Before the much-anticipated Odyssey by Christopher Nolan even hit the theaters, the Greek Times published “A Letter to Hollywood and Nolan’s Odyssey Cast from Us Greeks”, which states clearly and unequivocally a simple fact: Greeks exist. Yes, the same people who created the myths of Helen and Achilles, or Agamemnon and Odysseus, of Zeus and Athena - they are still here. They speak the language that Homer would have recognized. They look like their ancestors. They have survived persecution, genocide, the cruel Islamic occupation - and yet, they refuse to be obliterated. They are not hobbits or elves but actual people, and the Odyssey is their national heritage.
This is what the letter says:
‘What we are asking is something simpler and more human.
That when Greek stories are retold on a global stage, Greek people are not rendered invisible within them…
In discussions around The Odyssey, some have argued that mythology belongs to the world and should not be bound by cultural origin. Others see casting diversity as a reflection of the modern global audience rather than historical specificity.
We understand those perspectives. But universality does not require disconnection from origin”.
Unsurprisingly, there is already a heated discussion (to put it mildly) surrounding the letter. We can dismiss those who fling accusations of racism at any hint that casting a black actress as Helen of Sparta is a puzzling choice. The anti-racist shtick has grown stale. But there is still a question to be asked. What, exactly, are the writers of the letter asking for? That only Greek actors play characters of the Greek epic? That the Greek origin of the epic be acknowledged? That the historical specificity of the Odyssey be respected? These are different demands. Let us take them one by one (and do not worry, I will come back to Lupita Nyong’o at the end).
Writing (as) Japanese
The Tales of the Otori is a series of fantasy books set in a mythical Japan written by Lian Hearn. This is a pseudonym: the writer’s actual name is Gillian Rubinstein and she is Australian. When her identity was revealed, she was interviewed about the “cultural appropriation” involved in writing Japanese-themed novels:
“There has been a lot of discussion online in recent years about cultural appropriation and the issues associated with writing in a culture not your own – given the setting of the Otori and Shikanoko books, I would love to know how you avoid the pitfalls of doing this?
I was very hesitant about writing Tales of the Otori. I was captured by the characters and I desperately wanted to tell that particular story, but it seemed a very risky undertaking. Receiving an Asialink fellowship in 1999 gave me a certain degree of confidence. I was determined to learn Japanese and immerse myself in the culture and history of Japan, as well as spending as much time as possible there. I wanted above all to avoid stereotypes and cliches, and write about women and ordinary people as well as warriors and assassins. It helps that my world is a fantasy world but it is grounded in a real landscape that I have become very familiar with.”
It is hard not hear an apologetic note in the bestselling writer’s response, as if writing the Tales of Otori, while being named Gillian Rubinstein, is a morally dubious undertaking.
But this is nothing compared to the firestorm that engulfed other writers who dared to venture outside the narrow limits set by the culture warriors. Laura Moriarty was all but cancelled for having a Muslim character in her YA novel. Comments on Goodreads accused her of “profiting off people’s pain” and said “a white writer should not have tackled this story, and neither should a white character be the center of it”. The story of The American Dirt (2020) by Jeanine Cummins, a novel about Mexican immigrants to the US, pilloried for the sin of having been written by a non-Mexican writer, is too well-known to repeat. But even fantasy novels that deal with imaginary races have not escaped the ire of would-be censors. Laurie Forest’s The Black Witch was pilloried for being “racist, ableist, homophobic, and … written with no marginalized people in mind”, despite the fact that “the marginalized people” in the novel are fae and elves. Can one be racist against fairies?
The very idea of cultural appropriation rests on the notion of the immutable inherent characteristics that each culture possesses: a postcolonial distortion of Johann Gottfried von Herder’s concept of the Volksgeist, the unique and organic spirit of the people. It is ironic but not surprising that Herder, mostly associated with conservative movements in the 19th and early 20th century, is now echoed on the left, though I doubt that “culture cops” on Goodreads have any idea who he is.
But of course, the rigid policing of cultural boundaries quickly becomes a self-parody. Should only fae write about fae? Should fantasy writers hire hobbit sensitivity readers? How much Japanese “blood” should a writer have to be allowed to write about Japan? Once we start asking these questions, we are moving into the realm of racial anthropology, with its ominous history. Striving for cultural purity is no different from striving for racial purity. It is based on the same flawed premises: that cultures are homogenous; that there is some mystical quality that all members of the same culture share; and that outsiders trying to understand another culture are actually imperialists, taking over.
In addition, there is a hypocritical quality to the cultural appropriation witch-hunts. If the culture being appropriated is higher on the totemic pole of victimhood than the appropriator, the viciousness is unrelenting. If they are roughly on the same level, the objections are muted. Rubinstein got off relatively easy because Japan is a First World country. But try to write about Mexicans, Native Americans, or blacks while being white and the entirety of Bluesky will be after you.
