Mourning in the Time of Plague

The excess of meaning critics find in the depiction of Antigone is related to the excesses of a cultural phenomenon in fifth-century Athens, that of Homeric burial. Bonnie Honig’s reading of Antigone further depersonalizes Antigone as an expendable bit player in a larger politics of loss and lamentation. According to Honig, “Antigone does demand the right to bury her brother but Polynices is a pretext (just as his death is pretextual; it does not occur in the play). He provides an occasion for Antigone to object to the democratic order of the day.”Footnote ⁹ Homeric and democratic rites of burial are reflections of these competing political orders, the heroic values of the first upholding the singularity of each aristocratic death, the latter subscribing to a more democratic practice of homogenization. Honig is quick to point out that Creon is an unlikely figure of democratic practice, particularly in light of his tyrannical injunction against burying Polyneices, which he arrives at without consulting the people or the elders.Footnote ¹⁰ His democratic leanings, in keeping with fifth-century democratic thought, lie instead in his ban on lamentation and his misgivings about the perils of individuality. Funeral orations, delivered by men, were favored by the polis over excessive demonstrations of grief by women: the masculinist form of eulogizing praised the dead for their service to the city, underscoring the replaceability of such servers, whereas women’s loud laments mourned the singularity of the life lost. According to Honig, two interlinked functions of tragedy, that genre which monumentalizes and aestheticizes loss, are elaborated in ancient Greece: tragedy compensates for the loss of Homeric mourning practices; it serves also as a domain of controlled or disciplined subversion, where improper and transgressive emotions are momentarily entertained. Antigone’s mourning revives “forbidden elements of women’s lamentation.”Footnote ¹¹

Her keening and lamenting are neither private nor public (and formal), such as that of a professional mourner. Honig reminds us that “democratic Athens did not forbid kinswomen from mourning.”Footnote ¹³ We are to assume, then, that Antigone is banned from ritualistic grieving for the following reasons: her lament is not confined to the household; it is raw and self-indulgent; it commemorates the private and the particular; she wails outdoors.

Antigone’s discussion of her grief is calmly retaliatory at best and evasive at worst: we learn what it is by articulating throwaway comments on what it isn’t. Asked by Creon if she disobeyed the law intentionally, Antigone answers in the affirmative. It was not Zeus who had imposed this decree on humankind, nor can a decree of the sovereign’s “override the laws of Heaven.”Footnote ¹⁴ Antigone expresses no compunction for breaching a man-made edict. Death is welcome, she says to her “countless miseries” and the premonition of meeting her doom causes her “little grief”:

Antigone’s reticence about voicing her multifaceted grief could be read against the mass grieving brought on by the great plague of Athens in late fifth-century BCE. Thebes is a sick city, where “a pollution holds / All our people fast in its grip.”Footnote ¹⁶ The weltering surge of blood described at the start of Oedipus Rex (translated in Oedipus the King as the “angry surge of death”)Footnote ¹⁷ finds an augury in Haemon in Antigone, the first of the Theban plays. Named after the Greek word for blood, this character highlights the preponderance of blood relation in the plot structures of the tragedy—and its scenes of carnage, brought about either by statist violence or through the actions of its disaffected and self-lacerating characters. The original word for the “polluted”Footnote ¹⁸ sword of the house of Oedipus is miasma, a word used to describe the pollution of the plague and the befouling attendant upon intra-familial murder. “Sickness has come upon us, and the cause / is you: our altars and our sacred hearths / Are all polluted by the dogs and birds / That have been gorging on the fallen body / Of Polyneices,” Teiresias prophesises to Creon.Footnote ¹⁹ The guard describes Antigone as arriving obscured in a divine plague (theian noson):

However, the supernatural “visitation” Antigone is associated with does not contaminate like the plague, as does Creon’s vindictive act of exposing the body on a high plain to mutilating birds and dogs. As the guard reports to Creon, the body of Polyneices is found “thinly covered / With dust,” as if to avoid spreading pollution.Footnote ²¹ The dust is described as “dry”—“thirsty” could be another translation of dipsian / konin—suggesting Antigone’s urge is natural, or in accordance with the laws of nature. “The earth itself longs for the funeral offerings that Creon has outlawed,” suggests Rush Rehm.Footnote ²² It is notable that Antigone does not suffer from nosos like her male counterparts in Oedipal dramas: she is neither citizen nor scapegoat who will endure or cure the city. If she is associated instead with the “sickness that has come upon us,” as Teiresius tells Creon admonishingly,Footnote ²³ this is a scourge of nature that is itself innocent of meaning and intent. Polyneices’s body spreads pollution because it has not been consigned to his rightful place below the ground. Similarly, Antigone’s body, which has not found its proper place above the ground, spreads death like contagion, triggering the chain of events that claims Haemon’s and Eurydice’s lives.

