What If Odysseus Returned to Damascus?
What Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey reveals about exile, return, and time
I left the screening of The Odyssey with a question Christopher Nolan never asks: what happens after the return?
We all carry the image of Odysseus battling the sea, defying the gods, surviving storms to find his way back to Ithaca. Yet it was not that journey that stayed with me as I walked out of the cinema. It was the one that begins once he reaches the shore.
When I got home, I opened an airline website. I typed Paris. Then Damascus.
For a few seconds, I stared at the screen without really looking for a ticket. I was searching for something else: the possibility of return.
For fifteen years, that gesture had never crossed my mind. When a country is forbidden to you, you eventually stop imagining the road that leads back to it. The impossible becomes a habit. You stop checking whether it is still impossible.
Then Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell.
The news arrived one evening on my phone, between two insignificant messages. I read the sentence several times before I could believe it. Then I did something I had not done in fifteen years: I opened a map of Syria and searched for my street.
That night, I did not sleep. Not out of joy, nor out of fear, but because one sentence kept circling in my mind, simple, almost unbearable:
What if I could go back?
I was not merely living far from my country. I was living with the idea that I might never return to it. The day that impossibility cracked open, I understood how silently it had shaped part of my life.
I did not yet want to return. I wanted to know that I could.
The difference may seem slight. It is immense.
That is when I understood why Nolan’s film had unsettled me so deeply. We often read The Odyssey as the story of a man who finally finds his way home. I believe it tells another story: what time does to us.
When Odysseus returns, he finds Ithaca. But he does not find the world he left behind. His son has become a man. His wife has learned to live inside waiting. His kingdom has continued to exist without him.
Odysseus’s real victory is not that he crossed the sea. It is that he accepts that time, unlike him, never stopped travelling through his life.
And he could have returned sooner. For seven years, he remained on Calypso’s island, suspended between longing and forgetting. Was it captivity? Desire? Comfort? Perhaps all three. Every exile knows something of that suspension: the strange moment when return becomes possible, yet one is not ready to leave the place, or the version of oneself, that made survival bearable.
For a long time, I thought exile could be measured in kilometres. Today, I think it is measured in years.
Exiles carry their city with them, then spend years inhabiting it inwardly, polishing its memories as one polishes a stone. Slowly, memory no longer preserves a city. It composes a work of art.
I am a filmmaker. I know that a film never shows reality as it is. It chooses, cuts, brings things closer, erases, slows down. Memory works in the same way. It is our first editor.
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It does not restore the past. It rewrites it.
Sometimes, I wonder whether I truly miss Damascus, or whether I miss the film my memory has made from it. Today, I wonder whether what I miss is not a city at all, but a scent: jasmine.
Sometimes, a fragrance is enough to erase fifteen years.
I close my eyes, and Damascus reappears. Not the real city, but the one my memory has chosen to save: late-afternoon light on the stones of the Old City; Fairouz’s voice drifting from an open window; a line by Nizar Qabbani returning without warning; my mother’s face.
And yet, the desire remains.
Sometimes I imagine my return. Not as a hero, but as a stranger. Walking through the alleys of the Old City without saying my name. Stopping in front of the house where I grew up. Picking a handful of jasmine. Breathing deeply.
Not to recover my past, but to verify that it truly existed.
In The Odyssey, when Odysseus finally touches the soil of Ithaca, Athena veils him in mist. She makes him unrecognisable, even to those closest to him. We are told she is protecting him.
But I wonder whether she is simply making a deeper truth visible: Odysseus is no longer entirely the man who left.
I catch myself wondering whether, one day, I too will have to hide my face when I return. Not to deceive Damascus, but to give it time to recognise me.
And what if I am the one who no longer recognises it?
What if the alley from my childhood has grown narrower? What if the light no longer has the same colour? What if even the jasmine has changed its scent, unnoticed by everyone except me?
What frightens me is not that Damascus has changed. Cities change; that is how they remain alive.
What frightens me more is another possibility: that the person who returns will no longer be the person who left.
I hope that one day, a regular flight will once again connect Paris to Damascus. I will watch the city appear beneath the airplane window.
I do not know whether I will recognise Damascus. I do not know whether Damascus will recognise me.
But I already know that the real journey will not only connect Paris to Damascus. It will connect two versions of myself.
One boarded a plane believing he would return one day. The other has understood that we never return to the country we left. We return towards a country that continued to exist without us, while we continued to exist with it.
Odysseus defeated gods, sea, and war. But he never defeated time, and no one does.
We may cross oceans, survive storms, escape sirens and cyclopes, only to return to a house that is no longer entirely ours.
Time does not fight. It waits.
Perhaps that is what return truly means: not recovering the self we once were, but meeting the person we could only become by leaving. In Hegel’s words, it is a Rückkehr zu sich selbst, a return to oneself. We become ourselves only after having moved away from ourselves.
Perhaps this is what I will seek when I finally fly from Paris to Damascus: not the boy who left, not the city as I preserved it in memory, but the distance between us.
And, within that distance, the possibility of recognising myself anew.
