Postcolonial Tourism, Island
Specificity, and Literary
Representation: Observations
on Derek Walcott’s Omeros
Space and Culture
13(2) 154­–163
© The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/1206331209358220
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Anthony Carrigan1
Abstract
This article addresses the question of how postcolonial islands retain specificity while engaging
with the often homogenizing processes of globalized mass tourism development. Assessing the
contributions literary portrayals can make to such debates, it examines examples from Derek
Walcott’s epic poem, Omeros, which takes the poet’s Caribbean island birthplace, St. Lucia, as
its subject. It shows how, even as Walcott projects a critique of mass tourism’s exploitative
excesses, his incorporation of tourism into aesthetic practice suggests that future development
need not be inimical to cultural expression. It also argues that the poem’s epic form helps
reinforce St. Lucian particularity in the face of destructive tourism development practices.
Keywords
tourism, development, postcolonial, St. Lucia, Derek Walcott, island specificity, globalization, epic
“When tourism overtook sugar as the major foreign-exchange earner,” writes Polly Pattullo, “it
pitched the Caribbean into a new historical phase” (1996, p. 9). With “25 per cent of all earnings”
derived from the industry, the Caribbean is now the world’s most tourism-dependent region
(Gössling, 2003, p. 4), with tourism accounting “for approximately 2.5 million jobs or 15.5 per cent
of total employment” by 2001 (Duval, 2004, p. 3). Such industrial transformation evokes what
is, within mainstream tourism studies, a familiar list of concerns that are acutely dramatized in
island contexts due to limited space and resources. These include overcrowding, invasive and
often environmentally insensitive development, cultural commoditization, pollution, and the
destruction of vulnerable ecosystems. One of the most entrenched ironies attached to this process
is that, even as tourism depends on marketing destinations’ cultural and environmental difference
or distinctiveness, the overarching trope of the paradisal island means that they are often presented in homogeneous ways. Clichéd images of sea, sun, sand, and swaying palms have created
a situation in which “a more generic, global, and empty signifier of the tropical island could hardly
be imagined” (Sheller, 2003, p. 26), despite the enormous cultural, historical, and environmental
diversity of such islands.
1
Keele University, Staffordshire, UK
Corresponding Author:
Anthony Carrigan, School of Humanities, Keele University, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG
Email: [email protected]
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This process is not merely discursive. Caribbean islands’ natural and built environments,
particularly in coastal regions, are consistently subject to homogenizing transformations through
the development of tourism infrastructure. Moreover, the ways in which land is purchased,
resorts are owned, and profits are channeled away from islands by multinational corporations
(a phenomenon known as leakage, which can reach as high as 90%; Kempadoo, 2004, p. 21)
exhibits some of the industry’s neocolonial dimensions. Just as plantation economies greatly
benefited imperialist regimes, so tourism remaps aspects of these asymmetrical economic
flows, converting “primarily agricultural economies into pastures for pleasuring the leisured”
(Pattullo, 1996, p. 6). In many instances, the lack of economic and political parity experienced
by small islands in comparison with larger and more powerful nations makes it difficult for
them to exercise full autonomy when confronted by tourist developers’ demands for land and
services. Yet tourism also generates substantial income in many island states, providing muchneeded employment opportunities.
Given mass tourism’s pervasiveness and economic importance, many island states in the postcolonial Caribbean face severe challenges in retaining specificity while engaging with this
powerfully transformative global industry. I want to approach this crucial issue from the angle of
literary representation, responding to Carolyn Cartier’s assertion that tourism’s status as the
world’s largest industry “implicates a full range of questions about culture and political economy
in an era of globalization, and so must embrace issues beyond its traditionally more empirical
areas of inquiry” (2005, p. 2). Focusing on a few key moments in the epic poem produced by
St. Lucian writer and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, Omeros (1990), I will argue that, even as it
critiques exploitative practices, the poem also creates space for industry futures that reinforce the
particularity of St. Lucian modernity. This is achieved partly by highlighting the constructive
dimensions of tourism’s relationship with postcolonial cultural production.
