The Impossible Homecoming: Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey And The Trauma Of War – OpEd


Odysseus and his soldiers fighting the Cicones —allies of the Trojans— during the sacking of their city. After seizing goods and women, the Greeks are driven back by allies of the Cicones. This act of land-based piracy is the opening episode of the Odyssey. Credit: Theodoor van Thulden - Rijksmuseum, Wikipedia Commons


August 18, 2026
 IDN
By Sam Ben-Meir

Key Takeaways:

Nolan’s Odysseus is complicated not as a pure action hero but through the trauma of war: he longs for home yet repeatedly delays return, revealing the veteran’s paradox of wanting Ithaca while seeking oblivion from the man war has made him.

True homecoming is impossible because war transforms both the warrior and the household; Agamemnon’s fate and Odysseus’s violent reclamation of Ithaca show that the battlefield follows him home, making reconciliation through slaughter a hollow restoration.

The lotus and Sirens represent opposing escapes—forgetting the past or fantasizing its recovery—while real return demands bearing irreversible memory without repeating violence or fleeing into oblivion.

Emily Wilson begins her celebrated translation of Homer’s Odyssey with an imperative that has become almost as famous as the poem itself: “Tell me about a complicated man.” Christopher Nolan has acknowledged the importance of that formulation to his own adaptation of Homer. Yet in her fierce review of Nolan’s film, “An Uncomplicated Man,” Wilson argues that this is precisely what Nolan has failed to give us. His Odysseus, in her reading, is essentially an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero, a psychologically flattened version of one of literature’s most elusive figures.

I did not see the film that way at all. Nolan’s Odysseus is complicated not because he reproduces every contradiction of Homer’s hero, but because Nolan has reorganized those contradictions around one of the oldest and most difficult questions posed by the Odyssey: what does it mean to come home from war? The answer, Nolan suggests, is that strictly speaking one cannot.

When War Becomes Home

This is why Odysseus’s longing for Ithaca must be understood alongside his extraordinary capacity to postpone his return. He wants nothing more than to see Penelope and Telemachus again. Home is the fixed point around which his wandering consciousness revolves. Yet he remains with Calypso for seven years. More significantly in Nolan’s telling, he willingly consumes the lotus, surrendering himself to oblivion. He wants to forget Troy, his companions, his guilt, perhaps even the man he has become.

The contradiction is only apparent. These are the two desires of the traumatized veteran: I want to go home; I want to cease being the man who must go home. Nolan understands something here that Kathryn Bigelow understood in The Hurt Locker: war is a drug. Its addictive quality does not lie simply in violence. War reorganizes experience. Terror, comradeship, exhaustion, danger, purpose and the constant proximity of death establish an intensity against which ordinary existence can come to seem strangely insubstantial. Once that intensity disappears, something must fill the void.

Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024), another recent reimagining of Odysseus’s arrival on Ithaca, makes the point with brutal economy. Ralph Fiennes’s exhausted Odysseus observes that “war becomes home.” The phrase captures the terrible paradox at the center of nostos. Odysseus is homesick for Ithaca, but war has become another home. The journey from Troy is therefore never merely geographical. The deeper question is whether the man produced by Troy can still inhabit Ithaca.

Wilson is surely right that Homer’s Odysseus possesses a multiplicity that cannot easily be reduced to modern psychological categories. He is warrior and liar, husband and adulterer, victim and perpetrator, king and beggar, strategist and fool. But adaptation need not reproduce every Homeric contradiction to discover a genuine contradiction of its own. Nolan’s “strong misreading,” if we want to call it that, locates the complexity of Odysseus in traumatic return.

Between Memory and Oblivion

This is precisely why Calypso and the lotus matter so much. The lotus is not merely temptation. It offers release from biography. To eat it is to relinquish the burden of being the person who did what Odysseus has done. Troy disappears. His dead companions disappear. Penelope and Telemachus disappear. The terrible continuity between the warrior and the returning husband disappears. For a man haunted by what he has seen and done, there is mercy in such oblivion. But there is also annihilation. If Penelope represents the possibility of memory endured, the lotus represents memory extinguished. Odysseus is suspended between them. He can remember his way home, or he can forget why he ever wanted one.

That is hardly an uncomplicated man. Nor does Nolan allow Odysseus’s dilemma to exist in isolation. His use of Agamemnon’s return as a counterpoint is crucial. Agamemnon, too, goes home from Troy. His nostos is shorter and, geographically speaking, more successful. But arriving home does not save him. He returns carrying Troy with him and is murdered within the household to which he believed he had returned.