In an article examining historical records of the plague of Athens, Robin Mitchell-Boyask writes of a ghoulish archaeological find in Athens in 1998, at the very edge of the ancient cemetery outside the city gates. The relics scattered in this newly discovered mass grave were dated back to the exact plague years (430–426 BCE):

“Here is a sorrow that redoubles sorrow,” Creon laments toward the end of the play, increasingly aware that the origin of this epidemic of sorrows is not Antigone, it is he himself.Footnote ²⁵ Honig’s reading of Homeric funerary rites versus the democratic alternative does not take into account the plague episteme that informs both in the fifth century: the gap between the collective body of citizenry in the unmarked grave, and the unmarked (though subsequently memorialized) grave of Polyneices is closed in the play not through democratic unity but the contingencies of burial and mourning in the time of plague.

Stranger’s Rights and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

In the Oxford World Classics translation of Antigone, Kitto renders Creon’s peevish response to Antigone’s singing of her own dirge in the following words:

Honig interprets these lines in the original differently in her critical essay: “dead or alive, she will be stripped of her rights, her stranger’s rights.”Footnote ²⁷ A stranger is someone who lives in a city but is from somewhere else and does not enjoy the same civic rights as the locals: the ancient Greeks called them “metics.” As Tina Chanter points out:

I will now dwell on a twenty-first-century retelling of Antigone, which, albeit in a time and setting vastly removed from ancient Greek tragedy, addresses the critical oversight Chanter draws attention to. It speaks to the plight of “outsiders, foreigners, and slaves” by contextualizing Sophocles’s Oedipal family drama in questions of citizenship, colonialism, and race, in particular the insider-outsider, civilized-barbaric dichotomies determining paradigms of humanity and modernity in global cities to this day. Home Fire also helps us envision the role played by what Helene Foley terms the “female moral agent,” one whose gendering is complicated by racial difference at that, in the framework of tragic ethics and the Aristotelian idea of tragic choice.Footnote ²⁹

I read Kamila Shamsie’s 2017 novel Home Fire to supervise an undergraduate dissertation on the postcolonial Gothic. Shamsie does evoke the tropes of Gothic romance: incestuous twins, problematic patrilineage, the intimacy of violence, the uncanny optics of seeing and unseeing the corpse.Footnote ³⁰ The Gothic’s is a fractured, ruined realism, and although Home Fire is not constructed as a Gothic novel in the way, for instance, Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad is, it has an inscrutable object of terror in the figure of the anarchist and the suicide bomber.Footnote ³¹ The novel is set in the London of 2014–2015, its migrant ghettoes coming to terms with the controversial legislation that Home Secretary Theresa May implemented in 2014, which granted Britain the right to revoke citizenship of foreign-born Britons—even those holding only British nationality—if their actions were deemed “not conducive to the public good.”Footnote ³² Shamsie’s fictional home secretary, Karamat Lone, is the mouthpiece of the new Immigration Act of 2014. The historical irony is that, following the publication of the novel, we saw the appointment of the Conservative Home Secretary Sajid Javid. Javid, like Lone, is “the child of working-class Pakistani Muslim migrants, who makes his fortune in the corporate world before becoming a Tory MP.”Footnote ³³ Twitter called Shamsie “Nostrashamsie.”Footnote ³⁴

