How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Page)
Quote #7
[…] if you're content with not knowing what our names mean,/then I am not Afolabe, your father, and you look through/my body as the light looks through a leaf. I am not here/or a shadow. And you, nameless son, are only the ghost/of a name. (XXV.iii.138)
Achille's discomfort at not knowing the name for river and tree gods just got kicked up a notch. His encounter with his father's ghost makes him acutely aware that he really doesn't know who he is. His time at the settlement with his ancestors is meant to ground him in the reality of his family's past.
Quote #8
[… one] who the serpent-god conducted miles off his course/for some blasphemous offence and how he would pay for it/by forgetting his parents, his tribe, and his own spirit/for an albino god, and how that warrior was scarred/for innumerable moons so badly that he would disinherit/himself. (XXVI.i.139-140)
This story that Achille hears in the settlement of his ancestors could very well be his own, or Hector's. Afolabe has already taken Achille to task for losing curiosity about his true name, and we know that Walcott later shows us that Hector places himself in hell because he believes in a "white theology" (i.e., Christianity). Forgetting his roots entirely would be the worst thing that could happen to Achille, since it would mean spiritual disinheritance.
Quote #9
"The black bugger beautiful,/though!" The mate nodded, and Achille felt the phrase lift/his heart as high as the bird whose wings wrote the word/"Afolabe," in letters of the sea-swift./"The king going home," he said as he and the mate/watched the frigate steer into that immensity/of seraphic space whose cumuli were a gate/dividing for a monarch entering a city. (XXX.i.158-159)
On his way back to the island after his spirit journey, Achille spots a black frigate bird receiving fish from the white gulls around him. He is struck by the majesty of the bird and takes it as a sign from his ancestors that his personal dignity, once forgotten, has been returned.