Resurrecting antiquity: Memories of Medea in the Caribbean

Μήδεια: αἰαῖ,/ ἔπαθον τλάμων ἔπαθον μεγάλων/ ἄξι᾽ ὀδυρμῶν.

(Medea l: 111–112)

Medea: Oh, what sufferings are mine, sufferings that call for loud lamentation.

(Transl. David Kovacs)

On the ships of European colonialism, memories of the classics travelled across the globe, turning antiquity into a common reference point for many colonised cultures. Following these long and multidirectional journeys, many of the most recognisable appearances of the classics in postcolonial literature and art have either been conceptualised as part of a long-lasting legacy stretching back to antiquity, or, increasingly, have been recognised to deconstruct the very concept of a classical tradition as one that commonly privileges European perspectives. ¹ But as we are steadily moving away from the idea of a Eurocentric legacy that encompasses each and every engagement with classical antiquity, it becomes worth asking how useful the model of ‘adaptation’ remains to describe the relationship between a modern work and its ancient ‘source’, especially in postcolonial contexts that often have a politically charged and deconstructive relationship to Europe and its supposed cultural exports. Even the most self-conscious of literary engagements with antiquity, such as Derek Walcott’s reworking of the Homeric epics in Omeros or his stage version of the Odyssey, both of which rewrite the format, themes and even direct passages from their source material, hesitate to place themselves in direct relation to their ancient inspiration; Walcott’s narrator famously posits to never have finished reading the Homeric epics, which is a move that deliberately distances the originality of his own work from ‘the classical tradition’. Even apart from such intentional (re-)positionings, when looking at the vastness of references to antiquity – that may include anything from the neoclassical allusions in the 2014 video game Metro Redux to Ajax, the cleaning product brand – many echoes of antiquity no longer take the shape of self-conscious adaptations; works that, as Hutcheons (2013 [2006]) describes, ‘have an overt and defining relationship to prior texts, usually revealingly called “sources”’ (p. 3). Instead, especially from the twentieth century onwards, we can see how many references to the ancient world have started to appear as indistinct, fragmented and thinly scattered memories.

I want to map out the usefulness of memory studies as a framework to understand the scope, mobility and fluidity of certain kinds of engagement with antiquity that we may broadly summarise as ‘classical memories’, using Caribbean theatre as a principal case study to describe mnemonic negotiations with antiquity and the ways in which they might differ from more ‘standard’ adaptations. I intend for this discussion – alongside articles like Astrid Erll’s (2018) ‘Homer: A Relational Mnemohistory’ – to be a starting point for research that conceptualises antiquity as a series of memories that can be drawn on and reworked. Postcolonial classical reception provides a particularly rich context for an initial discussion of this kind of relationship between modernity and antiquity. As I will recount shortly, this is due to the unique relationship with Graeco-Roman antiquity we see in places like the Caribbean and the foundational scholarly work that has already been done on deconstructive negotiations with the classics in postcolonial environments. Antiquity has been distributed into postcolonial nations by way of a colonial education system (see Greenwood, 2010: ch. 2–3), which led, especially in the mid-twentieth century, to many creative negotiations that challenged the legacy and continuing power dynamics of the classics as a symbol of European colonial oppression. But while many of these engagements with Graeco-Roman antiquity drew on a thorough knowledge of ancient sources, which were either replicated and/or deconstructed, there also exist specifically mnemonic relationships to the classics which are worth exploring in further detail. In particular, what Michael Rothberg (2009) calls ‘[m]emory’s anachronistic quality [. . .] its ability to build new worlds out of the materials of older ones’ (p. 5) has allowed for the refiguration of classical materials into mnemonic templates for distinctly postcolonial stories that, both thematically and functionally, start to unravel the ties between a singular version of classical antiquity and European colonialism. This article aims to nuance such processes of mnemonic ‘refiguration’ from the ‘adaptations’ or ‘deconstructions’ more commonly discussed in both postcolonial scholarship and elsewhere. In postcolonial cultures as anywhere else, the classics are creatively remembered as much as they are assiduously adapted, and mapping out some of the distinctions between different engagements with antiquity will, I hope, help us to further understand the role and impact of the classics across transcultural memoryspheres.

