Antigone Taught Mandela Leadership

By Robin Bates | Published: May 12, 2026
Frederic Leighton, Antigone

Wednesday

Spurred by false reports of “white genocide” in South Africa, the Trump administration has been granting refugee status to white Afrikaners while denying it to others in far more desperate straits. While the country does suffer from high crime rates, whites are not suffering more than anyone else, and one only has to look at our own nation following the Civil War to realize how difficult such transitions can be. I find myself thinking how much worse it could have been had it not been for Nelson Mandela.

When Mandela died in 2013, I wrote a post on how he and his fellow Robben Island prisoners felt supported by various passages in Shakespeare, including Julius Caesar, Tempest, and Merchant of Venice. Only recently, however, did I register that Mandela also played Creon in a prison performance of Antigone. An old Guardian article notes that while Mandela appears more Antigone than the Theban king, nevertheless he may have learned leadership lessons from Creon that served his country.

For a refresher, Oedipus’s two sons have died fighting who is to rule Thebes. Next-in-line Creon decrees that the brother who attacked the city is a traitor and orders that his body remain unburied, contrary to divine law. Antigone, answering to a higher calling, violates the edict and performs funeral rites. As a result, she is buried alive in a tomb, and although Creon repents, he does so too late: Antigone, his son (who loves her), and his wife all commit suicide. At the end, as Creon is lamenting “on my head I feel the heavy weight of crushing Fate,” the Chorus weighs in with its moral:

There is no happiness where there is no wisdom;
No wisdom but in submission to the gods.
Big words are always punished,
And proud men in old age learn to be wise.

Antigone’s principled stand would have resonated with Mandela and his fellow prisoners, as would her arguments with her sister. Many South Africans were as fearful of joining the African National Congress (ANC) as Ismene is in joining Antigone’s rebellion. Note the following interchange, in which Ismene has just reminded her sister how they have already lost their father, mother, and both brothers:

Think how much more terrible than these
Our own death would be if we should go against Creon
And do what he has forbidden! We are only women,
We cannot fight with men, Antigone!
The law is strong, we must give in to the law
In this thing, and in worse. I beg the Dead
To forgive me, but I am helpless: I must yield
To those in authority. And I think it is dangerous business
To be always meddling.

To which Antigone responds: 

If that is what you think,
I should not want you, even if you asked to come.
You have made your choice, you can be what you want to be.
But I will bury him; and if I must die,
I say that this crime is holy: I shall lie down
With him in death, and I shall be as dear
To him as he to me.

And further on:

I am not afraid of the danger; if it means death,
It will not be the worst of deaths ––death without honor.

In reading this last response, I am put in mind of a passage from Julius Caesar that bolstered Mandela during his long imprisonment:

 Cowards die many times before their deaths;
 The valiant never taste of death but once.

In the Guardian article, author André Brink notes that Mandela had an “Antigone streak” from an early age:

But the Antigone streak that was to become in a way his trademark soon asserted itself – whether in defying his guardian by refusing the bride assigned to him, or in standing up to police, prison warders or the leaders of the apartheid regime by refusing to obey orders he regarded as unfair. These occasions never demonstrated a mere disregard for authority, but a considered refusal to condone the abuse of power; an assertion of personal dignity that not even the harshest punishment in prison could dent.

Yet for all his Antigone qualities, I find even more interesting how Mandela was also a Creon. Here’s a passage that Mandela would have delivered when he was acting out the king:

I am aware, of course, that no Ruler can expect complete loyalty from his subjects until he has been tested in office. Nevertheless, I say to you at the very outset that I have nothing but contempt for the kind of Governor who is afraid, for whatever reason, to follow the course that he knows is best for the State; and as for the man who sets private friendship above the public welfare, ––I have no use for him, either. I call God to witness that if I saw my country headed for ruin, I should not be afraid to speak out plainly; and I need hardly remind you that I would never have any dealings with an enemy of the people. No one values friendship more highly than I; but we must remember that friends made at the risk of wrecking our Ship are not real friends at all. 

Creon’s words on the responsibilities of a leader resonate with us now. Because our leaders didn’t hold Trump accountable for attempting to wreck our ship in 2021—because they didn’t put public welfare first—he is taking us all down in 2026. Mandela, on the other hands, echoes Creon in the following statement, found in his autobiography The Long Walk:

There are times a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way.

Brink lays out the risks Mandela was taking when he initiated meetings with South Africa’s white leadership, thereby moving out ahead of the ANC:

He knew only too well, he told me, even more emphatically than he’d intimated in his writings, that he was really duty-bound to obtain permission from the ANC leadership first before embarking on such a radical initiative. But he also knew that the ANC would never consent. And so he had to place his own future at risk, knowing that if the endeavor failed, or ever became known too early, any future role he might have hoped to play would be forfeited….What in some people, or in some situations, would amount to megalomania, may in others turn out to be a visionary decision.

From Brink’s account of Mandela, I can see how he learned from both Creon and Antigone, both the positives and the negatives. Through the Truth and Reconciliation process, he rejected Creon-like draconian punishments. At the same time, he was more practical—although no less principled—than Antigone. He also didn’t have her self-righteousness, which we see when she confronts Creon:

This talking is a great weariness: your words
Are distasteful to me, and I am sure that mine
Seem so to you. And yet they should not seem so:
I should have praise and honor for what I have done.
All these men here would praise me
Were their lips not frozen shut with fear of you.
[Bitterly.]
Ah the good fortune of kings,
Licensed to say and do whatever they please!