Caribbean tourism development and its effects on the region’s cultures and ecologies have
been one of Walcott’s abiding concerns over the course of his highly prolific career. As early as
1970, in his essay “What the Twilight Says,” Walcott was warning that “folk art, the language,
the music, and . . . the economy, will accommodate . . . the centre of power that is foreign”
(1998a, pp. 23-24). He rails against the neocolonial dynamics of tourism-related vocations that
have prompted a situation in which “[t]he lean, sinewy strength of the folk dance has been
fattened and sucked into the limbo of the nightclub, the hotel cabaret, and all the other prostitutions of a tourist culture” (p. 24).1 However, reflecting on such opinions in 1986, shortly before
beginning work on Omeros, he tells Edward Hirsch that
[o]nce I saw tourism as a terrible danger to a culture. Now I don’t, maybe because I come
down here so often that perhaps literally I’m a tourist myself coming from America. But a
culture is only in danger if it allows itself to be. . . . During the period I’m talking about . . .
tourism . . . was just an extension really of master/servant. I don’t think it’s so anymore.
Here we have a generation that has strengthened itself beyond that. (Hirsch, 1986, p. 220)
This did not prevent Walcott from continuing to voice opposition to exploitative forms of tourism
development, although in recent years he has increasingly addressed the interface between
cultural and environmental concerns. He was particularly vocal, for instance, on learning in the
late 1980s of the Hilton hotel chain’s plans to locate their unashamedly named Jalousie Plantation
hotel between St. Lucia’s iconic twin volcanic peaks, the Pitons, criticizing the short-sightedness
of a government that was prepared to sacrifice what he considers to be a sacred landscape. It is
the equivalent, he says, of “building a McDonald’s next to Stonehenge,” or “writing ‘Fuck you’
on a wall in Mecca” (quoted in Burnett, 2000, p. 53). Nevertheless, the Jalousie Plantation opened
for business in 1992, the year of the quincentennial when Walcott was also awarded the Nobel
Prize (Melas, 2005, p. 148). This highlights the limited capacity of even one of St. Lucia’s most
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feted personalities to intervene in such developments through politicized opposition (see
Carrigan, 2006-2007, for comparative discussion involving tourism development in Barbados).
Paula Burnett observes that
[a]s an American resident, Walcott now seeks out the islands as refuge from the depersonalizing scale and style of the modern city and as communities where people still have time
for each other, but he conveys also a sense that this difference is doomed, as the islands
insidiously get to look, and be, like everywhere else. (2000, p. 53)
Despite his 1986 concession to more positive cultural negotiations of Caribbean tourism, his
fears regarding the homogenization of individual islands, which he describes in 1970 as a
“vision of a hundred Havanas and mini-Miamis” (1998a, p. 24), are still very much apparent in
his lyrical Nobel acceptance speech, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” (1998b).
This was delivered 2 years after Omeros’s publication, at a time when St. Lucia’s 135,000
inhabitants welcomed 340,000 visitors (a figure which by 2005 had more than doubled). Walcott
(1998b) states that
in our tourist brochures the Caribbean is a blue pool into which the republic dangles the
extended foot of Florida as inflated rubber islands bob and drinks with umbrellas float
towards her on a raft. This is how the islands from the shame of necessity sell themselves;
this is the seasonal erosion of their identity, that high-pitched repetition of the same images
of service that cannot distinguish one island from the other. . . . [T]he benign blight that
is tourism can infect all of those island nations, not gradually, but with imperceptible
speed, until each rock is whitened by the guano of white-winged hotels, the arc and descent
of progress. (pp. 81-82)
The way in which Caribbean island commoditization co-opts culture and nature is evident here
from Walcott’s use of a term with strong geological connotations (“erosion”) to describe
processes of identity change while at the same time invoking a register of consumption (the Latin
root of “erode” means “to gnaw”) that reflects the market-driven characteristics of mass tourism.
Counterpointing the deeply negative implications held by this description of invasive development
(ironically recast as the infectious nadir of “progress”), I will address the ambiguities that arise
from Walcott’s poetic interrogation of the industry’s effects in St. Lucia, an Eastern Caribbean
island where tourist expenditures accounted for 64% of GDP in 2000 (Gössling, 2003, p. 22).
