The Desert-Crypt

Nadie atraviesa la región sin ensuciarse (2015) by Regina José Galindo
Courtesy: the artist and prometeo gallery di Ida Pisani Milan/Lucca

 

In several Latin American Antígonas, the landscape of the desert becomes a metaphor of the crypt: the living tomb of the dissident body. Written in 1951 by Leopoldo Marechal, Antígona Vélez is not buried alive. Conversely, she is ordered to ride a black horse towards the desert (where she will be killed by Indian arrows). This twist relates to Argentina’s neo-colonial history and, more specifically, to the period that spans from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Having become an independent state since 1816, Argentina had set the Conquest of the Desert as a foundational dogma. This project was completed by independent Creoles who wanted indigenous land, abandoned after the independence by the Spaniards. The very choice of the word ‘desert’ to designate the (clearly not only desertic) lands to be conquered is telling: declaring that ‘nobody was there’ (that is: beyond the Salado River at the southeast of Buenos Aires, which was the 19th century boundary between the lands controlled by the Creoles and those controlled by the natives), the government would justify the genocide of Argentina’s indigenous peoples.

Devised in six scenes (pictures/cuadros), Marechal’s play unfolds in a small ranch on the shores of the Salado River. The war between the two brothers is reset here within the context of the conflict between the Creoles and the natives. Having collaborated with the Indians, Polínices/Ignacio is a traitor, and this is why his body has to remain unburied. Antigone wants to bury her brother, although she does not argue in support of his acts, neither she elaborates a critique of the genocide. What is at stake is not the authoritarian power that Creon imposes to the polis, but his – almost nuptial – relationship with the still untamed land. The immense wildness of this land will substitute the living tomb of the dissident heroine.

In the fourth scene, Antígona meets Aemon/Lisandro in an Eden-like scenery; ‘both immobile’, like a ‘biblical couple’ (p. 47). The encounter between the two lovers before death differentiates itself from Sophocles’ play, but also echoes the 3rd stasimon which is an Ode to Eros. After this, Antígona appears dressed in male garments. Fully committed to her act, she nonetheless declares she understands Creon’s rationale: ‘The man who now condemns me is tough because he has reason’ (El hombre que ahora me condena es duro porque tiene razón) (p. 50).^[1]All the excerpts from Leopoldo Marechal’s Antígona Vélez and Perla de la Rosa’s Antígona: Las voces que incendian el desierto are translated from Spanish to English by the authors. The chorus’ women react immediately: ‘Child, he is your executioner!’ (Niña, es tu verdugo!), to which Antígona responds that ‘He wants to populate the south with flowers!’ (Él quiere poblar de flores el sur). That said, she seems to undermine this possibility at the same time: ‘dead on a bleeding steed, [Antígona Vélez] could rot the first flower of the garden he seeks’ (muerta en un alazán ensangrentado, podría la primera flor del jardín que busca). The moment of her death approaches: she and Lisandro/Aemon are bound on the rampaging horses. The two lovers will be killed by the natives’ lances. Their blood will water the sand.

Yet, when in the final scene the soldiers bring the dead bodies to Don Facundo, in opposition to Sophocles’ Creon, he does not repent. Instead, he declares that these sacrificed lovers will leave grandchildren to him: ‘All men and women who will, one day, harvest in this pampa the fruit of so much blood’ (Todos los hombres y mujeres que, algún día, cosecharán en esta pampa el fruto de tanta sangre) (p. 16). Inscribed in a recognizable iconography of martyrdom, the bodies of the lovers will finally fertilize the still unconquered land. Their young blood will pave the path for the Creoles.