The Greek letter exposed the intolerable hypocrisy of postcolonialism. Greeks were victims of the cruel Islamic imperial conquest and domination that crushed the country for 500 years. And yet they won their independence in a heroic struggle. Should they not be a poster-child for postcolonial liberation? But they are not POC, and in addition, they have the misfortune to be the founders of Western civilization. Remember how at the height of woke hysteria, NYT published articles with titles such as “Should We Cancel Aristotle?”
If the demand of the Greek Times is to have only Greeks involved in the filming of the Odyssey, it is no better than asking for a DNA test before you can be allowed to write about Anasazi. We can dismiss it as yet another narrow-minded attempt to enforce cultural purity.
However, what about using this demand strategically, as a way to push against the “culture cops”? For every action, there is a counteraction. Maybe meeting the absurdity of cultural boundary-policing with equal absurdity from the other side will finally stop the whole thing in its tracks.
Cultural Translation versus Cultural Appropriation
The interesting thing about the Odyssey is that it is one of the most cross-culturally adapted texts of all times. Forget Nolan. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) transposes Odysseus’ wandering into his contemporary Dublin, casting Leopold Bloom, a Jew, in the role of the king of Ithaca. This fits perfectly with the European legend of the Wandering Jew that postdates Homer by millennia. Cultures do speak to each other across time and space. Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian Nobel Prize laureate, wrote a powerful and touching poem “Ulysses” (1972) while in jail, subtitled “Notes from here to my Joyce class”, entering in a dialogue with Homer from Africa via Ireland:
On minds grown hoary from the quest
Rest, rooted even in the turmoil agency
A boulder solitude amidst wine -- centred waves
And hold, in paradox of lighthouse windows
On dark-fallen seas, are lighted beings
Suspended as mirages on the world’s reality.
And then there is Arthur C. Clarke’s and Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey 2001 (1968), a cinematic masterpiece that while not following the plot of the epic, resonates with its themes of quest for home, rebirth, and encounter with the mystery and wonder of the Universe.
The list of fantasy and SF novels that build on Greek mythology in general and the Odyssey in particular would run into hundreds of titles, from Rick Riordan YA sagas to the latest instalment in Greig Beck’s series of plunder of classic adventures called The Titans (2026). Let me add that despite these books not being equal of Joyce or Clarke, you should still read them because - why not? They are highly entertaining. I even wrote a Greek mythology-themed fantasy myself: Nine Levels, in which Hades becomes a mountain and minor daimons of the Greek Pantheon take over after the death of the Olympian gods.
But all these adaptations, whether fantasy or not, acknowledge their indebtedness to the Greek original. Precisely because cultures are not police states with chicken-wire borders patrolled by woke stormtroopers but open-ended domains of the imagination, their mutual influence is what keeps them alive and breathing. Yet at the same time, for a dialogue you need to have all participants respected, and priorities and hierarchies acknowledged. No matter what liberties they take with plot or characters, all of these cultural adaptations and translation signal that Homer and Hellas were there first. So, the second demand of the Greek Times letter - that the Greek origin of the epic be acknowledged - is not only reasonable but has been the default rule for centuries.
Black Athena?
But then we come to the crux of the matter. It is not mentioned openly in the letter, but everybody knows what it is about. Helen of Sparta may not have existed but she was the beauty ideal of Classic Greek culture. Greeks were the first ones in human history to celebrate the realistically rendered human body as an aesthetic value. Greek statues and their Roman copies represent a version of physical beauty that is simultaneously universal and particular; speaking to all humanity but rooted in the ancient Mediterranean phenotype. And Lupita Nyong’o, no matter how attractive, is not this phenotype.
Why does it matter? Remember the third demand of the letter: historical specificity. In a movie, every single visual detail matters. Physical appearance of the actors is a kind of language, speaking above and beyond the lines of the script or the action scenes. And because judging by the trailer, the movie does not set the Odyssey in a completely fictional world (as it could have done) but in some facsimile of Bronze Age Greece, having a black Helen assumes that there were sub-Saharan tribes in the Mediterranean of that time. And this is simply not true. The ultimate example of tendentious historical pseudo-scholarship, Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987), tried to argue that Classic Greek culture was created by black people via Egyptian colonization. Needless to say, this is nonsense. First, archeology proved that there was no colonization of mainland Greece by Egyptians, though there was some cultural influence. But even more pertinently, Egyptians were not black or rather, they came in all skin shades and gave zero importance to the color of their complexion. Like most ancient Mediterranean cultures, they were color-blind (the tradition we should certainly embrace).
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