In this book Cristina Pérez Díaz offers an award-winning bilingual translation of José Watanabe’s Antígona, the poetic/dramatic text that resulted of Watanabe’s collaboration with Peru’s internationally recognized theater collective, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, in 2000. I first learned of Yuyachkani and Watanabe’s Antígona in 2010, when I was about to start working on my PhD dissertation on Antigone. Wanting to rethink Antigone outside of political theory’s Euro-North American imaginary (G.W.F. Hegel et al.), Yuyachkani’s, like many other Latin American Antigones, offered me an alternative ground for thinking about the decolonial politics of mourning. This was crucial because the problem of Antigone, (Sophocles’, Yuyachkani and Watanabe’s, and all others) is the problem of the ground, as the new sovereign of Thebes, Creon, grounds his power through the act that refuses a ground to the corpse of Polyneices, criminalizing his mourning.
Actress Teresa Ralli and director Miguel Rubio, both founding members of Yuyachkani, started to work on the play before they commissioned Peruvian poet, Watanabe to create a script for Ralli’s solo performance. As Pérez Díaz reconstructs in her Introduction, Ralli had already interviewed women who, having survived the prolonged armed conflict between different governments and the Maoist guerrilla, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), had organized the Committee of Families of the Disappeared (2-3). Yuyachkani’s interest on Antigone, however, is arguably as old as the foundation of the group circa 1971. “Yuyachkani” is a Quechua word that means, “I am thinking, I am remembering,” establishing the same political link between being and memory that Antigone exposes as the source of the main conflict of the political. After all, to remember this land as belonging to Indigenous peoples or to the colonizers (white settlers or postcolonial criollos), is what establishes the ground for what can or cannot be considered as political.
With this translation Pérez Díaz offers us a groundbreaking yuyachkanization of Sophocles, if I am allowed the quechenglish. Not only because the book launches Rosa Andújar and Justine McConnell’s promising edited series, “Classics and the Postcolonial,” in yet another iteration of Antigone’s ground-breaking powers, but also because the two brilliant essays that accompany the translation re-politicize the democratic role that translation plays for decolonial politics.
In her Introduction, Pérez Díaz not only contextualizes Watanabe and Ralli’s collaborative process historically (going over Peru’s armed conflict and its afterlives) and aesthetically (characterizing Yuyachkani’s theatrical practice as uniquely postdramatic [“Third Theater”]), but also proceeds to trouble the contexts of the text. Her account of the collaboration, one in which (with her emphasis on Ralli’s scenic écriture as co-creative of Watanabe’s poetic script) she shows two, rather than one writing at work, performs deconstruction at its best. Her inversion of the hierarchy between Sophocles’ classical “original” and Watanabe/Ralli’s postcolonial “copy” not only revalues the subalternity of the vernacular but pluralizes it by grafting Antígona into other contextual assemblages. Central to this reassembling is her unapologetic valuation of her own translation as accented. “My way of speaking and writing [this translation] (with a regional accent),” says Pérez Días, “will always have a remainder, a certain quality that is not fully assimilated” (19). Antígona, with an unassimilable accent, recalls for us Jacques Derrida’s challenge to Hegel’s influential interpretation of Antigone by means of this character in Glas (1976). Recently translated into English as “clang,” the French “glas” refers as much to the sound made by the funeral bell, as it does to the class struggle, and to the glottis, that part of the larynx that affects the modulation of the voice and that, in Derrida’s assemblage, has the power to interrupt the phallocentric disembodiment of logos characteristic of Western metaphysics. Glas is Derrida’s most ambitious critique of Hegel’s dialectic. Glas turns the multiple forms of difference articulated in Antigone’s voiced lament, into a political challenge against the capacities of Hegel’s metaphysical system to confine them into a hierarchical and trans-historical opposition: Creon/Antigone, men/women, city/family, soul/body. This same political pluralization of Antigone’s difference is what Pérez Díaz’s accented translation of Watanabe’s text offers readers of English. One could even argue that Pérez Díaz antigonizes (auto-correct wants to change this to antagonizes) translation, as she aligns herself with Chinua Achebe’s call, during his famous debate with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, for non-native English speakers in Africa to learn how to write not like a native speaker. In Rey Chow’s terms, what Pérez Díaz’s accented translation of Watanabe’s text offers us is a beautiful, anti-assimilationist, undomesticated, and unbelonging experience in “postcolonial languaging.”