For comparative purposes, check out this passage from Mandela’s speech before his own court, which found him guilty and sent him to prison for 27 years. Note that it lacks Antigone’s bitterness:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Writing in 2000 after Mandela’s presidency had come to an end, Brink observes that, while he made mistakes, he accomplished far more than could reasonably have been expected given the impossibility of the task:

One need only take a small step back to compare South Africa today with the country of less than a decade ago to realize how much has been achieved. If programs for housing, health care, job creation or the reconstruction of education still lag behind the forecasts of five years ago, at least the groundwork has been done, the infrastructure provided, on which the real edifice can now take shape.

Part of Mandela’s success lay in how he was able to face up to where he’d gone wrong. Brink tells the story, recounted by one of Mandela’s three private secretaries, how every night he would ask them, “Now tell me what I have done wrong today, because I don’t want to make the same mistakes tomorrow.” In other words, he follows the advice that the seer Teiresias offers Creon:

Think: all men make mistakes,
But a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong,
And repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.

Classicist Edith Hall, in Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, believes that the ancient Greek tragedies offered training in deliberate decision-making and for that reason were seen as vital to Athenian society, given how it was dependent on its popular council. By getting caught up in his pride, Creon would have served as a negative object lesson for Greek citizens. I can very well imagine Mandela absorbing important leadership lessons as he performed the role. 

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The Joys of Reading Fanny Burney

By Robin Bates | Published: May 11, 2026

Tuesday

I’ve just finished reading Fanny Burney’s Cecilia for the first time and can report that, by the end, I found this 900+ page novel impossible to put down. While I loved teaching Burney’s earlier novel Evelina in my class on “Couples Comedy in the Restoration and 18th Century,” I can report that Cecilia is at another level. It also appealed to me as a Jane Austen fan.

Indeed, it was Austen who alerted me to the excellence of the novel. In Northanger Abbey, when Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe are bonding over their love of Ann Radcliffe novels, Austen finds herself compelled to defend the genre. Many moralists at the time, not to mention various literary characters (including Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice), feared that novels would lead young people astray. Even worse, Austen wrote, were those novelists who created protagonists who themselves denigrate novels:

[I]f a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, [Catherine and Isabelle] were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. 

Novel reading is attacked despite the joy involved, Austen complains. Even though “our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world,” she writes, “no species of composition has been so much decried.” As a result, young people fear acknowledging their enthusiasm:

[H]ere seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labor of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss——?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. 

I can testify that, while Burney is no Austen, she does indeed understand human nature and wittily serves up a variety of comic characters. One fictional technique she uses (and sometimes overuses) is having multiple characters intrude upon Cecilia at important moments. Maddeningly oblivious to her needs, they throw a wrench in her plans. I am reminded of the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera. 

Comedy often shares the stage with high melodrama—at one point Cecilia is pushed past her breaking point and goes temporarily mad—and there’s even a duel. (The closest Austen gets to a duel is Colonel Brandon fighting Willoughby for debauching his ward, but if you blink you miss it.) Burney appears to have taken a page from the 17th century French tragedians Corneille and Racine, where the heart’s longings are opposed by the call of duty.

In this instance, the problem is caused by the conditions under which Cecilia is to inherit her uncle’s large fortune when she comes of age: she can only marry someone who agrees to take her family name but falls in love with a man from a family that is inordinately proud of its name, which goes back centuries. Delvile could break with his family and become Mr. Beverley (as opposed to Delvile), but that would alienate both him and Cecilia from his parents.

Of course, there are other complications, including problems with each of the three men who have been appointed Cecilia’s guardians, along with various suitors who want to get their hands on her wealth and a seeming old friend who is determined to ward them off so that he can get her once his elderly wife dies. The comic side characters, meanwhile, include a narrow businessman, a pretentious officer, a loquacious lady, a mischievous lady, and on and on. One sometimes dreams of Cecilia sending these people away, but of course she is too ladylike to do so. In this novel, there is very little privacy and the social whirl never ends.  

While the virtuous Cecilia always wants to do the right thing, sometimes her youth, inexperience, and naiveté draw her into compromising situations. As in Austen, rules of etiquette impede communication and lead to misunderstandings.

For the Austen fan, there are special treasures, none bigger than the following passage. In it, a wise doctor provides the following advice to the young couple after Cecilia, through a series of misadventures, finds herself captive in a pawnbroker’s shop:

The whole of this unfortunate business,” said Dr Lyster, “has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE. Your uncle, the Dean, began it, by his arbitrary will, as if an ordinance of his own could arrest the course of nature! and as if he had power to keep alive, by the loan of a name, a family in the male branch already extinct. Your father, Mr Mortimer, continued it with the same self-partiality, preferring the wretched gratification of tickling his ear with a favourite sound, to the solid happiness of his son with a rich and deserving wife. Yet this, however, remember; if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination: for all that I could say to Mr Delvile, either of reasoning or entreaty,–and I said all I could suggest, and I suggested all a man need wish to hear,–was totally thrown away, till I pointed out to him his own disgrace, in having a daughter-in-law immured in these mean lodgings!

