Vincenzo Di Nicola
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| Army trucks carrying coffins out of the city of Bergamo in Italy |
One of the cruelest aspects of our current
predicament with the COVID-19 pandemic is that family members cannot accompany
their loved ones during their dying days in hospital and are denied even the
capacity to mourn together or to bury their dead. This image of army trucks
hauling bodies out of Bergamo in Italy because the cemeteries and crematoria
are overwhelmed beyond capacity is a haunting one.
This brings to mind Sophocles’ tragedy of Antigone
who was forbidden to publicly mourn or properly
bury her dead brother Polynices because of his treason against the ruler Creon
(see image of painting).
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| Antigone with the body of her brother Polynices - Nikoforos Lytras, 1865 |
In a modern novel set in Brazil, Érico Veríssimo
described the “Incident at Antares” (1971, made into a film in 1994; see film
poster), the fictional town of Antares where the graveyard workers go on
strike. As the bodies pile up, unburied, seven corpses from a wide swathe of
society, rise up to claim their right to be buried. When they are unheeded,
they disclose the sordid secrets of those in authority and the other
townspeople.
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| Incident at Antares (Poster for Brazilian TV Miniseries, 1994) |
In our contemporary tragedy, we are the unwitting
actors of this modern morality play where not even death is a liberation and
even public mourning and a decent burial are forbidden.
At a loss for explanations and solutions, we turn to those whose imaginations have prepared us beforehand – playwrights and novelists.
Montreal, QC, Canada
April 16, 2020