Agamemnon’s fate exposes the illusion contained in the very idea of homecoming. The warrior imagines home as something preserved in his absence: the same house, the same relationships, the same identity waiting to receive him when history has finished with him. But history does not leave home untouched. Nor does it leave the warrior untouched. The man who returns is not the man who departed, and the household to which he returns is not the household he left.

Agamemnon reaches home and discovers that home no longer exists in the form he imagined. Odysseus takes ten years longer to make the same discovery. In this respect Thomas Wolfe’s famous formulation—You Can’t Go Home Again—could serve almost as a subtitle to the Odyssey. Homecoming contains an impossible demand. It asks not merely that we return to a place but that time itself reverse direction. Restore the wife I left. Restore the child I knew. Restore the kingdom I ruled. Above all, restore the self who departed.

But there is no restoration. Penelope has spent twenty years without Odysseus. Telemachus has become a man in the absence of his father. Ithaca has been transformed by political disorder. And Odysseus has become someone whom the king who sailed for Troy might scarcely recognize. The deepest obstacle between Odysseus and Ithaca is therefore not Poseidon. It is time. And this is where Nolan’s emphasis on violence becomes particularly important. For when Odysseus finally returns, he does not simply put war behind him. He brings its grammar home.
When the Battlefield Enters the Home

The great irony of the Odyssey is that the warrior restores domestic order through slaughter. The skills that allowed Odysseus to survive Troy and the long journey home become the means by which he reclaims his household. Bow, cunning, disguise, calculation and killing—the instruments of war become instruments of reconciliation.

But what kind of reconciliation is achieved through massacre? Agamemnon returns from war and is murdered at home. Odysseus returns from war and murders at home. Their stories differ radically, yet Nolan’s juxtaposition of them illuminates the same terrible truth: the boundary between battlefield and household is far more porous than the warrior would like to believe. War follows him across the threshold.

That is why the Odyssey remains perhaps the greatest tale of homesickness ever written. And it is one reason it stands so close to the foundations of Western civilization. If the Iliad plunges us into the world of war—glory, rage, mortality, comradeship, revenge—the Odyssey asks the question that follows: what happens to the warrior afterward? How does the killer become a husband again, the soldier a father? How does a human being habituated to violence recover ordinary time? And can violence ever truly be left behind?

These questions reach far beyond Homeric Greece. They belong to every society that sends people to war and then expects them somehow to resume ordinary existence when they return. We speak casually of veterans “coming home,” as though geographical relocation accomplished the return. But the deeper homecoming—the recovery of intimacy, ordinary time, trust, vulnerability and a tolerable relation to memory—is infinitely more difficult.


The desire for Ithaca therefore cannot simply be opposed to the desire for war. Odysseus wants home desperately precisely because he has been transformed by its opposite. Yet the longer he remains away, the more impossible the object of his longing becomes. Ithaca gradually ceases to be merely a geographical place and becomes an image of reconciliation: the fantasy that the fragments of a life divided by war might somehow be made whole again.
The Pain of an Irrecoverable Past

This is why nostalgia is never simply memory. It is memory charged with desire—the longing not merely for what was, but for what can no longer be recovered. The word nostalgia itself preserves the wound: nostos, homecoming, joined to algos, pain. The desire for home is inseparable from the knowledge that the home one desires no longer exists.

Nolan’s Sirens give this nostalgia its most seductive form. Here he departs sharply from Homer. In Book XII, the Sirens tempt Odysseus with knowledge: they know what happened at Troy and promise access to what can otherwise remain hidden from mortal understanding. Nolan transforms their temptation into something more psychological. Their song reveals that “what you most want is what you most can’t have”: what you desire most is “what you already had . . . and lost.” The Sirens therefore offer not knowledge but restoration—the fantasy that what time has taken might somehow be recovered. If the lotus promises escape from the past through forgetting, the Sirens promise escape from it through nostalgia. One says: erase what happened. The other: return to what was. Both tempt Odysseus with the same impossibility—the refusal to accept that time is irreversible.

And here lies the spiritual crisis diagnosed by the Odyssey. Western civilization has repeatedly imagined history through departure and return: exile and promised land, fall and redemption, alienation and reconciliation, revolution and restoration. We leave home and dream of coming back transformed but intact. Homer knew better.

