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| A new, feminist production of a classic at American Repertory Theater |
Can we break our historic cycles of violence against each other?
If you’ve gone through something traumatic, can you ever go back to who you were?
Can you ever go back home?
This is the essential question behind the new version of "The Odyssey" by Kate Hamill at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, which I saw last weekend.
I'm wondering if people even read "The Odyssey" in school anymore. Did you read it?
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| Fantastic new translation. |
The epic poem by Homer is memorable for the "adventures" -- the mythical creatures and challenges -- Odysseus has to face to finally make his way back to his home, wife, and son in Ithaca -- 10 years after the 10-year-long Trojan War.
Odysseus: a Greek hero famed for his intellect and craftiness. The devisor of the Trojan horse by which the Greeks finally won the Trojan War, and which today stands as a metaphor of trickery.
Having used the hollow wooden horse to sack Troy, ending the war, Odysseus still had some criminal decisions to make prior to setting his black ships to sail toward home.
Such as what to do with Trojan hero Hector's wife, Andromache -- whose name itself means "fighter of men" -- and tiny infant son.
Allegedly in an attempt to stop the cycles of violence, Odysseus -- in various versions of the story -- hurls the infant from the battlements of Troy, or has him killed. The son can then no longer seek revenge for the death of his father. Odysseus faces the same ethical challenge when he returns to Ithaca to find -- not surprisingly, given his 20 year absence -- his wife surrounded by young suitors.
All of whom he murders.
"The Illiad" was always my favorite of these two epics. Homer wrote "The Illiad" as an anti-war poem, never glorifying the violence of the Trojan War but consistently depicting its horrors.
But the truth of my passion for the poem is the homosexual love story between the hero Achilles and his Patroclus at the poem's center.
There was not much in the class literature of my school years that reflected my experience as a butch lesbian.
Achilles and Patroclus were what I had.
And now I have these essential questions.
If you’ve gone through something traumatic, can you ever go back to who you were?
Can you ever go back home?
I was never able to go back home once I left.
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| Sound board and stage at ART's new production of Homer's "The Odyssey" |
My trauma was not physical violence, but that of being a young lesbian in a homophobic family and world.
I went away to college, moved into the more affirming world of feminism and gay rights, and never went back. It took decades for me to reconcile with my family.
Interestingly, my viewing of this new feminist version of "The Odyssey," which centers Penolope's experience, coincided with the appearance in the liturgical cycle of what is arguably Luke's most famous gospel: 6: 27-38, or, simplified as it so often is, the gospel of the "golden rule" -- do unto others.
I sat in the pew last week wondering how other U.S. christians are reconciling this gospel with the actions of the Republican administration as they eliminate jobs and humanitarian programs that save people's lives around the world in the name of "government efficiencies."
This term should send chills down all of our spines.
"Government efficiencies" are what dictators such as Hitler and Mussolini pursued. Making the trains run on time. Getting people into camps.
Eliminating people. Or their livelihoods. Because they are not people to them. Their hatred has turned whole groups of people into things. Avatars in some imagined online gaming system.
And this, as Hannah Arendt noted and repeatedly warned against, is the essence of totalitarianism: reducing living beings to things in order to commit violence against them.
It is happening around us now.
I recently read a post by a white supremacist who repeatedly dehumanized a black woman reporter right here in Portland, Maine.
We're all watching while action after action, word after word, dehumanizes transexual people.
All the while, a large group of our fellow citizens are chortling happily about "government efficiencies" that are mowing down civil rights and other programs.
Who wouldn't like to see government operate as cost-effectively as possible?
But when, as my father used to say, the "almighty dollar" becomes more important to you than treating other human beings as you yourself want to be treated -- then you are no longer a christian.
Many would argue that you yourself are no longer human.
That only monsters care more about money than about those in need.
Luke's gospel is not only about turning the other cheek.
In it, Jesus requires us to actually DO GOOD to those who hate us.
"Give to everyone who asks you, and from the one who takes what is yours do not demand it back."
Pray for those who mistreat us.
"For if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them."
This is how we end the cycles of violence with which we are afflicted. This is a gospel that stands as an affront to the "prosperity gospel" of contemporary U.S. evangelical christianity -- and to the actions of the current President of the United States.
Woe to those who seek to make a business deal from others' suffering.
As Ukrainian's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted, after being loudly and publicly berated by the U.S. President for defending his country from the totalitarian attack of Russia -- only woe will follow.
Ultimately, our compassion for these perpetrators must acknowledge that they are not well.
They are ill, acting out of character with our world, and spreading their illness.
We need a vaccine against their greed and hatred!
#newblogpost
Sources:
"How America Got Mean," David Brooks, The Atlantic, August 2023.
"Homer's History of Violence," Rowan Williams, The New Statesman, September 2023.
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