CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ANCIENT POETS

In his Autobiography, Malcolm X claims that the Homeric Question is something that preoccupied him during his incarceration: What Malcolm X decided to do in prison (i.e. devote the rest of his life to ‘telling the white man about himself’) is expressed in terms of an ancient Greek life. And that ancient life turns out to be the life of a black slave. The blinding of Homer – the most traumatic event in the poet's ancient biography – becomes an image for the Middle Passage, the defining catastrophe in the collective history of the African-American people, the point of no return. Malcolm X presents Homer not only as a kidnapped ancestor, however, but as a literary precursor. The white man wants to hear about his own great deeds, and what Malcolm X sets out to do is precisely to sing about the deeds of the white man, even if in terms that do not conform to eulogy. The Autobiography of Malcolm X thus sets out to emancipate Homer's original project: rather than ‘the Europeans’ glorious accomplishments’, it promises an account of their misdeeds. The point of contestation is not, in the first instance, the content of the Iliad and Odyssey (which is immediately conceded as what Europeans like to hear), but the identity of the author, and therefore the context, process and meaning of his creation. The fact that there is a scholarly Question about Homer opens up space for this shifting of the poet's identity.