MAY
14, 2013
UNBURIED: TAMERLAN TSARNAEV AND THE
LESSONS OF GREEK TRAGEDY
“Bury this terrorist on U.S. soil and we will
unbury him.”
So ran the bitter slogan on one of the signs
borne last week by enraged protesters outside the Worcester, Massachusetts,
funeral home that had agreed to receive the body of the accused Boston Marathon
bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev—a cadaver seemingly so morally polluted that his own
widow would not claim it, that no funeral director would touch it, that no
cemetery would bury it. Indeed, even after Peter Stefan, a Worcester funeral
director, had washed and shrouded the battered, bullet-ridden body for burial according
to Muslim law, the cadaver became the object of a macabre game of civic and
political football. Cemetery officials and community leaders in the Boston area
were concerned that a local burial would spark civic unrest. (“It is not in the
best interest of ‘peace within the city’ to execute a cemetery deed,” the
Cambridge city manager, Robert Healy, announced.) While the state’s
governor carefully sidestepped the issue, asserting that it was a family
matter, other politicians seemed to sense an advantage in catering to the high
popular feeling. “If the people of Massachusetts do not want that terrorist to
be buried on our soil,” declared Representative Edward J. Markey, a Democratic
candidate for the U.S. Senate, “then it should not be.”
And
so it went until late last week, when—due to the intervention of Martha Mullen,
a Richmond, Virginia, woman who’d been following the story, a practicing
Christian who cited Jesus’s injunction to “love our enemies” as her
inspiration—Tsarnaev’s body was finally transported to a tiny Muslim cemetery
in rural Virginia, and interred there in an unmarked grave. Until then, the
corpse had languished for over two weeks—not only unburied but, in a way,
unburiable. In one of several updates it published on the grisly affair, the Times quoted
Ray Madoff, a Boston law professor who specializes in “what she calls the law
of the dead,” about the case. “There is no precedent for this type of thing,”
Madoff told a reporter. “It is a legal no-man’s land.”
A legal no-man’s land, perhaps, but familiar
territory to anyone even casually acquainted with the Greek classics. From its
epic dawn to its tragic high noon, Greek literature expressed tremendous
cultural anxiety about what happens when the dead are left unburied. In part,
the issue was a religious one: the souls of the dead were thought to be
stranded, unable to reach the underworld without proper burial. (And without a
proper tomb, or sêma—a “sign” or grave marker—a dead person could
not hope for postmortem recognition, some sign that he or she had once lived
and died.) The religious prohibition had civic consequences: refusal to bury
the dead was considered an affront to the gods and could bring ritual pollution
on the community. The right of all sides to bury soldiers who had fallen in
battle was a convention of war; burial truces were regularly granted. In myth,
even characters who act more like terrorists than like soldiers—for instance,
the great warrior Ajax, who plots to assassinate his commanding officers but
ends up dead himself—are deemed worthy of burial in the end. Which is to say,
even the body of the enemy was sacrosanct.
This preoccupation with the implications of
burial and non-burial haunts a number of the greatest works of Greek literature.
The opening lines of the Iliad, the oldest extant work of Western
poetry, refer with pointed revulsion to the possibility that the bodies of the
warriors who died at Troy could become the “delicate pickings of birds and
dogs”; indeed you might say that getting the dead buried—even the reviled,
enemy dead—is the principle object of the epic’s grand narrative arc. Fifteen
thousand lines after that opening reference to unburied corpses, the poem
closes, magnificently, with a scene of reconciliation between the
grief-maddened Achilles—who has daily defiled the unburied body of his mortal
enemy, Hector, dragging it back and forth through the dirt before the walls of
Troy—and Hector’s aged father, the Trojan king, Priam. In a gesture of
redemption for himself as much as for the Trojans, Achilles finally agrees to
release the body for burial. The gigantic epic ends not (as some first-time
readers expect) with the Wooden Horse, or the Fall of Troy, but with the
all-important funeral of the greatest of the Greeks’ enemies—a rite of burial
that allows the Trojans to mourn their prince and, in a way, the audience to
find closure after the unrelenting violence that has preceded. The work’s final
line is as plain, and as final, as the sound of dirt on the lid of a coffin.
“This was the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses.”
As for the Odyssey, it, too—for all its emphasis
on its fantastical, proto-sci-fi adventures—reveals a telling preoccupation
with this issue. The great adventure epic features an extended visit to the
underworld, where, among other things, the flitting shades of the dead express
anxiety about their own funerals (and where Odysseus learns how he himself will
die, many years hence, “from the sea”); precisely at the poem’s midpoint,
Odysseus dutifully halts his homeward journey—and the epic’s narrative
momentum—to bury, with full honors, the body of a young sailor who has died in
a clumsy accident, as if to say that even the most hapless and pointless of
deaths merits the dignity of ritual. And in the work’s final, culminating book,
Homer slips in the information, ostensibly en passant but of course crucial,
that the bodies of the hated suitors—whose gory deaths we are, to some extent,
invited to savor, given their gross outrages against Odysseus and his
family—were duly permitted to be retrieved by their families for burial.