For its specific case studies, this article maps out some of the ways in which classical antiquity is remembered in Caribbean theatre. Specifically, it conceptualises the methods through which the characters and narratives of ancient Medea myths are refigured within two plays by Steve Carter and José Triana, Pecong and Medea in the Mirror [Medea en el espejo]. In both Pecong and Medea in the Mirror, memories of Medea’s story are interwoven into religious rituals native to the Caribbean islands where the plays are set, whereby echoes of Graeco-Roman characters, narratives and themes become part of the Caribbean cultural landscape. As the two productions place necromantic rituals at their centre, it is not only the ghosts of the past that are summoned, but the rituals themselves serve as imaginative frameworks through which memories of antiquity are both formally and conceptually resurrected into the Caribbean cultural environment of the present, linking the plays’ literary themes with their meta-textual processes of remembering and refiguring the classics. Through the content and narrative connotations of these staged rituals, both playwrights draw parallels between antiquity and modern Trinidad and Cuba, parallels through which the plays decontextualise and actualise narrative tropes and templates from Graeco-Roman myths to tell stories of twentieth-century Caribbean islands.

As I focus on the way in which the classics are remembered within Caribbean theatre, when describing the use of classical myths in Pecong and Medea in the Mirror, I purposefully speak of ‘refigurations’ rather than ‘adaptations’. Using Paul Ricœur’s term ‘refiguration’, Astrid Erll (2011a) describes the reshaping and restructuring of references into a new context, which allows them to assume renewed significance within cultural memory (154ff.). I also take the term ‘refigure’ from classicist Lorna Hardwick (2003), which she uses to describe the ways in which classical references are introduced into new contexts (p. 39). ‘Refiguration’ encapsulates the mnemonic and fluid quality I want to invoke as I read Carter and Triana’s use of classical mythology, while also allowing me to speak to both the discipline of memory studies and of classical reception. ‘Adaptation’, meanwhile, is tied to the idea of a more or less faithful transmission of an ‘original’ embedded in a particular context, describing, for instance, the transcoding of literature into film. It can offer ‘commentary on a source text’ or make these ‘texts “relevant” or easily comprehensible to new audiences’ (Sanders 2016 [2006]: 23), whereby the focus usually lies on the source text and the way it is remodelled into modernity. Although a modernisation and remediation of classical references unquestionably takes place when they are integrated into new cultural settings and genres, the kinds of relationships Carter and Triana’s narratives establish with the classics liken them more closely to instances of textual remembering.

In this article, I suggest that, within the study of the transcultural, long-term influence of classical mythology and its creative intertwinings with local traditions, it is sometimes more productive to speak of these entanglements as memories of the classics than as adaptations. While there are many examples from Caribbean literature in which authors consciously rework sources from Graeco-Roman antiquity, not every reference to classical mythology is useful to conceptualise through the framework of direct or even palimpsestic adaptations. The relationship between memory, reception and adaptation, and what separates them, is impossible to outline definitively, and there is, by necessity, significant interaction between them. And yet, more attention still needs to be drawn to the, relatively speaking, new scholarly framework of memory and to the ways in which memory interacts with existing categories like ‘adaptation’ and ‘reception’. Importantly, some scholars have begun to foreground the study of reception as a

central concern of the new transcultural memory studies. If we assume that all memory ‘travels’ (Erll), is constantly ‘on the move’ (Rigney), then it clearly must move somewhere, towards a (however transitory) destination. Successful memory transmission entails reception. (Törnquist-Plewa et al., 2017: 3)

If the study of reception is a study of memory, the reception of classical antiquity is perhaps the best example for an ongoing and multidirectional mnemohistory. ² As an all-encompassing classical education is increasingly becoming a thing of the past, and in light of the complex imperialist legacy of the classics, traditional adaptations based on deliberate explorations of antiquity are gradually supplemented with works that are inspired by different versions of antiquity more than they consciously or comprehensively engage with a single myth, a single tradition, or a single idea. ³

Certain strands of research within the discipline of classics have started to acknowledge the distinction between modern works perpetuating a classical ‘legacy’ and those seeking instead to establish intertextual connections shaped by inspiration and memory. Hardwick’s pivotal Reception Studies describes how the methods used in scholarship that investigates a ‘classical tradition’ accept a rather problematic historicist notion which looks for straightforward continuations of ideas and themes. This, she argues, could inadvertently produce the impression that the classical works have an unproblematic ‘meaning’ which can be extracted from the ancient context and be neatly reproduced within different cultural environments, implying that ‘ancient culture was dead but might be retried and reapplied provided that one had the necessary training’ (Hardwick, 2003: 2–3). ⁴ Criticising the term ‘reception’ commonly used in classical reception studies in a manner that is comparable to my hesitation about ‘adaptation’, however, Emily Greenwood (2004) writes that