This involves consideration of how Omeros’s negotiation of epic form creates an interrelationship
with its subject matter which binds the particularity of the aesthetic object to that of the island
it represents.
Although many Caribbean texts portray sides of island life that tourists rarely see, Walcott’s
narrator adopts stereotypical tourist perspectives at certain points in Omeros not only to contribute
to “the wealth and resonance of [the poem’s] imagery” (Melas, 2005, p. 147) but also to foreground tourism’s potential to play a constitutive rather than contrapuntal role in furthering less
exploitative development in St. Lucia. He achieves this by self-reflexively appropriating one of
tourism’s key visual practices: “see[ing] named scenes through a frame, such as the hotel window,
the car windscreen or the window of the coach” (Urry, 2002, p. 100). Such perspectives form part
of John Urry’s influential theory of the tourist gaze, which identifies the factors that endow
particular sites and sights with semiotic import for tourists. Although he avoids suggesting there
is a “single tourist gaze” or “universal experience that is true for all tourists at all times” (p. 1),
Urry observes that tourism’s visual economies are “socially organised” through the representations
of particular places across various media (p. 74). This involves a kind of “screening” that places
value on certain sites over others and can therefore “function to restrict or impair vision”
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(Huggan, 2001, p. 180). In this sense, sightseeing depends on the interrelationship between sensory
perception (primarily visual) and the social structures of the imagination, which is culturally
interpellated.
One effect of such selective viewing is to reduce the complexity of lived environments to
what Barry Curtis and Claire Pajaczkowska (1994) describe as “a surreal contingency which is
almost dreamlike” (p. 206). This is constructed, they suggest, with the aim of preventing travelers
from being consigned to “tourist hell”: sightseeing excursions “where meaning fails to congeal
in specific sites and remains illegibly diffuse, or where the spaces between sites overwhelm the
visitor with their insignificance” (1994, p. 206). Such sentiments are, of course, problematic in
their tendency to essentialize tourist motivations. They fail to account for tourists who relish the
unexpected or the contradictory (see Cartier, 2005, p. 5). However, Curtis and Pajaczkowska’s
(1994) observations correspond well with the kind of “dreamlike,” contingent environments
promoted by the juxtaposition of attractions in holiday brochures. These suppress the continuous or
“syndetic” reality of island landscapes (de Certeau, 1984, p. 101) by editing out their less
touristically pleasing components, a process that prompted Walcott to comment that “visitors to
the Caribbean must feel that they are inhabiting a succession of postcards” (1998b, p. 72). This
is precisely what he confronts in Omeros at the start of Book Six, when the narrator (who shares
biographical details with Walcott) returns to St. Lucia after touring Europe and North America
and takes a taxi from the airport to his hotel.
Claiming that “epic form in Omeros is ultimately articulated in terms of a spatial problematic
rather than a historical one,” endowing “cultural viability to a people’s existence in a place” as
opposed to their “unity . . . in historical time,” Natalie Melas suggests that this scene dramatizes
how, “[i]n the time of tourism, St. Lucia is a place become display, totally visible, detachable,
transportable” (2005, p. 52). This presents severe challenges to the poet and narrator as he
considers the transformative effects of St. Lucian tourism development during this deeply selfreflexive moment in the poem. In analyzing this, I will build on the insightful observations Melas
makes regarding Walcott’s justification for writing an epic two decades after he issued a warning about the potential for Caribbean subject-matter to pale into parody as a result of the
“disproportion between the bombast of the genre and the insignificance of provincial life” (pp.
147-148). Melas states that “St. Lucia itself is no longer provincial in the sense that it was in the
twilight of empire for it has gone, along with so much of the region, from a backwater of colonial history to a tourist Mecca” (p. 148). As such, the tendency toward mock-epic is attenuated
partly by the way in which the poem speaks directly to some of the key concerns regarding
global tourism development, including its implication in forms of environmental crisis and
neocolonialism (see also Carrigan, 2007, p. 154). However, whereas Melas focuses primarily
on how Walcott expresses frustration with touristic modes of viewing the commoditized landscape, I want to draw attention to the points of potentiality that also emerge regarding assertions
of island specificity in this scene.
