This paper advances a reading of Odysseus as an
indefinitely-detained migrant on Calypso’s island by putting the Odyssey
in dialogue with the treatment of Chinese immigrants to the United States
during the Exclusion Era (1910-1940). By comparing the Homeric poem and poems
inscribed by detainees on the walls of Angel Island Immigration Station in San
Francisco Bay, we see technologies of migrant detention at work: the use of
island geography, physical humiliation, disappearance from loved ones, and a
lack of recourse to justice. Odysseus’ reunion with Penelope and Laertes in
Ithaca also resonates with early 20th century interrogation practices, in which
Chinese immigrants were tested on their knowledge of the arrangement of their
homes and villages as a means of establishing family connections and identity.
I will also consider poems written by detainees in the U.S. detention center at
Guantánamo Bay and poetry’s role in the struggle to define time.