Austen is far more restrained than Burney and more economical with her language. Where Burney uses a broadsword to go after her satiric targets, Austen applies a stiletto. Nevertheless one sees the inspiration for many of Austen’s most memorable creations in Burney’s large cast of characters. 

Reading about men and women who take integrity, honor, and truth seriously is refreshing in this age when we are daily inundated with falsehoods and bad faith arguments. Moralists may have fulminated against the novel in the 18th and early 19th century, but Cecilia provides an inspiring exemplar of how one should behave, then and now.

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O’Connor Illustrates White Identity Formation

By Robin Bates | Published: May 10, 2026
Flannery O’Connor

Monday

As we witness former Confederate states scrambling to throw out elected Black representatives following the Supreme Court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, we are reminded once again how deeply racism is woven into the American fabric. When people talk about slavery as America’s original sin (along with Native American genocide), they capture the way that it continues to fester even though progress has been made. Henry Ford may have claimed that “history is bunk,” but William Faulkner understood the actual situation when he wrote, in Requiem for a Nun,

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.

Our greatest writers understand how this works. I’ve just read a wonderful essay by Toni Morrison on how one of these writers shows how racism is inculcated in the young. In her short story “The Artificial Nigger,” Flannery O’Connor lays out a grandfather’s successful effort to make his orphaned grandson as racist as he is. Nelson, rebelling against the old man, has the potential to develop in a different direction, but in the end fear of the Other wins out.

In her posthumously published Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon–a series of lectures Morrison gave at Princeton—Morrison discusses how authors like Edgar Allen Poe, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway use Black characters as foils against which to define whiteness:

[They] make sure the Africanist character is never without the sign of color or other marks of racial identification; never identify him or her as a citizen of a country or state; never give black personae power other than the power to serve; nor any voice other than comic, cowardly, obsequious, unreasonable, illicit, or de-sexed—unless the voice reinforces the status quo.

Making an interesting exception of Herman Melville—I’ve written about his profound insights into race in his novella Benito Cereno—Morrison notes that the Africanists in most canonical American novels

either have no family context or obligations, or if they do have family, they are irrelevant emotionally to the black person and certainly to the whites. Their condition is timeless, history-less, without a cultural context other than their convenience or inconvenience to white culture. In short, they are bodies—for labor or exploitation; or they are shadows that haunt, hound, or threaten; or they are shadows that protect and guide.

While O’Connor doesn’t herself have fully fleshed-out African American characters, Morrison credits her with showing us “what purposes they serve in a white male consciousness and ultimately in literature itself.” Morrison says that, if she could have gotten away with it, she would have used the same title for her course that O’Connor uses for her story.

In it, Mr. Head worries that Nelson is not according him the respect he deserves. He therefore plans to teach him a lesson: from their home in rural Georgia, he will take him to Atlanta and so frighten him with its Black population that the boy will never question him or leave him. In other words, Nelson’s foundational identity will be based on a contrast with African Americans.

O’As it turns out, however, Mr. Head gets lost and can’t find his way back to the train station. They blunder into a Black community where people are willing to help them, but Mr. Head is too frightened to ask for directions. Then, determined to teach Nelson a lesson, he hides out when the boy falls asleep. When Nelson awakes and finds himself alone, he bolts out of sight and knocks over a woman carrying groceries. Like Peter denying Jesus, Head pretends that he doesn’t know him, stunning the woman and her friends:

[Mr. Head]  stared straight ahead at the women who were massed in their fury like a solid wall to block his escape. “This is not my boy,” he said. “I never seen him before.”

He felt Nelson’s fingers fall out of his flesh.

The women dropped back, staring at him with horror, as if they were so repulsed by a man who would deny his own image and likeness that they could not bear to lay hands on him. Mr. Head walked on, through a space they silently cleared, and left Nelson behind. Ahead of him he saw nothing but a hollow tunnel that had once been the street.

The betrayal is so deep that Head is convinced that his betrayal can never be forgiven and that he has lost the boy forever. So much for using Atlanta for white identity formation. What saves him and brings about reconciliation is the sight of a plastic lawn statue:

He had not walked five hundred yards down the road when he saw, within reach of him, the plaster figure of a Negro sitting bent over on a low yellow brick fence that curved around a wide lawn. The Negro was about Nelson’s size and he was pitched forward at an unsteady angle because the putty that held him to the wall had cracked. One of his eyes was entirely white and he held a piece of brown watermelon. Mr. Head stood looking at him silently until Nelson stopped at a little distance. Then as the two of them stood there, Mr. Head breathed, “An artificial nigger!”

The statue is in a sorry state:

It was not possible to tell if the artificial Negro were meant to be young or old; he looked too miserable to be either. He was meant to look happy because his mouth was stretched up at the corners but the chipped eye and the angle he was cocked at gave him a wild look of misery instead.

This caricature of blackness brings the two together. As Morrison explains, 

The narrative turns at this point. This means by which unification takes place, by which forgiveness is possible, by which mercy arrives, by which self-respect is regained is via the transference of humiliation to a plastic black form and the clear evidence that self-loathing disappears once it is projected onto this plastic, artificial (invented, made, constructed, built) figure who, fortunately for the characters’ requirements, is not alive and cannot speak, move, or, most importantly, look, return a look, or be understood to also know Mr. Head. It is my contention that this story is paradigmatic and is an uncommonly explicit model of the way in which black characters function in fiction as a trope for (catalyst of) self-fabrication.