The translation itself is then followed by another excellent interpretative essay, that should not be understood as the dialectical synthesis that comes to resolve the previous two moments: Introduction (affirmation) and Translation (negation); in fact, there is no definitive resolution. Rather, the interpretation that Perez Diaz offers invites more, rather than less difference, precisely by adding yet more contexts to disassemble and re-assemble Antígona, while inviting readers to enter them all. The appendix concludes the book by recalling the other journeys of Watanabe’s Antígona in Buenos Aires, México City, Cuba, Venezuela, and the Czech Republic.
How does Pérez Díaz’s interpretation of Watanabe’s Antígona yuyachkanizes Sophocles’ tragedy? First, by emphasizing the fact that at the center of Watanabe’s stage is no longer Antigone but Ismene, the one who remembers, the one who subjects the recollection of all that happened to critical thinking (“I am thinking, I am remembering”). As Pérez Díaz argues: “Watanabe’s text takes an important angle with respect to Sophocles’, turning the entire text retrospectively into a memory” (125). But this is only one of several modifications and Pérez Díaz goes over them all: Watanabe’s decision to displace the opening scene to the end; to have the entire play be a memory of Ismene, who is revealed as the Narradora only at the end; to redistribute crucial lines from the famous “ode to man,” performed by the Chorus in Sophocles’ original, to Antigone; and to delete the speech in which Antigone articulates her own law, to mention only a few. These modifications are the result of a compelling way of doing comparative literature Pérez Díaz qualifies as a form of reading the postcolonial text beside the classical one.
But the two most important changes of this reading, the ones on which Pérez Díaz dwells the longest, and with good reasons, are the ones in which the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics converge in Watanabe’s text to deliver a powerful postcolonial critique of neo-colonial authoritarianism in Peru, the Americas, and the other contexts in which his play has been performed and can now be read by means of Pérez Díaz’s translation. First, there is the aesthetic replacement of the tragic dialogue with the postdramatic monologue, one that Pérez Díaz rightly interprets in more political, rather than exclusively aesthetic ways. She claims: “If stichomythia shows the failure of democratic politics in the fissures of language, as Goldhill argues, the monologue in Watanabe’s Antígona shows isolation as an effect of a failed political community” (116). Or, to put it more precisely: “With the change of form and the opening of a different affective landscape, language does not so much show the failure of communication Goldhill signals in Sophocles as it shows the lived experience of the catastrophic failure of politics, lived in the very skin of the citizens” (119). Generalized loneliness, a characteristic effect of authoritarianism, overwhelms the otherwise vanishing politics of Antígona.
