Afolabe

Character Analysis

The Importance of Being Afolabe

It's only natural that a poet would be obsessed with the meaning of words and utilize them to the full. We see Walcott do just this with his punning ("ances-tree") and the playful parsing of the Greek name Omeros into his home dialect (II.iii.14). Words are intensely personal here and each one matters.

It's no surprise, then, that Walcott creates a character who exists primarily to highlight issues of language and naming. Say hello to Afolabe, whom we first meet in Midshipman Plunkett's timeline. Afolabe is enslaved and attached to a British regiment on St. Lucia, valiantly leading the effort to position a cannon in the harbor to fire at French ships. His successful leadership results in something unexpected and probably unwelcome: It earns him the name Achilles.

The admiral who gives him the name probably thinks he is doing Afolabe a great honor—Achilles is no joke—but the re-naming of a person is a re-making of him, since names are a reflection of cultural and family preferences. Afolabe's story is a relatively light example of how personal identities are destroyed and recreated at the whim of colonialist captors. Worse ones follow.

When Achille takes his spirit-journey to Africa, he encounters his father and ancestors in their original settlement. Afolabe spends the first few moments with his son stuck on introductions; he's horrified by Achille's apathy toward his own enigmatic name (what does "Achille" mean, anyway?), and he gives the whippersnapper a good schooling on the significance of a name:

"A name means something. The qualities desired in a son,
and even a girl-child; so even the shadows who called
you expected one virtue, since every name is a blessing,
since I am remembering the hope I had for you as a child.
Unless the sound means nothing. Then you would be nothing." (XXV.iii.137)

Afolabe's biggest challenge in this scenario is convincing his son of the importance of linguistic inheritance in the transmission of culture and cultivation of personal identity. And it's a good thing that Achille gets it, because Afolabe is plenty willing to disown his child over the young man's unwillingness to know more about his name. For Afolabe, it shows a lack of dignity unbecoming one of his tribe. Well then.

Afolabe cannot fathom why his son would be so indifferent to his name, since he himself sees it as the foundation of identity. But we have to remember: This is Afolabe before the Middle Passage. He does not know of the fate that awaits him on the other side of the Atlantic, where everything about his way of life will be disrupted and changed—including his name.

My Father, Myself

Seven Seas gets it right: Achille returns to Afolabe in Africa to seek his true identity. He's not really there to save his people from the horrors of enslavement (though he wants to); his real driving purpose is to meet himself face-to-face. When he sees Afolabe for the first time, Achille finds something quite familiar:

He sought his own features in those of their life-giver,
and saw two worlds mirrored there: the hair was surf
curling round a sea-rock, the forehead a frowning river,

as they swirled in the estuary of bewildered love,
and Time stood between them. (XXV.iii.136)

Afolabe's face seems intimately connected with his own land and culture ("frowning river")—but also with Achille's ("surf curling round a sea-rock"). It's as though Afolabe's face holds all of Achille's past, but also his present: His origins are stamped in Afolabe's features, and in reading them, Achille comes closer to understanding his true identity.

The nobility and dignity that Achille detects in his father comes back to him when he returns to St. Lucia and sees Afolabe's name written in the sky by the wings of the frigate-bird.

Any guesses about which African name Achille wants to give Helen's baby? Yeah, we'd put money on Afolabe, too.