In short, American whites define their whiteness by contrasting it with a fabricated image of blackness.

By the end of the story, Nelson’s rebellion has ended and he has bought into his grandfather’s stereotypes. After they descend from the train that has brought them home, O’Connor writes,

Nelson, composing his expression under the shadow of his hat brim, watched [his grandfather] with a mixture of fatigue and suspicion, but as the train glided past them and disappeared like a frightened serpent into the woods, even his face lightened and he muttered, “I’m glad I’ve went once, but I’ll never go back again!”

Thanks to his grandfather’s abusive initiation ritual, race differentiation, race fear, and race superiority are now permanent parts of his self-identity. 

Racial identity formation differs from family to family, of course, but versions of the drama in O’Connor’s story occur every day all over America as parents pass on their prejudices and their fears to their children. Their anxieties are exacerbated when demagogues like Trump and Pete Hegseth turn up the volume. Meanwhile, racist school boards and library boards rewrite curricula, ban books, and forbid teachers from putting up “Everyone is welcome here” posters. The children then grow up to become legislators who, when the Supreme Court gives them permission, can’t redraw electoral maps fast enough. 

Further thought: Morrison points out that O’Connor sees whiteness in and of itself as empty, something ghostlike. For instance, this is what Head and Nelson see in the train window:

“I heard you,” the boy muttered. “It’s no use in you yelling,” and he sat down and turned his head to the glass. There he saw a pale ghost-like face scowling at him beneath the brim of a pale ghost-like hat. His grandfather, looking quickly too, saw a different ghost, pale but grinning, under a black hat.

Morrison points out that O’Connor then sets up a dramatic contrast with the African American characters on the train, whose colors are warm and vibrant:

A huge coffee-colored man was coming slowly forward. He had on a light suit and a yellow satin tie with a ruby pin in it. One of his hands rested on his stomach which rode majestically under his buttoned coat, and in the other he held the head of a black walking stick that he picked up and set down with a deliberate outward motion each time he took a step. He was proceeding very slowly, his large brown eyes gazing over the heads of the passengers. He had a small white mustache and white crinkly hair. Behind him there were two young women, both coffee-colored, one in a yellow dress and one in a green. Their progress was kept at the rate of his and they chatted in low throaty voices as they followed him.

Later there’s the following encounter when Nelson, unlike his grandfather, has the courage to ask a Black woman to ask for directions. Note the warmth of the interaction, which contrasts with Head’s sterile stereotypes:

[Nelson] stood drinking in every detail of her. His eyes traveled up from her great knees to her forehead and then made a triangular path from the glistening sweat on her neck down and across her tremendous bosom and over her bare arm back to where her fingers lay hidden in her hair. He suddenly wanted her to reach down and pick him up and draw him against her and then he wanted to feel her breath on his face. He wanted to look down and down into her eyes while she held him tighter and tighter. He had never had such a feeling before. He felt as if he were reeling down through a pitchblack tunnel.

As I used to tell my students, life becomes infinitely richer when we open ourselves to Otherness rather than retreat into narrow isolation.

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She My Lodestar While I Go and Come

By Robin Bates | Published: May 9, 2026
Mary Cassatt, Mother and Child

Sunday – Mother’s Day

Agonizing over his best friend’s death in In Memoriam, Alfred Lord Tennyson at one point asks

… but what am I?
      An infant crying in the night:
      An infant crying for the light: 
And with no language but a cry. 

At such moments any number of poets, experiencing similar loneliness and desolation, have turned to thoughts of mother. There’s Carl Sandburg, hurdling through darkness on an all-night passenger train, who conjured us a mother-child image to define “home”:

 III. Home

Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:  
I heard it in the air of one night when I listened  
To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry in the darkness. 
(from “Poems Done on a Late Night Car”)

Elizabeth Akers Allen imagines herself as that child in “Rock Me to Sleep.” Here’s the first stanza:

Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,
Make me a child again just for tonight!
Mother, come back from the echoless shore,
Take me again to your heart as of yore;
Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care,
Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair;
Over my slumbers your loving watch keep;—
Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep!

Irish poet Eavan Boland poem imagines the Virgin Mary as that mother:

Ave Maria

If love’s a country
I am its citizen,
And if you are the Virgin Mary
I am your child.

Christine Rossetti has a wonderful poem expressing appreciation for her 80-year-old mother, whose heart she “is my heart’s quiet home” and whose love serves as her lodestar. Perhaps echoing Milton’s “Lycidas,” where the poet talks of weaving a laurel wreath for his departed friend, Rossetti talks of weaving “a wreath of rhymes wherewith to crown your honored name.” The blessed glow of her mother’s love, she says, “transcends the laws/ Of time and change and mortal life and death.”

The poem has a certain formal air, as though this wreath of rhymes is being presented upon a special occasion:

Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome
Has many sonnets: so here now shall be
One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me
To her whose heart is my heart’s quiet home,
To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee
I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome;
Whose service is my special dignity,
And she my lodestar while I go and come
And so because you love me, and because
I love you, Mother, I have woven a wreath
Of rhymes wherewith to crown your honored name:
In you not fourscore years can dim the flame
Of love, whose blessed glow transcends the laws
Of time and change and mortal life and death.

Happy Mother’s Day!

