045: Brightness, in Spite of Everything
Kamila Shamsie's "Home Fire," Sophocles' "Antigone," honor, shame, love & other fundamental things, life after social distancing, Rena J. Mosteirin reinvents the sonnet, & Doodle Dispatches
Isme: This thing cannot be done
Antigone: But it still has to be tried
—Seamus Heaney, from The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone
We have a lot to weave together this week so buckle up my friends, I promise to get you back home safe. To start, here are four things to know about the tragic Greek play, “Antigone.”
Her name is pronounced an·ti·guh·nee, which I didn’t know until I was 30 and had been mispronouncing it for a decade, even whilst teaching the play to actual human children.
The play, despite stuck inside withered paperbacks with thick-necked Greek marble statuary on the cover, is a fuckin’ banger. It takes you from tears, to fistbumping cheers, to sister solidarity, to rage, and then back to tears again. In a good way.
If, in the last year or so, you’ve woken up on the couch after a news binge, whimpering to yourself, but why are they wearing Kente cloth, then help is on the way. Seamus Heaney’s version of Sophocles’ play and Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire, a modern retelling of the play, are here to oxygenate, rehydrate, and exfoliate your principles.
For good measure, here’s the story of Antigone in the form of a tweet:
Home Fire is a prize-winning, Booker-listed, page-turner of a book that offers a faithful retelling of the original Greek play, with a “value add,” as we say in the professional managerial class, in the form of a contemporary setting, sexier plot development, and culturally rich characterizations.
Aneeka Pasha, a Muslim, Anglo-Asian lawyer is at the center, the honor-loving, authority-flouting Antigone figure. Her older sister, Esma Pasha, is, like Sophocles’ Isme, the anxious rule-abider who wants to protect herself and her sister from suffering. Parvaiz Pasha, Aneeka’s twin brother, is the Islamic fundamentalist version of Antigone and Isme’s brother Polyneices who turned traitor and went to war against his brother. And, the modern-day curse that presages all three of these young people’s lives is the fact that the Pashas’ father was an accused jihadist who died as a prisoner in the Parwan Detention Facility at the U.S. Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
Just as with Antigone and Isme in the play, Aneeka and Esma are tangled up in a conflict they believe is about values, but that I believe has more to do with experience and personality. Aneeka is outraged about what has happened to her brother and blames the racist colonial British state for creating the conditions of confusion and vulnerability that led to his radicalization. She’s an attorney by training and is highly motivated by principles of honor and justice. She’s young, beautiful and fearless and doesn’t respect the rules of an unjust system.
Esma, who inherited the responsibility for Aneeka and Parvaiz’s care when their mother died, has just restarted her graduate studies after taking time off to support her young siblings. She’s terrified that Parvaiz’s choices will ruin her own and her sister’s chance at happiness and professional success in the UK, and her fear is not unfounded: the novel opens on a scene of her being interrogated in an airport security room as she tries to fly to the United States to meet with her thesis advisor. Esma, not surprisingly, is motivated by the need for stability and safety; she has more experience than her sister in the immutability of an unjust system.
Aneeka and Esma are united in the power of their love for their brother. But, trapped as they are inside a broken system, each woman is forced to make ‘choices’ that feel like betrayal to the other. The worst of these is that Esma has reported Parvais to the British authorities in order to signal the appropriateness of the rest of the family’s loyalties. This is, of course, unforgivable in the eyes of Aneeka.
The motif of conflicted kinship is carried through the book’s secondary narrative which centers on a fictional Home Secretary, Karamat Lone, who is a controversial figure in the Anglo-Asian community because of his pro-assimilation politics. (Interestingly, Home Fire was published in 2017, two years before Priti Patel become the real life Home Secretary.) Like, Isma, Karamat is professionally and personally invested in following the rules; he believes that immigrant communities should assimilate to the norms of the dominant (colonial, white) culture as a means to personal and professional success. He is his own best example: a former activist who, by deciding to work within the established power structure, has risen to his current, prominent position in government. Known as the “Lone Wolf,” Karamat’s fate is to be the person who must adjudicate the lives of Parvais, Aneeka and eventually that of his own son
Isma and Karamat both embody the strength of the cross-cultural, panhuman myth that obedience leads to freedom. It’s especially painful because they are so well-intentioned and, in some ways, stronger than their more idealistic counterparts. They are somehow able to bend and twist themselves to norms while also trying to find ways to be true to their deepest selves and loves.