Unlike the tourist-reader of Jamaica Kincaid’s jeremiad, A Small Place (1988), who repeatedly fails to comprehend the significance of postcolonial Antigua’s landscape on a taxi ride
from the airport, Walcott’s narrator is very much aware of his surroundings’ range of significations and their implications for aesthetic practice. He describes how:
I saw the coastal villages receding as
the highway’s tongue translated bush into forest,
the wild savannah into moderate pastures,
that other life going in its “change for the best,”
its peace paralyzed in a postcard, a concrete
future ahead of it all, in the cinder-blocks
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of hotel development with the obsolete
craft of the carpenter, as I sensed, in the neat
marinas, the fisherman’s phantom.
(Walcott, 1990, p. 227)
Walcott conducts a skilful counterdiscursive reversal of linear perceptions of progress in this
passage. While expressing nostalgia for the passing crafts of the past, he does not essentialize a
view of the natural landscape as paradisal and unchanging. Instead, he uses the taxi’s rapid
movement to map the kind of linguistic “translation” inherent in colonial perceptions of
Caribbean landscapes onto the physical changes presented by tourist modernity. Rather than
“developing” the island, the narrator interprets the tourism industry’s operations in terms of
“paralysis”: a “concrete / future” that undermines the nuanced variety of physical features
formerly evident in St. Lucia. Complementing this, the negative aspects of tourism development’s
effects on local human labor patterns and environmental relations are symbolized through the fate
of one of the poem’s protagonists, Hector, whose death is described in the section immediately
preceding this scene.
Refashioning the central love triangle in Homer’s Iliad, Omeros opens with two St. Lucian
fishermen, Hector and Achille, sparring over the love of a beautiful local woman, Helen. However,
whereas Achille continues to ply this trade throughout the poem, Hector is seduced by the lure of
tourist lucre and trades his former vocation for “The Comet, a sixteen-seater passenger-van”
(Walcott, 1990, p. 117), which he uses to ferry tourists across the island. There is a self-reflexive,
poetic justice in Hector’s fate, as his desire to make money prompts him to drive at uncontrollable and ultimately fatal speeds. When his driver comments that Hector “had a nice woman.
Maybe he died for her,” the narrator silently adds “[f]or her and tourism,” concluding that: “He’d
paid the penalty of giving up the sea / as graceless and treacherous as it had seemed, / for the taxi
business” (pp. 230-231). As a former fisherman, Hector embodies the switch in patterns of
St. Lucian employment (characteristic of the Caribbean more widely) that has seen many workers
move from agricultural careers to employment in the service industry and is reflected in Walcott’s
mobile depiction of landscape here. Just as tourism degrades the natural environments it celebrates, Hector emblematizes the process of (self-) “development” that ultimately consumes the
very thing it aims to promote.