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Obama’s Election and a Blog Launched

By Robin Bates | Published: May 8, 2026
The Obamas on election night 2008

Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 33rd Installment

The political high point of my life was Barack Obama’s victory in 2008. Julia and I were spending a sabbatical semester in Madison, Wisconsin with my brother Sam and his wife, and as we watched the Grant Park election night speech, my heart filled. For one who had grown up in segregated Tennessee, the event seemed miraculous. I remember taking note of a tearful Jesse Jackson and sharing his joy. 

What I failed to realize is that the very event that was causing my heart to soar was freaking out a significant portion of the American electorate. In the years that followed, like many white liberals I would become aware of what African Americans have always known, that the tentacles of racism reach much deeper than whites realize. Even Republicans who voted for Obama (I was related to several) would pull back when he proved to be too Black, when he complained about Cambridge police arresting Henry Louis Gates or when he said that, if he had had a son, he would have looked like Trayvon Martin.

Suddenly Obama was revealing that he wasn’t a Tom Robinson type of Black, grateful to Atticus Finch for his support, or one of the “faithful souls” in D.W. Griffth’s Birth of a Nation.” Obama’s sin in these instances was reminding us that many African Americans are angry and with cause. To cite from William Dixon’s novel on which Griffith’s film is based (The Clansman), too many Americans still fear the uppity Black captain who has insulted a white doctor and prefer the fantasy of the “faithful man” who puts him in his place:

“Fellow citizens,” [the Captain said], “you are the equal of any white man who walks the ground. The white man’s day is done. Your turn has come.”

As he passed Jake’s cabin, the doctor’s faithful man stepped suddenly in front of him, looking at the Captain out of the corners of his eyes, and asked:

“Is I yo’ equal?”

“Yes.”

“Des lak any white man?”

“Exactly.”

The negro’s fist suddenly shot into Gilbert’s nose with the crack of a sledgehammer, laying him stunned on the pavement.

“Den take dat f’um yo’ equal, d—n you!” he cried, bending over his prostrate figure. “I’ll show you how to treat my ole marster, you low-down slue-footed devil!”

The stirring little drama roused the doctor and he turned to his servant with his old-time courtesy, and said:“Thank you, Jake.”

To get both Black and white votes, Obama had to walk a fine line between uppity Captain and faithful man, and for Black critics like Princeton professor Cornel West, he wasn’t really Black. He was Black enough, however, to unleash a reaction that we are still living with. As I write this installment of my memoir, I have just witnessed the rightwing justices on the U.S. Supreme roll back many of the gains that were paid for in blood in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Tennessee legislature is currently dividing up the city of Memphis so that it can throw out our one Black Congressman. Donald Trump’s utterly illogical birther lie struck a chord with racists because it confirmed for them that Obama didn’t belong in the White House.

In the following year, as the Tea Party backlash picked up in intensity, I remember getting almost physically sick as I taught Birth of a Nation in a “History of American Film” class. The film might have been almost a hundred years old, but the sentiments it expressed were so recognizable that I discovered I couldn’t teach it anymore, despite its technical brilliance.

After having spent an unsuccessful year trying to find a commercial publisher for Better Living through Beowulf: How the Early British Classics Can Guide You beyond Terrorism Fears, Relationship Anxieties, Consumer Emptiness, Racial Tension, Political Cynicism, and Other Contemporary Challenges, my agent dropped me, forcing me to try small publishers. I found one and spent the first semester of my sabbatical putting the book in order. Unfortunately, the 2008 crash caused the publisher to retract his offer, leaving me high and dry. While the seven years I had spent writing it were not entirely wasted as the project had supercharged my teaching, I was nevertheless discouraged.

Fortunately, my son in marketing provided an alternative. If I started blogging, he told me, I would create a platform, which in turn would help me publish my book. He guided me in determining an identity for the blog, found a talented artist to set it up, and taught me how to post my essays and set up a weekly newsletter.

My response once I started blogging: “Who needs to write a book when one can share one’s ideas this way?” I loved the immediacy of the format and how it could reach readers around the world. I had found my medium.

As I’ve explained, daily blogging allowed me to do full justice to my central concern: how does literature change lives? Rather than propose one overarching theory, which I don’t think exists, I could share a steady stream of examples of literature at work.

I also realized that I had finally found a public forum for sharing my political views (since I couldn’t do this in class). In the early years, in the spirit of Obama’s attempt to reach across the aisle, I worked on being as politically even-handed as I could, although the Republicans I included have all become NeverTrumpers and, in some cases, Democrats: David Brooks, Michael Gerson David Frum, Tom Nichols, Norman Ornstein, Jennifer Rubin. I once got a positive response from Gerson, a key architect of George Bush’s compassionate conservative platform, about an essay I wrote in 2017 comparing his attack on political evangelicals to William Blake’s critique of the church. I included some of these columnists in my 2012 book How Beowulf Can Save America since I was looking for ways of dealing with and moving past the immense anger and resentment I saw welling up in the country.

I now recognize a certain political naivete on both my part and Obama’s. Applying Othello to the Obama presidency two years into Trump’s first term, I better understood why Obama either didn’t recognize or didn’t acknowledge the depth of the hate being directed against him:

As to why Obama and Othello were/are both credulous, it stands to reason that they would believe in a system that recognizes their qualities and elevates them accordingly. Each is officially accepted within the club, with even Desdemona’s father eventually opening his arms to the Moor. Their faith that merit will rise to the top, even in a racist society, seems borne out.