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The story of the indoctrination of Parvaiz is another example of why I raised the question I asked a couple of weeks ago in “Mixtape:” are we doing right as a culture by our boys and young men?
Farooq, the ISIS recruiter who targets Parvais, lures him with grandiose stories of Parvais’s father, whom Farooq claims to have known. From there, he skillfully plays to Parvais’s loneliness and fears of inadequacy, alternately flattering him for his intelligence and goading him to take actions that his father would be proud of. Slowly, over time, Farooq undermines Parvais’s connection to his sisters, friends, and country, too, telling him that he must be wary of an “emasculated” version of Islam, “bankrolled by mosques and by the British government.”
And then, Farooq tortures Parvais. He chains him so that he can neither straighten up or lie down, but must remain hunched in a squatting position for hours in an intentional evocation of the rendition of his father. In so doing, Farooq pierces the core of Parvais’s vulnerability: his shame. “How much do you know about what they did to prisoners in Bagram?” Farooq asks him when it’s over. The implication is that Parvais is inadequate and weak for not avenging his father’s dishonor. Believing that he must join the cause of the jihadi to redeem his father’s suffering is now psychologically in reach.
There is a second, equally effective, form of manipulation. Parvaiz is a talented sound engineer who can’t get work in London: lacking the right connections he can’t get a paid job on a film set, and lacking money, he can’t afford to work his way up as a low or unpaid intern. It’s an easy thing for Farooq to do to get Parvaiz work and, in so doing, show respect and appreciation for his skills. It’s a case study in the way that violence and exploitation will fill the vacuum created by the failure of the dream of a just and civil society.
The effects of radicalization last just long enough for Parvaiz to make the fatal mistake of joining a terrorist group in Pakistan. By the time he realizes his mistake, it’s too late. Karamat, in his role as Home Secretary, refuses to extradite Parvaiz. He tries to escape anyway and is executed by the jihadi.
Which brings us back to the classic, devastating image first given to us by Sophocles in ancient Greece: the slaughtered brother, whose body is being dishonored by the state, and the sister who is determined to bury him.
*
By now you must be wondering why I used the phrase, “sexier plot development” and then went on to describe nothing but human suffering. Which is fair. So, let’s go back to the story of Aneeka, who sets out to seduce Karamat’s son as a means of helping her brother.
Eamonn Lone, whose Irish-sounding name serves to both to obscure his Anglo-Asian ancestry and signal that he is a modern day version of Haemon, Antigone’s fiancée in the original version, is an easy target for the beautiful and brilliant Aneeka. But, plot twist, she succeeds so magnificently that she falls in love with him, as well. And so, as the intensity of Eamonn and Aneeka’s journey into each other’s lives heats up, we are given a super hot, beautifully sensual counterpoint to the alienation that drives the suffering in the other parts of the book. Eamonn is assimilated and secular; Aneeka is observant and devout, but when they are together, their instinct for connection, eros and hope outshines conflict, death and despair. There is a whole section on these two lovers that reads like how a love song makes you feel.
Then, when the execution of Parvaiz makes the national news and Aneeka goes to Karachi to try to bring his body home to London to be buried appropriately, the love story gets a global audience. In a striking choice by Shamsie, this last section of the book is told through the eyes of Karamat via a succession of security briefings, newspaper reports, and live-streamed videos. Over the course of several days, Karamat reads and views the scenes of Aneeka’s dramatic, press-friendly, and visually stunning vigil next to the body of her dead brother and tells himself that she’s just cynically exploiting the media.
But, when Eamonn joins Aneeka at the side of her dead brother, it’s a no contest on who will win the narrative. It doesn’t matter that Parvaiz is dead. It doesn’t matter that both Eamonn and Aneeka have shattered their connection to the rest of their families. It doesn’t matter that the world is broken and a young man’s body is decaying in the heat of Pakistan. What matters—for the length of time it takes to read this section, at least—is that the two of them are bearing the weight of the sacrifice together.
The complex emotion of this reminded me a bit, of the famous scene in Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes of a Marriage” which has just now been retold in a modern setting for HBO starring Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaacs. In the scene, the now-divorced couple are back together for a night, despite being in relationships with other people. There’s no pretense left between them and nothing to fear; they’ve already done the worst to each other. There’s no future left for them—that’s not the point. The point is that for this moment they are together, and it’s transformative. In the new version, Chastain’s character, Mira, is the one who says the famous lines:
Here I am, in the middle of the night, without much fanfare, in a dark house somewhere in the world, sitting with my arms around you and your arms around me.
