I am Sick of the 'Discourse'

Dear reader,

I am sick and tired – yet again! The latest round of ‘discourse’ about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is making me question what the hell I am doing at this point in my life with regard to the Hearth of Hellenism project.

The current round of online chatter about Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey centers on the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. I do not want to summarize the ‘drama’ itself here in this posting. So many others have addressed it – I will later on – but right now I simply need to get off my chest how I am feeling. This post serves more as a reflective journal entry for myself than as an educational piece I normally write.

The reactions around Lupita Nyong’o / Helen have made me seriously consider giving up educating all together – or scaling back my activities. I find myself outnumbered by the sheer volume of ignorant, racist, ahistorical, anti-Greek, which is the clusterfuck being called ‘discourse’ that is filling up social media. Reading what I am reading online is killing my love for history and the deep love I have for my culture. I find that the world around me is both uninformed and unwilling to be educated – aside from the minority of people willing to explore the nuances of history, identity, language, culture, and more.

How do I find the will to write when people cannot or do not want to process the fact that, for example, Homer does not describe Helen as a blond? Or that the English word for blond comes from an ancient Greek word that captures a wide array of colors, including brown? People are set in their narratives, such as the narrative that Helen must have been a pale blond-haired, blue-eyed, Nordic-looking woman instead of a Bronze Age Mediterranean woman if we were to imagine her. Homer gives us very little detail about what she looked like. Perhaps, as philosopher Dimitris Liantinis suggests, Homer did not want to limit our imagination of what beauty could be. If Homer had said she was blond with blue eyes, then beauty would be limited to that.

As I have said before, as a Greek-American, I support Lupita Nyong’o as Helen. A figure like Helen, known as the most beautiful woman, cannot be the exclusive domain of white, blond-haired women. That ‘standard’ depiction caters to white supremacy, and I am sick and tired of Greek history being used as a proxy for white culture. It also causes issues within the Greek community through internalization of white beauty standards. I can elaborate on this and other points made in this post, and I plan to later, when I am more collected in my thoughts. The topic is difficult because there are different communities to speak to – there is the white American audience and the Greek audience, the latter needing hand-holding in untangling whiteness from Greekness, which tests the limits of my patience and faith in humanity.

Until then, these are my raw and unfiltered thoughts at the moment concerning the ‘discourse’.

If you did not listen to my interview with Dr. Curtiz Dozier, you should listen; it is on the topic of white nationalist appropriation of the classics to justify hate. Which is important to understand given the Nolan ‘discourse’