Sophocles’s the Antigone is the “marrow” of Home Fire, Shamsie has said in interviews following its publication. The twins Aneeka and Parvaiz are Antigone and Polyneices; Isma is the loving sibling Ismene, precipitately forgotten by the younger pair. Parvaiz is radicalized when a recruiter cynically lets him in on the family secret that his father was a jihadi who had fought in Bagram and was killed in Guantánamo. Aneeka seduces (but also falls in love with) Eamonn Lone, son of Karamat, hoping to use him to bring her brother home. It is interesting to note that although Aneeka does sacrifice marriage for a greater cause, and although she is indeed a brotherless daughter burdened with the need to create progeny to keep the family name alive, she is not the Euripidean “sacrificial virgin” Foley identifies Antigone with.Footnote ³⁵ The loyalty, Shamsie also seems to say, lies not only with the natal family and natural laws but with the plight of the global Muslim community as a heterogeneous whole. Home Fire dislodges the discourse of family commitment or allegiance to the dead for one of collective resistance and lamentation. Although, in relation to the siblings’ father and Parvaiz’s own death, there is the Sophoclean determinism that “the dead made their own demands, impossible to refuse,” Shamsie’s characters remain ordinary enough through the course of the novel, their motivations understandable if not morally justifiable.Footnote ³⁶ It is their time that is out of joint and oddly inhuman, Shamsie seems to suggest. In the final scene of the novel, we see the spectacle of Parvaiz’s corpse in its ice coffin playing in a loop on British TV. Parvaiz had died trying to escape ISIS, and his dead body, refused entry into Britain, ends up in Pakistan, where Aneeka stages a televised vigil in a public park:

This is not simply a tableau of fate and elemental grief, but a politically strategic exhibition staged by the avenging Aneeka, a point not lost on Karamat Lone: “‘Impressive,’ said the Home Secretary.”Footnote ³⁸

In her speech on November 24, 2014, May declared: “We have worked hard to make it easier to get rid of foreign nationals, including terrorists and terror suspects, who should not be in this country.” This statement is echoed by Karamat Lone in a TV interview after the death of Parvaiz Pasha in response to Aneeka’s desire to bring his body home: “We will not let those who turn against the soil of Britain in their lifetime sully that very soil in death.”Footnote ³⁹ “This country,” “the soil of Britain,” “foreign nationals”—each phrase with its own deep history of injury toward bodies not allowable in the political community. In the summer of 2018, Sajid Javid, as home secretary, declared that Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, two recently captured members of an Islamic State group called “The Beatles”—so-called because of their British nationality—would not face trial in Britain. Their citizenship was revoked, and Javid said that he would seek no assurances that they do not face the death penalty if they are later tried in the United States.Footnote ⁴⁰ In response to the outcry of human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and politicians from across the political spectrum, Number 10 asserted that it was “a priority to make sure that these men [who had perpetrated beheadings of prisoners etc.] face[d] criminal prosecution,” hinting that in this case due process would be overlooked in the pursuit of “justice.”Footnote ⁴¹ In 2019, we saw the case of the so-called ISIS bride Shamima Begum. She had left East London for Syria at age fifteen, and four years later, she appealed to be allowed to return to Britain. She had given birth to her third child in the Al-Hawl refugee camp—the other children had died in infancy from malnutrition and illness. “Citizenship is not a privilege; it is a protected status,” the noted Human Rights lawyer Helena Kennedy states, yet the so-called war against terror in the post-9/11 years has seen many British citizens made unBritish. Citing Kennedy in an article on citizenship deprivation cases, Shamsie points out the dishonesty of exiling one’s citizens using “go back where you came from.”Footnote ⁴² Shamima Begum had been erroneously identified as a Bangladeshi national by the ministry of foreign affairs: Bangladesh was quick to retaliate that there was no question of her being allowed into the country. “I wasn’t born in Bangladesh, I’ve never seen Bangladesh and I don’t even speak Bengali properly, so how can they claim I have Bangladeshi citizenship,” Begum told a reporter.Footnote ⁴³ News of her son’s death broke days after Home Secretary Sajid Javid decided to revoke her British citizenship, rendering her stateless.

Home Fire bristles with angry and sardonic humor, at its tragicomic best when it delineates “Mr British Values” Karamat Lone’s dilemma:

Parvaiz is no one’s brother, no longer a British citizen, but an impersonal “enemy of Britain.” Aneeka/Antigone, in an impassioned exchange with Eamonn Lone, states:

Shamsie weaves into the plot of Home Fire instances of the atrocities mentioned previously and also fleshes out the Muslim citizen’s negotiation of what they know about Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with what Arun Kundnani calls “the fantasies of the war on terror,” fantasies moderate Muslims must fall into step with to hold on to that coveted designation.Footnote ⁴⁶ Kundnani estimated in 2014 that the FBI had one counterterrorism agent per ninety-four Muslims in the United States, pointing out that one of the lists the authorities had drawn up about suspected radicals in the United Kingdom included three hundred children younger than fifteen years of age. Aneeka Pasha’s claim to grieve, therefore, is also a claim to the right to reshape ethical discourse.

