Sea Peoples

Speaking in Tongue

Home is not a place you return to. It is a voice that never left.

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My mother came to stay. She can barely remember the passcode to her own phone. Now she is expected to memorize seven-digit codes for eighty-one gates stored in an application, to submit to facial recognition in a lobby that smells of palo santo diffusers and legal caution, to understand that access is conditional. I watched her stand in the corridor, befuddled, holding her phone — the cognitive supplement — and becoming, in that moment, a prisoner of modernity. Captured. We all are. Some of us are just more agile at navigating the barriers.

The gates are no longer about keeping anyone safe, although they advertise that. They are about liability. This is the new nomenclature of security: multi-authentication, credential-stacking, the language of user experience. We are not being protected. We are being documented. Property management has built a system in which entry is a verified credentialing event, and the verification costs us in attention paper-cuts.

I have a word for this. I coined it in another essay, tracing how a flawed 1968 thought experiment about a pasture became the intellectual alibi for enclosing everything from English commons to the Iranian financial system: Enclosurenomics — the doctrine that transforms every shared resource into a privately held asset, sustained by the myth that the commons is doomed without a fence. That essay was about land and money and sanctions. This one is smaller and closer to the bone. Because the same doctrine doesn’t stop at borders or bank accounts. It reaches into a doorway, a translated poem, and eventually a mouth. I’ve watched it operate at three scales now — over a threshold, over a story, and over a tongue — and I don’t think you can understand what my mother lost in that corridor without seeing the whole shape of the thing.

I should say here that I’m not writing this from outside the fence. Just as I’ve lamented working on algorithms for targeted advertisements, I’ve also worked on keyless entry apps for short-term rental companies. A long atonement ahead. I know exactly how the gate gets built, I do not yet know how to take them down.

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The displacement of moving from a single-family home to a multi-family building is a case study in Enclosurenomics. The buildings are connected by interior corridors — a Kafkaesque rubric of glass and concrete — and every perimeter requires an app. Gone are the days of a physical key, a guard who knew your name and let you in. Now, an app, with its own subscription, is bleeding us dry through brute-force engagement. It is exhausting, but it is only one layer. There is the subscription fatigue, the dozens of monthly extractions that have replaced the common good. There is the limbic hijacking of the feed, engineered to keep us scrolling so we never notice we’re being enclosed. There are news cycles calibrated to maintain a low-grade panic, or to rage-bait us into sharing something — anything — so that we welcome the very gates that confine us. This is what most of us know as home today.

I had just finished Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey when I went to see Christopher Nolan’s film of the same epic, and what struck me first wasn’t the gatekeeping — though there is plenty of that, Wilson the classicist deciding which cadences are admissible, Nolan the showman deciding what survives contact with an audience that has lost the time to read a 164,000 word translation. Both of them, in their very different registers, were translating the same displaced man. Odysseus is not a hero who happens to travel. He is defined entirely by not being home — twenty years adrift. He is, literally, one of the Sea Peoples: the loose confederation of seafaring, land-losing populations who appear in the historical record right around the Bronze Age collapse, when the old palace economies burned and entire coastlines emptied into boats. Homer’s epic isn’t really about a war. It’s about what happens to a person’s language, memory, and name when the sea takes the ground out from under him and doesn’t give it back on schedule.

But the epic is more than that thread, and I don’t want to flatten it into a single moral. It’s also a story about what a person is willing to do to the people who raised him, and how he lives with himself afterward. Odysseus honors the gods and the dead who came before him even as he lays waste to Troy, the civilization those same gods and ancestors built. He does it with cunning, with expert skill, and then he goes into exile for twenty years — not entirely by accident, I think. The exile is the price. The film critic Cole Haddon, writing about the backlash to Nolan’s adaptation, makes this explicit in a way I hadn’t fully clocked myself: Nolan’s Odysseus doesn’t get a clean redemption arc. He admits, on screen, to atrocity — to bringing a civilization down — and the self-exile isn’t heroic humility, it’s closer to a war criminal removing himself from the society he’s no longer fit to live in. What the poem seems to be arguing, underneath the monsters and the storm, is that we all do things we’ll later lament, things we feel obliged to do to honor whatever god we currently worship — money, survival, a deadline, a boss — and the only sin worse than doing them is doing them without awareness. The lotus-eaters offer Odysseus’s men a flower that erases the memory of home entirely, no more grief, no more longing, just forgetting dressed as peace. He drags his men back to the ships anyway. That’s the lesson I actually took from watching this unfold twice, once on the page and once on the screen: you’re allowed to do the shitty, necessary thing. You are not allowed to eat the lotus. You have to stay awake enough to know what you did, carry it, and go into exile from your own comfort long enough to actually reckon with it — not spin a new story every time it’s convenient to save face in front of the next audience.