* * *
But no work of ancient literature is as obsessed
with unburied bodies as Sophocles’ “Antigone,” a tragedy first produced in
Athens around 442 B.C.: the entire plot centers on the controversy over how a
community that has survived a deadly attack will dispose of the body of the
perpetrator of that attack—the body, as it happens, of a young man who had
planned to bring destruction on the city that had been his home, who “sought to
consume the city with fire…sought to taste blood.”
The young man in question is Polyneices, a son
of the late, spectacularly ill-fated king Oedipus who, after a power struggle
with his brother Eteocles, fled the city, eventually returning with an invading
army (the “Seven Against Thebes”) to make war on his homeland. At a climactic
moment in the battle, the two brothers slay each other, but the invasion is
ultimately repelled and the city saved. In the opening lines of the play, we
learn that the body of Eteocles, the defender of the city, has been buried with
full honors, but, according to a decree promulgated by the new king, Creon (who
is the young men’s uncle), no one, under pain of death, may bury or mourn
Polyneices, whose corpse is to be left “unwept, unsepulchered, a treasure to
feast on for birds looking out for a dainty meal.” (The particular horror,
expressed from the Iliad on down, that humans could become the food of the
animals we normally eat ourselves is noteworthy: a strong signal of a total
inversion in the scheme of things of which the unburied body, the corpse that
remains above rather than below ground, is a symptom.)
Creon, like the Senate candidate from
Massachusetts, cares a great deal about public opinion, as we later learn; but
it’s certainly possible to argue that his edict is grounded in a strong if
idiosyncratic morality. When confronted about his rationale for enshrining in
the city’s law what is, after all, a religious abomination, the king declares
that Polyneices’ crime against the city has put the young man beyond
morality—that while burial of any dead is a religious obligation, it is
impossible to imagine that “the gods have care for this corpse,” that one might
ever see “the gods honoring the wicked.” As he sputters his final line in this
debate, you sense that he is acting out of a genuine, if narrow, conviction
that evil men do not merit human treatment: “It cannot be.” (“It should not
be”: so Representative Markey,
apropos of the burial that offended the sensibilities of Massachusetts voters.)
But just as strong as Creon’s convictions are
those of his niece Antigone, sister to both of the dead young men—Eteocles
enshrined in his hero’s tomb, Polyneices lying naked on the ground, his nude,
weapon-torn body exposed to the elements, to the ravenous birds. From the moment
she appears on stage, outraged after having heard about the new edict,
Antigone’s argument is for the absolute imperative of burial—indeed, for the
absolute. For her, burial of the dead is a universal institution that
transcends culture and even time itself: the “unwavering, unwritten customs of
the gods … not some trifle of now or yesterday, but for all eternity.” (She
mockingly asks whether these can be overruled by the mere “pronouncements” of
Creon.) This conviction is what leads her to perform the galvanizing action of
the play: under cover of night she goes to the desolate place where Polyneices’
body lies out in the open and performs a token burial, scattering some dirt on
the body.
It is to this symbolic burial that a terrified
soldier—one of the guards whom Creon had set around the body, to make sure no
one would inter it—presumably refers later on, when he anxiously reports to
Creon that someone has performed the rite. Enraged, Creon orders the man to go
back and “unbury” the body: to strip off the thin covering of dirt and expose
the corpse once more to the elements. It is upon his return to the
foul-smelling site that the soldier discovers Antigone, who at that moment is
arriving, and who cries out in despair when she sees the denuded corpse. She is
taken prisoner, has her great confrontation with her uncle (from which I quote
above), and, in one of the diabolically symmetrical punishments so beloved of
Greek tragedians, is herself buried alive as punishment for her crime of
burying the dead—walled into a tomb of rock, to expire there. (By not actually
killing her, Creon, who has the master bureaucrat’s deep feeling for the small
procedural detail, hopes to avoid incurring ritual pollution.)
There she does die—imperious to the end, she
hangs herself, rather than waste away as anybody’s victim—but not before Creon
has been persuaded of the folly of his policy. As often happens in tragedy, the
persuasion takes its final form as a heap of dead bodies: not only Antigone’s
but those of Creon’s son, the dead girl’s fiancé, who has slain himself over
the body of his beloved, and Creon’s wife, too, who kills herself in despair at
the news of their child’s violent end. The king who had refused to recognize
the claims of family is, in the end, made horribly aware of how important
family is.
“The claims of family” is just one way to
describe what Antigone represents. The titanic battle between her and Creon is,
in fact, one of the most thrilling moral, intellectual, and philosophical
confrontations ever dramatized; inevitably, it has been seen as representing
any number of cultural conflicts. Certainly in the play there is the tension
between the family and the community, but there is also that between the
individual and the state, between religious and secular worldviews, between
divine and human law, feminine and masculine concerns, the domestic and
political realms.
But perhaps a broader rubric is applicable, too.