Later in the novel, in the scene of martyrdom she has staged for Karamat Lone and a growing global TV audience, Aneeka says:

Helene Foley, commenting on the revolutionary charge of funereal rituals performed by women in Greek tragedy, draws attention to the use of lamentation to expose injustice, mobilize witnesses, and win public sympathy. Aneeka’s statement to the gathered news agencies in this apocalyptic scene conveys her blocked and incomplete mourning, carefully chosen words of social protest connecting her profound and private loss to everyday atrocities. It is a theatrical tour de force, her face a muddy mask from the dust storm raging through the park, on which she draws lips with a spit-licked thumb. As Foley observes of Antigone, “She uses lamentation to carry her point assertively in a public context that might otherwise have silenced her speech.”Footnote ⁴⁸

The social justice Aneeka seeks is also racial. A majority of Britons who have lost their citizenship in recent years are immigrants.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nationality is overwhelmingly revoked from citizens who hail from Muslim countries: this is often done on the basis of secret evidence and on the unsubstantiated assumption that the dual national would be able to become a citizen of another country. A fabricated narrative of never quite belonging to the adoptive country fuels this practice. The novel captures the toxic xenophobia peddled by some British tabloids, their blatant lying and hatemongering. After Parvaiz Pasha’s death, unnamed sources come to the fore, falsely claiming the boy had idolized his militant father from his childhood. “Aneeka ‘Knickers’ Pasha” and the “Muslim fanatic Parvaiz ‘Pervy’ Pasha” become criminal accomplices in this lurid retelling. “Knickers,” so christened because of her opportunistic use of the home secretary’s son to help her twin, is now the “terrorist’s Twisted Sister” and the key player in “Hojabi”gate. The melancholy “Aneeka” section of the novel, heavy with her introjected object of grief, drowns out her thoughts and words in waves of reported hate speech.Footnote ⁵⁰

The preordained tragedy of lives doubly victimized by an unequal society and a tiered citizenship system is occasionally alleviated by Shamsie’s wit. Home Fire gives us GWM—or the surveillance systems trained on Googling While Muslim—“ecosystem beards,” and “passports that look like toilet paper to the rest of the world.”Footnote ⁵²

Antigone speaks her last words 410 lines before the end: she is, in other words, missing from nearly one-third of the play. She speaks approximately 218 lines to Creon’s 344. Kamila Shamsie circumvents this curious marginalization of Antigone in the eponymous play by titling her reworking Home Fire. The novel, Shamsie’s seventh, is set in London, with excursions to Karachi, Amherst, Massachusetts, and Syria. The five acts of the play are five of the chapters in this work of prose fiction, only one of these named after Aneeka. Although this is not plague-ridden London, the twins are shown to inhabit a world reeking of untimely death: their father and mother lost at a young age, now Parvaiz. Like Antigone and her brothers, “Grief was the step-sibling they had grown up with, unwanted and inevitable.”Footnote ⁵³ The nexus of death and home is dramatized in the way Parvaiz dies in a drive-by shooting in front of the British Consulate in Istanbul, where he had gone to find a way back to London; Aneeka meets her fate as she tries to bring him home because he, the dead brother, “wants to come home.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In the course of the novel, Aneeka’s suffering is transmuted to a cautionary tale about despots and their deadly politics. If Antigone is consumed with the desire for proper burial, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire is also about bringing unburied truths home. Both original and belated tragedy lose interest in the personal lives and loves of their protagonists. The twinned trajectories of Aneeka and Parvaiz—identical in some stretches, parallel and divergent in others—are eventually subsumed by the tableau of the former’s spectacular defense of her stranger’s rights in a park lined with banyan trees. In the end, as the Pakistani high commissioner tells Karamat Lone, Aneeka is not British, no one’s sister, not even a grieving teenage girl, but “a woman who has stood up to a powerful government, and not just any powerful government but one that has very bad PR in the matter of Muslims.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Antigone’s Suffering in Exegetical Literature

In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan states that “Antigone reveals to us the line of sight that defines desire.”

