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Tuesday
I’m thinking I didn’t do enough justice to the Washington Post article I wrote about yesterday. Or rather, I didn’t acknowledge how much I identified with the way that former Hong King English professor Wendy Gan used Sophocles’s Antigone to assess her own response to authoritarian crackdowns. The piece took me back to my own activist days in the early 1970s.
While Gan refers to freedom activist Chow Hang Tung as “the Antigone of Hong Kong,” she is setting up a contrast with herself, whom she essentially sees as “the Ismene of Hong Kong.” Throughout the piece, one senses guilt over what she sees as her own cowardice. Whereas Chow stood up to the Chinese authorities and went to prison for it, Chow chose to flee Hong Kong for Singapore, where she was raised. I regard the article as an attempt to come to terms with what she sees as her Ismene behavior.
I identify because, when I was in college, I was haunted by the sense that I wasn’t doing enough to stop the Vietnam War, that I was always choosing easier roads for myself. In high school, I too had looked to Antigone for inspiration although, in my case, it was the French playwright Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. I had cited a passage from the play in an essay assigned my senior year—in the headmaster J.R. McDowell’s required religion class—where we were supposed to present the values we lived by. I cited Antigone’s rejection of a happy life when it comes at the expense of a principled life:
I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life–that life that must go on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness–provided a person doesn’t ask much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good little girl. I want to be sure of everything this very day; sure that everything will be as beautiful as when I was a little girl. If not, I want to die!
When I got to college, I felt I should do everything possible to stop the war. After the Kent State shooting, I went to Minneapolis with 80 students and faculty from Carleton and St. Olaf to block the doors of the Hennepin County induction center. We went with the intent of getting arrested in a peaceful protest and arrested we were. But that didn’t seem enough.
For a moment, I thought that if I joined a hardcore leftist group, that would mean I was really committed so I tried out the Trostskyist Workers’ League. But I quickly learned that they were far too doctrinaire for me. I wanted commitment but not that kind of commitment. In 1972, I tried out electoral politics, campaigning for George McGovern, but I got sick with anxiety whenever I approached a stranger’s door. I wrote brave editorials in the Carletonian, which I edited my senior year, yet constantly saw myself as a fraudulent idealist, one who talked a good game but didn’t follow up the words with action. I remember feeling guilty all the time.
In short, like Gan, I was an Ismene who felt she should be an Antigone.
I have come to understand guilt much more in the years since. I have come to believe that feeling guilty is, in part, a reluctance to acknowledge that we are powerless. When we feel guilt for large events, it can be because we thought things would have transpired differently if we had only done something. Painful though guilt can be, it may not be as painful as the idea that, no matter what we do, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Looking back, what could I have done other than what I did—which was march, get arrested, and write editorials—to shorten the war? And yet, I was haunted by the idea that I wasn’t doing enough or sacrificing enough.
I therefore found comfort, years later, in a Lucille Clifton poem. In “poem with rhyme in it,” she reveals that she herself has experienced similar feelings of guilt. The poem indicates that African Americans—including presumably Clifton herself—feel that they are somehow responsible for their plight. Although, against their will, they have been brought to a country by people who don’t honor the land, they beat themselves up for how bitter the land has become. Again, I wonder whether thinking that she is somehow responsible is, once again, an unwillingness to acknowledge her powerlessness.
But when she listens to the stars in “this long dark night,” she regains perspective. They tell her that their bitter-as-salt lives are not their fault.
It is not Ismene’s fault that she is caught in an impossible situation, nor was it mine that the Vietnam War raged all around us. Although not a person of color, I find Clifton’s absolution of responsibility immensely comforting. Here’s the poem:
poem with rhyme in it
black people we live in the land
of ones who have cut off their own
two hands
and cannot pick up the strings
connecting them to their lives
who cannot touch whose things
have turned into planets more dangerous
than mars
but i have listened this long dark night
to the stars
black people and though the ground
be bitter as salt
they say it is not our fault
So if you find yourself guilt-ridden for the state of the world, listen to the stars–which is to say, reflect deeply. You may find that they will guide you to a more balanced perspective.
Response from Julia Bates: 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.”
