Performing Walcott, Performing Homer

This chapter explores three performances of Derek Walcott’s epic poem, Omeros. The first was never realized, but can be traced in the draft scripts and storyboards that Walcott penned for a film of Omeros; the second was adapted and directed by Bill Buckhurst, and staged at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in London in 2014 and 2015; the third is the artist Isaac Julien’s filmic installation piece, Paradise Omeros (2002). Each of these reworks Walcott’s poem for performance in ways that reflect on the multiple oral traditions from which his poem draws, as well as on the intervening appropriation of those spoken forms into literary texts.