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Antigone

 by Sophocles

Written ~440 BC

Home Fires

by Kamila Shamsie

Published 2017

Read Oct 2019

The Theban Legend of Oedipus King of Thebes and his family was well known before Sophocles wrote his Theban plays in the 5^th century BC. This reader was educated in the legend through Sophocle’s Theban plays.  This reader will not comment on Sophocle’s innovations or brilliance.  Others are far better positioned to do so.  This reader will only recount the overall plot of his first Theban play, Antigone.  

Before the play starts, the sons of disgraced Oedipus, Polyneices and Eteocles, have contended for the throne of Thebes, held by Creon, the brother of Oedipus’ widow and the person Oedipus charged to care for his children as he leaves for exile.  Polyneices has attacked the city of Thebes while Eteocles fought to defend it, supported by Creon.  The brothers have killed each other in direct face-to-face combat with each other.    Creon, again firmly in charge of Thebes, has proclaimed that Polyneices, because he attacked Thebes, will not be buried but will be left to rot and scavenged by carrions while Eteocles will be buried per customs.   The ruling against Polyneices is considered very harsh punishment.   

Oedipus’ daughter Antigone and Ismene differ with regards to their willingness to obey Creon’s proclamation.  Antigone declares her brother will be buried; Ismene promotes caution and is unwilling to war against the state.  Antigone executes some burial rites defying Creon.  She admits this to Creon and argues with Creon about the immorality of the edict and the morality of her own actions.  Antigone and her sister are taken away for punishment although Antigone indicates Ismene is innocent.   Creon’s son and Antigone’s finance, Haemon, arrives and initially indicates support for his father, suggesting he is turning against Antigone, but then argues for lenience for Antigone including that the people support Antigone’s actions.  After arguing, Haemon leaves, indicating he will never again see his father.  Creon decides to punish only Antigone and has her buried alive in a cave, to minimize wrath from the gods.  After interaction with a blind prophet, Creon eventually decides to reverse his decision and orders Antigone released.  Unfortunately Antigone has already hanged herself.  Haemon kills himself when he finds Antigone’s body.  Creon begins to blame himself for all that has happened but not soon enough as his wife, Haemon’s mother, has also committed suicide.   

In the acknowledgements to Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie tells us she took up a suggestion to adapt Antigone in a “contemporary context”.  This reader found her results stunning.  This writer has decided not to reveal details of the adaptation and leave that for readers to discover themselves.  However, this writer can indicate that the choices Shamsie made to exemplify Oedipus’s disgrace,  Polyneices’ crime against the state,  and the circumstances Creon creates for himself and his state allow us to experience the extreme situations that the ancient Greeks understood about the Theban Legend.  The choices force us to experience the terrible dilemmas the characters face and to realize the answers seem obvious but aren’t.   

Congratulations, Kamila Shamsie for enabling this reader to really understand the depth of the questions Antigone requires us to face. 

The Cuckoo’s Calling

Published 2013; Read Aug 2019

The Silkworm

Published 2014; Read Oct 2019

Career of Evil

Published 2015; Read Oct 2019

By Robert Galbraith

The Cuckoo’s Calling is the first in a series of detective novels featuring Coroman Strike and his temp, Robin, written by J.K. Rowling under the name Robert Galbraith.  This reader enjoyed these books while doing long distance driving for many of the same reasons she enjoyed listening to the Harry Potter series while driving:  the characters—both the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are richly drawn and well-rounded with positive and negative attributes; the characters make some bad decisions that lead to consequences they need to repair; the plot is engaging; the language is great.  The reader gets engaged in the personal story of the detective and his temp (later investigative partner) while the chase is on to solve the case of the specific book.  In Career of Evil, the case directly involves Robin and brings forward some perps from Coroman’s past.  The series is set in London and the daily routines and corresponding language and idioms fall nicely on the listener’s ear.   This reader looks forward to listening to the fourth book in the series and hopes J.K.  aka Robert will continue finding new adventures for this engaging and unlikely pair of investigators. 

