Postcoloniality's polyphonous voices: Toni Morrison's 'Tar Baby' and Derek Walcott's 'Omeros'

This study attempts to situate Toni Morrison's Tar Baby and Derek Walcott's Omeros in a postcolonial, specifically Caribbean, context. The characters in Tar Baby and Omeros exist in a world of contentious and healing forces. Morrison's and Walcott's visions of the Caribbean world unfold conflicting histories of glory, degradation, and exploitation. Their songs of the Caribbean present diverse and polyphonous melodies. Both authors explore the subject of postcoloniality in an attempt to analyze the residual effects of colonialism and postcolonialism on both African and European characters in their works. They also endeavor to reach what Carol P. Marsh-Lockett specifies as an attempt to "counter inherited realities and to (re)construct and acknowledge a hitherto squashed or simply ignored Caribbean truth."; In their pursuit of truth, Walcott and Morrison create characters whose quests for wholeness and identity in this turbulent world incorporate theories of precolonial cultural recuperation and postcolonial syncreticity. Along with these theories, colonialism's tie to the African slave trade lends credence to theorist Antonio Benitez-Rojo's definition of the "plantation system" as an agrarian institution based on the production of cash crops in the Americas. Simultaneously, Benitez-Rojo declares the importance of the "plantation system," a hierarchically structured society established by the agricultural industry and the enslavement of Africans (plantation system). As a result of both systems, a stratified community emerged, yet the melding of languages, beliefs, and customs nurtured a unique sense of cultural syncreticity.; Morrison and Walcott make use of these applications of theory in Omeros and Tar Baby. While both authors utilize a vast array of Western traditions, their works are replete with folk cultural aspects of the African Diaspora. They investigate the themes of exile, creolization, and the plantation. Morrison and Walcott acknowledge and revel in the hybridization of the New World culture, but their characters' odysseys conclude with a glorification of Africa and the natural world as a means of salvation and self-realization.