How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Page)
Quote #7
[…] a republic without class,/tiered only on wealth, and eaten with prejudice/from its pillared base, the Athenian demos demonic and its ocracy crass,/corrupting the blue-veined marble with its disease,/stillborn as a corpse, for all those ideals went cold/in the heat of its hate. (XLI.i.206)
Hatred flows both ways as the narrator travels through the Deep South. The classic architecture leads him to think about the Greek culture that inspired it and the ideals that supposedly transferred to the New World. He realizes that there's nothing like hatred (dehumanizing a whole race) to pervert a good thing (democracy).
Quote #8
"This is we Calypso,/Captain, who treat we like swine, you ain't seeing shore./Let this sun burn you black and blister your lips so/it hurt them to give orders, f*** you and your war." (XL.ii.203-204)
When the narrator is in Greece, he imagines Odysseus on his ship and the response of his crew, forced into dangers and eternal wandering not of their own making. He's clearly also thinking of the Middle Passage and the curses that might be on the lips of that "crew" as well.
Quote #9
Feel the shame, the self-hate/draining from all our bodies in the exhausted sleeping/of a rumshop closed Sunday. There was no difference/between me and Philoctete. (XLVIII.iii.245)
Most feelings of self-reproach refer back to the shared wound between Philoctete and the narrator, which gives shame an ancestral root. In these cases, shame not only makes them feel dreadful about themselves, it isolates them from the community at large and from the people they are meant to love.