Iphigenia Reimagined
IPHIGENIA REIMAGINED
The first stitch of The Oresteia’s three-act tapestry begins with eagles. Two of them, circling wingtip to wingtip above the beaches of Aulis, sharpening their sight towards the scene below.
In the BBC version of Aeschylus’s famed tragedy, the throng of soldiers at Aulis itching to sail to war against Troy are beginning to brawl within themselves. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and the man who has stepped up to marshal the warriors of various Greek kingdoms, gives a clap like thunder. He tells his men he will solve the violent winds preventing their departure, catharise their rage with the war they crave. He tells them he will do whatever it takes.
In a flurry of feather and instinct, the eagles interrupt Agamemnon’s address. They tuck, swoop, then spiral dizzyingly towards a jagged boulder fringing the beach—the crowd thinks they intend to smash themselves against the rock, a uniquely human assumption—and complete their descent beak-first, fatally pinning a stray hare that no one had observed before. The eagles tear apart the hare before anyone can move a bone, and out of the prey’s pierced belly spills its unborn babies, which the eagles fall upon too. Agamemnon turns to Calchas the Prophet, Calchas is transfixed. The eagles, the hare. The eagles, the dead.
When I am seven, I become personnel to the American consciousness. My grandmother asks me in the car who I would vote for, if I could. I say Hillary Clinton because she is a woman, and my cousin laughs in the passenger seat. This is the cousin who refuses to bless me when I sneeze. She makes it her mission to subvert ritual.1 I make it my mission to come up with a better reason as to why I want Hillary Clinton to be the President of the United States—I do not conceive that I am mutinous, too.
Six days before my eighth birthday, Donald Trump wins the presidential election. This, we all know. He wins again in 2024—which means, of course, that two years into his second term, it becomes okay again for a white woman to approach me in a chatter-congested-suburbic coffee shop, patronise my accent-ridden2 mother with an assumption that we are Chinese, and spit on my essay that she’d eavesdropped me reading to my mother in which I discuss a professor’s scholarship behind the term “Asian/American” (note the solidus).
I apologise for the run-on; my civility is a work in progress. The eagles will come and slaughter my brain-children, anyway. Will you let me choose, though? The limbs I’ll lose to the war that will come? They say it is for the greater good.
“Whatever it takes, Calchas. Tell me what they want.”
In the background of the crowd’s bated breath, one of the eagles has gone in with its beak and gripped its prey by the throat to smash it against the stone once more. Its comrade keeps shredding apart the hares’ unborn babies and the action is practically compulsive; the eagle can’t seem to stop itself.
Standing on his platform, Agamemnon desires a show. He wants his prophet to declare the gods’ demands in front of his men so that he may flex his metier as a general of definitive Greek strength. But Calchas does not answer. He turns to the waters and the wind; looks to the skies, squints and shakes his head, then peers at the eagles and clenches half-moon indents into his palm. A grievous reminder of his mortality.
“Into the tent, sir.”
The general is not pleased; he pulls Calchas roughly into his chest and the men quarrel in whispers. The soldiers also cannot help but buzz amongst themselves. Alas, Calchas refuses to divulge divine messages in public, so he gets Agamemnon to retreat with him. They enter the tent, and when the curtains come down and the two face each other in the heart of the space, the semicircles in Calchas’s palm grow deeper still.
“What is it, Calchas? What blood do the gods want spilt?”
Nothing, for a moment. And then a soft, “My lord.”
“Out with it! We cannot wait!”
Calchas knows that he is dealing with two unstoppable forces; the wrath of the gods and the waves of human warlust are destined to collide. He knows that he is, put simply, just a conducting rod.
“Iphigenia, my lord. They want your daughter.”
On the car ride home from the coffee shop, my mother is silent. We’re turning the corner of the CVS on North Main Street when she pulls into the parking lot and opens her mouth. Like a fish out of water, I think, because she just keeps opening and closing, opening and closing. In reality, I know that my mother probably has much to say. I imagine, abstractly, that her condition can be characterised like that one quote from Sofia Vergara in Modern Family (“Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?”). But my mother is, in reality, very intelligent and versatile, even in English. She can discuss Nature Mag articles and the rapid development of artificial intelligence with a well articulated vocabulary, go back and forth with me on Oscar movies and who deserves Best Actor. What is difficult, really, is becoming emotional in English—except she has left Vietnam for so long that it is awkward to be emotional in Vietnamese, too. We are a family that tiptoes around feeling-shaped craters.
“Tại sao con lại cãi nhau với bà Mỹ trắng đó?” Why did you argue with that white lady?
I am baffled.
“Mẹ, you heard the way she was speaking to us. That was fucking ridiculous. You think I’m gonna let her talk about some, Everyone is oppressed and you’re not special for writing about being Asian American? I’m oppressed because my white dad wouldn’t teach me Italian thirty years ago? Bullshit. Fucking bullshit is what that was. And then she talked to you in that fucking…fucking voice, like you’re a damn idiot, and Mẹ, I have never been more angry in my life. I’m allowed to live in this town and be American and write about my own damn experience being a chink.”
“Don’t say that word, Mickey.”
“I’ll say it if I fucking want to! She pretty much called us chinks herself, if she wasn’t so bent on arguing that racism doesn’t exist!”
