In this column distributed by the Elon University Writers Syndicate, Professor of English Rosemary Haskell connects her teachings to the current discourse on U.S. immigration and the war in Gaza. The column was published by the Greensboro News & Record and The Wilson Times.
Migrants and immigration – these are the year’s topics, along with the competing concerns of the Gaza war and the Hamas hostages in Gaza, both dead and alive.
Immigrants are the willing guests of the “host” country, unlike the unwilling guests of Hamas, their threatening hosts. But all are connected to the rich and complicated notion of hospitality, something I’m concentrating on right now as I prepare to teach (in translation!) Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to my undergraduate students this fall.
The hospitality theme recurs in the Odyssey, where Greek hero Odysseus, returning to Ithaca after the Trojan war, becomes the guest of many island hosts on his journey: some more kind and honorable than others.
Circe’s seductive charms pall, along with her party trick of turning Odysseus’s crew into pigs, as do beautiful but clinging Calypso’s. Odysseus the guest becomes a pampered prisoner who must escape. Cyclops chief Polyphemus punishes Odysseus’s bad-guest qualities by eating several of his crew; the fleeing survivors blind the giant’s single eye. Top of the nice-host charts is King Alcinous, who wines, dines and welcomes Odysseus to his court without even asking his name.
But even Alcinous has an ulterior motive: might Odysseus be a good catch for a marriageable daughter? Pure, disinterested, unconditional hospitality is a rare thing. Hosts usually want something from their guests.
It’s in the last book of the Iliad where hospitality is really tested. The stakes are high for both guest and host. Aged and frail Priam, King of Troy, visits famously angry and volatile Greek chieftain Achilles during the Troy v. Greece war. Priam seeks the return of his son Hector’s body, slain in battle by Achilles. Crossing the Greek’s threshold, Priam occupies the role of reluctant guest, and supplicant.
Scary host Achilles gives him a tasty dinner (from a “gleaming sheep”) and agrees to return Hector’s body for funeral rituals, along with a 12-day truce to accommodate them.
Priam has skillfully encouraged Achilles to identify with an aged father’s grief for his son by reminding him of his own old father, alone and unprotected, back in Greece. But Achilles, deeply moved by sympathetic (and guilty) sorrow, warns Priam: I might not stay calm. Don’t push your luck.
Hermes, Priam’s divine guide, agrees, waking Priam from his guest-room bed and hastening his departure back to the Trojan camp, with the returned hostage, the dead Prince Hector.
In this episode, we see the host and guest as “near enemies,” with the guest as both threat to the host’s emotional stability and a near-victim of his violent nature. This ambiguity is, as French critic and philosopher Jacques Derrida argued, the paradoxical heart of hospitality: calling it “hostipitality,” Derrida argues that hosts need guests to dispense hospitality and to be benefactors.
The guests thus look more like givers, not takers. They give the host the capacity to be generous, turning the tables of the hospitable encounter. Priam enables Achilles to be magnanimous.
What kinds of hosts are we, in the United States? Our national hospitality is conditional: we are not open-handed King Alcinous, and we definitely want to know the immigrant’s identity, to say nothing of every detail about his background.
And once the migrant is here, many conditions apply, as recent ICE arrests demonstrate. Migrants must be “good guests,” which apparently now means, like Priam, knowing when to leave.
Perhaps as Americans, we could be better hosts, realizing that our relationships with migrants are reciprocal: giving and receiving, benefactor and beneficiary, are reversible processes and roles. Guest-migrants give us the opportunity to be our best selves, generous and forgiving.
Right now, the Achilles-Priam episode is almost too meaningful, with its added poignancy about the return of the body of the dead enemy. In Gaza, Hamas fighters cling to their unwilling guests, dead and perhaps alive. In the earlier days of the war, a truce allowed the return and release of some. Now, Achilles’s gift of a twelve-day truce looks pretty generous.
Which Priam-like negotiator might be able to get a similar deal from the Palestinian fighters? Would they sit down to dinner? Would Hermes the messenger god be available as a guide and protector in enemy territory?
Immigrants and hostages: they play their parts in the drama of hospitality, which is as old as humanity itself and as fragile and dangerous as ever. But the good host and the good guest have the opportunity to achieve great things.
We can welcome our migrants with generosity and enlightened self-interest; and the wretched “guests” of Hamas can go home to their sorrowing fathers, after both sides have shared their grief and mutual sorrow.
Views expressed in this column are the author’s own and not necessarily those of Elon University.