How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Page)
Quote #10
And then Achille died/again. Thinking of the ants arriving at the sea's rim,/or climbing the pyramids of coal and entering inside/the dark hold, far from this river and the griot's hymn. (XXVII.ii.146)
As he watches his people being led away in chains, Achille's despair is acute. He knows the horrors that await them and would do anything to prevent it—but he can't change the course of history.
Quote #11
They had wept, not for/their wives only, their fading children, but for strange,/ordinary things. This one, who was a hunter,/wept for a sapling lance whose absent heft sang/in his palm's hollow. One, a fisherman, for an ochre/river encircling his calves (XXVIII.iii.151)
This is the Middle Passage, where enslaved Africans were split from their tribes and families and imprisoned in the holds of a slave ship. The pain they feel, Walcott points out, comes from the loss of a life to which they can never return.
Quote #12
I was as old as her/exhausted prayer, as her wisps of memory floated/with a vague patience, telling her body: "Wait,"/when all that brightness had withered like a memory's flower, like the allamanda's bells and the pale lilac/bougainvillea vines that had covered our gabled house./They, like her natural memory, would not come back. (XXXII.i.166)
When the narrator visits his mother in a nursing home, he reflects on the cruelty of dementia, which leaves the body fine but eats away at the memory and intellect. The moments of clarity that she experiences are sad reminders of the life she's left behind—though she's still alive.