There is no return without transformation because time itself makes literal return impossible. The question is not whether Odysseus can recover the world he lost. He cannot. The question is whether he can establish a relationship with what remains. That distinction matters. Reconciliation is not restoration.

The past survives precisely because it cannot be repaired. Nolan’s Odysseus therefore faces something more difficult than monsters. He must learn whether memory can be borne without either repeating what it remembers or fleeing into oblivion. The lotus offers one answer: forget. War offers another: repeat. Ithaca demands something harder: remember and nevertheless live. That is the real homecoming.
The Greater Ordeal of Coming Home

Wilson’s criticism of Nolan ultimately rests not on fidelity alone. She has explicitly defended adaptations that radically transform their sources. Her deeper complaint is that Nolan’s transformation produces an Odysseus without sufficient psychological, emotional or ethical depth—that the complicated man has been converted into a conventional action hero.


But that judgment overlooks the contradiction around which Nolan has constructed his protagonist. His Odysseus longs for precisely what he repeatedly flees. He wants Penelope and chooses oblivion. He seeks peace but carries within himself the habits of war. He desires home while no longer knowing whether he is capable of inhabiting it. He survives because of the qualities that make reconciliation most difficult. The action hero normally defeats his enemies and returns home. Odysseus discovers that returning home is the greater ordeal.

That is why the lotus and the Sirens matter. One reveals how attractive the destruction of memory can become when memory itself is unbearable; the other, the equally seductive fantasy that what has been lost might somehow be restored. And that is why the violence on Ithaca matters. It demonstrates that Troy cannot simply be left behind on the other side of the sea.

Nolan’s Odysseus is not Homer’s Odysseus in every respect. No adaptation could be. But he is hardly uncomplicated. He is divided between memory and oblivion, war and domesticity, guilt and survival, the man who left and the man who returns. His tragedy is not that he cannot find his way home. It is that he finds it. And discovers that homecoming has only just begun.

Sam Ben-Meir teaches philosophy at the City University of New York, College of Technology. He is the author of Ethical Interanimality: Toward a Relational Philosophy of Nature (Westphalia Press, 2026).


About IDN
IDN-InDepthNews offers news analyses, features, reports and viewpoints that impact the world and its peoples. It has been online since 2009. Its network spans countries around the world.
View all posts by IDN →

Courage for Peace, Not for War

Kathy Kelly

 August 14, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

Photo: Swedish Red Cross.

Can we escape the terrors of our time?

In September of 2025, during a Saturday vigil in Stockholm’s Odenplan Square, Isak Hernández, age nine, asked if he could recite a poem he wrote. Deeply troubled by images he saw, day and night, from Gaza, he resolved not to be silent. “Their lives are not numbers,” Isak declared. “Their dreams are not ashes.” His refrain repeated: “I won’t be silent,” and he begged the world, “Listen to me.”

Isabella Lundgren, a Swedish jazz vocalist, heard Isak deliver his poem. She felt his words had reverberated throughout Sweden. No one could possibly turn away. Everyone, she said, bore the responsibility of witnessing. She and Isak collaborated to turn his poem into a song entitled “Their dreams are not ashes.”

Their witness is crucial for counteracting decisions on the part of countries which have newly decided to enter NATO.

We should acknowledge that NATO has done nothing to stop the U.S. provisioned Israeli genocide or to restrain Israel.

On the contrary, NATO seeks fuller integration of Israel’s “security” into NATO strategies. What’s more, tradebetween Israel and European countries continues.

The Swedish government ought to argue that NATO must force Israel to end their genocide of Palestinian people.

We should note that Israel possesses at least ninety-one thermonuclear weapons which it refuses to declare. Each of these weapons would cause the death of at least six million people – a Holocaust – in a can, waiting to be opened on human civilization’s last day. A planetary omnicide comprising every conceivable genocide, military analysts agree, is almost certain to occur days, hours, or even minutes after any of these weapons are ever again used.

Sadly, Sweden’s hurried entry into NATO in 2024, alongside the rise of armaments industries and even support for nuclear weapons acquisition, compromises Sweden’s historic capacity to resist the rush into unimaginable genocides.

What are the major threats we all face? Surely, the list must begin with the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Next, we must reckon with possible ecological collapse. Following this, we must prepare for outbreaks of new pandemics. And, achingly, we must oppose genocide. War is not the answer. Militarism exacerbates each of these threats.

