Monthly Archives: July 2010
Euripides’ Medea
My holiday books are in a dead heat with books I have discovered in my mom’s bookshelves. I could have told myself that books were not a necessary item to bring with me on a trip home, but I got greedy. The latest raid left me with seven books in each hand and three in front of me. But incredo-woman as I am in the field of literary vice, I am able to multitask, so this weekend I have been reading Herta Müller’s ‘Der Mensch ist ein grosser Fasan auf der Welt’, Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waves’, and Euripides’ ‘Medea’. Three completely different books, both in style and theme, and all three keeping me on my toes.
Raided books
MEDEA
I finished the copy of Medea first – it wasn’t that long, so it was a good night’s read – which I found out both my mother and my uncle read in high school. As I was reading it, I thought about the famous line “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorn” (originally from W. Congreve’s play ‘The Mourning Bride’ from 1697, but often misquoted as a Shakespearean line, it goes like this: Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.) I also thought about how you often toss it out whenever a woman gets angry to disarm or delegitimize a miffed out female. In the context of Medea it is also relevant to mention that Fury is a female spirit of punishment in Greek mythology (The Furies (Roman mythology) or Erinyes (Greek mythology) in the Underworld punish the guilty, and are avengers of violations of natural order, among these kinship murder). The story of Medea in Greek mythology is this: deeply in love with the warrior hero, Jason, sorceress Medea agrees to help him in his quest as long as he promises to take her with him and marry her. As many mythologies go, there are a lot of hindrances and creatures with different divine powers to be conquered. In the beginning of Euripides’ tragedy Medea, although now married to Jason, has been scorned by him in favour of the daughter of king Creon, in order to help his political status. So enraged by this treachery she wows to take a most gruesome revenge. Medea is known and revered in the land as a wise woman, and Creon genuinely fears her retaliation, so he exiles her, but she persuades him to give her time to find a new haven. Unknown to him, she has just bought time to concoct a plan to hurt Jason by killing his daughter. Jason himself goes to her to smooth things out, the first time of no use, but on the second visit she leads him to think she has forgiven his actions and wants to give his wife to be a present of a dress and a coronet. In fact, she has poisoned the clothes and in the most horrific way Glauce (Creon’s daughter) dies. When Creon touches her he is also killed by the poison. Two down, two to go, as Medea has no intention of stopping here. In order to really get to Jason, she also kills off their own children.
The tragedy is truly worth the read, it is pure spears to the heart, and the dialogues are beautiful, and each sentence is laden with moral and ethical food for thought. It truly is tragedy in its truest sense. The character of Medea, also the interpretation Euripides makes, has been an inspiration and topic of many men and women throughout history, not only literary history, but living history in general; her actions scolded, her passions revered, her sorrow felt and discarded, she truly is a being of great magnitude. The sacred role of motherhood is contested, she is cast into the role of a monster, and yet maintains an aura of pride about her. And there is always the question if her intelligence is a stumbling block or an asset – is intelligence of the mind or heart, or maybe a harmonious fusion of the two? Throughout the whole ordeal she holds her head high, places the full blame of occurring events on Jason, and seeks justice for her lost honour. She truly is complex, and although the play in itself, as I earlier said, is a quick read, the story is not easily out of mind. I suspect it will not be long until I go through the play again, and I would really love to see it played out, even if it could never stand ground with the impressive characters and scenery I have built up inside my head 🙂
Different images of Medea
Medea
Scene from a South African adaptation of Euripides’ Medea. Performed by Jazzart Dance Theatre during 1994-1996.
Directors: Mark Fleischman and Jennie Reznek
Photographer Ruphin Coudyzer.
Choreographer – Alfred Hinkel
Composer – Rene Avenant
Actor – Bo Petersen (Medea)
Medea
Medea about to kill her Children - Delacroix
Medea about to kill her Children - Delacroix
Medea killing her son - Vase
Nostalgia: Alex Haley’s Roots
When I was a kid I used to raid my mother’s book shelves after I had emptied the village library, and my own book club books were turned over about 4 times. Most of the stuff I read I couldn’t really fully understand in all their complexities, but there are a couple of books from her shelf that have stuck by me for all these years. One of these books was Alex Haley’s ROOTS.