Something happened before my own screening that I didn’t expect, and it’s stayed with me longer than most of the film itself. I saw The Odyssey at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, in IMAX 70mm, and ahead of the feature, the theater ran exclusive footage from Dune: Part Three — a scene from its coming epic battle, shown nowhere else, gifted specifically to audiences who’d shown up for Homer. It’s not an accident that Villeneuve chose this crowd for that footage. House Atreides, the doomed royal line at the center of Herbert’s saga, was named by Herbert after the House of Atreus — the same cursed Greek lineage that produced Agamemnon, Odysseus’s fellow king, the man whose own homecoming ends in murder rather than reunion. Paul Atreides carries that name into deep space the way a displaced family carries an old word across an ocean. The theater was quietly staging a callback across three thousand years and two different galaxies, and it worked only because everyone in that room, on some level, recognized the frequency. That’s the oral tradition too — the epithet, the stock phrase, the audience nodding because they’ve heard this pattern before in a different mouth. Homer’s original listeners would have caught the same kind of echo every time a poet invoked “Zeus who gathers the clouds” or compared a hero to a lion twice in the same evening. A trailer Easter egg and a Homeric epithet are doing identical work: rewarding the people who already know the shape of the story, and pulling everyone else a little further into the room.

That complexity is exactly where Wilson’s translation, for all its scholarship, falls short of the tradition it’s translating. Oral epic survives because it is relatable — because a storyteller sitting by a fire has to hold a room of people who have no obligation to stay and listen. A meticulously vetted, three-thousand-year-old poem rendered in clinical, insulated academic English, however masterful the line-work, is not built for that room. It’s built for a seminar. And somewhere, for all we know, there’s an even older epic we’ve never recovered, asking an even bigger Homeric question than “what is the nature of things and what does that demand of me” — something closer to why are we even here, and what immunological response does this planet eventually mount against a species behaving exactly like a parasite. The monopolies, the corporate fascists, the dictators-in-training we currently endure look, from that angle, less like isolated bad actors and more like symptoms — self-replicating the way any successful parasite replicates, showing up now in dwindling birth rates and dwindling GDPs across whole regions. It doesn’t seem to be happening fast enough to self-correct. Which is presumably why humanity built itself a thermonuclear option, just in case the slow method fails.

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Here’s the other place the translation-versus-adaptation framing breaks down, and it’s the part I think gets missed most often. An epic of this scale, on film, is not one person’s labor. My friends who worked on Nolan’s production described months of grueling work — building sets by hand, sewing and aging costumes, choreographing and re-choreographing stunts, standing in freezing water for a single shot that lasts four seconds on screen, sciatica from editing. Hundreds of people, most of them anonymous to the audience, gave a significant chunk of their lives to this telling. That is structurally far closer to how The Odyssey actually came into being — generations of anonymous oral performers, each one revising, embellishing, forgetting a line and improvising a better one, the poem assembled by a crowd across centuries — than a single scholar’s years alone with a Greek text is. I don’t want to diminish Wilson’s labor. But it is one mind’s labor. The film is thousands of hands.

Labor is love, in the most literal sense I can offer: the more people who pour their hours into a single outcome, the more love has physically been spent on it, whatever the studio’s motives were for spending it. That doesn’t make the film more “accurate.” It makes it, in one specific and underappreciated way, more faithful to the form the original story was actually told in.

There’s also a rule I learned in film school that I think about often: when you critique a film, you critique it as craft, from pre-production through post — the writing, the casting, the blocking, the sound mix, the choices made in the room, not the reviewer’s own appetite or grievance. You don’t get to swap in your personal taste and call it analysis. By that standard, Wilson’s review isn’t really criticism of the film Nolan made. It’s a referendum on whether Nolan deserved to touch the text at all — which is a different question, asked in the costume of the first one.