The Dispossessed

By Ursula LeGuin

Published 1974

Read July 2019

Although this book won two prestigious awards focused on science fiction and fantasy (Hugo and Nebula), this book is not a typical science fiction or fantasy.  Rather it is an example of LeGuin’s  literature in which she creates a new setting for a story to explore significant universal themes, this time about the ability to create and sustain an anarchist society.  In this book, the setting is focused on Urras, an earth-like planet and its moon Anarres.  Anarres became populated by approximately 1 million self-exiled persons over the course of 20 years (it took that long for everyone to make the journey by spaceship) who chose to leave Urras and set up a new society on Anarres following the Settlement of an uprising on Urras.  The self-exiles are known as Odonians, taking their descriptor from the name of the Urrastian woman, Odo, whose writings provoked the uprising on Urras even while she was jailed for nine years.  The Settlement agreed by the Urrastises and the Odonians specified that Urras would continue to obtain raw mineral materials from Anarres but does not otherwise interfere with Anarres.  If addition, no Urrasti can pass into Anarres beyond a space port wall during the trips to Anarres to pick up the minerals it obtains from the planet.   The story starts approximately 160 years after Anarres has been isolated from Urras.  The main character is Shevek, a theoretical physicist who was born on Anarres. 

LeGuin starts the book on Anarres as a passenger (whom we later learn to be Shevek) boards the spaceship at the space port which is about to take a shipment of minerals to Urras.  This initiates the story, told in the Urras chapters, about Shevek’s stay on Urras .  Chapter two is set on Anarres and starts the story, told in the Anarres chapters, of Shevek from infancy to his decision to leave Anarres and visit Urras.  LeGuin alternates the Urras and Anarres chapters.  In some editions, the chapter titles indicate the name of the planet which greatly accelerates the reader’s ability to understand the book’s structure and move between time and space settings. 

Through the Anarres chapters Shevek’s story provides the reader an insight into the Odonian culture including how children are raised, how people address their sexual needs and sometime form partnerships when they choose to have children, how communities are physically structured, how people obtain work assignments, where they live, eat, work, and socialize.  The reader comes to understand Anarres and Odo’s teaching as Anarres inhabitants born there understand them as well as how these inhabitants understand Urras.  Using Shevek’s story, LeGuin allows the reader to see how an Anarres inhabitant’s perspectives about the societies on this pair of planets evolves as he matures from infanthood to adulthood. 

Odo’s writings provided a blueprint for establishing the society, although she never participated in it as she died on Urras before the self-exiles begin to leave.  The reader is invited to consider how well she did in the design that was meant to enable a world in which the community’s shared goals of sharing, giving to the community what you can give, taking from it only what you need, and owning nothing personally, allows a society with no government, no laws, and no motivation for, and thus no incidents of, crime. Life is very austere:  people sleep in small, bare, shared rooms in dormitories, eat in communal refractories which also have sitting room areas, and contribute a day of manual labor each doced (10 days) so that the least desirable but necessary work can be shared.    In addition to the drive for avoiding possessions, austerity is also a somewhat natural outcome of living on a primarily arid planet on which the native life is a few types of plants on the land (no land-based animals) and some fish species in the seas. 

The reader will not reveal how it comes about that Shevek leaves Arranes and goes to Urras, nor what happens when he is there, but will indicate that Shevek’s experiences on Urras inform the reader about Urras.  The reader follows Shevek’s evolution in understanding of the “properitarian” societies on Urras and what this means to Shevek’s intentions for being on the planet.

This remarkable book gives the reader substantial concepts to consider on nearly every page.  Just a few examples include:  what drives us to have possessions; what does it mean “to need to work”; what does it mean “to be worked”; how the tension between “the drive self-improvement” (in various forms) and the “drive to do good for society” are played out in various social and economic structures.  Some extracts from Odo’s works that are quoted include:   “free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think” and “excess is excrement”.   An ongoing concept that Shevek and his colleagues struggle with regards when customs become laws as evidenced by the ways those not followed those customs are treated.  A phrase used in marketing the book, and that appears as a subtitle in some editions, is “An Ambiguous Utopia”.  There are ample examples revealing Anarres to be less than a “true Utopia”.  But the reader is immediately forced to consider the similarities and differences between Arranes and his own country.  So although LeGuin creates a foreign setting to consider these and other ideas, the reader is acutely aware that she is addressing universal concepts that surround our own current (and past) society, country, and world. 