It’s powerful solace for anyone who’s seen enough tragedy to reject platitudes or false hope. It promises nothing but the one thing that is possible: for this moment at least, we aren’t alone.
Don't forget, though, that the play, “Antigone” is a tragedy not a comedy. Don't say I didn't warn you.
*
In the Seamus Heany’s translation of Sophocles’ play, the Chorus sings the line, Glory be to the brightness, to the gleaming sun as over and over. It’s an oddly positive refrain, given the tenor of the story. I like to believe, without the academic training to back it up, that it’s Sophocles’ way of shining a bright light on the importance of individual freedom.
This line rolled around in my head for most of this past week as I set about trying to right-size myself back into the lovely but suddenly frighteningly small orbit that is my life here in Vermont. Glory be to the brightness is an apt description of the light of late autumn in my part of the world, and I needed every bit of that poignant, reassuring beauty to get myself through the transition. Because it hurt—more than a bit—to fit myself back into this current here and now.
This is because for a whole week prior to this one, I got to be well away from the personal and political anxieties, the inconveniences of masks and social distancing, the annoyance of polarizing politics and geriatric governmental leadership, and all the rest. I was in the Netherlands and in Belgium, and because I was vaccinated, with my little paper index card to prove it and a negative PCR test to reinforce it, my life could be blessedly ordinary again.
It turns out I had misplaced my awareness of the glory and brightness of many ordinary things. I had let myself forget the pleasure of talking and laughing with friends in crowded, happy, noisy rooms, of walking a cobblestone street to find a ‘restaurant of requirement,’ of hugging, whispering, shaking hands and the other variations on physical closeness, and of traveling, working, and even standing in line next to other people as a matter of course and not exception. I had let myself forget what it’s like to just go and visit a friend’s house, or even to sit in a restaurant for a long time without feeling guilty about the waitstaff. I had let myself forget other things, as well.
The thing that freaked me out was realizing that I had let myself in for that level of forgetting in the first place. It felt like I had given the concept ‘for the good of many’ too much of my personal head space. It felt like self-betrayal.
One of the penultimate scenes in Home Fire is the one in which Karamat, his wife, and his daughter have all been taken to a safe room. It serves as a pointed metaphor for the logical end point of his (and Isma’s) philosophy of obedient rule-abiding. He and his family are protected, to be sure, but the price is to be locked in a steel-reinforced bathroom by their security detail, where they sit for hours without knowing what is happening or when they will get out. It’s a vividly claustrophobic portrait of the emotional cost of safety, and it reminded me that I’ve never wanted to make life decisions based only on keeping myself and others safe—emotionally or otherwise.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t be circumspect in our response to a dangerous world. Of course I don’t regret following the rules during a global pandemic. I also understand why I created a kind of parallel emotional lockdown to make it work for myself. It’s what had to be done. But going forward, I hope I can do just as well for myself and others and still hold more light and space for my own soul. What makes a life worth living? What does it feel like to love against all reason? What are the everyday sources of joy and pleasure? I want to ask these questions as often as How can we all stay safe? I can’t choose my fate any more easily than a character in a Greek tragedy, but I can choose to sing for myself a chorus about glory and brightness instead of social norms and conformity. I don’t have to embrace self-denial, even if I have to follow, for a time, a few rules of survival.
Leaf Pile
Doodle Dispatches is SBB’s resident artist and saves us all, every week, from the dreaded Wall of Text. You can see her work on Twitter and Instagram, as well as order all kinds of fun prints and gifts at DoodleDispatches.com
Experiment 116
I have not got my hands on Rena J. Mosteirin’s new book Experiment 116 yet, but what she’s doing with poetry, technology and culture gives me the good kind of chills. (And I am not only referring to the way her Zoom chat game is so good that she made me snort laugh inappropriately in a Very Serious Meeting last week.) In brief, the experiment of Experiment 116 is to take Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 through a ‘defamiliarization’ exercise with the help of Google Translate. Spoiler alert: Shakespeare totally holds up.
Here’s a snippet from Literary North’s interview with her.
Here are my recommended next actions: Read the rest of the interview. Buy the book. Then, how about we get together online and have a book chat? Let me know if you’re interested.
That’s it for this week. Next week is another installment of the serialized memoir, Socially Distanced. —xoxo Courtney
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