DEREK WALCOTT, FIRST TO SEE THEM 337the sacred ‘ohias then / the sacred koas then / the sandalwood and the halas.”
“Do I have to explain?” Walcott has said. “I think not.” Since he grew up with
it,laurier-cannelles, though a colonial naming and not native Aruac, would lose
truth and tone in English as cinnamon laurel.
Gilgamesh too centers on violence, as the king destroys the Cedar Forest
for a gate in his capital and a raft to return there. Walcott ’s native voice, from
under a sea-almond tree, tells how we “murderers” first “killed” West Indian
cedar for the dugouts that mean their livelihood. “I lift up the axe and pray for
strength in my hands / to wound the first cedar.” Not just “wound” but “pray”
looks for a primal oneness, a violence tenderly, sacredly done.
This genesis in Omerosties nature ’s loss to human need.
Wind lift the ferns. They sound like the sea that feed us
fishermen all our life, and the ferns nodded “Yes,
the trees have to die.”
When huge new power saws wounded these trees, “the Aruacs’ patois crackled
in the smell / of a resinous bonfire... and their language was lost.” Yet the
logs, still feeling “eagerness to become canoes,” entered the surf “and their
nodding prows / agreed with the waves to forget their lives as trees”—as if
nature already forgave the original sin.
Walcott reaches back before colonial time to the iguana (an Aruac word the
tribe ’s name stems from) that watched “for centuries... till a new race / un-
known to the lizard stood measuring the trees.” Even “nettles guard the holes
where the laurels were killed,” and Nature itself wants in on the storytelling:
“garrulous waterfall,” “talkative brooks.”
Now the epic moves out on pirogues with Hector and Achilles by way of
contemporary Africa, Europe, and America—places that have drawn Walcott
himself away from home. Following “the American dream,” he discovers a
ripe Indian summer marred by history: “a New England / / that had raked
the leaves of the tribes into one fire / on the lawn back of the carport,” and the
Union Pacific Railroad, “A spike hammered / into the heart of their country as
the Sioux looked on.”
As this modern odyssey heads home, Achilles meets strange weather, bursting
seas that mean “somewhere people interfering / with the course of nature.” If
once that sea could “feed us / fishermen all our life,” now the seabed is scoured by
thirty-mile nets, “steely blue albacore / / no longer leapt to his line,” “man was
an endangered / / species now.” Only Achilles’ return redeems this wandering
along “the rift in the soul.” His own cove and village “held all I needed of para-
dise,” with “no other laurel but the laurier-cannelle’s.” Mooring his dugout “ribbed
in our native timber,” he recalls the story’s “green sunrise of axes.” To square