And:

It is Othello’s earned success, on the other hand, that makes him a believer. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,…tonight is your answer,” Obama said in his 2008 victory speech.

Perhaps because they have achieved the impossible, both Obama and Othello underestimate the extreme lengths to which racial animosity drives their enemies. Although their stratospheric rise is experienced as salt rubbed into wounded white pride, they can’t see it. After all, doesn’t their success benefit all of society?

What drives Iago, I contended, is not economic anxiety but fear of losing status. Regarding the U.S., having once thought that “it’s the economy, stupid,” I now believe that “it’s race, stupid.” Culture and economy are intertwined, of course, but I’ve come to believe that the former preempts all else. As Lyndon Johnson famously said, 

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

Writing this blog has sharpened my awareness of how accurate this is. Along with Shakespeare, figures like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, Lucille Clifton, James Baldwin, and many others have been my guides. The daily discipline of connecting these truth tellers to the day’s events has been a means of exploring the issues and anchoring my perceptions.

And it all grew out of a failed book.

Past Installments of A Life Lived in Literature
A Life Lived in Literature: How It All Began (Sept. 5, 2025)
Early Reading Memories (Sept. 12, 2025)
Childhood Confusion: Reading to the Rescue (Sept. 19, 2025)
Confronting Segregation (Sept. 26, 2025)
School Reading vs. Real Reading (Oct. 10, 2025)
Childhood in Paris (Oct. 17, 2025)
My Time at Sewanee Military Academy (Oct. 24, 2025)
Existentialism for High School Seniors (Oct. 31, 2025)
Why I Majored in History, Not English (Nov. 7, 2025)
My College Search for Authenticity (Nov. 14, 2025)
On D. H. Lawrence and a Sexual Awakening (Nov. 21, 2025)
My Life as a Bildungsroman (Nov. 28, 2025)
Grad School: Literary Baptism by Fire (Dec. 5, 2025)
Early Scenes from a Marriage (Dec. 12, 2025)
Bringing Up Baby in Grad School (Dec. 19, 2025)
Grappling with Racism (Jan. 2, 2026)
Journal of a Young Teacher (Jan. 16, 2026)
Teaching and Reading in Yugoslavia (Jan. 23, 2026)
Life at 40: Barely Controlled Chaos (Jan 30, 2026)
From Secular Humanist to Christian Believer (Feb. 6 2025)
Looking Back at a Lifetime Together (Feb. 13, 2026)
To Ljubljana with Love (Feb. 20, 2026)
Forging a Separate Identity from My Father (Feb. 27, 2026)
“Better Living” Emerged from a Midnight Epiphany (March 6, 2026)
The Golden Years before Tragedy Struck (March 13, 2026) 
Using Lit to Grapple with a Death (March 20, 2026) 
Lit in the Year following Justin’s Death (March 27, 2026)
My Eldest Son, Named after a Keats Sonnet (April 3, 2026)
Sterne’s Uncle Toby and My Own Toby (April 10, 2026)
After the 2nd Death, a Book Project (April 17, 2026)
Making Lit Meaningful for Students (April 24, 2026) 
Horizons Broadened (May 1, 2026) 
Obama’s Election and a Blog Launched (May 8, 2026)

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At 75, She Accessed Her Inner Amazon

By Robin Bates | Published: May 6, 2026
Benin statue of a Dahomey Amazon warrior

Thursday

As Julia and I move through our 70s, it can be dangerous to ask us how we are doing since sometimes we’ll tell you. At length.

Put another way, we will launch into a sonorous organ recital. Symphony in Blue, let’s call it.

Sometimes we’re looking for information, sometimes for the comfort that comes from sharing. It’s important, however, that we know our audience. Our aches and pains may be of less interest to our auditors than they are to us. 

Perhaps the best approach to our increasing infirmities is to have a sense of humor about them. That’s why I appreciate Julia’s poem “My Life in Velcro.” She is determined to stride into our twilight years with a smile on her face.

My Life in Velcro
By Julia Bates

The 70s seem to be about patching up
Knees wrists hips brain
So I sleep with a wrist splint
On each arm
Strapped in with Velcro
Rrrrripppp, Ripppp

As I tear off the wrist wrap
From the day
Only on the right
And pull on the night brace
One on each arm
Rrrripppp, Ripppp

At least it helps
The PT person said
There are people that 
Don’t get relief 
But I have an official
Diagnosis: carpal tunnel
Severe-new
Meaning “operate” because
Deterioration hasn’t begun
In the muscles, ligaments
And I may continue to sleep in
A brace even after surgery
Rrrrippp, Rrrippp

And now the knee
I’ve had knee pain before
As the patient PT person
Reminded me
Haven’t you been in here before?
But the sharp little pain
From going up and down stairs
Doesn’t go away
So a big black brace
BBB for short
Strapped on above and below
The knee for stabilization
Very tough Velcro
Rrrripppp, Ripppp

After her deep tissue digging
My masseuse says I look
Like an Amazon warrior woman
As I strap on wrist and knee
Ready for grocery shopping
Car wash
Then off to book group!

And for walks about town–
Hiking poles
How about a cane, the Orthopedist asks
No, I say. I’M NOT THAT KIND OF OLD WOMAN YET!!
Hiking poles hint at adventure
Exploration
Courage
Head up
Big Smile
The next decade 
Doesn’t stand a chance!!
Rrrrrippp, Rrrrripppp. 

