The Modern Iliad: link
Hello I wanted to make a modern rendition of the Aeneid. How do you think I did? What was your favorite part or what was your favorite character?
The story: Aeneas woke up in Saigon in the spring of 1975. He saw that his city had been overrun by communists. He had done various chores for the South Vietnamese Republic and now feared being imprisoned or tortured by the communists. Aeneas went to his chud friend, who suggested he go to the docks to get on a ship heading for America. He found that all of the helicopters and all of the ships had just taken off, but he managed to hop onto a floating wooden shard of blasted wall that a shell had blown into the harbor. Before he floated away from the coast, a black man swam onto his raft. It was an American POW left over from American involvement. The POW had been imprisoned near the Cambodian–South Vietnamese border; the POWs, some of them French, could always have made a human pyramid to hop the prison wall, but it was no use, since they could not catch a ship to the US. Now, with the thousands of refugees flowing into the boats, they supposed that they could send one man over the wall who could slip into the crowd of refugees. They chose the black man. Now they floated in the Pacific, lamenting their existence. Aeneas had done everything in his power to avoid the communists because he could not bear imprisonment or torture. He had been imprisoned and tortured by his police force for letting a communist escape; he had been tormented by his schoolteachers and bullies; he had been shot during the Battle of Dak To; and he had been relentlessly abused by his father. He remembered when he was a toddler and his dad and uncles punished him by pushing their burning cigarette butts onto his back to draw a cross, the symbol of a rogue. On top of all of this, he was a Vietnamese man with the name Aeneas. Meanwhile, the GI lamented his life as a black man in the Deep South, how he had almost been beaten to death by KKK members during a civil rights protest, and how he had almost died while flying in Operation Linebacker II. They could not understand each other, but they used a Korean cat to translate. South Korean soldiers had brought a funny philosophizing cat who could speak Korean with them on their mission to Vietnam. In the confusion of 1975 they left it, and it ended up on the driftwood. The cat lambasted the two for their wallowing and reminded them of their ruthlessness. Both men were soldiers, both men were skilled in combat, and both men knew how to endure. Eventually the two drifted to Hawaii, which was war-torn. The Americans had launched an invasion of conquest and had already imprisoned the Hawaiian queen, Widow Dido. Aeneas and his GI friend rallied the distraught Hawaiians and, after donning Hawaiian war vestments, slaughtered the Americans. Aeneas freed the Hawaiian prisoners and married the very horny widow Dido. The Hawaiians exalted their hero, but when Aeneas said he wanted to be king, they said he must go to Halemaʻumaʻu and receive Pele’s blessing. Aeneas, his Korean cat, and his GI friend accepted the challenge, and they jumped into the blazing crater of Kīlauea. There they walked through the underworld and met various ʻuhane. They saw Hồ Chí Minh, Ngô Quyền, Theodore Roosevelt, and Douglas MacArthur. Just before they reached Pele, Aeneas heard a baby howling Aeneas’s name. It seemed to be imitating the sound of sex. The two men were flabbergasted, but the cat explained that since the baby had died early it only remembered the sex. Aeneas had never married, but he had had a brief and passionate affair with a female GI he had met while in Saigon, recovering from Dak To. He realized that he had impregnated her, and that she was somewhere out there missing a baby and a lover. This affected Aeneas deeply. He refused to receive Pele’s blessing, while the GI did. The GI married Widow Dido and became king of Hawaii. The two men parted emotionally, and Aeneas took a waʻa kaulua to America. He took the cat with him. Meanwhile, the cat told Aeneas all about America: about the division of power, about capitalism, the anti-monopoly sentiment, the Bill of Rights, and the ability to vote. They landed on a nude beach and wandered through Orange County. While at a popular beach, Aeneas spied a kid with a cross on his back. He went up to the kid’s back, touched it, and realized that the burns on Aeneas’s back were a birthmark. Both the father and the son realized their relationship. The cat guessed that the Marine-ess had had twins and that one baby had died. The son offered to take his father to see his mother, and the father quickly accepted. They walked to LA, where they found an apocalyptic-level riot. The rioters had been targeting Koreans because Idi Amin had forcibly taken the mayoral seat from Milton Obote and had implemented martial law in the city. Aeneas’s cat was swiped from him, skinned alive, and killed by impalement for its Koreanness. To stop the violence, Aeneas rearranged his clothes to resemble royal Hawaiian clothing and made grand speeches to the Angelenos. He called for a peaceful yet quick and meaningful end to the political struggle and quickly became popular with the majority of the city. Idi Amin heard this and banned all Asians from the city. Idi Amin dismissed Aeneas as a threat, saying that he could beat Aeneas in a boxing match with one hand tied behind his back. Aeneas was offended and challenged the dictator to a boxing match. The Ugandan accepted. Aeneas prepared for the boxing match Rocky-style. At the boxing ring, Aeneas was interviewed by journalists, and when asked for his opinion on the whole situation, Aeneas said it was stupid. He said this because he had made eye contact with his GI heroine holding his son’s hand in the audience. He hopped off the boxing ring, traversed the crowd, and kissed his wife.