[r]eception studies tends to simplify complex cultural relationships, as it is all too easy to envisage the relationship between different cultures as a linear trajectory between two poles. This makes for suspiciously neat narratives that chart the flow of ‘influences’. In the case of the Caribbean, such a polar, linear model of reception is particularly artificial. (p. 365)

It is, in part, based on Greenwood’s foundational research into classical reception in the Caribbean that I have chosen to discuss two examples from Caribbean theatre as I attempt to address some of the methodological queries she has raised across her work. Both the terms ‘adaptation’ and ‘reception’ risk underplaying the importance of multidirectional global frameworks which have already decontextualised and universalised many classical tropes, images and characters. To reiterate, ‘refiguration’ is a term already used within both the discipline of classical reception and in memory studies, and can thus serve as a useful methodological connection between the two disciplines as it denotes a more flexible, memory-driven relationship between antiquity and modern context. Recognising and analysing fluid, decontextualised and casual mnemonic references to antiquity then allows me to discuss refigurations of classical narratives that have thus far been overlooked by scholarship, such as references to the Graeco-Roman underworld which both Pecong and Medea in the Mirror interweave into their versions of the Medea myth.

In recent years, scholars like Stef Craps and Michael Rothberg have placed the global dimension of memory at the centre of the discipline of memory studies, breaking out of a singular focus on the nation and ‘static sites of memory to [observe] the dynamic movement of memory’ (Craps, 2013: 73). They have explored the ways in which memories travel and are refigured in different contexts, with Rothberg (2009) famously rejecting the framework of purely competitive memory in favour of ‘ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing’ as memories travel between different cultures and timescapes (p. 3). Examining Carter and Triana’s plays as works whose refigurations of a mythical past are instances of travelling memory allows us to explore negotiations of historical context, transcultural mobility and the aesthetic longevity as well as fluidity of ancient memories, as the classics are refigured in postcolonial spheres. Specifically, this article investigates the refiguration of the Medea myth in Caribbean theatre, focussing on the ways in which the story of Medea has come to exist as a series of transculturally resonant memories, which were partially created, and partially refigured within local memoryspheres. As part of this investigation, I discuss the reasons why the figure of Medea has resonated with Caribbean culture, prompting her story to be remembered in the first place, how the myth is then restructured to fit into native religious environments and how the ancient story is framed to echo local concerns. ⁵ As I explore references to several different versions of the Medea myth in antiquity, as well as other ancient narratives such as Odyssey XI, the question of how the past is refigured within a certain context is worked through both as it relates to the specifics of intertextual literary analysis and socio-cultural concerns around transcultural remembrance.

As I hinted at before, the Caribbean is a particularly interesting space for this kind of analysis, as a colonialist education system inextricably intertwined memories of the classics with memories of Europe and, therein, memories of oppression. In the twentieth century, as fights against colonial rule were in full force, classical literature became an important point of negotiation in literary circles, as authors recognised both its legacy as European ‘heritage’ and the revolutionary potential inherent in tragedies like Sophocles’ Antigone. While classical myths, narratives and characters were well-known and popular among Caribbean writers, adaptations of the classics were often seen as at risk of perpetuating a Eurocentric worldview, particularly given the relative lack of famous or internationally marketable works dealing with native contexts and ideas. ⁶ Tobias Döring describes the ‘contradictory dependence on, and independence from’ colonial traditions, in which intertextual references in texts like Harris’ The Secret Ladder map out what Döring (2002) defines as a ‘postcolonial “third space” in which both colonial traditions and tropes of resistance interact’ (pp. 3, 206). In response to this complex literary inheritance, more Eurosceptic authors like Kamau Brathwaite have established a cultural hierarchy within their work that favour their local context by only integrating classical allusions and themes into a Caribbean setting after they had been purposefully fragmented and decontextualised. ⁷

Within creative environments already marked by complex relationships with antiquity, Caribbean theatre offers a wealth of case studies for classical reception, both due to the number of references to Graeco-Roman tragedy, and the propensity of playwrights to include deconstructive, parodic or otherwise counter-canonical engagements with the so-called ‘classical tradition’. The political implications of many such engagements have been discussed prominently in works like Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins’ (1996) Post-colonial Drama, in which they discuss the ways in which the postcolonial and/or African theatre traditions are

used to interrogate classical models. In particular, indigenous songs, dances, stories, and ceremonies demonstrate the viability of forms of narrative construction and verbal/visual representation that differ from the dominant conventions of contemporary western theatre as it has evolved over the centuries (p. 38).