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It Was the Worst of Times: Gilded Age Redux

By Robin Bates | Published: May 6, 2026
Trump’s plans for the new $1 billion White House ballroom

Wednesday

While I have zero interest in celebrity culture and in extravagant affairs like the recent Met Gala, my attention was recently caught by an Amazon workers protest. Apparently Jeff Bezos and his wife, who paid $10 million to host the affair, were greeted by hundreds of bottles filled with yellow liquid inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Apparently Amazon delivery drivers are being forced to urinate in bottles and sometimes poop in bags because they are not granted time off for bathroom breaks.

The story is emblematic of GOP class warfare, where legislators cut taxes on billionaires while slashing safety net programs that support America’s needy. Meanwhile the president, even as his tariffs and war push up grocery and gas prices, gilds the White House with gold and obsesses over plastering his name and picture all over buildings, coins, airports, passports, and elsewhere. Oh, and his new ballroom, which he said would be privately funded, now looks as though it will cost $1 billion of taxpayer money. “Build the ballroom!” has become the 2026 version of “Build the wall!”

It’s enough to send one back to Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities.

Dickens novel, of course, is about what happens when extreme poverty meets extreme wealth. Here’s a passage on poverty:

The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.

A major political question is how Trump can maintain the loyalty of white working-class voters while shrugging off their affordability concerns. Dickens provides a kind of answer in the “mender of roads” character. Even though the man himself experiences hunger, he fixates on the lives of the glitterati:

[S]oon the large-faced King and the fair-faced Queen came in their golden coach, attended by the shining Bull’s Eye of their Court, a glittering multitude of laughing ladies and fine lords; and in jewels and silks and powder and splendour and elegantly spurning figures and handsomely disdainful faces of both sexes, the mender of roads bathed himself, so much to his temporary intoxication, that he cried Long live the King, Long live the Queen, Long live everybody and everything!… Then, there were gardens, courtyards, terraces, fountains, green banks, more King and Queen, more Bull’s Eye, more lords and ladies, more Long live they all! until he absolutely wept with sentiment. During the whole of this scene, which lasted some three hours, he had plenty of shouting and weeping and sentimental company, and throughout Defarge held him by the collar, as if to restrain him from flying at the objects of his brief devotion and tearing them to pieces.

The Defarges, who will play key roles in the revolution to come, have brought the man to Versailles as part of their grand plan. “You are the fellow we want,” Defarge tells him. “You make these fools believe that it will last forever. Then, they are the more insolent, and it is the nearer ended.”

Is it because his fans have been letting Trump get away with his non-stop corruption that he thinks he can be brazenly open about it. Do his insolent relatives and billionaire friends figure the flush times will last forever because Trump won a second term? How willing will the MAGA faithful be to turn a blind eye when gas reaches $5 a gallon? By the end of the novel, the road mender has become a wood sawyer making jokes about cutting off heads.

While Dickens’s novel makes clear that violence is not the answer, how about a major party realignment and enlightened tax policy? That would begin addressing the ills besetting our nation. 

Imagine fewer lords and ladies and more food for the hungry. Might an average mender of roads vote for that?

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Hope in Blooming Lilacs (Whitman)

By Robin Bates | Published: May 4, 2026

Tuesday

As our reactionary Supreme Court attempts to put the last nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act, states throughout the south (including my own Tennessee) are striving to remove as many Black legislators as possible from government. On April 15, the 161st anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death, historian Heather Cox Richarson provided a useful overview of the fascist right’s relentless assaults on African Americans ever since. The racism that fueled the civil war has never vanished from the American psyche.

Richardson quotes from Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” his powerful response to Lincoln’s death, and it’s instructive to revisit the poet’s heartbreak now, when we worry that we may need a similar elegy to mourn the death of America as a multiracial democracy. 

Richardson notes that, following Lincoln’s death, his Tennessean successor Andrew Johnson tried to reverse the hard-fought gains of African Americans. While Congress fought back, the lack of accountability for the bloodiest and costliest war of the 19th century meant that “the ideas of the Confederacy never became odious.” Former Confederates, the historian notes, “still talked to newspapermen, gave speeches, ran for office, and garnered support.”

And so it has been ever since. Whenever the federal government intervened to protect minority rights, southern whites complained about an overreaching government threatening individual liberty. This, Richardson writes, “became an article of faith among the radical right.” Southerners also rewrote the Civil War as a noble “lost cause”—this is how I was taught it in seventh grade Tennessee history—and that mythology spread to northern and western states, where white supremacists had their own anxieties about minority groups. On January 6, 2021, a Confederate flag was even carried by Trump rioters assaulting the Capitol.

So with Trump pardoning those rioters; with the Supreme Court killing the Voting Rights act, granting Trump total immunity, and leading the attack on women’s reproductive choices; with the administration attacking on environmental regulation, renewable energy, federally-owned nature preserves, and sacred Indian sites; with governmental heads, including Pete Hegseth, firing African Americans indiscriminately; and with billionaires, domestic and foreign, corrupting officials with their money, many of us feel like Whitman solitary hermit in the poem. We’re mourning the death of the American promise as the poet thrush mourns Lincoln’s death:

Solitary the thrush, 
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, 
Sings by himself a song. 