Shevek’s research regards developing the concept of and equations defining a unifying theory of the universe.  This is a goal that has been pursued by physicists throughout time and that currently remains unanswered.  While the concepts of “Sequency” and “Simultaneity” as they are discussed in this book were interesting to this reader, it isn’t necessary to become distracted by the specifics.  However the concepts of research to expand scientific knowledge and engineering that use that knowledge to some end(s) is very relevant to assimilate.   Shevek wants to author the work.  He doesn’t want anyone person or group or country to own it.  So a question LeGuin challenges us with is to understanding what it is required in order to have a world in which valuable knowledge isn’t in some way owned so that the benefits it enables can provide profit to only some (and in which knowledge that isn’t owned is actually utilized). 

As in most great literature, the end of this book does not provide a closed ending to the story.  Rather the reader is invited to continue to consider the questions posed by LeGuin for her characters and for us. 

PS–this book will earn the designation “classic” in 5 years as this reader anticipates it will continue to be read and discussed 50 years after its publication.

Jaybar Crow

By Wendall Berry

Published 2000

Read Aug 2019

Jaybar Crow is born in 1914 near Port William, KY (the setting for many of Berry’s books).  He’s orphaned at age 7 and goes to live with his aunt and uncle who pass within about three years.  At that point Jaybar  is sent to an out of town orphanage.  He briefly attends a small college on scholarship to become a minister but leaves when he realizes he doesn’t have some answers to important questions his congregation members will likely have.  He arrives in Port William in 1937 just as the town barber has left town with his family as the trade couldn’t support a family, but maybe could a single fellow.  As he had learned to barber while at the orphanage, an occupation has is found.  The local banker becomes convinced Jaybar can make the payments on the small building housing the barber shop—one room on the first floor for the shop; one room above for living quarters; outhouse in the back; no running water.  Jaybar settles into his trade and the barber shop becomes a fixture in the community.  He falls in love (from afar) with Matty who marries her high school sweetheart and Big Man on Campus, Troy Chatham.  Troy wants to be a big farmer too and jumps on the mechanization band wagon, buying tractors, and other equipment and  going into debt to pay for it.  This is contrary to Matty’s parents (and other neighbors’) ways.  In 1969 when Jaybar is 54, the health inspector gives Jaybar an ultimatum:  get running water in his barbershop or close down.  Jaybar chooses the latter and moves to a friend’s cabin on a nearby river.  He takes his barber chair with him and some of his customers follow him, but only providing him “donations” so he stays on the right side of regulations.   Thus Jaybar continues his life, just barely “on the grid”.  Between discussions of the goings on in the town, there are stretches of Jaybar’s thinking about faith including the questions that prompted him to leave college.

Berry beautiful language and pace forces the reader to slow down and savor the spinning of his tale of a past time when things were simpler and slower and a person’s interaction with “the grid” could be very slight.  This reader lives part of the year in a rural area populated by Amish farmers.  All have some source of revenue to pay taxes and buy the goods they don’t make themselves (cloth, shoes, books, etc).  But their interaction with “the grid” seems limited to what’s required to live the disconnected lifestyle they’ve chosen.  Berry’s subtle message asks us to consider “who has it right”? 

A Woman is No Man

By Etaf Rum

Published 2019

Read Sept 2019

In 1990, in Palestine, Isra’s family receives a suitor, Adam and his mother, Fareeda.  Adam’s family had migrated from a refugee camp in Palestine to Brooklyn, NY in 1976.  Fareeda brought her son, Adam, to their homeland in 1990 to find a good Arab wife for him.  Within a few weeks Isra (17) has been married to Adam (30) and moved into to his parents’ home in Brooklyn.  Seven years later, Fareeda and her husband are left to raise Deya and her three sisters after their parent were killed in a car accident.  In 2008, Fareeda is focused on finding a suitor for Deya who is torn between loyalty to her family and Arab culture and her desire to have a life beyond being an obedient wife and mother.

