Grief as Resistance: A Close Reading of The Burial at Thebes and Home Fire Anonymous College

In both Seamus Heaney’s 2004 play The Burial at Thebes and Kamila Shamsie’s 2017 novel Home Fire, strict borders are heavily enforced by oppressive governmental institutions that seek to homogenize collective identity through restrictive forms of surveillance. Heaney and Shamsie each present two distinct adaptations of Sophocles’ well-known play Antigone, retelling the ancient Greek tragedy through modernized language and settings imbued with current social and political issues. Contrastingly, Heaney retains original character names and circumstances while Shamsie expands the original story by retelling Antigone as a conflict between an immigrant Pakistani family and the British government. Both works interrogate the socially accepted definitions of statehood and citizenship, rooting their respective “Antigone’s” in direct opposition to harmful structures that impose legality at any cost.

In The Burial at Thebes, Heaney emphasizes Antigone’s fight for justice, pushing back against Creon’s burial laws that disrespect the legacy of her late brother Polyneices. In Home Fire, Shamsie portrays her Antigone-equivalent Aneeka publicly denouncing the British government’s desecration of her brother Parvaiz’s body. In both works, the law...