Now, as corrupt political leaders extract the hard-earned resources of people throughout Europe and pour those resources into bulging coffers of, primarily, U.S. military contractors, it’s crucial to hear Isak Hernández’s pledge not to be silent. We also can learn from the legacy of Sweden’s heroic diplomat, Count Folke Bernadotte.

 As Vice President of Sweden’s Red Cross, during World War II, he witnessed first-hand how prisoners in concentration camps suffered. He resolved to negotiate with SS leader Heinrich Himmler for the release of prisoners. Bernadotte collaborated with Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian relief groups to create the White Buses campaign. Ultimately, they managed to free over 17,000 thousand prisoners from concentration camps.

During World War II, Adolph Hitler, eager as current European leaders for war with Russia, plainly aimed to eliminate the Jews in Europe. He wanted to create “Grossedeutchland,” – “Greater Germany.” The SS had turned into an immense bureaucracy under Himmler’s control, systematically enacting Hitler’s hideous “final solution.” Amid chaotic and extremely dangerous conditions Bernadotte and his team steadily negotiated liberation and transport of prisoners.

Sune Persson records, in Escape from the Third Reich: Folke Bernadotte and the White Buses, the minutes from the May 13, 1945, gathering of the Jewish Stockholm Community. The chairperson thanked the Swedish Red Cross and Count Bernadotte:

“When the assembly now gathers here today, it is with a strong sense of entering a new epoch. These recent times, darker than humanity has ever known them, have reached a climax, so desperately coveted, and we stand –yearning, inquiring, hopeful – on the threshold of a new world…We would like to think at this moment of the admirable rescue operation undertaken by the Swedish Red Cross, bringing thousands of people – among them a considerable number of Jews – here to our country, to liberation from the horrors of the concentration camps and a terrible demise.”

But Bernadotte’s work on behalf of refugees and mediation wasn’t finished. After World War II, the United Nations Security Council unanimously chose Bernadotte to be the UN Security Council mediator in the Arab–Israeli conflict of 1947–1948.

Count Folke Bernadotte’s first report to the Secretary General outlined the desperate plight of Palestinian refugees, nearly a quarter of whom, he wrote, “are simply camped out and living under trees. In most places there was absolutely no sanitary accommodation, and since water was drawn from surface collections, and typhoid was endemic, grave possibilities in this regard at this season of the year were likely.”

He surveyed destroyed Palestinian villages and witnessed long lines of people waiting for food, scarce medical aid, and an ongoing humanitarian disaster. He and U.S. diplomat Ralph Bunche wrote a proposal to meet short-term and long-term needs of refugees. Their plan would allow for fixed boundaries between the Israelis and the Palestinians, with an economic union between the states and assurance that Palestinian refugees could return.

“It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice,” Bernadotte wrote, “if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine.”

Boldly and truthfully, Bernadotte drew links between meeting humanitarian needs and creating an environment in which peace could take hold. He insisted the UN must respect the refugees’ “unconditional right to make a free choice.”

Bernadotte’s and Ralph Bunche’s report was submitted to the UN on September 18, 1948, but Bernadotte did not live to present it in person. On September 17, terrorists from an extremist Zionist group, the Stern Gang, ambushed Bernadotte’s motorcade. They fired six bullets into Bernadotte’s body. His colleague, the French Colonel André Sérot was killed by seventeen bullets.

Count Bernadotte’s principled humanitarian work may have cost him his life, but we can choose to continue his legacy.

It’s encouraging to know that the 2026 Stockholm Forum for Peace and Development has recognized a fundamental reality: “many modern security risks, from climate shocks to pandemics and cyber threats, do not have hard security solutions and do not stop at borders. They are, however, further exacerbated when geopolitical rivalries undermine cooperative solutions.”

I hope Count Bernadotte’s inspiring life and Isak Hernández’s compassionate insistence: “I won’t be silent,” will steer us as we reckon with what Dr. King called “the fierce urgency of now.”

Kathy Kelly (kathy@worldbeyondwar.org), Board President of World BEYOND War, co-coordinates the November 2023 Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal. She is the author of Other Lands Have Dreams, published by CounterPunch/AK Press.

Review

The Odyssey Challenges the Right-Wing Myth of a “Golden Past”

The new film pushes back against MAGA attempts to use a fetishization of the ancient world to legitimizing bigotry.