These points suggest that Walcott’s narrator conforms ideologically to the attitudes of antitourism commentators. Melas claims that Walcott’s observations on landscape commoditization
in this passage foreground his realization that “[w]here there ought to be the density of historical
memory, there is someone else’s souvenir” (2005, p. 152). St. Lucia’s cultural, historical, and
environmental particularity is hereby reduced to the kind of picture postcard representation that
involves a “spatio-temporal dislocation of nature, and the consequent decontextualization of
those that exist within it” (Edwards, 1996, p. 200). In this light, it is interesting that Walcott has
himself been criticized for adopting a romanticizing perspective, detached from the everyday
problems affecting those like the many residents of Soufrière—the town next to the Pitons—
who disagreed with his opposition to Hilton’s Jalousie Plantation due to the employment
opportunities it offered. This has some significant generic ramifications. For example, although
Paula Burnett describes Omeros as mock-Homeric rather than Homeric in design, she also sees
the concern with the collective—a convention of the epic genre—as “absolutely central” to
Walcott’s poem, along with “the relation of the poet to his society” (2000, p. 161). Yet for Ian
Gregory Strachan (2002), Walcott is found wanting on precisely this point. Strachan argues that,
in valorizing peasant life and ignoring the fact that the “poor of the Caribbean [are] cramming
into city slums,” Walcott delivers a “model of liberation” that is “far too individualist in nature”
and “evades socioeconomic and political realities” (p. 209). Indeed, he suggests that one of the
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few portrayals of successful group activism in Walcott’s work, involving the Rastafarians who
attempt to create Eden in the Jamaican mountains in his 1976 musical O Babylon!, is “achieved
through moving . . . away . . . from the rest of society” and its “social, economic, and political
problems” (pp. 209-210; italics added). This is ironic given that Walcott’s returnee narrator in
Omeros offers his thoughts on industrial development and tourist modernity as he moves toward
St. Lucia’s built-up areas.2
Rather than evading difficult questions, one remarkable feature of this section of the poem is
the way its touristic critique turns on the poetic voice itself. Comparing “the obsolete / craft of
the carpenter” to his own “craft,” which “required the same / crouching care” (Walcott, 1990,
p. 227), the narrator poses a series of rhetorical questions that challenge Omeros’s touristic and
neocolonial complicities, as well as its propensity to romanticize St. Lucian life from afar:
Didn’t I want the poor
to stay in the same light so that I could transfix
them in amber, the afterglow of an empire[?]
[. . .]
Had they waited for me
to develop my craft? Why hallow that pretence
of preserving what they left, the hypocrisy
of loving them from hotels [. . .]?
[. . .]
Art is History’s nostalgia, it prefers a thatched
roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church
above a bleached village.
(Walcott, 1990, pp. 227-228)
Commenting perceptively on this section, Melas suggests that, “haunted in a particularly acute
and complicit way by the colonial past,” Walcott implies here that his own art is “inimical to
change.” He therefore “quite openly poses his virtuosic epic poem of the tourist era as a manifest
anachronism” (2005, p. 150). There is an even darker implication if a double meaning is read in
the question: “Had they waited for me / to develop my craft?” The verbs in these lines bind
tourism, colonial ideology, and poetic vocation together as the narrator subtly implies that
“the poor” of St. Lucia have worked as waiters (“waited”) for the benefit of his own poetical
“self-development.” The narrator’s “craft,” like the hotels he “hypocritically” loves them from,
seems to serve the interests of an elite minority, “transfixing” local inhabitants in circuits of
impoverishment and underdevelopment. Yet this is a conspicuously negative conclusion to draw,
particularly as it represents only part of the work performed by this important section in the
wider context of Omeros. For Walcott does not just portray the “thatched / roof”; both in this
example and throughout Omeros he is highly attentive to phenomena that might be considered
less aesthetically pleasing, such as the “cinder-blocks / of hotel development.”
Walcott’s (1990) syndetic depiction of the landscape in this scene undermines his narrator’s
complaint that St. Lucia’s “gold sea” has become “flat as a credit-card, extending its line / to a
beach that now looked just like everywhere else, / like Greece or Hawaii” (p. 229). This critique
is laced with destabilizing irony as, first, the “credit card” simile is profoundly antiromantic, and
second, the resemblance between modern touristic Greece and St. Lucia further heightens the
changing yet comparably epic milieu of both, with Caribbean and Mediterranean linked by
Homeric and touristic similarities. By juxtaposing this form of modern, touristic homogeneity
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alongside a “nostalgic” aesthetic that makes a “paradise” of local “poverty” (p. 228), Walcott’s
narrator is not presenting a simple dialectic between the Arcadian vision of a timeless, premodern
St. Lucia and its uniformly bleak, contemporary neocolonial outlook. Rather, he offers a
landscape that is endowed with synchronic meaning and implicated in continual processes of
social, cultural, and economic change. The poem interrogates the ways in which an increasingly
globalized island both retains and disposes of aspects of its colonial history while participating
in the production of fresh possibilities. Tourism is not merely a neocolonial continuation of
past practices but a vector of change that simultaneously acts as a subject of cultural and environmental analysis. It bears relations to forms of colonial subjugation even as it provides a conduit
for new forms of individual autonomy to emerge. This entails a complex and multilayered vision
of St. Lucian modernity in which the pace of environmental change is reflected by the mobile
landscape observations generated from the perspective of that fast-paced, double-edged emblem
of modernity and change, the taxi.