As audience, we fall under the spell of Antigone. Lacan seems to regard Antigone as the subject, not object of fascination. Antigone’s fascination is what orients her ethically (and here Lacan’s reading differs from other readings of the play). For Hegel, for instance, Antigone and Creon represent complimentary ethical claims—which must be balanced and synthesised for Sophocles’s tale to be morally uplifting. Lacan does not see in Antigone’s desire an opposition to Creon’s law in the sense that her actions are not direct responses to Creon’s demands. What she embodies, instead, is the drive to bury her brother, her one duty. It is this “unshakeable, unyielding position,” Lacan says, which bestows her with the “unbearable splendour” that, as mentioned previously, fascinates us.Footnote ⁵⁷

The history of Antigone’s critical reception is the history of a longstanding fascination, as George Steiner argues in his 1984 book (his term for it is “obsession”). Matthew Arnold stated that the play turns upon “the conflict between the heroine’s duty to her brother’s corpse and that to the laws of her country.”Footnote ⁵⁸ George Eliot accused him of misreading, but echoes of the Arnoldian interpretation can be heard in her observation that the play was about the struggle between “elemental tendencies and established laws by which the outer life of man is gradually and painfully brought into harmony with his inner needs.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The symbolic overload of Antigone figurations in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Goethe, Lacan, Woolf, Steiner, Butler, and many others helps contextualize her strange reincarnation in postcolonial fiction, such as Shamsie’s Home Fire. In exegetical literature, Antigone stands interchangeably as the ethical subject, the force of resistance to the inderdictions of state power, the claims of kinship (in fierce, if also tragic, opposition to Creon’s claim of universality), messianic violence, anti-authoritarianism, and feminism. Martha Nussbaum reads Antigone, a play that begins with the question “Do you know?” as a tragedy of deliberative reason. Each of the protagonists has a “simple deliberative standard and a set of concerns neatly ordered in terms of this.”Footnote ⁶⁰ And although one is far more correct in the content of her decision, both have, with devastating consequences, narrowed their sights. Shamsie’s evocation of Antigone goes against the grain of Hegel’s reading of her as hypostatized law and Lacan’s deciphering in her actions the vicissitudes of the death drive. Nor is the figure easily reducible to the claims of the non-normative family, as Judith Butler powerfully argues. Like other works of postcolonial fiction before hers, Shamsie foregrounds the raced body at the intersection of love and politics, society, faith, and family: Antigone, here, is both timeless myth and a contingent redrawing of polity in the twenty-first century for the socially marginalized who seek cultural intelligibility. In a correction to Martha Nussbaum’s vision of the antinomies of a deliberative world, Shamsie’s Home Fire seems to suggest that there is no practical wisdom, no good human living to be had, for those doomed to make choiceless choices, or a bad choice that is also the only viable one to be made. After all, Sophocles had envisioned her as the foreigner—as Françoise Meltzer points out, his Antigone echoes the “leitmotif on homelessness begun in Oedipus at Colonus,” a foreignness that takes on “ontological proportions since it partakes of what Kierkegaard called ‘the fellowship of the already dead.’”Footnote ⁶¹ According to Meltzer, this explains her inscrutable desire and how home for her increasingly comes to mean “the foreign country of death.”Footnote ⁶²

Sophocles’s Antigone, which was the most popular play of the trilogy until Freud’s introduction of the Oedipus complex in the early twentieth century, has been used to critique global wars (Seamus Heaney), the German occupation of Paris and Nazi censorship (Jean Anouilh), patriarchy (Simone de Beauvoir), masochism (Jacques Lacan), and heteronormativity (Judith Butler), to name some of the more prominent extrapolations. Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes used the contemporary parallel of the Bush administration forcing its coercive justification for the war on Iraq: as the edict from Creon reads, “whoever isn’t for us / Is against us in this case.”Footnote ⁶³ It is highly relevant that Heaney’s version was commissioned to mark the centenary of the revolutionary Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Antigone has been read as the embodiment of the death drive and the desire for death—by no means the same thing—by Jean Anouilh, boredom, also by Anouilh, Adamic sin and guilt by Kierkegaard, the fundamental antinomy between state and kinship in Racine (La Thébaïde).Footnote ⁶⁴ In his remarks on tragedy, Hegel identifies Antigone as the category of tragic situation that arises from a conflict between “ethical life in its social universality and the family as the natural ground of moral relations.”Footnote ⁶⁵ She has also, almost always, been read as the flip side of the Creon (sovereign) coin.