And here’s something to hyuck at: Wilson’s review is, without meaning to be, the exact parable Nolan was dramatizing. Odysseus stays faithful — to his mission, to the gods he’s supposed to honor, to the role he’s been assigned — despite serious misgivings about what that faithfulness costs him and everyone around him. He does the loyal thing while doubting, in real time, whether loyalty is even the right instinct. Wilson does the same. She stays faithful to her role as the text’s guardian, defends the ground she’s been assigned to defend, even as — by her own admission on Bluesky, walking back one of her more strained readings — some of it didn’t fully hold up under her own scrutiny. She wasn’t wrong to have misgivings. She was wrong to let the misgivings pose as craft criticism instead of what they actually were: a person protecting a home she didn’t realize was also just a threshold.

So when a classicist critiques a medium outside their domain, I’d ask them to consider what that critique is actually protecting. Haddon makes the same accusation directly about Wilson’s own published takedown of Nolan’s film: that for all its academic seriousness, it reads less like engagement with what the director was actually doing — casting choices used deliberately to indict white supremacy and colonial violence, ambiguity used deliberately to leave the gods unresolved — and more like a scholar defending the one thing a Hollywood adaptation threatens: her authority over how the text gets read. Not the text — the text has survived worse than a film adaptation, and it survived because it was built to be re-told by whoever could hold a room, not preserved behind glass. The critique protects relevance. A job as a god at the door. It can wear the costume of reverence for the craft while functioning as a toll booth — another performative trap, piling cognitive load on cognitive load until thought itself starts to feel like a premium subscription. Looked at that way, it has always been a race to the bottom, and we are all reaching for whatever handle looks like the fastest way to shore.

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The same enclosure happens to language itself, and this is the one I feel in my own mouth.

A linguist once told me that a conservative estimate puts the average person’s lifetime word count around 124 million words — roughly 4,300 words a day, averaged across a life, though the real distribution is wildly inconsistent. What’s stranger is the direction it’s moving: recent research suggests the average person’s daily spoken vocabulary is shrinking by several hundred words a year, a loss attributed largely to the shift from talking to texting, from sentences to emoji. The drop appears to be cross-linguistic, not exclusive to English, and steepest among people under twenty-five, who’ve grown up defaulting to digital shorthand instead of speech. I’ll admit the precise numbers are contested and worth treating skeptically — but the direction of travel isn’t in serious dispute, and it should unsettle anyone who loves a language enough to still speak it out loud.

This isn’t only about individuals talking less. Whole languages are disappearing — linguists estimate that one is lost roughly every three months, as its last native speakers die with it. And here’s the strange twist: by some models tracking language history across the last twelve thousand years, global linguistic diversity actually peaked one to three thousand years ago, in the long aftermath of the Bronze Age collapse.

Before that collapse, centralized palace economies — the Mycenaean Greeks, the Hittites — dominated the Mediterranean and the Near East, hyper-connected the way a handful of frontier labs now dominate how language gets modeled and standardized. When those empires burned to the ground within a single generation, trade routes ceased, central scripts vanished, and people scattered into isolated valleys, islands, and hills. Separated groups stop borrowing from a shared center, and within a few centuries their language fractures into something new. It’s the same mechanism, I think, by which uneven rules applied unevenly across AI platforms are already fracturing English into new dialectal pidgins — not through empire this time, but through the gradient of who has access to which model, trained on whose defaults.

That fracturing didn’t last. The scattered populations eventually consolidated into iron-wielding empires — Rome, Han China, Persia — and the superpowers absorbed the smaller communities, imposing standard administrative languages on the subjugated and triggering the steep decline that followed. In the Greek world this meant the loss of Linear B. In the Indus Valley it meant the slower erosion of the Harappan script under climate pressure rather than sudden collapse. In China, the written language survived largely intact even as entire cultural strata were deliberately erased when the Zhou conquered the Shang. Fragmentation, then consolidation, then loss — it is the same three-beat rhythm every time, whether the thing being enclosed is a coastline or a tongue.

Standardization always wears the same costume, whether it’s applied to a coastline, a currency, or a mouth. It arrives measuring: word counts, literacy rates, “market reach,” the number of speakers a language needs to justify its own survival. It arrives scoring performance: which dialect is efficient, which is legible, which one scales. This is the same grammar I traced in the Iranian sanctions architecture — a system declared a commons only worth protecting once it has been fenced, measured, and put to productive use. Language dies the way the English forest died: not all at once, but act by act, each one locally reasonable, each one dressed as progress, until the thing that used to be shared by everyone belongs, functionally, to whoever standardized it first.