By Nicholas Powers , 

Truthout

July 25, 2026

The cast of The Odyssey attends the premiere of the film on July 14, 2026, in New York City.

Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Universal Pictures

Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens with a shot of the bard Demodocus — played by rapper Travis Scott — hitting a staff on a table for a beat. The movie then cuts to Sinon, an Achaean soldier in front of the Trojan Horse, who is played by transgender actor Elliot Page. Later, the hero, Odysseus (a somber Matt Damon) confesses that he is a war criminal. The blood on his hands stopped him from coming home.

The new film, which turns Homer’s epic into a critique of the West, started drawing the ire of right-wing critics before it even hit the screens. This version of The Odyssey calls out racism. It calls out patriarchy. It exposes the human cost of war and denounces the military machismo that Homer and the modern right-wing “manosphere” celebrate. It corrects the failure of empathy in the 8th century BCE epic. We are lucky to have a version of the Odyssey that portrays the real conflict within the story: how a scared and wounded man tries to heal his humanity so he can come home.
Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth

In the film, Trojan soldiers on horseback gallop across a beach to the Trojan Horse, a giant statue, half-buried in sand. They see the scared soldier Sinon, who says the Trojan Horse is a peace offering. Hardened by war, they kill Sinon but wheel the statue into the city. In its belly, Odysseus and his men wait for nightfall to open Troy’s gates for their army to bring death and destruction.

Nolan’s The Odyssey cuts back and forth across time. In this way, Nolan is loyal to the structure of Homer’s poem, which tells scenes in flashbacks. The center of gravity is Odysseus, long-bearded, trapped on an idyllic island by the nymph Calypso (played by an ethereal Charlize Theron). She drugs him with a lotus flower that causes amnesia. Bit by bit, he remembers his journey after the Trojan War. He recalls his arrogance at guiding his men on a quick sail home. He got them lost and killed. Struck by guilt, he eats more of the memory-erasing lotus.

Memory is key in this movie. Memories of war are how a son, Telemachus (a stoic Tom Holland), learns of his father, Odysseus, and in turn learns how to “become a man.” Memories of war are also how Odysseus accepts the blood on his hands. At the high point in the film, the effects of the lotus fade. He remembers the sacking of Troy. Fire eating stone. Soldiers hacking people like butchers working sides of beef. Odysseus wanders around, stunned at the gore and death. Finally, he snaps out of it, and says to Calypso, “I didn’t want to go home.”


Is There a Future Without Incarceration? Abolitionist Art Shows Us One.
Prison abolitionist art creates a future to briefly live in, and from that place, turn and look at our present. By Nicholas Powers , Truthout May 23, 2026

I read Homer’s Odyssey. I taught Homer’s Odyssey. I can tell you that however soul-stirring and epic it may be, it is written for the elite ruling class.

Nolan’s The Odyssey centers the inner conflict of a war veteran struggling with trauma. When Damon’s Odysseus returns to his castle in Ithaca, disguised as a beggar, he talks with his wife about the horror of war. Nolan’s focus is not original; in 2024’s The Return, actor Ralph Fiennes also played an Odysseus wracked by grief and guilt. Fiennes said in an interview it was “an antiwar film.” In that version, Penelope (played by a steely Juliette Binoche) yelled at him, “How many men did you kill? How many women, raped?”

I read Homer’s Odyssey. I taught Homer’s Odyssey. I can tell you that however soul-stirring and epic it may be, it is written for the elite ruling class. Homer’s Odysseus in no way shows how violence maims men’s souls. But as Damon’s Odysseus walks numb while Troy burns, you can imagine it not as Troy but as Tehran after U.S. and Israeli attacks, or Baghdad during Desert Storm, or Ukraine after Russian missile strikes.
Make Patriarchy Gross Again

In this new recasting of The Odyssey,feminist critiques also abound. The film shows the pressure of patriarchy on women characters such as Penelope (an embattled Anne Hathaway), Circe the witch (a haunting Samantha Morton), and also the unnamed women cut down by soldiers. The tragedy is that the film’s critique can only go so far to the degree that it remains loyal to the source material. Homer’s original, beginning to end, reaffirms male supremacy.

Mother and son fight over the future. Telemachus urges Penelope to marry. He pleads with her that this way, he can maneuver to the throne. She snarls at him, “I have sat on the throne for years! I have experience but none of it matters as much as the bristle on your beard.” She storms off, the point made that she is the most capable leader, but in a patriarchy, her young son has more authority than she does.

