Call and Response:Derek Walcott’s Collaboration with Homer in His THE ODYSSEY: A STAGE VERSION Rachel D. Friedman Towards the end of Omeros, Walcott’s poetic persona, after admitting to Omeros that he has never read his poems “all the way through,” proclaims to him that he was the “freshest” of all of his readers (1990.283): I have always heardyour voice in that sea, master, it was the same songof the desert shaman, and when I was a boy your name was as wide as a bay, as I walked alongthe curled brow of the surf; the word “Homer” meant joy,joy in battle, in work, in death, then the numbered peace of the surf’s benedictions, it rose in the cedars,in the laurier-cannelles, pages of rustling trees.Master, I was the freshest of all your readers. For me, coming to Walcott as a classicist who had spent years reading and studying the Homeric poems, the freshness of his readings was stunning and invigorating and has helped me to discover a Homer that I did not previously have access to.1 [End Page 59] Walcott has often insisted on the simultaneity of great art and of the damaging limitations imposed by readings based on chronology. He encourages us, instead, to listen to the conversations that emerge between him and the poets he has read. At a symposium at Duke University, for example, held in 1995, he spoke in a room filled with collages by Romare Bearden, the great African-American artist who grew up in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance. Walcott used the occasion to reflect on Bearden’s response to Homer in his Odyssey collages and analogized Bearden’s creative process to his own (1997.240–41): And yet I think it is this whole freshness of experience that made me feel that my references to Homer, and to all the other writers I was indebted to in the book, were perfectly valid. And I knew it would lead to a kind of academic acclaim that I’m not very happy about—“Oh, so much is owed to so-and-so”—I hate that. It is a patronizing way of saying about, for instance, Romare’s work: “Look at those black cutouts. They are like Greek vases.” Yes, they may be like Greek vases, but they are simultaneous concepts, not chronological concepts. The black cutout of a diving figure is no more historical than the silhouette of a Greek athlete on a vase. It’s not a question of where you stop, since you then have to go from the Greek silhouette back to the Egyptian profile, et cetera. If you think of art merely in terms of chronology, you are going to be patronizing to certain cultures. But if you think of art as a simultaneity that is inevitable in terms of certain people, then Joyce is a contemporary of Homer (which Joyce knew). Walcott’s appeal to the work of Bearden to explore the nature of the relationship between two artists across the ages can provide us with a fruitful starting point for considering the nature of Walcott’s own collaboration with Homer in his 1993 The Odyssey: A Stage Version (henceforth SVO), the focus of my attention here. [End Page 60] In the catalogue of a recent exhibit of the Bearden Odyssey collages at the DC Moore Gallery in New York, Robert G. O’Meally, a scholar of jazz, effectively compares this process of collaboration between Bearden and Homer to the kind of improvisation that happens between two jazz musicians playing together (2007.22–23): But Bearden was also an improviser in the “Harlem” sense that that title implies collaboration. For like Charlie Parker, working so closely with Dizzy Gillespie that on records you can feel the two men breathing together as they create their exciting musical lines, Bearden in this series of collages gets close enough to The Odyssey of Homer that the two artists play together like section-mates in a jazz band. Just as Homer the writer/singer/(and perhaps dancer) of poetic lines depended on his audiences to complete the creative process (jazz people...