The Odyssey Project - My Name Is Nobody

In The Odyssey Aeolus, the god of winds, loves listening to Odysseus tell stories. He rewards him with a bag containing all the winds except the one that will blow him safely home to Ithaca. But his crew think the bag is full of treasure that Odysseus is concealing from them. When they are almost home they open it, the winds escape, and blow the ship back to Aeolus's island.

Zaffar Kunial's father comes from Kashmir, but in his poetic response to Homer he explores the more mysterious story of his mother's family. Kunial finds a place name on the map of Orkney that is the same as his grandmother's and unravels the odyssey of an ancestor who was blown about the world, from Egypt to Orkney in the Napoleonic Wars. And, like Odysseus, he was a soldier and storyteller. His family also wandered, crossing the sea to an island. The place they were trying to get to, then were ripped from, was home.

Producer: Julian May.

Zaffar Kunial's response to the bag of winds tale in The Odyssey blows him north to Orkney

Writers from various diasporas create new radio poems in response to Homer's The Odyssey.

Inua Ellam, who was born in Nigeria, begins the second week of responses by 10 contemporary poets, all refugees, exiles, migrants or their offspring, to Homer's Odyssey, which is full of parallels with the world today. Ellams's poem is inspired by the episode where the temptress, the witch Circe, turns Odysseus' men into pigs. As Odysseus goes to rescue his men, he's advised by the god Hermes that he should eat a certain herb to protect himself. In Ellam's update, all street rhythms and rhymes, Odysseus's ship is a broken-down bus, Circe's palace a warehouse club and Hermes is as much a dealer as a god.

With Inua Ellams himself, Maeve Bluebell Wells as Circe and Tom Forrister, Hermes.

Producer: Julian May.

Inua Ellams sets the Circe episode of The Odyssey in a bus stop and a warehouse club today

Writers from various diasporas create new radio poems in response to Homer's The Odyssey.

Golan Haji is a Syrian Kurdish poet and translator who writes in Arabic. He had to leave Syria after the war broke out at the end of 2011 and now lives in Paris.

Haji has worked with the English poet Stephen Watts on this poem which is inspired by the episode in The Odyssey in which Odysseus hears his own story told by a blind bard, but cannot reveal his identity. Yet, as much as this episode, the poem is driven by the idea of blindness as a different mode of perception: Homer is said to have been blind and Odysseus listens to another blind bard's account of himself, his own story taken over and changed by the others. Haji was struck, too, by parallels in the work of the great Arabic poet Abul 'Ala Al-Ma'arri, who was also blind. Ala Al-Ma'arri has the status in the Arab world of Dante in Europe and Haji's poem engages him. Look not for narrative in Haji and Watts' beautiful poem (though it is there), rather, enjoy its music and illuminating imagery.

Producer: Julian May.

Golan Haji and Stephen Watts' poem inspired by Odysseus hearing to a story told - his own.

Writers from various diasporas create new radio poems in response to Homer's The Odyssey.

In The Odyssey there is a moving episode in which Odysseus goes into the Underworld to meet the shades of dead luminaries. He also sees his mother, and realises she has died since he left home. He tries repeatedly to embrace her, but as she is a spirit, cannot.

In McCarthy Woolf's poem, written throughout in rhyming couplets, the story takes place in a portacabin in a port, and in a minicab. Here the mother, Cleo, who died soon after giving birth to her son, Valentine, is trying to make contact with him. Valentine is a cabbie on a night shift, and his controller on the radio has godlike power. But there is strange interference, on the radio and even his passenger's mobile phone.

Karen McCarthy Woolf is Cleo; Samuel James is Angel and Valentine and Maeve Bluebell Wells plays the Passenger.

Producer: Julian May.

In Karen McCarthy Woolf drama Odysseus's mother tries to contact him from the Underworld.

Writers from various diasporas create new radio poems in response to Homer's The Odyssey.

The Afghan musician Milad Yousofi plays specially composed music on the rubab.

Producer: Julian May.

In Reza Mohammadi's response to Homer, Odysseus is doomed to witness carnage in Kabul.

Writers from various diasporas create new radio poems in response to Homer's The Odyssey.