On one level, Walcott’s taxi represents a meeting-point between changing forms of local
employment and the infrastructure tourism entails. On another, its dynamic presence in Walcott’s
syndetic, poetical landscape functions as a metaphor for St. Lucia’s evolving, “glocalized”
modernity (Robertson, 1995). It is an example of how processes of localization and globalization
are condensed as the specificities of St. Lucian life inflect the operation of transnational industries
such as tourism, which is portrayed by Walcott as participating in (among other things) the epical
economies of Homeric Greece and the insular environments of the postcolonial Caribbean.
The narrator displays a subtle awareness of the taxi’s complex, polyvalent role when he states:
“My craft required . . . the same crabbed, natural devotion / of the hand that stencilled a flowered
window-frame” (Walcott, 1990, p. 227). “Craft” can be read here both as his poetry and as the
dynamic vehicle he is in the process of depicting. In this sense, his vehicle of representation
(writing) and the vehicle he portrays (the taxi) become co-constitutive, offering synergetic
perspectives on the tourism-driven changes affecting the St. Lucian landscape. Within this
relationship, neither written representation of touristic phenomena nor the environmentally
embedded reality of tourist modernity precedes the other. Walcott’s negotiation of mendacious
tourism marketing strategies that cloak his narrator’s concerns beneath the asyndetic “paralysis” of
picture-postcard aesthetics is energized by a strategic ambivalence in which artistic production
and touristic reality propel each other.3
Such ambivalence is brought into sharp relief in another scene later in the poem, as the blind
Homeric muse Seven Seas shares coincidental feelings with Walcott’s narrator. In Book Seven,
he warns “that man was an endangered / species now, a spectre, . . . and that once men were
satisfied / with destroying men they would move on to Nature” (1990, p. 300). This consideration
causes him “[i]n fury” to sail “south, away from the trawlers / who were dredging the banks,”
and to think about relocating elsewhere:
He might have to leave
the village for good, its hotels and marinas,
the ice-packed shrimps of pink tourists; and find someplace,
some cove he could settle
[. . .]
far from the discos, the transports, the greed, the noise.
(Walcott, 1990, p. 301)
The metaphorical description of tourists as shrimps has a worrying proleptic quality, positioning
tourist bodies as grotesquely parodic ciphers of a nature that is rapidly being polluted and unsustainably
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consumed; “the shrimp were finished” (1990, p. 301), he thinks to himself. Yet unlike the
narrator of Walcott’s autobiographical poem, Another Life (1973), who despondently intones:
“Hotel, hotel, hotel, hotel, hotel and a club: The Bitter End” (1986, p. 292), Seven Seas deems
that the “end” is not necessarily nigh, finding “no cove he liked as much as his own village,”
and therefore choosing to return to it “whatever the future brought” (1990, p. 301). His decision
is perhaps based partly on the recognition that the destruction of “man” and “nature” are not
easily separable: tourists transform into shrimps while the trawlers he despises are anthropomorphized
by the pronoun “who.” But on a structural level it also represents Walcott’s ultimate assertion
that, rather than deserting the Caribbean, the “muse” of poetry continues to play a vital role in
depicting its contemporary “touristed” landscapes. Such environments are defined by Cartier as
represent[ing] an array of experiences and goals acted out by diverse people in locales that
are subject to tourism but which are also places of historic and integral meaning, where
‘leisure/tourism’ . . . economies are also local economies, and where people are engaged in
diverse aspects of everyday life. (2005, p. 3)
Extrapolating an ethic of sustainable practice in relation to portrayals of intensely touristed
landscapes requires acknowledgment that “Art” is not only “History’s nostalgia” but also its
anticipation. Walcott states in “The Antilles” that poetry “conjugates both tenses simultaneously:
both past and present” (1998b, pp. 69-70); in my reading of Omeros, it also conjugates the future.
