much change. Walcott's cynical (realistic?) perception of the hand-over shows that the tensions are less racial than economic at this point.
Quote #4
A gull/screeched whirling backwards, and it was the tribal/sorrow that Philoctete could not drown in alcohol./It was not forgetful as the sea-mist or the crash/of breakers on the crisp beaches of Senegal/or the Guinea coast. (XXIV.ii.129)
The legacy of slavery is everywhere in this poem, perceived even in the natural beauty of the island and the sea. Here, Achille is entering his sun-induced delirium and beginning to reflect on his identity. There's also the recurring image of the sea as a great geographical and historical continuum, linking St. Lucia to a troubling ancestral past. For more on this, check out the "Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory" section.
Quote #5
And Achille felt the homesick shame/and pain of his Africa. His heart and his bare head/were bursting as he tried to remember the name/of the river- and the tree-god in which he steered,/whose hollow body carried him to the settlement ahead. (XXV.i.134)
Walcott thinks a lot about racial memory, and both Achille and Ma Kilman struggle hard with a loss of knowledge that should be a part of their DNA. When it doesn't work out that way, the characters feel guilty—like they are betraying themselves and their ancestors.
Quote #6
Half of me was with him. One half with the midshipman/by a Dutch canal. But now, neither was happier/or unhappier than the other. (XXV.ii.135)
Walcott refers to his dual racial identity in these lines, through the characters of Achille and Midshipman Plunkett. As he moves through the narrative, Walcott repeatedly identifies himself with characters on both sides of the "meridian" and tells us that he means to "stitch together" the two hemispheres in his work.
Quote #7
[…] if you're content with not knowing what our names mean,/then I am not Afolabe, your father, and you look through/my body as the light looks through a leaf. I am not here/or a shadow. And you, nameless son, are only the ghost/of a name. (XXV.iii.138)
Achille's discomfort at not knowing the name for river and tree gods just got kicked up a notch. His encounter with his father's ghost makes him acutely aware that he really doesn't know who he is. His time at the settlement with his ancestors is meant to ground him in the reality of his family's past.
Quote #8
[… one] who the serpent-god conducted miles off his course/for some blasphemous offence and how he would pay for it/by forgetting his parents, his tribe, and his own spirit/for an albino god, and how that warrior was scarred/for innumerable moons so badly that he would disinherit/himself. (XXVI.i.139-140)
This story that Achille hears in the settlement of his ancestors could very well be his own, or Hector's. Afolabe has already taken Achille to task for losing curiosity about his true name, and we know that Walcott later shows us that Hector places himself in hell because he believes in a "white theology" (i.e., Christianity). Forgetting his roots entirely would be the worst thing that could happen to Achille, since it would mean spiritual disinheritance.
Quote #9
"The black bugger beautiful,/though!" The mate nodded, and Achille felt the phrase lift/his heart as high as the bird whose wings wrote the word/"Afolabe," in letters of the sea-swift./"The king going home," he said as he and the mate/watched the frigate steer into that immensity/of seraphic space whose cumuli were a gate/dividing for a monarch entering a city. (XXX.i.158-159)
On his way back to the island after his spirit journey, Achille spots a black frigate bird receiving fish from the white gulls around him. He is struck by the majesty of the bird and takes it as a sign from his ancestors that his personal dignity, once forgotten, has been returned.
Quote #10
Shadows escaped through the pine/and the pecan groves and hounds were closing in fast/deep into Georgia, where history happens/to be the baying echoes of brutality,/and terror in the oaks along red country roads,/or the gibbet branches of a silk-cotton tree/from which Afolabes hung like bats. (XXXV.i.178)
The narrator's journey through the Deep South reveals the scars of slavery at every turn. It takes little poetic imagination for the narrator to relive the racial violence and injustice once so rampant in that place.