I will build on their and others’ research on the socio-political environments in and around Caribbean theatre that have shaped specific engagements with antiquity, as I provide a methodological examination of the textual/meta-textual planes on which discourse with antiquity takes place. Therein, my reading of antiquity as a set of transcultural memories, transmitted and refigured within Caribbean theatre, in some regards echoes Gilbert and Tompkins’ (1996) discussion of ‘the rehearsal/production of a play [as] a continued reacting – which may or may not be interventionary – of and to an originary script’ (p. 18). ⁸ Theirs, and others’ like Herbert Blau’s statements – ‘[w]here memory is, theatre is’ (Blau, 1990: 382; qdt. in Roach, 1996: 4) – draw attention to the same privileged relationship between theatre and continued remembrance that Carter and Triana utilise as they have us remember antiquity as a collection of decontextualised and intermixed references, carefully reassembled on a distinctly Caribbean stage.

In large parts due to their complicated inheritance as part of a Eurocentric, imperialist tradition, the classics have increasingly been received and constructed as a language of universality. While, on the one hand, adherents to a Western ‘classical tradition’ have long seen the classics as introducing universal values and ideas, postcolonial authors, on the other hand, have come to intentionally refigure classical narratives around a singular, universally recognisable idea or theme; a skeletal template through which local stories could be introduced to a global audience without them losing their specificity. Refiguring the classics as multidirectional and increasingly schematic memories allowed Caribbean authors to circumvent having to engage with the threat of a comprehensive Eurocentric tradition that might be seen to overshadow the originality of their own work. ⁹ We must, of course, be careful in how we conceptualise this relationship between classical antiquity and the refiguration culture. As Rothberg (2009) writes, ‘[a]n overly rigid focus on memory competition distracts from other ways of thinking about the relation between histories and their memorial legacies. Ultimately, memory is not a zero-sum game’ (p. 11). In light of the close relationship between colonialism and classical antiquity, however, I propose that twentieth-century Caribbean authors who referenced classical myths and narratives could not quite escape comparisons between their own work and a Eurocentric ‘classical tradition’ that were of a distinctly competitive nature; comparisons pervasive enough for Walcott to focus much of his reflections on his long poem Omeros on the ‘kind of academic acclaim that I’m not very happy about – Oh, so much is owed to so-and-so – I hate that’, calling this way of talking about influence ‘patronising’ to certain cultures (Walcott, 1997: 240). I propose that some postcolonial authors attempted to overcome this competitive dimension of ‘classical memories’ by refiguring the classics as supposedly ‘universal’ schemata, as memories that could be invoked outside of the Eurocentric and colonial legacies of classical antiquity. ¹⁰

The works discussed here are Steve Carter’s (1990) Pecong and José Triana’s (1959) Medea in the Mirror, both plays which refigure and actualise various echoes of the Medea myths. Steve Carter is an American playwright whose work often references the Caribbean or the Caribbean diaspora – a famous example of this is his ‘Caribbean trilogy’ (Cf. Nesmith 2016: 137, 141-142). José Triana, who passed away in 2018, was a Cuban poet and playwright. Although he lived in Spain during his youth and spent the last years of his life in France, Triana remained in Cuba for a large part of his life, including the year in which he produced Medea in the Mirror. By comparing their adaptations of the Medea myth, I thus consider both the perspective of a playwright who writes from inside the Caribbean and the perspective of a playwright who writes about the Caribbean but as a member of the Caribbean diaspora (Carter’s mother was from Trinidad).