Rob Shields asserts that “images of particular environments or places serve both referential
[. . .] and anticipatory functions (serving as a guide to future encounters at or in given sites and
places)” (1991, p. 14). The examples addressed here show how a destabilization of the dreamlike, asyndetic clichés associated with paradisal island stereotypes creates discursive space
from which the industry’s various operations in St. Lucia can be valorized and critiqued simultaneously. The ambivalence that inhabits relationships between colonial histories, touristic
practices, and modes of writing foregrounds the uneven processes of globalization and modernization of which postcolonial island tourism is symptomatic. Yet it also highlights the potential
for St. Lucian specificity to be retained through engagement with these developments’ reconfiguration of local environments. From the stories related in taxi cabs to aesthetic productions
such as Walcott’s epic itself, Omeros shows how St. Lucia’s touristed landscape is being integrated into local cultural practices. Indeed, there is a provocative connection between the way
in which Walcott domesticates the Homeric epic, putting it in service of Caribbean aesthetics
and the representation of St. Lucia specifically, and how the poem’s emphasis on the contrapuntal or counterparadisal stories embedded within landscapes helps assert insular specificity.
The latter not only undermines some of mass tourism’s environmental homogenizations, but
also enhances the kind of particularity that so often attracts tourists seeking distinctiveness in
their chosen destinations (see also Carrigan, 2006-2007, pp. 71-72).
Drawing on Robert Kern’s ecocritical work, Omeros’s portrayals of tourism development
could be said to “amplify the reality of the environment” in ways that elevate it from the status of
“setting” (2003, p. 260). Attention to the visual economies associated with forms of tourism helps
frame specific island environments as active participants in the wider ecological processes to
which human actors and actions contribute and by which they are simultaneously defined. The
kind of “ethics of seeing” (Sontag, 2001, p. 3) sponsored by Omeros (particularly through
appropriation of the tourist gaze, although I also mean “seeing” in the sense of “understanding”)
involves more than a counterdiscursive conception of fetishized postcolonial island landscapes.
It demands a multifaceted assessment of how tourism development can be enriching and vitiating
in cultural, ecological, and economic terms. Walcott’s “glocalized” portrayal of an increasingly
touristed environment therefore contributes to changing the texture of touristic reality, providing
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a very different “guide to future encounters” (Shields, 1991, p. 14) than those conventionally
accessed by tourists in St. Lucia. In so doing, his work acknowledges the need for change but also
guards against what he calls “the dangers of change” (1998b, p. 82). This continues to be a
crucial consideration in postcolonial island contexts as the intersection between spatial disputes
and local place-attachments is enhanced by bounded topography and underwritten by colonial
legacies which have paved the way for exploitative corporate enterprises. Understanding how
future economic as well as ecological sustainability practices must be linked to cultural
expressions of St. Lucian modernity is a challenge Omeros poses and provides pathways
toward addressing.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication
of this article.
Funding
The author thanks the AHRC for a Doctoral Award which supported the research and writing of this
article.
Notes
1. Walcott was at this time based in Trinidad, whose culture had already been reduced to a “night-club
turn” by tourism a decade earlier, according to diasporic Trinidadian writer V. S. Naipaul in his notoriously negative Caribbean travelogue The Middle Passage (1962/2001). Naipaul proceeds to claim that
“nothing pleases Trinidadians so much as to see their culture being applauded by White American tourists
in night-clubs” (p. 67).
2. Tellingly, despite writing a chapter-long critique of Walcott’s touristic complicities, Strachan makes no
extended engagement with Omeros.
3. This is a key feature of Walcott’s complex conceptualization of different forms of tourism in Omeros, a point
I have discussed elsewhere in relation to his portrayal of cruise tourism (Carrigan, 2007, pp. 150-157).
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Bio
Anthony Carrigan is Lecturer in English at Keele University, UK. He is currently completing a monograph on postcolonial tourism and has published widely in the postcolonial field on topics including
tourism, sustainability, indigeneity, and the environment.
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