The desert/crypt therefore appears as an interesting trope in Marechal’s version: if, in Sophocles, Creon decides to bury Antigone alive in a ‘caverned dwelling-place, eternal prison’ (verses 801-2), the tomb designed for her by Don Facundo becomes the vastness of the untamed land, traversed by the galloping animal. And further, if Creon needs to expel Antigone from the public space of the polis, in a society where women were deprived of civic rights, what Don Facundo wants is to sacrifice her, through the natives’ lances, in his ‘civilizing’ genocidal project. In this sense, and although the play interestingly imagines Ignacio/Polínices as an opponent to the Creoles, the violence of Argentina’s neo-colonial history is not really questioned. Commissioned by Eva Peron herself, Marechal’s play seems to be inscribed in the main national myth, in the neo-colonial epic of the Conquest of the Desert, albeit under the all-encompassing umbrella of Peronism.^[2]For a different interpretation, see Fradinger (2023). We thank Moira Fradinger for her enabling comments with the occasion of this field note. Her book Antígonas: Writing from Latin America is an … Continue reading

The desert-crypt takes a completely different form in another Latin American Antigone, Perla de la Rosa’s Antígona: Las voces que incendian el desierto (Antigone: The Voices That Set the Desert on Fire), written in 2004. Set in contemporary Juárez, a Mexican city located at the US border, it addresses the serial killings of local women (feminicidios) and the subsequent government indifference in acknowledging the violence and inaction in preventing it.

The desertic landscape of Juárez becomes the setting in which the female protagonists of this work are both buried and seeking refuge:

MUJER 1: Soy una mujer en esta ciudad, donde todo es arena. […] Ser mujer aquí es estar en peligro. Por ello decidimos construir refugios bajo la arena. Ampararnos bajo la arena para continuar viviendo. Se trata de ocultarnos, de desaparecer de la vista del enemigo. (Prólogo, p. 187-8)

WOMAN 1: I am a woman in this city, where everything is sand. […] Being a woman here means to be in danger. This is why we decided to build shelters under the sand. Protecting ourselves under the sand in order to continue living. It’s about hiding, about disappearing from the enemy’s sight.

The desert here becomes a crypt but, rather than only condemning to death, it offers a hideaway, a sanctuary where all women can stay together and survive. When any form of exposure in public space is also exposing the women of Juárez to the possibility of their brutal demise, then gathering underground is the only viable option. The female body is expelled from the polis, just like in the Sophoclean tragedy.  However, this expulsion in de la Rosa’s Antígona is not ordered by the Creontian law in reaction to a woman’s ‘inappropriate’ dissidence. It is, instead, self-inflicted by multiple Juárez women as a strategy to counter the immediate threat of being murdered for the very fact that they occupy a female body.

Polínices is one of these women; she is the disappeared sister whose body Antigone wants to find and bury. She is looking for it in the desert, where many other female bodies have been already encountered:

En el desierto varias personas realizan un rastreo, buscan cuerpos de víctimas. Antígona también se encuentra ahí. Ismene ha llegado a buscarla, la encuentra con aire delirante y desgastada por el sufrimiento. (Escena IV, p. 195)

In the desert, several people are searching for the bodies of victims. Antigone is also found there. Ismene has come to look for her. She finds her in delirium and worn out by suffering.

The desert-crypt then is both a refuge and a tomb. As Antigone proclaims to her sister Ismene:

Muchas han muerto bajo la complicidad del tirano, han aparecido destrozadas sin más tumba que este desierto, consumidas por el sol inclemente de esta ciudad de ojos muertos. (Escena IV, p. 201)

Many have died under the complicity of the tyrant, they have appeared in pieces with no other grave than this desert, consumed by the unrelenting sun of this city of dead eyes.

The Juárez women are buried under the sand, where the ones who are still alive and hidden co-exist with the already dead and disappeared. Challenging the notion of Antigone as this fearless heroine, defiant to the point of losing her life, de la Rosa in her work is sensitive to the class-laden agony of countering the disposability of the undocumented, unrecognized, unprivileged female body.

 

References

de la Rosa, Perla (2004). Antígona: Las voces que incendian el desierto. Available online: https://www.scribd.com/document/357553642/Perla-de-la-Rosa-Antigona-Voces-que-Incendian-el-Desierto-pdf

Fradinger, Moira (2023). Antígonas: Writing from Latin America. Oxford University Press, 2023.

Marechal, Leopoldo (1998[1965]). Antígona Vélez. Ediciones Clásicas Literarias.

 

Marios Chatziprokopiou and Alkisti Efthymiou