Philoctete’s wound (from a rusted anchor) carries a fetid odor. Ironically, its cure, “a foul flower” also reeked so badly that Ma Kilman was forced to wear a cologned handkerchief over her face in order to pick it (246 and 237).”[1] The wound and its cure are again connected with this line, “The mulch it was rooted in carried the smell, when it gangrened, of Philoctete’s cut” (238).[2]
Why does Philoctete’s wound and its cure mimic each other? Is the cure for the wound of history, history itself?
“The still island seasoned the wound with its salt; he scooped the bucket and emptied the bilge with its leaves of manchineel, thinking of the stitched, sutured wound of Philoctete was given by the sea, but how the sea could heal the wound also” (242).[3]
2 comments:
I've always been puzzled by Philoctete's wound, so emphatically EMPHASIZED from the very beginning of Omeros. Made by a rusty anchor, it resembles an anemone, thus ever-so-neatly mooring the erstwhile fisherman to the sea, past and present. Like so many motifs throughout the poem, Philoctete's wound reifies the island's history. And given the poem's ostensibly historiographic investments, to cure the wound seems almost nihilistic. Perhaps it's for this reason that Ma Kil[l]man, obeah practitioner, must find and perform the cure, which seems at once to nullify and confirm the relationship between Philoctete and history.
As for the smell, it seems to resonate with the poem's overall emphasis on strong smells. (Silly reader! Smells can't resonate! That's synesthesia!) Not for nothing does our fearless hero Achille ultimately smell his name in his armpit. In such sensuous aspects, the wound and its cure form a closed loop analogous to one from past to present to future.
Winnie--I can't help but think that the cure "mimicking" the wound says something more than about the profundity of smells in Omeros. If History (objectionably capitalized) is the cure for the wound of history, is Walcott saying that we should research it (like the failed Plunkett?) Dream it (like Achille?) or write a new one (arguably like Walcott)?
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