For you could say that what preoccupies Antigone, who as we know is attracted
to universals, is simply another “absolute”: the absolute personhood of the
dead man, stripped of all labels, all categories—at least those imposed by
temporal concerns, by politics and war. For her, the defeated and disgraced
Polyneices, naked and unburied, is just as much her brother as the triumphant
and heroic Eteocles, splendidly entombed. In the end, what entitles him to
burial has nothing to do with what side he was on—and it’s worth emphasizing
the play is not at all shy about enumerating the horrors the dead man intended
to perpetrate on the city, his own city, the pillage, the burning,
the killing, the enslavement of the survivors—but the fact that he was a human
being, anthropos. (This tragedy is, indeed, famous for expressing a
kind of astonished wonder at what human beings are capable of, accomplishments
for which Sophocles uses the ambiguous adjective “deina,” which means
both “terrible” and “wonderful”—“awesome,” maybe, in the original sense of that
word.) This is why, during her great debate with Creon, while the king keeps
recurring to the same point—that Eteocles was the champion of the city, and
Polyneices its foe, and that “a foe is never a friend”—such distinctions are
moot for Antigone, since the gods themselves do not make them. “Nonetheless,”
she finally declares, putting a curt end to another exchange on the subject,
“Hades requires these rites.” The only salient distinction is the one that
divides gods from men—which, if true, makes all humans equal.
* * *
It was hard not to think of all this—of the
Iliad with its grand funereal finale, of the Odyssey strangely pivoting around
so many burials, and of course of “Antigone”—as I followed the story of
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s unburied body over the past few weeks. I thought, of
course, of canny politicians eyeing the public mood, and of the public to whom
those politicians wanted to pander. I thought even more of the protesters who,
understandably to be sure, wanted to make clear the distinction between victim
and perpetrator, between friend and foe, by threatening to strip from the enemy
what they saw as the prerogatives of the friend: humane treatment in death. The
protesters who wanted, like Creon, not only to deny those prerogatives to an
enemy but to strip them away again should anyone else grant them—to “unbury the
body.” I thought of Martha Mullen, a Christian, who insisted that the Muslim
Tsarnaev, accused of heinous atrocities against innocent citizens, be buried
just as a loved one might deserve to be buried, because she honored the
religious precept that demands that we see all humans as “brothers,” whatever
the evil they have done.
This final point is worth lingering over just
now. The last of the many articles I’ve read about the strange odyssey of
Tsarnaev’s body was about the reactions of the residents of the small Virginia
town where it was, finally, buried. “What do you do when a monster is buried
just down the street?” the subhead asked. The sensationalist diction, the word
“monster,” I realized, is the problem—and brings you to the deep meaning of
Martha Mullen’s gesture, and of Antigone’s argument, too. There is, in the end,
a great ethical wisdom in insisting that the criminal dead, that your bitterest
enemy, be buried, too; for in doing so, you are insisting that the criminal,
however heinous, is precisely not a “monster.” Whatever else is true of the
terrible crime that Tamerlan Tsarnaev is accused of having perpetrated, it was,
all too clearly, the product of an entirely human psyche, horribly motivated by
beliefs and passions that are very human indeed—deina in the worst
possible sense. To call him a monster is to treat this enemy’s mind precisely
the way some would treat his unburied body—which is to say, to put it beyond
the reach of human consideration (and therefore, paradoxically, to refuse to
confront his “monstrosity” at all).
This is the point that obsessed Sophocles’
Antigone: that to not bury her brother, to not treat the war criminal like a
human being, would ultimately have been to forfeit her own humanity. This is
why it was worth dying for.
* * *
Sometimes, a less elevated instinct, a raw
practicality, could lead the characters in Greek plays to a version of the same
conclusion: that because we will all want to be treated like human beings at
some unimaginably low moment—because we all die—we must treat the “monsters”
thus, too. This, too, is a possibility worth considering right now.
It is, in fact, the point of the tart ending of
another play by Sophocles—one he wrote about Ajax, the good soldier turned evil
terrorist. At the end of this tragedy, written not long before “Antigone” was
composed, a conflict arises over whether the body of the criminal should be
buried. His enemies—Agamemnon and Menelaus, the leaders of the Greek
expedition, whom Ajax had plotted to murder—insist, of course, that his body be
cast forth unburied, like the body of an animal, “food for the birds.” (Again.)
Yet unexpectedly, there springs to his defense a man who also had been his
enemy. That man is Odysseus, who in a climactic confrontation with the two
Greek generals—who are his allies and commanding officers—persuades them that
to pursue their hatred after death would be grotesque. Rather typically for
this type, the swaggering Agamemnon worries that to relent would make him
appear “soft”; but Odysseus, wily as he always is, argues that “softness” is
nothing more than justice—nothing more than acting like a human being. Then he
makes his final, stark point, one with which, you suspect, even Creon wouldn’t
argue:
AGAMEMNON: You will make us appear cowards this day.
ODYSSEUS: Not so, but just men in the sight of all the Greeks.
AGAMEMNON: So you would have me allow the burying of the dead?
ODYSSEUS: Yes; for I too shall come to that need.
Or, as Antigone put it, “I owe a longer
allegiance to the dead than to the living, for in that world I shall abide
forever.”
