/lit/ - Literature

Tell me what do you guys think of this idea. It’s a new tragedy I have been wondering about. I would appreciate suggestions to construct a better plot. I don’t have the time and space to go for much detail here, but let me express some main lines and bones from the project I am conceiving.

>First thing you should know is that the tragedy is going to be based on Antigone: Sophocles play will be its source model.

The play will be set in Afghanistan, shortly after 2001, in a period post-Taliban, when the institutions of the country are being slowly rebuild after years of war, many of them with the help of the U.S. government.

The main characters is a young woman (let us call her here Antigone/Malala) who was trained in a school for girls, an institution supported by the USAID:

https://www.usaid.gov/afghanistan/education

The school will be modeled in the real life Marefat School, in Kabul:

https://marefat.wordpress.com/about/

After receiving her training and graduating as a teacher, the girl decides to visit the remote district where her father was born and where many of her family members still live. She desires to build a school there, one especially concerned with the education of girls.

In the city, her uncle (the tribe chief) summons the elders and attacks her niece decisions of building the school. The important thing to know here is that this man has lost many family members in attacks made by U.S. drones, (by military and intel mistake, of course), without ever receiving even a sign of apology. Thus, this man has a ferocious hate for anything that the US. Government represents, and the fact that his niece was trained by U.S. institutions is an affront to him.

What is important here is that this man, the uncle of Antigone/Malala is not thinking clearly, not even considering the benefits of education, but only his emotional scars and the government that caused them. His decision to disallow the construction of the school, thus, although somewhat based on conservative and religious opinions, is much more a reaction against the violence perpetrated by the West: the man simply cant forgive the U.S. for killing his innocent loved ones.

Also, Antigone/Malala’s uncle urges her to remember that her father, his brother, was himself killed by one of the U.S. military operations, and that he was a peaceful man, a hard-working and learned man, a teacher and a political progressive. He somewhat critics his dead brother for not being dedicated enough to Allah and by adopting several western-culture habits and thought-models, but still maintains that he did not deserved his fate. He questions how could Antigone betray the memory of her people, of her father, and decided to study under the enemy, to adopt the ideology of the enemy.