Ants

Pro tip: In the world of Omeros, you probably don't want to crush any ants. They may be tiny, but they represent some serious might in this poem.

The key to this symbol can be found early in the text, when the narrator meets with his ghost-father for the first time. He reminds his son of the women who carried heavy baskets of coal on their heads for mere pennies to support their families, recalling: "the unending/line crossing like ants without touching for the whole day" (XIII.iii.74). And when they reached the top of their climb, he notes: "There, like ants or angels, they see their native town,/unknown, raw, insignificant" (XIII.iii.75). They are above their town, but not necessarily empowered by this (ants are tiny) or really part of it (angels, after all, aren't earthly).

These women in particular represent not just a lost generation of ancestors; they are also the purveyors of culture and language. They embody a whole way of life that is all but lost to the characters in the text. Achille feels the searing guilt of one who should remember the "true names" for things in the natural world, words in a language that he doesn't understand but that he perceives to be in his blood.

Ma Kilman also experiences the frustrating loss of ancestral knowledge when she goes on the memory quest to find the root or herb that will heal Philoctete's wound. It isn't until she hears the call of the ants (these are actual ants, friends) in a language that she recognizes that she can succeed in her mission:

Her hair sprung free as the moss. Ants scurried
through the wiry curls, barring, then passing each other

the same message with scribbling fingers and forehead
touching forehead. Ma Kilman bent hers forward,
and as her lips moved with the ants, her mossed skull heard

the ants talking the language of her great-grandmother (XLVIII.ii.243-244)

You read that right: The ants are transmitting the lost language of Ma Kilman's ancestors through their little antennae. It's not exactly personification; it's more like transmigration—the simile Walcott uses earlier becomes reality.

Although the ant comes across as a rather noble little creature for the services it renders, let's make no mistake: It's not exactly a noble creature—in fact, we generally use the image of the ant to convey feelings of smallness and insignificance. Walcott plays on this habit when he chooses ants as his point of comparison for the women crushed (literally and figuratively) by the weight of their servitude as they carry coal.

Achille sees this line up when he envisions his newly enslaved ancestors as "ants arriving at the sea's rim/or climbing the pyramids of coal" (XXVII.ii.146). And when it comes to their descendants who deal with the psychological wounds of slavery, they also are presented as little, shame-filled ants (XLVIII.iii.245).

Walcott himself is even an ant: "I was an ant on the forehead of an atlas,/the stroke of one spidery palm on a cloud's page,/an asterisk only" (LIX.i.294). On the one hand, he's feeling supremely insignificant, humbled by his smallness in the historical perspective of things—but on the other, he's become his island. Like St. Lucia, he is a speck on the atlas, a footnote existing on the margins of history. But he's also an entire freaking island.

If this ant business sounds depressing, well, that's because it totally can be. We see both the narrator and Major Plunkett looking for a way to insert St. Lucia into the epic History of the World (that's right, we busted out capitalization for that one) because they feel it has been forgotten. But Walcott makes it clear that St. Lucia holds a unique place in history and in his own mind:

[…] The sea was my privilege.
And a fresh people. The roar of famous cities
entered the sea-almond's branches and then tightened

into silence (LIX.i.295)

Ants they may be (as most of us are), but the island filters away the violence of history and gives Walcott a rare insight into its place in the world.