Antigone, who upholds blood ties, reverences “the gods of the nether worlds,” Hades to Creon’s heaven.Footnote ⁶⁶ Both Creon and Antigone represent forces that upset the natural order of things. Creon has confused the upper and lower worlds, Teiresias says: “You have sent a life to settle in a tomb; you keep up here that which belongs below, the corpse unburied.”Footnote ⁶⁷ And Antigone’s desire is not for law but “unwritten and unchanging” laws.Footnote ⁶⁸ She—and this is the Lacanian reading—is the excess of the symbolic, of the registers of law, kinship, nomenclature. Hers is not a phallic jouissance: her wanting is not in response to man’s fascination with objet a. She is a being of radical “solitude,” Lacan states; hers is a jouissance “that is beyond.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In Antigone’s Claim, Judith Butler argues that desire which bursts forth in this way, overtaking symbolic norms, leads to death. She also sees in Antigone’s excessive grief for Polyneices the traces of her unspoken mourning for Eteocles, the other brother, and the ungrievable bodies of her parents, Oedipus and Jocasta. For the melancholic, language “becomes the event of the grievance.” “Emerging from the unspeakable, language carries a violence that brings it to the limits of speakability,” Butler states.Footnote ⁷⁰

Kamila Shamsie follows the dramatist Jean Anouilh in making Antigone the younger (rebel) sister, while law-abiding Ismene/Isma is the older. In one of the many Sophoclean echoes in the play, Isma says, “She is my sister. Almost my child.”Footnote ⁷¹ There is, however, no room for a voice of compromise and accommodation in the original or its retelling. “Her wry cleverness is so compelling that it is difficult not to pine for her in the later stages of the novel, from which she is largely absent,” says Natalie Haynes of the character of Isma in her Guardian review of Shamsie’s novel.Footnote ⁷² In Sophocles’s version, too, Ismene had a paltry sixty lines. Hapless heirs to an incestuous marriage, each sister is heavily invested in the propriety of social ritual: “If we defy the King’s prerogative / And break the law, our death will be more shameful / Even than theirs,” Ismene cautions, evoking the sins of the son-husband and mother-wife, two names in one made obscene by that very collocation.Footnote ⁷³ If, in her last moments, Antigone is not able to count her only surviving sibling as a friend despite Ismene’s ardent declarations of love for her errant sister, it is because nothing can avail against her hopeless, impossible task, just as Ismene had predicted. In the final scene between the sisters in Home Fire, Isma is speaking words of love to Aneeka, trying to end her thrall to the dead Parvaiz, who, she beseeches, was also her baby brother. Rendered increasingly absurd in her blind love for and protectiveness toward her sister, she asks Aneeka to go back to university, study the law, and remember the dear departed in her prayers, as normal people tend to do. Each sister calls the other’s love useless, the utilitarian logic of these statements a strange one to bring to bear on love objects and loving in the first place. The grieving Aneeka drives Isma out of her life, preoccupied as it is with Parvaiz’s phantasmal presence: “This house was for the twins only now.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Helene Foley has argued in her powerful critique of Antigone that the play’s eponymous lead has difficulty communicating the meaning of her actions with her audiences both inside and outside the play. This is because “there is no traditional or recognized procedure for a female moral agent in classical Athens” and also because Antigone’s predicament forces her to abandon “one set of traditional female obligations (to marry and to obey her guardian) to pursue another.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire grapples with the additional challenge of creating an intelligible Muslim Antigone with agency and heroic traits, which, ironically, are to be read in conjunction with the morally unintelligible act of forsaking the living for the dead or endangering living kith and kin to honor the dead. Why, we may ask of the twenty-first-century retelling is the brother (Parvaiz) irreplaceable but not the sister (Isma) or Eamonn (who is his parents’ beloved son and his sister’s beloved brother)? Why does Aneeka throw away her own bright life so lustily? Foley identified it as Antigone’s “moral myopia,” the classical heroine’s refusal to betray her brother despite the brother’s act of treachery to the state.Footnote ⁷⁶ The anomie marking the Shamsie novel offers further insights. Instead of the plague, Home Fire describes the virulent Islamophobia of post-9/11 United States and the United Kingdom, which afflicts and quarantines all Muslim life, irrespective of class, faction, or acculturation. The novel had, after all, begun with Isma’s protracted security interrogation at a London airport on her way to graduate school in the United States: “Do you consider yourself British?” “I am British,” she had answered, painfully aware that despite not having a second country of which she was a citizen and despite her ready acquiescence with the passive citizenry that is the lot of the Muslim immigrant, this claim would sound equivocal.Footnote ⁷⁷ Her sister Aneeka, a lawyer-in-training, knowingly eschews the unfair law for impossible ideals of justice.