The sharpest feminist critique comes at the hands of a witch. During a flashback, Odysseus remembers sailing to island. His men are hungry and spot a farm house. They run to it and the grey-haired Circe, a witch in disguise, feeds them meaty broth that casts a spell. In a deliciously lurid scene, she reshapes each man into a pig, like a sculptor working wet clay. When Odysseus comes, he knows she is a witch. She accuses men of being animals, led by “base instincts” who rob and rape and kill. Only after Odysseus threatens to kill her sister, whom she transformed into a raven, does she reverse the spell, changing the pigs back into his soldiers. Bitterly, she says, “Back into your disguises.” Male self-image is a mask hiding their animal nature.

The Right-Wing Freak Out

Right-wing critics ripped their hair out over this film before it even hit theaters. They hated that Nolan actively diversified the cast. They saw it as evidence that this was a “woke” Odyssey. Once again, their argument goes, liberals stole another piece of culture from them and ruined it.

Exhibit number one: the rumor that Elliot Page would play Achilles. (Not true —again, he played Sinon the soldier.) MAGA critics discovered that Page was cast and got it into their heads that he was Achilles, the most famous warrior in all of literature. Achilles was played like a beefcake calendar model by Brad Pitt in 2004’s Troy. The idea of a transgender actor supposedly “desecrating” Achilles masculinity drove them to create AI videos showing Page as Achilles getting easily killed or stumbling over his shield.

Meanwhile right-wing critics also derided the casting of Black actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy as historically inaccurate. Really, they were grasping for an excuse to vent racism. Elon Musk called her casting an “insult.” Right-wing personality Matt Walsh posted on X: “Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world.’” Again, the racist AI videos came, one showing Black actor Samuel L. Jackson as Helen of Troy, implying Nyong’o was ugly.

The fight over who owns history is the fight over legitimacy. Whoever owns the past owns the future.

What spurred this right-wing freak out? A fetish for a “golden past.” Seen through the right’s political lens, the past is a time of law and order, in which natural roles in gender and class were strictly observed, which led to social harmony. In this illusionary past, the best ruled and the inferior obeyed. Professor Curtis Dozier dissects the right’s obsession with antiquity in his 2026 book, The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate. He argues that the ancient world is a mirror in which racists can see themselves, legitimized by academic prestige, and that history reflects their values. He summarized the right’s use of history in a New Books Network interview:


Look, this society, ancient Greece and Rome, which you respect and believe is a high point in human civilization, they excluded foreigners from citizenship. They excluded women from political rights. They regarded outsiders as a dangerous threat. They practiced eugenic measures. Plato said if any deformed infants are born, they should be taken away and put into a dark place and never seen again.

The fight over who owns history is the fight over legitimacy. Whoever owns the past owns the future. It is a fight you see in the reactions to Zack Snyder’s 2006 movie 300 compared to Nolan’s 2026 The Odyssey. Snyder’s Spartan warriors, lean and muscled, were idealized men. 300 became the war cry of the MMA-glorifying, manosphere-participating, testosterone-advocating MAGA man. Like Dozier said, it gave their male fantasies a fake Ph.D. in history. It gave them license to attack empathy and women’s rights and diversity.

Home, Sweet Home

The reaction to Nolan’s The Odyssey gives me hope. Yes, it’s flawed. Yes, Nolan’s loyalty to the text forces him to miss more daring interpretations. Yes, the theme of trauma as the obstacle to Odysseus coming home is overwhelmed by the spectacle of violence. In the end scene, it’s obvious the film relishes in Odysseus massacring the suitors. Even so, at the end, the old king exiles himself so his son Telemachus can rule Ithaca with clean hands, saying that Zeus’s Law (basically, the Golden Rule) means Odysseus must leave again, so that peace can come.

In part, Odysseus chooses exile because earlier in the film, he realizes that he was wrong. Everywhere he stopped, he was told about the “people from the sea” who came and stole and killed and ravaged. They broke Zeus’s Law. They brought darkness. Odysseus, in a moment of clarity, says: “We were the sea people. We were.”

