Can the subaltern sing? Analogy, alienation and discursive precarity in Derek Walcott’s Omeros

Abstract

ABSTRACT The contribution of postcolonial writing to our understanding of precarity lies in its post-structuralist emphasis on the question of representation so that the act of representing precarity becomes discursively precarious. Gayatri Spivak’s foundational essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” provides us with conceptual tools to problematize what may be called “discursive precarity” – that is, that set of enunciative conditions in which intellectuals speak on behalf of the precariat – but also run the risk of silencing them by substituting subaltern voices with their own. The article explores Derek Walcott’s Omeros as a poem of discursive precarity by examining a rhetorically unstable double-movement, wherein the poet-narrator’s identification with, and alienation from, the subaltern is dialectically and irremediably mediated by his own position of privilege. Paradoxically, the poem can only achieve legitimacy through the acknowledgement of its lack of legitimacy to sing of, and for, the subaltern.