Between Ismene and Antigone: Comments on the Politics of Grief and Dissent in Iran
I have been keeping up with the Iranian elections religiously, and, like many others have also been keeping up with the story on Neda Soltani—the Iranian woman whose death was captured on cell phone video and posted to youtube. Given the gruesome manner of her death, many have taken to adopting her face as a symbol of a potentially fledgling Iranian movement for ‘change’. However, I believe it’s the events that have followed in the wake of her death that have provided the most damning levers against tyranny and corruption.
There are several elements in the way Iranian officials have handled this situation that strike me as poignantly disturbing. Her fiancé, Caspian Makhan, has gone on record in describing the difficulty they faced in recovering her body from officials. The government resolutely denied the family the right to a funeral, forcing them to cancel a memorial at a mosque and remove a mourning banner they’d hung. They had to content themselves with her being hastily buried in a plot of ground eerily surrounded by other freshly dug plots. Lastly, her family—whether forcefully evicted or fleeing for their safety—have left the flat they once inhabited, sans explanation. Specifics are hard to come by as neighbors and the surviving Soltani’s are understandably reluctant to grant interviews or divulge much information.
The whole situation bothers me. Preeminent amongst these reasons is the fact that Neda Soltani was murdered and no investigations into her murder appear to be under way. But this aside, I find the government’s refusal to allow her family to hold any sort of funeral services to be unacceptable. It’s a violation of a very human right. You can’t ban people from grieving and honoring the dead without expecting a repercussion.
People posit all sorts of things as being the defining factor in what separates us from the animals, whether its our ability to reason, create art, or wage war.I'm generally loath to play this game, but for kicks I'm going to single out the human proclivity for ceremony as that which defines us. At all stages of human life it exists and whole institutions and industries are designed around our apparent need for it.
Death rituals are probably as old as human civilization itself and they serves a multitude of purposes. Sprung wailing from the ways in which we cope with death--both logistically and metaphysically--is the ceremony of mourning. Funeral rites could arguably be called the colostrum of grief because they're intended to enable the process of healing. Furthermore, funerals are an amazingly humbling and utterly humanizing rite—how we treat and dispose of the dead irrespective of who they were in life says a lot about us, as individuals and a culture.
It is in the denial of a private memorial service and the forced privation of public grieving for Neda Soltani that I think will drive politically ambivalent Iranians into action, even if this mobilization proves situational and ephemeral.
Situational activism seems to involve people who for one reason or another choose to agitate on behalf of a cause even though they normally aren’t politically active. I’d argue that most people who are situationally activist are often normally content to let others do the fighting and legislating. They seem to demand only the right to live and often accept (begrudgingly or not) whatever restrictions or freedoms that other people’s activism might have wrought.
Perhaps the Soltani’s themselves fall into this category, because by all accounts the late Soltani was not very politically active, nor supportive of one leader over the other. Her presence at the protest stemmed from her discomfiture at blatant electoral rigging; she was attempting to make known her disapproval of a government that had been flagrant in its violations of the social contract. Her fiancé has attributed her death to one of being in the wrong place at the wrong time—so she's hardly a martyr type. From what little I've managed to glean about her, she strikes me as the sort of person that seems to comprise the citizenry in most modern nations. She represents the bread and butter, so to speak, and citizens like Neda Soltani are why nation-states seem to thrive in the first place. Why then would any government adopt such an unjust policy against the people it relies upon to function?
In pondering this, I’m reminded of the Sophoclean play, “Antigone.” The story involves a civil war that results in the death of two brothers (Eteocles and Polynices) fighting on opposite sides of each other. Their uncle, Creon—admittedly a little drunk with power over his victory in war—is averse to Polynices for fighting against him. He declares a formal edict announcing that Eteocles, who fought on his side, shall be honored with burial while Polynices is left to rot.
The parallels (and perhaps the promise) I find between the present Iranian situation and this fictional Greek one, lies in the verbal dialogue between two sisters—the pragmatic Ismene and the eponymous and fervent Antigone (siblings to the deceased brothers). Antigone continually violates Creon’s edict--whose violation carries a death sentence--by burying her brother in secret only to have Creon exhume him. Defiant to the end, she’s caught and declares to Creon that his state bestowed authority holds no sway over her duty to honor her brother. With that she’s sentenced to die.
