Derek Walcott

Although their argument is dense and complex, the main thrust of explanation of a minor literature by Deleuze and Guattari is that its creators are members of marginalized populations in a culture whose mainstream social and literary attributes are interpreted as a locus of power that becomes the platform for narrative and poetic discourse shaped as criticism and evaluation on one hand and as sociocultural coping strategy for both author and his literary instrument on the other.

When Deleuze and Guattari speak of the "problem of expression" (16), as applied to Kafka, they are referring to the difficulty that a practitioner of minor literature has in making his voice heard, either because of practical career constraints or because of the unfamiliarity of the mainstream with literary articulations from the margin. On the other hand, the minor-literature practitioner is uniquely positioned to give voice and authority to the margins by claiming rhetorical and axiologi

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of the lingering residue of colonial and postcolonial experience. Indeed, Omeros deals with the history of Europe in St. Lucia as a means of arriving at the history of his characters there. For example, Chapter XIV cites the use of the island by the French as a naval way station during the American Revolution, as well as the colonialist rivalries of the French, British, and Dutch in the West Indies (82f). Significantly, this was also the period of the active slave trade, and St. Lucia was a way station for that, too, as the subsequent generations of islanders attest. The language, poetic structure, and details of character and incident in Omeros mark it as a reworking of Homer's Odyssey. Walcott appropriates the epic form and content alike to the enterprise of commentary on colonialism. One method of doing this is in the assignment of character names. Philoctete, Achille, and Helen are not white Europeans but black Caribs, and the conceit of their names appears to derive partly from the common practice among American antebellum slave owners and slave traders of giving their chattel names from Graeco-Roman mythology (Figueroa 211). The use of these names, together with the three-line epic stanzas, is also symbolic of Walcott's e
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Approximate Word count = 2981
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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