Derek Walcott and Reinaldo Arenas wrote Caribbean epics with references to ancient Greek epics. In the hybrid work Otra vez el mar (Farewell to the Sea), which contains prose and free verse, Hector, a Cuban poet catches sight of Homer through the blur of a cigarette smoke while another battle of Troy is being waged on the sand: Cuban Acheans and Troyans fighting with phalluses instead of swords. In the long poem Omeros, the narrator has a vision of the Greek Homer emerging amidst the Saint-Lucian foam whereas Hector is not a warrior but a fisherman.
In various aspects, the politics of these two texts deal with a revival approach of democracy. For instance, Homeric names become Caribbean names. Besides, by portraying Hector either as a fisherman or as a homosexual, both writers mock heroic epics but they are at the same time democratizing our idea of grandeur.
In the Cuban political context, this contest of heroism can be read as a critique of tropical Marxism. But it is also a denunciation of a mechanical repetition of a European system. Having in mind the slavery aspect of Athenian democracy, Omeros’s narrator criticizes the American transposition of a system with “its demos demonic and its ocracy crass.”
In this light, it might be relevant then to focus on the poetic strategies used by the writers to open their texts to a freer understanding of epics.