Role-Playing in Antigone and Africa: Can we Read Sophocles through Sizwe?

Abstract

Role-Playing in Antigone and Africa: Can We Read Sophocles through Sizwe? SARAH H. NOOTER μή νυν ἓν ἦθος μοῦνον ἐν σαυτῷ φόρει. Do not now wear only one character. —Sophocles, Antigone, Haemon to Creon θυμέ, φίλους κατὰ πάντας ἐπίστρεφε ποικίλον ἦθος, ὀργὴν συμμίσγων ἥντιν’ ἕκαστος ἔχει· πουλύπου ὀργὴν ἴσχε πολυπλόκου, ὃς ποτὶ πέτρῃ, τῇ προσομιλήσῃ, τοῖος ἰδεῖν ἐφάνη. Heart, twist your character differently for all of your friends, joining your nature to the one each one has. Take on the nature of the intricate octopus who looks just like the rock to which it clings. —Theognis “And from that simple beginning, like three subversive spiders, we spun out the story of Sizwe Banzi is Dead. It changed our lives, and I believe changed South African theatre in the process.” —Athol Fugard, about himself, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona This article examines the machinations of power and performance. I examine plays in which oppressive regimes cause and perpetuate role-playing and role-reversals , even to the point of reducing men to animals, if in metaphorical terms. The performance of rule and resistance in Sophocles’ Antigone is reflected through the play and context of Sizwe Bansi is Dead (hereafter Sizwe), devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona of South Africa in 1972. Several adaptations of Antigone from African playwrights are also relevant. Comparison with the patterns of role-playing in Sizwe shows that, in Sophocles’ Antigone, both Creon and Antigone are at pains to exhibit their asarion 21.2 fall 2013 sumed roles. This reading sheds light on how these performative stances become mutually destructive. Performance, a term that has come to be both capacious and overcrowded, has been defined as a “loose cluster of theatrical practices, relations, and traditions.”1 Here I will use performance more narrowly to designate acts that are intended to be displayed before spectators or, in the words of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “any action that assumes an audience during its actualization .”2 Performance can be a happy part of day-to-day life; in a reasonably free society, people can express their opinions in an open forum, complain in public, mourn in accordance with ritual, and marry in the eyes of religion and law. In an oppressive state, however, as Tina Chanter writes, a polity does not “afford its excluded others the possibility of self-representation .”3 Rather, performance is actively directed by the state and resistance takes the form of mirroring performative actions. In Antigone, this sort of performative scripting transforms the world of Thebes and the roles of Antigone, Creon, and their associates, with famously tragic results. The events that occur at Thebes after the two sons of Oedipus have killed one another call not only alliances but also identities into question; this dislodging allows for the shake-up of roles that follows. The play begins with Antigone’s announcement of Creon’s edict to her sister, Ismene . Antigone immediately poses the decree in the form of a challenge, one that she says will expose the true nature of Ismene: “you will soon show whether you are well-born or evil among noble people” (καὶ δείξεις τάχα / εἴτ’ εὐγενὴς πέφυκας εἴτ’ ἐσθλῶν κακή [27–28]). Antigone suggests here and elsewhere that the actions that people perform will have the effect of unveiling their true selves, and many critics, Hegel not least, have also read the play this way, seeing the characters as stand-ins for deeply entrenched, overweening positions: Antigone is and has always been a partisan rebel; Creon is a paranoid misogynist.4 But I would argue that something quite different is taking place. Rather than true natures being exposed, characters role playing in ANTIGONE and africa 12 are compelled into warped roles they would not have otherwise assumed. For example, at one of Creon’s more manic moments he makes the following pronouncement about Antigone: “For then I am no man, but she is the man, if, with impunity for these things, power lies with her” (ἦ νῦν ἐγὼ μὲν οὐκ ἀνήρ, αὕτη δ’ ἀνήρ, / εἰ ταῦτ’ ἀνατεὶ τῇδε κείσεται κράτη [484–85]). Creon uses the “future most vivid” conditional , a grammar-bending, translation-resistant construction reserved for “threats and warnings.”5 In his mind, he is threatened with the most menacing reality imaginable: his very manhood, and with it his existence, could be effaced by Antigone’s deed of burial. Creon steers wildly to avoid such destruction of his identity, but the consequences of this steering are of course even more horrific, consequences that...