“STOP cursing! You are educated! I pay for you to be educated!” My mother darts her eyes around the parking lot like someone is going to jump out of a bush and go Gotcha! I knew you people weren’t good enough to be here! She is bent forward against the wheel, one foot ready to press gas on the pedal, and I can only thump my head back against my headrest and squeeze my eyes shut in response to my mother’s mousiness. But her fear is not irrational.
Last break, we had been in Utah to visit family and witness the marvel that is Zion National Park. In Utah, there are what my cousins like to call the big three: Mountains, Mormons, and MAGAs. And when we’d crossed state lines going from Vegas to Orderville, there were, indeed, Mountains, Mormons, and MAGAs. The first two, I could appreciate well enough. Then we passed by our first MAGA-merch-selling stand on the side of the interstate highway. A banner read, “Hot summers call for ICE.” My father slowed, my mother stiffened. The eyes of a bandana’d seller followed us as we passed, headed towards the vehicle checkpoint for God’s All-American glory.
When I open my eyes again, I see that my mother has shut hers. We are alone in the parking lot, and for that, she is grateful. I am sorry in this moment. Sorry that I am mutinous, too.
In the tent, Agamemnon lifts one half of the entrance curtain and beckons a servant to fetch his best warrior. When Achilles arrives in the room, Agamemnon is stone in the face. He tells his soldier that Iphigenia is the demanded sacrifice and will serve her purpose as such, but that she must first be summoned to the Grecian frontlines and taken away from her mothers’ cocooning arms back in the Palace of Mycenae. Thus, they will tell the palace that Agamemnon has set her to marry Achilles before the military leaves. And like a spindle getting pedalled, Clytaemnestra lets her daughter leave.
When she arrives at the beaches of Aulis at last, the girl is ridden with bridal giddiness.
“Father! How good it is that I will get married before you all go on to save Helen and return victorious from Troy.”
“Iphigenia. My darling, my dear. I am afraid there is but one issue that must be settled before then.”
“What is it, Father?” Iphigenia watches her father closely. He is steely and ashen.
“We cannot set sail before your death.” The princess wags her brows playfully at him.
“Well, goodness me, it will be a long while before then.”
“No, my dear. It won’t.”
Iphigenia, smart girl she is, understands then. She is not betrothed to Achilles. Her fate is stone, knives, and the sea. When she is marched out of her father’s tent, she does so willingly. At the end of the aisle awaits Achilles, machaira hidden in the sleeve of his uniform as is custom. She joins him at the altar, at the stone that the eagles have since abandoned, and turns to face the beach of awed soldiers. The susurrations in the throng die. Some cannot bear to look at their princess; others return her stare with resolved grimaces. No one moves a bone when Achilles slides the sacrificial knife out of his sleeve and takes her life quickly and without fanfare.
Somewhere in the crowd, I recognise my eyes, my nose, my thick black hair. I can only discern a hazy outline, but I am certain that my mouth is open and I am screaming, I am screaming, I am screaming as we march forward in unison and the waves of fighters knock my knees into synchronisation. We approach the ramps of the ships and I think to myself that I am not ready to go die for the atrocity that I just witnessed. My voice gives away what my body cannot.
AN ADDENDUM
On the grayscale album cover for The 1975’s Being Funny in a Foreign Language, Matty Healy surfs the roof of a graffitied car. The vehicle is run halfway into the sand of a beach in southern England and Healy is photographed in the moment he ostensibly touches down on the roof. Knees bent to stabilise, black coattails captured in windy motion, the picture manifests as purposefully dynamic. His head, too, is bent ninety-degrees down, but it is Matty Healy, and he is intentional, he is obsessed with the rituals that bind humanity, he isn’t a showman taking his bow right now. I imagine this clad figure, arms outstretched (left is twisted so the hand says stop, right is contorted so the palm is demanding the skies and its storms), is rather something volant. He has just landed from flight; he is searching for the hare to pin and ravage and call sacrifice.
The opening track of this album is titled the same as all of the opening tracks for The 1975s’ albums: eponymously. There is “The 1975” from I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful, “The 1975” from The 1975, and “The 1975” from Being Funny in a Foreign Language. I am concerned with the last. Matty Healy sings,
“This will get bigger if you know what I mean,
I’m sorry if you’re living and you’re seventeen.”
He cries,
“You see, I can’t sleep ‘cause the American Dream
Has been buying up all of my self-esteem,
While QAnon created a legitimate scene,
But it was just some bloke in the Philippines."
Satirical gold—Healy is, in actuality, patently English in a cultural-cornerstone-that-is-Glastonbury sort of way. Even the lyrics read cheeky despite their States-oriented content. All of this is unimportant. I listen and I care that I am living, I am seventeen, I am losing sleep because of the American Dream.3
Aeschylus and Matty Healy—they both chorus that blood begets blood. It is a chorus of dissonance, incongruous in language and culture and timbre, but it remains universal. It states that we inflict violence onto those who dare harm our tribe, and then we turn around and stab our own for having sinned against one another. It is ouroboric; we are constantly eating ourselves tail to mouth.
2 My complicity bares itself raw in ink.
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3 My American Dream emerges in paralysis. There is a little demon crouching on my chest so even my muscles are prohibited from tensing. I sleep a little funny—when I doze off, my eyes never seem to shut all the way; my friends tease this foible, I grow afraid of a husband—so to the ordinary eye I am amusing when slumbering in a State of Fear. I don’t think people understand that what plagues me is the demon being on my chest and weaponising my ribcage; I am not sure if they will ever recognise that we are being attacked by something spectral that is not so removed from our bodies.
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