Mona Arshi, who was a human rights lawyer before following her vocation as a poet, takes us through her own parent's journey from Northern India to Britain in the 1960s. Her piece is partly the poetic narrative of first her father's journey, and then her mother's, who followed later. It is, too, a meditative essay on what arrival and settlement means. How do we create home, and what happens to that which we have left? Arrival can be signalled by an event as much as a journey's end - her father in a queue of recently landed Sikhs outside the barbers, waiting to have their long hair cut for the first time because, now they're in the West, they will no longer wear their turbans.

The actor Vincent Ebrahim tells Mona Arshi's father's story. Her mother tells her own which, as she follows her husband, is the opposite of Penelope's, the wife of Odysseus. And there is poetry in English and Punjabi, about the next generation, rooted and growing here.

Producer: Julian May.

Mona Arshi, in Homer's light, considers her Sikh parents' journey to England in the 1960s.

Writers from various diasporas create new radio poems in response to Homer's The Odyssey.

Escaping a war zone, a man tries to cross the sea on a flimsy raft. It disintegrates in a storm and he is washed ashore. A kind woman gives him clothes and people help him on his way. This is one episode in The Odyssey, but the parallels between Homer's ancient epic and what has been happening recently in the same region, are striking. When the Cyclops asks Odysseus what he is called he replies, "My name is Nobody."

Among the refugees, exiles and migrants who have arrived recently, and the offspring of those who came earlier, are poets. Radio 4 has commissioned 10 such writers, from various diasporas, to create new radio poems written in response to The Odyssey. Daljit Nagra, Radio 4's Poet in Residence, is curating The Odyssey Project and introduces the poets and the context of their pieces in relation to Homer.

In the first programme Mir Mahfuz Ali, who almost drowned in a whirlpool when he was forced to flee Bangladesh, responds to the Scylla and Charybdis episode, when Odysseus finds himself between a monster on rock and another in a whirlpool. Here, Ali creates a modern boat crossing, such as those we've been hearing about in the news for the past few years. Woodisi, poet and player of the oud, risks the perilous crossing aboard the Siren, in the hands of the dubious boat owner, Solyman.

Mir Mahfuz Ali comments himself, but because his voice was damaged when he was shot in the throat by a Bangladeshi policeman for singing anti war songs, the actor Zubin Varla reads Woodisi's words. Milad Yousofi plays the oud.

Producer: Julian May.

Mir Mahfuz Ali responds to Scylla and Charybdis in The Odyssey with a sea crossing today.

Writers from various diasporas create new radio poems in response to Homer's The Odyssey.

Tamrat in the Cyclops' Cave is a collaboration with the English poet Chris Beckett, who speaks Amharic. It is a richly sonic piece, in both languages, performed by a cast of Ethiopians living here, with music and sound from Addis Ababa and the mountains.

Writer and Narrator Alemu Tebeje

Producer: Julian May.

Poet Alemu Tebeje's tale of Tamrat, growing up in Ethiopia, akin to the Cyclops' cave.

Writers from various diasporas create new radio poems in response to Homer's The Odyssey.

In China today many children are left in rural villages with grandparents while their parents work vast distances away in the coastal cities. Odysseus, similarly, abandons his son Telemachus and goes to war. Sarah Howe, winner of the T. S.Eliot Award, was born in Hong Kong. In her response to Homer Telemachus is a Chinese girl left in the countryside. She wants to leave, but for reasons more complicated than to look for her father.

Producer: Julian May.

Sarah Howe looks at the story of Odysseus's son, Telemachus, from a Chinese perspective.

Writers from various diasporas create new radio poems in response to Homer's The Odyssey.

In the final episode of The Odyssey Project, Radio 4's Poet in residence, who has curated and introduced the series, reads his take on Odysseus's homecoming. He takes on the suitors who have been feasting at his expense and pestering his wife for her hand in marriage, so they can take over his land. It's a bloody scene that ends with Odysseus and his man slaying every suitor. In Nagra's poem, his protagonist, Daag, a modern day migrant living in Sheffield, returns to his village home in the Punjab to reclaim his wife. To reclaim his wife from the men of the ruling caste who have exploited the corrupt region by running their own harem and gambling den. Daag is from the knife-cutter caste, he has plenty of blades and, in a Bollywood way, knows how to handle them.

Producer: Julian May.

In the final response to Homer, Daljit Nagra takes on Odysseus sorting out the suitors.

Writers from various diasporas create new radio poems in response to Homer's The Odyssey.