What does it mean when Antigone says, “I have to please / The dead far longer than I need to please / The living”?Footnote ⁷⁸ Is the key to Antigone’s incommunicable suffering to be found in this speech act, with which she disavows rest and companionship in life for chimeras of rest and companionship in a wished-for afterlife? Although Antigone evokes sacred laws to justify her stance, it is arguable that even to a contemporary audience of Greek tragedy it would be adjudged “reckless” and “hopeless.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The chorus seems certain that “None are so foolish as to long for death,” and, baffled by her death-defying stunts, proceed to call her stubborn, too bold, and too reckless.Footnote ⁸⁰ The role of Haemon in Antigone, which adds to the sum total of suffering in this drama, if not the suffering of Antigone herself, raises further questions about Antigone’s allegiance to the living. As commentators have pointed out, love scenes were considered improper in ancient Greek drama, nor can we find modern love on that Greek stage. Even so, there is no hint of romantic love between the pair. Antigone names Haemon just once in the play—“O my dear Haemon! How your father wrongs you!”—and even that line is attributed to Ismene in most manuscripts.Footnote ⁸¹ The introverted, melancholic charge of Antigone is such that she does not know that Ismene did eventually intervene on her behalf or that warm-blooded Haemon had overcome his submissiveness to lecture his father, Creon, on the civic virtues of dialogue, deliberation, and amenability. It is Creon who comes closest to understanding Antigone’s love of the dead and the concomitant choice of a buried life: when he consigns her to a subterranean cave, imprisoning but not killing her outright, he says “She may live / Or die, as she may choose” in this new home, which, like her old home, is a tomb.Footnote ⁸² After all, as Antigone has said herself to Ismene, “I have given / My life already, in service of the dead.”Footnote ⁸³

Antigone names her father’s unconscious sin as “the source of all my anguish,” a grudging statement that casts doubt on what had seemed, at first, an unhealthy fixation to her family of origin.Footnote ⁸⁴ This lament is in response to the chorus’s “For some old sin you make atonement,” their unequivocal pronouncement that her act of civil disobedience, so fraught with risk and danger, should be seen as a daughter’s paying for the sins of her father.Footnote ⁸⁵ It is a peculiar evacuation of agency on the part of a female protagonist who had provoked her sister to make her act of transgression known, warning Ismene that she, Antigone, would hate her more if the latter kept it a secret. As with the references to the plague discussed in the earlier section, Antigone’s tragic predicament is mapped between the extremities of collective or inherited guilt and suffering and personal innocence. Antigone ponders here the harsh fate that befell the race of Labdacus, the paternal grandfather of Oedipus, reaching its apogee of “blind madness” in the marriage of her parents. The apostrophe that follows could refer to Oedipus or Polyneices and presents Antigone’s own life as prescripted by fateful necessity:

The chorus recognizes the piety inherent in an act Antigone has previously deployed the language of moral requirement to justify but point out at the same time that it transgressed authority, which brooks no disobedience. Simon Goldhill reads the ambivalence in the chorus’s response to this interjection astutely:

Her unhappy and undead life is a suffering she has brought upon herself, the chorus insinuates, and Creon, lurking in the background in this scene, crudely reinforces the verdict. However, the slain becoming the slayer of the living is a recurrent theme in Sophoclean and Euripidean tragedy, and powerfully attaches to the synecdochal “dead hand.” Although Antigone pursues death, she is pursued by death in turn, benumbing her life to regain its vitality. This might explain her compulsive need for the second burial, which suggests that she was not content with the first burial’s lack of human attribution (and the dire consequences her own complicity in it would invite). “Is the deed to be valorized not by its own symbolic power, not by having been performed once and sufficiently, but by Antigone’s discovery, arrest and punishment?” Harold Schweizer asks. “Is she to rival the death of Polyneices?”Footnote ⁸⁸

I had suggested at the start of the article that what is baffling about the suffering of Sophocles’s Antigone is that there seems to be no discernible eros in her piety. The Antigone refigured by Kamila Shamsie is, by contrast, a moral agent who acts in the name of love. The inscrutability of her actions—the exhibition of her brother’s putrefying body in a public park in Karachi to force a repatriation of his body to London, for instance—is attributed to the “madness of love.” The Pakistan high commissioner, for instance, evokes a mythic tale of star-crossed lovers to the unmoved home secretary:

Home Fire presents tangled vocabularies of love: the maternal love of Isma, a young woman herself, for her orphaned twin siblings; the transfiguring passion that changes Parvaiz in a matter of weeks and that his sisters mistake for his being in love for the first time; the devouring love (and subsequently rage) Parvaiz inspires in his twin; the unconditional love for her brother Eamonn admires in Aneeka; the love of Aneeka, which makes Eamonn step out of his father’s shadow; and the worldly Karamat Lone’s love for his beautiful, unworldly boy, the very child who precipitates his downfall. This overabundance of love does not, however, make way for better understanding and communication between the characters, and it certainly does not better or save their lives. Parvaiz does not get to tell her twin he is coming home to and for her; Aneeka does not get to express her abiding love for Eamonn except through the violent epithalamion at the novel’s end. Antigone’s suffering and the sum total of suffering in Antigone, with or without the tribulations of love, remain inscrutable because they are particular and peculiar in the original as well as in the retellings, and constitute a mythic madness resistant to generalization. Home Fire ends with an effulgent sight made uncanny by deadly afterimages, which the reader doesn’t find verbalized on the page but must imagine instead. As with the chorus in Antigone, there are no commensurate words (of lamentation) with which to make sense of the tragedy.

In young Antigone’s final lament, she grieves for herself because no one is left or allowed to grieve for her truncated life. She descends to Hades “all unwept of friends,” and with no community of offspring.Footnote ⁹⁰ Look what I suffer, at whose hands, for having respect for piety, she says: “How savagely impious men use me, / For keeping a law that is holy.”Footnote ⁹¹ Her lament, which is not a recant, resonates in the interstices of the public (in front of the chorus) and private (in the royal enclave of Creon). As Charles Segal points out, she is performing both the female function of wailing and lamenting (thrēnos) and the male one of delivering her own funeral oration.Footnote ⁹²

She is led to the execution like a man, but hangs herself with her veil of femininity, her hijab, if you will. Neither an ideologue nor a fundamentalist, Antigone is, in fact, various and changeable in her dramatic monologues, lamenting the fate of dying “Unwept, unwedded and unbefriended” when she is not rejoicing at the prospect of meeting loved ones in the afterlife.Footnote ⁹⁴ She seems to be reminding the audience of the deceptiveness of appearances and that, childless though she may be, she has shown an overabundance of maternal devotion in performing the last rites for her departed kin: “For when you died it was my hands that washed /And dressed you, laid you in your graves, and / poured / The last libations.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Where Western subjectivity is about a “dyadic unbridgeability” between categories,Footnote ⁹⁶ Antigone, with her uneasy kinship with death and her transgression of gender registers, is excess and extra, the sovereign subject-to-come. It is this nonsynchronicity with her time that is, I claim, the ground of her dreamless, public, furious yet nonviolent suffering. It is not a coincidence that both Sophocles’s Antigone and Kamila Shamsie’s Aneeka are portrayed as defiant children. In her final moments, it remains for the hitherto judgemental (and adult, if not aged) chorus to not simply see the action from both sides but feel and weep for Antigone in a way she was unable to care for herself. From this point in the play, most of the lines are sung, not spoken.