Art Can Help Us Subvert Patriarchy
But only if we continue to fund it
Toni Morrison’s speech “The Habit of Art,” included in her book The Source of Self-Regard, references an event originally written about by an unnamed young reporter. It recounts the way that a group of Haitian citizens used theater to undermine the Tonton Macoute, a special operations unit within the Haitian paramilitary during Jean-Claude Duvalier’s 15-year dictatorship. “Tontons” were authorized by the government to instill terror in citizens by systematically and indiscriminately murdering them. And when the government decided that this form of terror wasn’t vile enough, it instituted a rule that forbade people from retrieving corpses laying in public spaces. Not even families could honor their deceased loved ones with a proper burial without themselves becoming targets of the state. The bodies were to remain untouched until garbage trucks arrived to collect them.
In the midst of all of this, a school teacher decided to assemble a group of locals to perform a play in a garage every night. According to the reporter, the militia paid them no mind. To them, the meetups were nothing more than a triviality. The play they were practicing, however, was Antigone, an ancient Greek tragedy written by Sophocles around 440 B.C. that emphasizes the right of citizens to reject violations of freedom and warns of…