Rum tells this story through Deya chapters in 2008-9, Isra chapters progressing through the 1990’s, and Fareeda chapters in both time periods as well as some flashbacks to her earlier years.   Through these three perspectives we learn about how three women have struggled with the culture Fareeda is so committed to maintaining even though they now live in America:  1) the only path for a woman is marriage; 2) a wife’s role is to have children, preferably sons, clean, cook and obey her husband and her husband’s parents; 3)  the role of the man is to provide for his family and keep his wife and daughters safe, pure, and obedient, beating them if necessary; 4) the role of sons is to support his father in providing for the family while supporting his own and to obey his parents.  This lead to the situation that a girl must be married off quickly to both to relieve the father’s financial burden and to ensure she is considered pure and desirable for marriage.  Fareeda’s marriage was fully arranged—she met her husband the day they were married.  By Isra’s time, the suitor and potential bride did meet before they were married but both sets of parents had authority over the decision.  For Deya and Fareeda’s own daughter, Sarah, the mothers sought out potential arrangements but the suitor and potential bride had some involvement in the decision.  However, both suitor and potential bride knew they had no choice but to marry someone suitable to their parents so their say was still limited. 

Deya she is anxious to go to college before marrying and to marry for love, not by arrangement.  She was only seven when her parents died but she knows her mother was very sad and was regularly beaten by her husband.  She wants to avoid that fate and wants to know more about her mother to understand the whys behind the situation.  Her grandmother wants her to forget the past and agree to a suitor as quickly as possible—most of Deya’s Islamic girls-only school classmates have already made contracts with suitors or are even already married.  She even tells Deya that Isra’s problem was that she was possessed by jinn.

I leave the rest of the story for you to discover but will indicate aspects Rum asks us to consider.  What barriers must be overcome by an individual, family, or a community to enable their culture to change and allow new roles and responsibilities for both women and men and how to accomplish this?  While the story of Isra is clearly heart-breaking, Rum gives us some view of Adam’s situation as well—a man who wants to be an imam but is forced by his family (through the requirement of obedience to his parents) to tend his father’s business, set up his own business, set up a business for his brother, pay for his other brother’s college education and father sons and not the four daughters he and Isra have.  Neither Isra nor Adam appears to have much choice in their individual or collective life path nor has either been given any tools which they can use to make their lives or the lives of their children satisfying.  Role modelling of their parents hasn’t been helpful but loyalty to family and their culture has been thoroughly taught and learned.

Throughout history, nearly regardless of location in the world, women and men have been initially rooted in a role and responsibility system that makes unmarried daughters a burden to the father and sons an asset to the family both as sources of financial support and a path for keeping wealth in the family.  Slowly this system has been cracked in many places and the roles and responsibilities of partners within families is much less rigid and choices are can be made by the partners, not solely dictated by past practices and customs.  This reader proposes this trend has allowed for a general lifting of well being for all parties.  Unfortunately some cultures retain the oppressive gender roles and responsibilities system, the members of which are literally moving to new locations through immigration as a result of oppression created by man (war waged at the country or “tribe” level) or climate change (i.e. drought).    America and other countries receiving immigrants are faced with the dilemma of wanting immigrants to assimilate into their society (whether or not they will allow them to become citizens (!)) and recognizing, to some extent, that immigrants shouldn’t be completely stripped of their culture as a result.  How then to handle the situation of Fareeda’s family whose culture includes wife beating as acceptable?  How then to challenge the value of loyalty to family when that family’s culture teaches and advocates practices unacceptable to other parts of society.

Rum’s story suggests that the individual plays the critical role.  Individuals can muster their strength to challenge.  Individuals can mentor, help, support other individuals in their fight to challenge and break ground for themselves or their children.  This too is a universal truth—individuals helped individual slaves find a path to free states, individuals help other battered women find safety, individuals help other alcoholics break free of their disease.  Individuals have responsibility to find strength for themselves and then have a responsibility to help others.  Then individuals can become a movement. 

Read this book to become aware of a culture that remains present in our own country and in other places.  Become aware of the challenges these individuals face.  Become an individual open to “the other story”.   Grow.