Unburied Grief

As one act of terrorism and vengeance follows another in Israel and Gaza, I have been thinking about Sophocles’ Antigone, a play presented in Athens in 441 BCE, during a tenuous peace bracketed by two long wars. Sophocles’ audience of about 15,000 was packed with his fellow Athenian combat veterans and the relatives of those who died in battle. What did they see onstage? A girl, Antigone, princess of Thebes. She has been prevented on pain of death from burying her brother, because he is an enemy of the state. She is willing to die.*

I’m thinking about Antigone now as the war spreads beyond the borders of Gaza and Israel. Every day will leave not only more dead, but more of the living unable to bury the dead. More who cannot find the body, or go to where it is trapped. More who have learned that there is too little left to bury. More who are too severely injured themselves to do anything but weep.

What can a play drawn from myth, performed almost 2,500 years ago, have to say about this two-fold suffering of loss and the inability to mourn?

Antigone is set in the city of Thebes, in a mythical, pre-historical time. Only days before, an invading army has been defeated. At its head was a challenger to the throne, Polyneices, a royal prince of the kingdom. He is Antigone’s brother, and it is his corpse that lies unburied outside the city walls. Antigone’s other brother Eteocles, died defending his claim to the throne. He lies dead within, buried with honors. The brothers killed each other.

Their uncle Creon, now king of Thebes, has forbidden anyone, even family members, from recovering the body of Polyneices. He declares that whoever dares to perform even the most perfunctory of funeral rites will be put to death.

As vultures eat her brother’s body, Antigone rages. Although she is a princess, she is a powerless teenager, and twice powerless for being a woman, as Creon reminds her. She is determined to bury her brother, even if it means death. Her sister Ismene begs her to stop, to save herself from punishment. But Antigone is as brave and angry as any ancient hero. Somehow, she evades the king’s sentries – twice -- and sprinkles dust over her brother’s corpse, enough by the rules of ritual to count as a burial. She is caught in the act and brought before Creon.

The king sentences her to death, rejecting the pleas of the citizens. His own son Haemon, who is engaged to marry Antigone, begs him for mercy. But Creon is unmoved. The girl is taken to a cave to die of starvation.

When Creon learns that she has hanged herself rather than wait for a slow death, he tries to stop the disaster he has set in motion. But Haemon has already killed himself next to Antigone’s body. When his mother the queen finds out that her son is dead, she kills herself inside the palace.

At the play’s end, Creon owns the disaster he has created, and repents, but too late. In tragedy, knowledge always comes too late. His brief rule is over; the royal house is destroyed. Three bodies await burial. It is up to Ismene, as the surviving female member of the family, to perform the ritual mourning. But the play ends before she is summoned, leaving us without what we currently call ‘closure,’ as if catastrophe were a road or a door to be opened and shut.

Some of us know the shock and anguish of not to be able to bury a loved one. The body has vanished in a natural disaster – a wildfire, a flood, an earthquake - or lost to the human cruelty of war, abduction, mass graves. Or we are mourners with nowhere to mourn:  we are incarcerated, or have no means or money to go to the funeral, or a raging plague keeps us in isolation, and we say a bodiless goodbye over a phone. Whether the body of a loved one is reduced to a corpse, or ashes, or, most terribly, bits and pieces, we want to honor it and remember that this body was the home of a specific life, not something to be discarded.

I myself have no hope of ever seeing the ashes of my mother, father and sister put to rest, or even knowing where they are. A vengeful sibling has hidden them from me. At least I know that each died in peace, and not alone.

The word drama is Greek for actions. The actions of tragedies speak, even when there is no clear moral lesson. We cannot say with certainty what the original, war-weary audience heard Antigone say. To me, at least, it is a reminder and a warning that the treatment of the dead has consequences for the living. But even doing what is right, as Antigone does, will not heal grief or prevent future losses.

Like all Greek tragedies, Antigone was meant to be performed only once, in honor of the Dionysus, god of theater. We have no theater of Dionysus in which to gather once a year in honor of a god of transformation and communal joy and sorrow. As a nation, we are not practiced in recognizing moral quandaries, much less thinking about a way out. Still, we may see through the lens of ancient tragedy what we are seeing now, updated hour by hour: War implicates both the guilty and the innocent. Bodies are deemed either vile enemies, selfless patriots, or collateral damage, depending on one’s role in the theater of war.

A few notes:

*Her name is pronounced Ann-TIG-oh-nee. She was the daughter -- and sister -- of the doomed Oedipus. She does not appear in Sophocles’ most famous and influential play, Oedipus the King, but has a primary role in Sophocles’ final play, Oedipus at Colonus. But those are stories for another time. (I should note here that we do not know if women were allowed to attend the theater. We do know that women were responsible for carrying out the rituals of mourning.)

There are many translations of Antigone available in libraries, online and in bookstores. In recent years, I have been using translations by Peter Meineck and the late Paul Woodruff in in my classes. Woodruff was a combat veteran of the Vietnam War and a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas.

Antigone has a long history of adaptation, beginning in the 16^th century.A helpful starting point is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Modern_adaptations_of_Antigone_(Sophocles_play)

Anne Carson’s recent adaptation of the play, Antigonick, is to my mind particularly brilliant. https://www.ndbooks.com/book/antigonick/

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