Song of the bleeding throat, 
Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know, 
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)

I can think of few more powerful images in American poetry than “song of the bleeding throat.” The pastoral elegy does what the great elegies do, providing the poet a means of expressing and exploring intense grief: 

O powerful western fallen star! 
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night! 
O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star! 
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me! 
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.

The poem opens with a profound irony that I remember noticing when my own son died in April, which is that nature, oblivious to human sorrow, doesn’t stop springing to life. “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,/ And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,” Whitman writes, “I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.” 

Noting the irony, T.S. Eliot wrote, “April is the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land” in a poem that owes much to Whitman.

And yet, this “ever-returning spring” will become a source of hope as “Lilacs” progresses and can also bolster those of us reeling from Trump’s assaults on the American dream. As the train carrying Lincoln’s body to Illinois passes through the landscape, Whitman senses a resilient and vibrant nation. Imagining America as a burial chamber, Whitman says he will hang the following pictures on its walls:

Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes, 
With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright, 
With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air, 
With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific, 
In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there, 
With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows…

And because he is the poet of all America, not just rural America, Whitman includes cities in his pastoral elegy, including “my own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships.” He also mentions a generalized city, “with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,/ And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.”

So yes, while Death enters into the drama, it does not get the last word, even though Death claimed not only Lincoln’s but thousands of Civil War soldiers (“I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,/ And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them”). This is not a facile optimism but a profound understanding of how death can be followed by new life. The fact that Lincoln was shot on Good Friday is not lost on Whitman. 

Recently I wrote about feminist Rebecca Solnit’s optimism and how she cites Antonio Gramsci’s “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” As Solnit observes about her latest book,

People do not remember the past … [they] often seem to live in a perpetual present. And some find that reassuring, that nothing is ever going to change. Some find it despair-inducing, because nothing is ever going to change. I wanted, in this horrible moment, to remind people that what the far right is doing globally, I think, is largely backlash. A new world is being born, and they’re basically trying to abort it. 

For Solnit as for Whitman, the life cycle will emerge triumphant, bringing with it healthy change:

Fossil fuel lobbyists cannot undo it. Putin and Trump and that idiot in Argentina [Javier Milei] cannot undo it. They’re trying to push rewind on the VCR, which feels like the right technological moment in history for them. They’re essentially saying, if you listen closely: ‘You all are very powerful. You’ve changed the world profoundly, with the environmental and climate work, feminism, queer rights, the general anti-authoritarian push for accountability and equality. All those things are connected.’ Your enemies appraise you accurately, even when you don’t believe it yourself.”

For those at the time, the death of Lincoln seemed like the end of the world. But it takes more than reactionary temper tantrums, no matter how damaging, to end America’s great democratic experiment.

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Using Poetry to Stand Up to Tyranny

By Robin Bates | Published: May 3, 2026
Frederic Leighton, Antigone

Monday

My dear friend Rebecca Adams recently alerted me to Kimm Addonizio’s “Sleepless Nights,” which uses myth and literature to imagine the possibilities for action in the face of oppression. Will we be fatalistic when infants are “left to die on hillsides, Oedipus abandoned” or will we be like the shepherd who rescues him?  The poet asks us directly:

if you knew what was coming would you dig a burrow or cower
in the shade of a grass blade as the shadow of the hawk passed over
or would you be like Antigone, defying the king, refusing to dishonor
her slain brother, sentenced to entombment she hung herself—

Sadly, Americans dealing with ICE have had too many occasions to ask themselves about their potential for heroic action. “Unhappy the land that needs heroes,” Galileo observes in Bertolt Brecht’s play.

Addonizio recounts a story with which I am unfamiliar. While I’ve written about how Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates at Robben Island turned to Shakespeare at critical moments, I didn’t know about their performance of Sophocles Antigone. I’ll research that for a future post. 

But I did know about the Allies’ use of Paul Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne,” a poem I was required to memorize while attending a Paris middle school. My father, who was in France a month after D Day—he actually landed on Omaha Beach, but it was mostly free of Germans by then—had a record recounting the story of the invasion. Included was the story of how the invading forces sent out the first three lines of the beloved poem to shortwave radios to signal that the invasion would commence within the next two weeks. Then, five days later, the next three lines were sent out to instruct the Resistance to begin cutting the rail lines. 

Sleepless Nights
By Kimm Addonizio

Lately I’ve lain in bed with a disembodied voice, listening
to the ancient Greek myths and their meanings, imagining
Athens and Naxos and Thebes, imagining infants left to die
on hillsides, Oedipus abandoned and then rescued by
a shepherd, no one could avoid their fate, not then, maybe not ever,
if you knew what was coming would you dig a burrow or cower
in the shade of a grass blade as the shadow of the hawk passed over
or would you be like Antigone, defying the king, refusing to dishonor
her slain brother, sentenced to entombment she hung herself—
maybe you know that story, or the one about Nelson Mandela
and his fellow inmates at Robben Island performing the ancient play,
learning it secretly from scraps of paper—or Verlaine’s
“Chanson d’automne” on the BBC, in 1944, the long sobs of the violins,
just a few words to signal the French Resistance, imagine.

As I recall the record, the broadcaster said something to the effect of, “And now to our friends in the French Resistances, Les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne.” A song about autumnal depression has always seemed to me to be a strange way to announce a hopeful invasion but it serves Addonizio’s theme well: heroic action as the best response to sleepless nights and fatalism.

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