Second, there is the aesthetic replacement of Creon’s paranoid reading with Ismene’s reparative one, a gesture that Pérez Díaz also reinterprets in more political ways (as does Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick from whom she draws the distinction between paranoid and reparative readings). Watanabe not only cuts many of Creon’s lines, but he also frustrates his redemption: the last monologue that Sophocles gives to Creon, Watanabe gives instead to Ismene. Creon represents the paradigmatic figure of a paranoid reading, one that sees enemies everywhere, even after their defeat in the battlefield. If Polyneices’ corpse is kept over-ground, it is precisely to offer an artificial ground to the otherwise groundless fantasy of sovereign control. Whoever speaks against the authoritarian regime is de facto an enemy, a sympathizer of Polyneices. Dissidence and conflict, otherwise the life-source of democratic politics, are immediately coded as civil war in disguise, and surveillance and control come to replace the public space of agonistic deliberation. By contrast, Watanabe’s Antígona, unlike Sophocles’, represents the paradigmatic figure of civil society’s reparative reading, one that calls for peace, dialogue, and conflictual deliberation, rather than state terror, as the response to political terrorism during the civil war and its aftermath. The subject of peace is, thus, a constant presence in Watanabe’s Antígona, and Antigone’s law only takes the form of the universal “Hades grants them equal rights” (67). The very first line of the play says: “Today is the first day of the peace” (33). And in the end, Ismene begs Antigone to ask Polinices to forgive her (101). It is Ismene, rather than Antigone, however, who best represents this reparative reading. Here, yet again, Watanabe’s text innovates. As Pérez Díaz argues: “Ismene’s difference ought to be understood within a feminist framework, to the extent that it reframes the story of the myth as one told and repaired by a female survivor” (124). In the end, Ismene not only regrets her failure to give a hand to her sister, but also commits herself to perform the rites that she neglected, re-interpreting herself, as Pérez Díaz argues, as “hand-tied” not only to her siblings but to all those who have been thus injured by the authoritarian government (I’m thinking here of Antigone’s distinctively enlarged speech, as it is common to most Latin American Antigones: “My brother, no longer my kin, but everyone’s corpse” [43]). As Pérez Díaz concludes: “With these gestures, Ismene’s political position changes drastically, from a passive witness of atrocity whose silence makes her complicit with oppression, to a politicized agent of change” (126).
Because her interpretation of Watanabe’s Antígona depends on reading the postcolonial text besides Sophocles’ original, while refusing the Peruvian “localization” that such postcolonial interpretation otherwise innocently commands, in the end Pérez Díaz feels compelled to mobilize Emily Greenwood’s concept of “omni-locality” against Moira Fradinger’s concept of “cannibalization.” This concern is justifiable, given that Fradinger argues that rather than reading Latin American Antígonas in relation to the Greek precursor, we should read them in dialogue with each other. But if I have any point of contention with this otherwise extraordinary book, it is that I do not think such opposition necessary. Fradinger’s decolonial rumination, like Greenwood’s Gramscian subaltern classics and Pérez Díaz’s postcolonial deconstruction, wants the same pluralization of the contexts that have been neglected by the colonial power of the classical canon. She only calls for a more radical displacement of the “original.” But we are all in the same war of positions. All that Fradinger’s approach offers us is the opportunity to ask other kinds of questions. For instance, what if one were to read Watanabe and Ralli’s reparative Antígona beside Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona Furiosa? Is Antigone’s “furia” the fuel of Ismene’s reparation? Or, what if one were to read the afterlives of Yuyachkani’s post-dramatic gestures in Sara Uribe’s postmodern Antígona González? What, finally, if the stone that Watanabe’s Antígona recalls speaks not to the forgotten memory of the ancient Greek goddess, Niobe, but to the forgotten memory of Intihuatana, the ritual stone of the Inca, pointing towards a different non-anthropocentric understanding of temporality and Earth-tied form of decolonial mourning?
References
Chow, Rey. Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience, Columbia University Press, 2014.
Derrida, Jacques. Clang. Translated by David Wills and Geoffrey Bennington, University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Fradinger, Moira. “Demanding the Political: Widows, or Ariel Dorfman’s Antigones.” Whose Voice is This? Iberian and Latin American Antigones, special issue of Hispanic Issues on Line, edited by Jennifer Duprey, vol. 13, 2013, pp. 63-81.
Gambaro, Griselda. “Antígona Furiosa.” In Information for Foreigners: Three Plays. Translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz, Northwestern University Press, 1992, pp. 133-160.
Goldhill, Simon. Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Greenwood, Emily. “Reception Studies: The Cultural Mobility of Classics.” Daedalus, vol. 145, no. 2, 2016, pp. 41-9.
Greenwood, Emily. “Subaltern Classics in Anti- and Post-Colonial Literatures in English.” The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, edited by Kenneth Haynes, vol. 5, Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 576-607.
Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford University Press, 1977.
Uribe, Sara. Antígona González. Translated by John Pluecker, Les Figues Press, 2016.