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Monday
A recent Washington Post feature caught my attention when it characterized Chinese freedom activist Chow Hang Tung as “the Antigone of Hong Kong.” Wendy Gan, formerly a professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong, draws on the Sophocles play to make the comparison. What drives her essay, however, is less how Chow is like Antigone and more on how she herself is like Antigone’s sister Ismene.
For background on Chow, Gan notes that, in 2020, it became a crime in Hong Kong (as it already was in the rest of China) to memorialize or even openly acknowledge the events of Tiananmen Square. Tiananmen, part of a 1989 challenge to the government, resulted in up to 10,000 deaths in one of the bloodiest political crackdowns in modern history.
Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, once guaranteed by Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, are now forbidden. Gan tells what happened next:
Chow, a bespectacled barrister with a broad, frank face and a friendly smile, stepped up to maintain Hong Kong’s commitment to remember Tiananmen. Knowing that a permit to gather and conduct the memorial had been denied, she posted on Facebook that she would continue the tradition of lighting a candle in a public space to commemorate the events of June 4, 1989. She was promptly arrested. In January 2022, she was convicted and sentenced to 15 months in prison for these words. The charge was promoting an “unauthorized assembly.”
In Sophocles’s play, Antigone insists on holding funeral rites for her brother Polynices, who has killed and been killed by his brother Eteocles in civil strife following the banishment and death of their father Oedipus. Their uncle Creon, now on the throne, decrees that Eteocles will be buried with full honors while the body of the traitor Polynices will be publicly shamed. As Antigone reports to Ismene,
They say that Creon has sworn
No one shall bury him, no one mourn for him,
But his body must lie in the fields, a sweet treasure
For carrion birds to find as they search for food.
That is what they say, and our good Creon is coming here
To announce it publicly; and the penalty—
Stoning to death in the public square!
According to ancient Greek belief, the soul of an unburied body would wander forever as a phantom in the afterlife, never being admitted to Hades. Creon, in other words, is defying the laws of the gods, which leads to Antigone’s protest:
Antigone. Ismene, I am going to bury him. Will you come?
Ismene. Bury him! You have just said the new law forbids it.
Antigone. He is my brother. And he is your brother, too.
Ismene. But think of the danger! Think what Creon will do!
Antigone. Creon is not strong enough to stand in my way.
As Ismene resists, Antigone becomes insistent:
Antigone. But I will bury him; and if I must die,
I say that this crime is holy: I shall lie down
With him in death, and I shall be as dear
To him as he to me. It is the dead,
Not the living, who make the longest demands:
We die forever. . . . You may do as you like,
Since apparently the laws of the gods mean nothing to you.
Ismene. They mean a great deal to me; but I have no strength
To break laws that were made for the public good.
Antigone. That must be your excuse, I suppose.
But as for me, I will bury the brother I love.
Gan regretfully acknowledges that she herself did not have the courage to follow Chow’s path:
I know that I am not like Antigone, principled and unafraid, choosing to defy her uncle Creon’s decree and give her brother his burial rites, even if it means certain death. Antigone marches unwaveringly through the play like an otherworldly saint set on martyrdom. No, I am not Antigone; I do not have such courage; I do not have a death wish.
It is therefore Ismene whom Gan identifies with, even though both Antigone and Creon look down upon her:
If we are to believe Creon, Ismene seems akin to one of those red-nosed pathetic women who exist in a Jane Austen novel merely to showcase the heroine’s patience and virtue — a poor and sorry specimen of a woman. But I must admit that I rather like Ismene. She is ordinary. She fears for her own skin. She finds excuses not to be heroic: “We are only women, We cannot fight with men,” she tells Antigone. I know we are meant to aspire to Antigone’s dogged pursuit of the higher law, but I feel more at ease with Ismene. When she says to Antigone, “And I think it is dangerous business, To be always meddling,” that line rings true to me; I have this fear within me too. Ismene knows what it means to live in a hostile world. You can call her a coward, one who values self-preservation over justice, but she is a survivor.
Most of us, Gan writes, “will never be as steadfast as [Chow] is, especially in the face of hardship and suffering. We survive by evasion. Like Ismene, we know the art of inconsistency.”
Gan tells us the story of how she has been an Ismene rather than an Antigone. Raised in Singapore, she moved to Hong Kong because of the way the Singapore government cracked down on dissidents, and she has now moved back to Singapore in response to Chinese repression. In other words, she chose to flee rather than to fight. One senses that her engagement with Antigone is, at times, an attempt to justify herself to herself. Thus, she looks to defend Ismene.
