Nobel laureate Derek Walcott begins his epic poem Omeros with a story of a festering wound that won’t heal. The story is rich in symbolism: the wound was inflicted by the anchor of a sunken slave ship, and the plant that ultimately provides salvation grew from a seed that had been transplanted from Africa, borne by a swallow. The wounded fisherman bathes in water suffused with this plant inside of a rusty cauldron that had been a part of a former slave plantation. Walcott describes him emerging as if from a baptism, like a second Adam in a new world. For the characters of the poem, healing does not come from repression or neglect of history’s wounds or from perpetual cries for revenge, but from accepting and transforming the meaning of the conditions that those wounds left behind. Walcott’s native island of St. Lucia becomes, then, not a cursed vestige of a violent colonial history but instead what he calls a “self-healing island.”
George is a beautiful man who writes beautifully. I am grateful for his honesty and his openness.
As the author of Hebrews wrote, it is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Or, as one midrash puts words into God's mouth: I heal with the weapon with which I wound. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away: blessed be the name of the Lord! May we learn from Him to love our brothers as ourselves and find mercy by being merciful.
What a moving essay. This one will stay with me for a long time.
George is a beautiful man who writes beautifully. I am grateful for his honesty and his openness.
As the author of Hebrews wrote, it is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Or, as one midrash puts words into God's mouth: I heal with the weapon with which I wound. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away: blessed be the name of the Lord! May we learn from Him to love our brothers as ourselves and find mercy by being merciful.