In a time of war and poverty and global warming, we need this version of The Odyssey. We need to see a war veteran learning how to heal in order to belong again. The U.S. has committed so much violence in its short 250-year history. We have suffered from it and also sometimes caused it, and we feel lost. But we can get home. We have to recognize our complicity in the chaos we decry. We have to see the blood on our hands, clean it off, and then hopefully, when we reach out for forgiveness, we’ll receive it.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Nicholas Powers
Nicholas Powers is the author of Thirst, a political vampire novel; The Ground Below Zero: 9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street; and most recently, Black Psychedelic Revolution. He has been writing for Truthout since 2011. His article, “Killing the Future: The Theft of Black Life” in the Truthout anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? coalesces his years of reporting on police brutality.

Long overlooked and newly energized, Black Buddhist studies challenges US Buddhist history

(RNS) — Buddhism is an American religious tradition that intersects meaningfully with African American religious history, experts in the emerging field of Black Buddhism say.

“Race, Caste, and the Challenge of Karma” conference, organized in conjunction with the Black Buddhist Faculty Project, April 4-5, 2025 (Photo courtesy of Frank Wojciechowski)

Chloe Landen

July 24, 2026 

RNS

(RNS) — When Pamela Ayo Yetunde began hospice volunteering with an organization that utilizes mindfulness to help patients confront their own deaths, she was already far removed from her Methodist upbringing and on a quest for “peace of mind.” At the same time, she was reading the book “Touching Peace” by the influential Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh. Shortly thereafter, she began sitting for meditation retreats.

Those introductions to Buddhism changed the trajectory of her life. Yetunde has now been a Buddhist for 24 years and is an accomplished pastoral counselor, educator and author of several works, notably contributing to “Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom.”

Yetunde told RNS that many Black people are increasingly drawn to deeply practiced Buddhism, in part because it lacks the “guilt and shame”-based practices and beliefs common in Christian traditions.

Long overlooked and newly energized, “Black Buddhism” is emerging as a movement and academic field to rewrite the history of Buddhism in the U.S. — a history that has overlooked the role of Black practitioners and intellectuals for more than a century, scholars argue.

In early August, Princeton University will host a four-day Black Buddhism Faculty Training workshop that aims to “foster generative conversation among scholars of African American religion and Buddhism” and develop resources to teach about Black Buddhism in their classrooms. The workshop is sponsored by Princeton’s Black Buddhism Faculty Project (BBFP) launched in 2023. The initiative draws attention to the growing study of Black Buddhism, which it describes as “a boundary-crossing field” in its bridging of scholars across Buddhist Studies, American Religions, African American Studies and Comparative Literature and Philosophy.

Adeana McNicholl (Photo courtesy of Frank Wojciechowski)

Black Buddhism as a self-identified movement emerged in the ’90s and accelerated after the 2020 Black Lives Matter reckoning, when some Buddhists began engaging in conversations about race and karma and held meditation retreats specifically for people of color, said Adeana McNicholl, an assistant professor of religious studies at Vanderbilt and part of Princeton’s BBFP. 

Most historians trace the origins of Buddhism in the U.S. to the mid-19th-century Gold Rush, when Chinese laborers and immigrants arrived on the West Coast and in Hawaii. Buddhism’s national presence only expanded in the late 19th century with the arrival of Japanese immigrants. But scholars say that isn’t the whole story. 

“Black people have been engaging with Buddhist thought and ideas for nearly as long as Buddhism has been in the United States,” said McNicholl, who is writing a book about her research on the history of Black Buddhism and “Afro-Asian Solidarity.”

RELATED: Online forum helps Asian Americans find their way in Americanized Buddhism

---

Jonathan C. Gold, a professor of Buddhist Studies and the director of Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion, of which the BBFP is a part, said those behind the initiative hope to strengthen academic knowledge of Black Buddhism. The faculty contend Buddhism is fundamental to American religious history and intersects meaningfully with African American religious history.

Ralph H. Craig III (Photo courtesy of Frank Wojciechowski)

Buddhist ideas, figures and tenets — particularly the commitment to nonviolence — played an important role in the long Civil Rights movement, spanning from the end of Reconstruction to the late 1960s, said Ralph H. Craig III, an assistant professor of religion at Whitman College who is involved in Princeton’s project. Influential Black thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Howard Thurman and Bayard Rustin engaged with various Eastern philosophies and Asian anti-colonial movements.

Notably, Black Civil Rights leaders meaningfully interacted with Hindu leader Mahatma Gandhi, who drew inspiration from the Buddha’s approach to nonviolence and transformed it into a tool of political resistance. Later, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. developed a close friendship with Nhất Hạnh, the Buddhist monk, who once told King that some referred to him as “a bodhisattva, an enlightened being.”