Even though the weaker sister remains with her brothers while Antigone suffers with her blind father in his exile, Gan points out that Ismene hasn’t entirely sold out. She remains loyal to her father and serves as a spy, “bringing reports of the latest oracles and court politics to Oedipus and Antigone. She is the two-faced insider who knows what it means to appear one way and think another, to say one thing and do another.”
At this point the article starts seesawing back and forth between regretting that we don’t have more Antigones and finding some comfort in numbers: most of us are not Antigone. “Ismene is clear-eyed,” Gan writes, “but she is not heroic.” Drawing on “The Power of the Powerless,” an essay by Czech freedom activist Vaclav Havel, Gan writes that Ismene
lives in the world of appearances while trying as best she can to live in truth. She is akin to Havel’s greengrocer who puts up a poster he does not believe in to signal his acquiescence to the totalitarian system. She will obey Creon’s diktat, though she disagrees with it. She will subvert where she can, as she does in Oedipus in Colonus, and she will, at the end of Antigone, perhaps inspired or shamed by Antigone’s actions, attempt to live by her conscience instead of her fear. But no one will make her a protagonist, because her existence is too ordinary, too mean. In an unjust world, we have Ismenes in abundance, when what we need is Antigone, the fearless beacon of truth.
One passage from Havel’s essay particularly resonates with Gan. It deals with how authoritarian systems seek to strip us of our humanity:
Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. … Each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie. Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialization of his inherent humanity, and to utilitarianism. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life.
To which Gan responds,
Here was the psychology of Ismene laid bare. Here was my own psychology. It is a disturbing revelation, and one that explains why I am not in jail like Chow Hang Tung, and why I am also no longer living in Hong Kong. We each find our ways to live in the truth — and I have chosen exile and a return to my native Singapore.
In her dreams, Gan writes in her conclusion, she is Antigone, and she imagines Sophocles’s heroine forgiving her sister for not having taken the harder route:
I can hear [Ismene] singing. It’s her voice, for sure — lilting but penetrating. It makes my heart glad. I do not recognize the song and it is in a language that I do not understand, but I know that it is Ismene who is singing, and she is telling me that she will survive and keep singing. I was angry with her for not coming with me to bury Polynices, but now I think that it is actually good that someone survives. Someone has to die and someone has to live. She will be lonely, my poor sister, while I will have the company of my father and my brothers. That will be her lot in life. Though if she keeps singing like this, like a songbird in a cage, dreaming of swaying green branches and racing blue skies, she will be fine. Ismene will be fine.
In my dreams, I am an Antigone who forgives Ismene.
I suppose we can none of us entirely know if we would choose the Antigone or the Ismene route when pressured by an authoritarian system. Like Gan, we probably dream of being Antigone and realistically acknowledge that we’re more likely to behave like Ismene. But if, as Havel puts it, we have to live in a lie, better to do it as Ismene does than embrace the lie wholeheartedly. In any event, Sophocles’s play provides us with a framework, as it provides Gan with a framework, for understanding our choices.
Reader comment from Julia Shinnick:
Psychologists have asserted that children of abused parents will often feel responsible/guilty for being abused. Apparently this is preferable to admitting the parents are responsible. They will cling to their parents, even though it is clear the parents hurt them repeatedly. I think this is related to your thoughts on feeling guilty about not doing more for the world situation. Somehow, it is mentally preferable (?) to a child to think he is guilty of something that causes his parents to abuse him rather than realize the parents are at fault, or to realize he is powerless to change them (by behaving better, etc.).
Seems to me that you and the poet are addressing the same individual phenomenon on a much larger scale. The microcosm and the macrocosm, sort of. Maybe a projection of “parents” onto the world? I think this is also related to what is known in trauma literature as the “just world illusion.”
My response: I find this to be a wonderfully wise observation, Julia. To think of draft-aged men during the Vietnam War as abused children is both comforting and clarifying. I remember watching Good Morning Vietnam, the Robin Williams film about a military broadcaster during the war, sometime during the 1980s and sobbing at the end of it. I suddenly saw, as I hadn’t before, how much we had gotten beaten up by a country that we had been raised to trust. Something similar happened with The Long Walk Home, about the Montgomery bus boycott, which had me reliving similar abuse (as a liberal in a segregated society) during my teenage years. (Of course, we didn’t have it nearly as bad as Black families, but the experience still took an emotional toll.) So “just world illusion” is a perfect encapsulation and a concept that is new to me.