Alex Haley's Roots
To sum it up in too few words, the book is a family saga, written by Mr. Haley about his ancestry and as a symbol of the Afro-American slave history. The name Kunta Kinte has buried itself into my memory and is a symbol of both the knowledge I, since this book, acquired of Afro-American slave history, and the focal point from which I have read literature of this nature. Alex Haley researched his family history for over a decade in museums and libraries around the world. What really stuck with me was when I read in the the last chapters just how important this story was for Mr. Haley, as he climbed into the cold cargo hold of the ship he travelled with from Africa to USA. He spent all ten nights down there, naked and freezing, in order to get an inkling of what his forefather went through, even how minor his experience could be compared to that of Kunta Kinte and so many of his country men and women. This sat with me, the amount of dedication to the story and how important it is to acknowledge something in order to process it. As much as I owe this book, and books like this one much for helping to build my character, sadly, this book also introduced me to an experience that I wish I could have lived without: shame over the color of my skin – shame over my cultural heritage and apparent standing in life. Irrational as it may be for a 12 year old girl, stuck in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean without ever having experienced or thought anything that could resemble any discriminatory act, the weight of the connotations that followed my skin color was heavy. How this could even be true, that you could take a human being, put them in shackles, transport them in pitiful conditions across the Atlantic Ocean, using them and abusing them in every manner, was so horrible a fact to come to terms with. I don’t know if the shame is a collective shame of the caucasian race in the Western post-modern world, or if it’s just because I’m an easy knock out, but it was very real during all my teenage years, that as much as I revered the great accomplishments of European thinking and philosophy, equally as much I was appalled by the darker corners. In later years, this shame has turned into anger and then to commitment.
Having said that, I am eternally grateful for having read Roots. I am grateful that I learned that there is hope of breaking the mould, that things are not doomed or static, that the most powerful things in life are not always easily seen, and that they take time. And most of all I am grateful for having been shown that the ubiquity of human determination and intelligence can surpass and find loopholes in all constraints.
Which book turned your world upside down and why?
Books and McDonald’s
Are you familiar with the phrase: “There is no such thing as a free lunch”? It is the notion that something always comes at a cost, whether it is hidden or apparent, the individual or society at large always pays the bill. This phrase came to me as I was reading how Detroit Public Library in the USA, and McDonald’s have joined forces to get little kiddies to read more! And how do these two institutions propose to do this: well, every time a kid checks out a book, they get a stamp in a little McDonald’s bookmark by the sweet librarian, and for every five stamps (that is every 5th checked out book) the critter gets a Happy Meal. I’m sorry, a-what-now? Is the situation in Detroit really sooo bad, that the public library feels the need to take up with a major fast food chain that deals in fats, sugars and every known additive known and unknown to the masses, subverting nutritional values and blurring the lines between profit-business and communal enterprises, in order to get kids to read a book or two? Do they not see the blatant ironic twist to their plan?
Photo by Jason Rzucidlo - ©AmericaJR.com
How is it that the gatekeepers of knowledge are being reduced to check out clerks for burger joints? And how on EARTH (pardon, getting worked up here) is it remotely a good idea for the child’s mental nourishment to link the joy of reading with a Happy Meal at your local McD? I can absolutely see the win-win-win situation for McDonald’s, but I simply can’t get my head around why, oh WHY, a library would sink so low to get a reading audience. Do more active field work, for god’s sake! Educate and involve parents, introduce children to literature with active involvement, don’t send them down fatty, mind-droning, brainwashed lane!
I find this piece of information truly disturbing, borderline ridiculous. Imagine going to your dentist, getting your dental exam only to whip out the coupon for your very own free gallon of Coke, and have him stamp it (for all your hard work in the chair!).
Reading is a very complex cognitive process, that requires awareness and interpretation, fast food dulls your senses. I weep, truly…
So you tell me, would you send your kid down to the library with his/her own McDonald’s punch-card and rest easy in the fact that, ‘at least she/he is reading’? Is the lunch worth it?
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