Buddhist ideas trickled down to broader African American public spaces, influencing Black newspapers, the musical world of jazz, new religious movements and other cultural products, Craig said.

“It’s not necessarily just because they happened to pick up a book in a bookstore and it blew their minds, right? There is a kind of circulation of ideas that’s happening,” Craig added. 

---

RELATED: In upcoming anthology, Asian American feminists critique mainstream Buddhism

---

By the end of the 20th century, Buddhism had become more familiar to Americans and was promoted by many celebrities, including the “Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll,” Tina Turner.

Despite its historical presence and popularity, only 1% of U.S. adults identify as Buddhist today. Of that population, a majority were born outside the U.S. and nearly 60% are Asian, a quarter are white, and only 3% are Black. Yet McNicholl cautioned against taking survey results at face value. “It’s limiting if we just assume that religious identity is equivalent to formal professions of faith or attendance,” she said, adding that those who engage in practices like Buddhist meditation but wouldn’t necessarily call themselves Buddhist get left out.

Black Buddhists like Yetunde say the tradition continues to grow and is appealing to many Black Americans in its offering of a radical acceptance not easily found within other U.S. religious traditions. “You can be a Black woman, you can be a Black trans woman, trans man, queer and … you can still be a leader within Black Buddhist traditions and Buddhist traditions,” she said. 

Princeton’s BBFP has partnered with and received support from the Numata Foundation, Lion’s Roar and the Initiative for Black Buddhist Studies. Since its inception, the BBFP has established a digital library, held three workshops and begun developing teaching resources and curricula that bring together scholars and practitioners. 

For now, Gold measures the initiative’s positive impact by the growing confidence among those who defend Black Buddhism’s distinctive contributions to contemporary Buddhism. Gold cited several recent panels related to Black Buddhism at the annual American Academy of Religion meeting as examples.

Keynote lecturer Dr. Larry Ward speaks at the “Race, Caste, and the Challenge of Karma” conference in April 2025. (Photo courtesy of Frank Wojciechowski)

Nonetheless, McNicholl acknowledged that persisting within Buddhist studies is “a lingering sense that what counts as real Buddhism is Buddhism in Asia, and not necessarily Buddhism in the United States,” she said. Even further removed are Black Buddhists, because “they’re not Asian, they’re not white, which is sort of like the predominant demographics of the academy of Buddhist studies in the United States,” she added.

“American Buddhism, Buddhism in the West, is up for debate,” Craig told RNS. And claims to authentic Buddhism are not limited to the academy. Craig noted that in addition to Asian Buddhists and Black Buddhists, there are also alt-right, white supremacist Buddhists. 

Tenets like karma also remain topics of meaningful and contested discussion. Last year, the BBFP hosted a conference called “Race, Caste, and the Challenge of Karma” that examined how it can be “difficult to reconcile traditional Buddhist approaches to karma with projects to counter systemic injustice.” The discussion was spurred by the work of Rima Vesely-Flad, who wrote “Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition” and created the Initiative for Black Buddhist Studies.

Vesely-Flad became interested in karma after one of her students at Union Theological Seminary, a 70-year-old Black woman enrolled in the school’s Buddhism program, asked a visiting monastic how he explained the suffering of Black people. His response was, “You suffer because of your karma.”

“She left the Buddhism program after that,” Vesely-Flad told RNS.

Karma is a central Buddhist doctrine. “We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist,” Vesely-Flad said, adding that Buddhists must acknowledge it has been weaponized against subjugated people to blame them for their own oppression. Yet Vesely-Flad also remains interested in how karma has been used to confront harm.

The term “Black Buddhism” is similarly contested. Vesely-Flad, for instance, distances herself from the term, which she claims flattens the nuance that Black practitioners are a part of a variety of Buddhist lineages with distinct practices and interpretations. Instead, she prefers terms like “Black Buddhists” and “Black Buddhist thought.”

McNicholl noted that the field of Black Buddhist studies is growing around the juncture of America’s 250th, as the country is thinking about how “we tell the story of religion in the nation,” she said.

“Uncovering this history of Black Buddhism allows us to see the diversity of religious life in the United States” and to recognize that Buddhism has been a part of the national fabric for much of the nation’s lifespan, she added.