I happen to speak one of the languages still being pruned by that rhythm, and it is, quite literally, a sea people’s language. Hokkien has no native alphabet. It is a Sinitic language of the Southern Min branch, carrying linguistic sediment more than fifteen hundred years deep, forged when waves of refugees fled war and collapsing dynasties in central China, moved south into coastal Fujian, and then did what displaced coastal people have always done: took to the water. They carried Hokkien across the South China Sea into Southeast Asia, and further still, in the diasporic routes some linguists trace back to the same maritime peoples who scattered after the Bronze Age collapse — the ancestors, in a sense, of Odysseus’s own kind, if you follow the coastline far enough east. It is a language made entirely by displacement, by people who had already lost one home and had to build the next one out of breath and memory, because there was no script left standing to carry it in.

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Denying local judgment and the rules communities generate for themselves — usually through art, through the specific cadence of how people actually talk to each other — is how a fence gets mistaken for a foundation. We can hang whatever pretentious label we like on the people building these gates, but underneath the labels is something much plainer: they are protecting a paycheck, not a commons. To live in modernity is to authenticate, over and over, at every threshold. The enclosure has moved inward, until it isn’t just the lobby that requires a credential — it’s memory, it’s vocabulary, it’s the shape of a sentence itself.

The gatekeepers of private quarters were once human — the guard at the door, the neighbor who knew your name, experts of their small domain and almost divine in it. The youth do not revere those gods anymore. They’ve replaced them with interfaces, protocols, brand liturgies. A face scanned in a lobby. A model trained on someone else’s defaults. The center is not holding, and it isn’t clear it ever will again.

Here is what I think Odysseus actually learns, twenty years and a thousand translations later, and what neither Wilson’s fidelity nor Nolan’s spectacle quite says out loud: home was never the island. Ithaca is just the noun the story needs. Home is the language your mother spoke to you with — the specific cadence, spoken by that specific mouth, that recognized you before you had a name for yourself. That’s the only kind of home that survives a Bronze Age collapse, or an eighty-one-gate lobby, or a diaspora across an ocean. You can lose the land. People do, over and over, across every century this essay has walked through, the Sea Peoples included. What’s harder to lose, if you protect it, is the voice that made the land feel like land in the first place.

My mother is that voice. When she speaks Hokkien to me — a language with no alphabet, carried for fifteen hundred years by nothing but breath, memory, and the mouths willing to keep saying it — that is the one unenclosed threshold I have left. It survives the only way a sea people’s language ever survives: person to person, at a kitchen table, in a corridor, in a voice moving from one shore to the next.

And when she passes, the language prunes further. Not extinct — Hokkien still has millions of speakers — but smaller by exactly the shape of her, by every word she carried that I never learned to ask her for in time. That is the real estate I should have been securing all along. Her voice, unenclosed, while I still have the chance to stand in the doorway and listen. We descend from the Sea Peoples whether we know their name or not — displaced from something, translating ourselves for whatever shore comes next. What is worth asking is whether we kept the one language that still calls us home before the water takes it.

There’s a coincidence that a friend turned me on to, and I want to be honest it’s not a fact: Homer sounds like homer, like home with a name attached. There’s no real shared root — Hómēros is Greek, of disputed origin, maybe “hostage,” maybe “he who fits together”; home is Old English, Germanic, a different family entirely. The etymology doesn’t hold up. But the ear doesn’t always care what the etymology says, and I don’t think it’s an accident that the man credited with teaching a whole civilization how to think about itself has a name that, in English, resolves into the thing every one of his heroes is trying to get back to. The Greeks treated Homer’s epics the way later cultures treated scripture — recited to children, argued over by philosophers, cited as moral authority long before anyone called it religion. A polytheistic bible, if you will: not one god’s law handed down, but a whole pantheon’s worth of competing, quarreling, half-honest gods, which might be the more truthful shape for scripture to take. If that’s what Homer was doing — building a home out of contradiction, out of many gods instead of one certainty — then my mother is doing the same thing in a much smaller epic, with an audience of one, in a language with no alphabet at all.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The story the building tells is that we are safe, that the app knows best, that the subscription is the price of belonging. It is a goddamn lie, but it is the only language the building understands. My mother speaks a truer one. Home was never the island, and it was never the gate. It is her voice. I am trying, before it’s too late, to learn it well enough to keep the door open myself.

What I imagine Calypso's island of Ogygia might have looked like