Ismene, on the other hand, while sympathetic to Antigone and conscious of her duty to Polynices, cannot bring herself to act against the state. It is only when Antigone is sentenced to death that Ismene—unable to withstand the loss of her only remaining sibling—attempts to falsely implicate herself to Creon. Antigone, in some of the coldest lines uttered in Greek tragedy thwarts Ismene by saying: “You shall not die with me. You shall not claim that which you would not touch. One death is enough.”(141) Antigone later commits suicide, as does her fiancé and Creon's son, Haemon. Ismene, presumably survives but the reader isn’t terribly privy to her fate.
Perhaps I’m holding out for the idea that the Iranians shall find a place somewhere in between these two radically different sisters—fanaticism and pragmatism. In more than one article and op-ed, people continually point to Gandhi’s methods as being perfectly suited to any emergent change in Iran. Civil disobedience, of course, often elicits a violent response from the state, and it requires time for it to take hold. It’s a hard thing to do and even harder to keep doing. But, I think that if one of the catalysts in this situation is the denial of funeral rites, then the best methods in response may be one of non-violent disobedience. Perhaps it shan’t be the Soltani’s that decide to disobey the edicts of their Supreme leader or refuse to bend to the bullying of the Basiji. Perhaps it will be another family or group that definitively decides that come what may, they will not be kept from mourning and honoring the loss of a loved one as they see fit.
References
1. In Iran, Gandhism Comes of Age, by Steven Waldham
2. Neda Soltan's family 'forced out of home' by Iranian authorities
3. Sophocles. The Theban Plays: Antigone
Jun 25, 2009 | tagged in Blood Sausage (Politics), Lobster (Literature) 
Reader Comments (14)
Great article title =D
I'm hoping for a non-violent Gandhi type to chill out the whole region. Unfortunately the language structure reinforces the word as law and new memes are hard to introduce in this culture.
It has to be someone in the region who is a native religious man who is well respected and not radical in either direction. Any suggestions?
One has to wonder how things would have played out if our country didn't overthrow their elected government fifty years ago (and installing the Shah as US-friendly figurehead)...
That amongst many other policies that the US adopted in the 'fight against communism,' which includes arming islamic fundamentalists.
A glaring example is our funding of the Mujahideen. Who would have thought that, though they were our friends during their fight against the Soviets, they would end up being the foundation for Al-Qaeda. Just one of the many, many, many hits of our C.I.A. (they have more hits than Michael Jackson, The Beatles and Zamfir combined).
who would have thought? Maybe a people whose minds weren't so blindly committed to the idea of killing the snakes with mongoose that they never thought one generation ahead of the hoards they'd unleashed.
The amount of short-sided policy we dish out would be comedic if it didnt contribute to such a fucked reality. Who would have thought? Well, us, I'm sure, if we'd thought things through a little longer. I realize that there are some decisions that regimes must make on the fly because the circumstances demanded a quick strategy. This one doesnt count.
There is a sense of geo-political nostalgia... Central-American coups are back in vogue.
lol. I pissed myself when I read about that coup. Was like, wow. How retro.
And Zelaya was moustachioed to boot. All he needed were some Ray Ban aviators for the whole shebang.
I wanted to go to Pride this year as part of a mustache party where the theme was latino dictators, revolutionaries, banditos, and the like. Because we wear the mustache so well.
but I had to get fuckin lazy so I didn't go. oh well. Maybe folsom street fair
I think that fashion dictates that you have to wear either a bandoleer (to look like a panadería calendar muse), or an "esé" hat and locs to resemble the Lowrider logo.
I was going to go in a bandolier. Or at least I was planning on gluing a bunch of condoms together (still in the wrapper, of course) and making a bandolier.
A condom bandolier... quite genius.
Quite simply, given the zealous (in religion and power) nature of the current government of Iran, a Ghandiesque movement will not work. It is virtually impossible to succeed with a non-violent movement in any country where the government is internal, and not a de-facto representative of a foreign nation, as the Satraps were (see also: Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.) The great fear in my eyes is that, given the reactions of the Iranian government are virtually identical to the Chinese reaction to Tienanmen Square, Nigeria's reaction to Biafra, and the actions of Jozef Tito in Yugoslavia. How long does it take an iron fisted regime to cross into the territory of Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and Kim Jong-Il? Given the increasing nuclear ability of these places, when does it also cease to be solely an internal civil rights issue, and become a true international danger?