The story of Medea has long been a preoccupation of both writers: Carter describes how, having seen several versions of the play, he has ‘always been fascinated by it’, and decided to write a ‘black version’ inspired by the work of Joe Papp (Nesmith, 2016: 147). Triana wrote his own version of Medea after writers like Miguel de Unamuno and Jean Anouilh (Nikoloutsos, 2012: 21) and, as we will see shortly, also drew on several classical versions of the myth besides Euripdies. ¹¹ Personal preference aside, their choice to draw on the tale of Medea and to locate it in a postcolonial context is interesting, as Sophocles’ Antigone has often been seen to provide a set-up more easily described in the terms and with the vocabulary of a colonial regime, as it tells the story of an oppressed heroine fighting for justice against a tyrannical state. ¹² The heroine of the Medea myths, and particularly of Euripides’s tragedy, is harder to locate within such a binary, as it presents a woman who is, at best, morally ambiguous and, at worst, demonised by her contemporaries and posterity alike. Unlike Antigone, however, the character of Medea is more compatible with a specifically non-European cultural environment, as well as the religious rituals both Carter and Triana reference within their plays. The ancient Greek poet Pindar, for instance, described Medea as Παμφάρμαϰος ξείνα, a ‘foreign woman adept in every drug’, referencing the fact that Medea was known to be both a foreigner and a witch (McDermott, 1989: 31). Likewise, Dolores O’Higgins (1997) notes that Medea is later called a κελαινώπεσσι Κόλχοισιν or ‘black visaged’ Egyptian Colchian by Jason and his crew. Medea’s difference in both sex, race and culture to the Greek men is a predominant theme in Pindar’s ode Pythian

providing a foundation for Pindar’s constructed parallel between the Hellenizing magic of Jason and the ‘civilizing’ powers of his own poetry and of Arcesilas’ rule. [. . .]Medea, of course, is the ‘other’ in every sense of the word, defining the Hellenic (male) self by epitomizing its antithesis. (O’Higgins, 1997: p. 107)

Jason also emphasises Medea’s inherent difference to the Greek ‘norm’ at the end of Euripides’ Medea: οὐκ ἔστιν ἥτις τουτ’ ἂν ‘Ελληνὶς γυνὴ ἔτλη ποθ’, translated as ‘there is no Greek woman who ever would have dared this’ (Medea 1139–1140; quoted in McDermott, 1989: 31). Ancient Greek texts tended to figure Medea as an outsider to their society, and it is memories precisely of her displacement and exclusion which have powerfully resonated in the Caribbean. In a global milieu in which the Caribbean and its authors have been figured as outsiders to a Eurocentric (literary) ‘norm’ or canon, Medea’s story is remembered as one shaped by exile, discrimination and injury comparable to that suffered by the black inhabitants of the Caribbean. ¹³ In fact, as Wetmore (2003) describes, Medea is the play that is most often adapted in black theatre, to the point where ‘[t]he idea of a “Black Medea” had become so cliché by the early 1990s that George C. Wolfe was able to parody it in his satire The Colored Museum’ (pp. 149, 148). ¹⁴ As is in some ways reflected in Carter and Triana’s plays, the Medea myth has a long history of being adapted to reflect the racism, enslavement and marginalisation black communities have faced, wherein Medea is turned into a more ambiguous, if not supposedly positive character as her motivation to kill her children becomes her wish to save them from racial oppression. From Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Guy Butler’s Demea (1990), to Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), Medea has always been both a prominent and politically charged case study for classical reception (cf. Lauriola, 2015: 397ff).

Both Carter and Triana remember Medea’s outsider status, and refigure it within the context of their own plays. Pecong is set on Trankey Island, or Ille Tranquille [the Isle of Calm], a fictional Caribbean township. Mediyah, the play’s black protagonist and its modern Medea figure, lives in relative seclusion with her brother and grandmother in a hut on the edge of town. Her name, Mediyah, is a creolisation of the sorceress’ ancient name, already alluding to the linguistic and cultural translocation that is part of Carter’s refiguration of the ancient Medea myth. Mediyah is feared by the locals, both for her supernatural powers, as well as her ability to travel alone to Miedo Wood [the Wood of Fear], a neighbouring island that is supposedly deadly to anyone who enters it. While in the wood, she rescues a stranded Jason and as she nurses him back to health, falls pregnant with his children. Jason’s betrayal of Mediyah’s trust parallels the Euripidean tragedy but is coloured in explicitly racial and economic terms: he as a white man abandons his black lover for the daughter of the richest man in town. The same themes echo also through Medea in the Mirror, in which María, a mulata in Havana, faces eviction by her white landlord Perico Piedra Fina after she is abandoned by her lover Julián, a Jason figure, who chooses Fina’s daughter as his bride, and thereby establishes a connection to one of the richest families on the island. ¹⁵ An important connection between Pecong and Medea in the Mirror lies in the fact that the betrayal of the Medea figure’s lover causes social alienation and the risk of displacement for the protagonist, which the plays implicitly parallel with the situation of the ancient sorceress. Memories of Medea’s alienation are thereby refigured into the race politics of the twentieth-century Caribbean, in which Medea’s status as a foreigner comes to determine her modern counterpart’s skin colour and economic standing, rendering her as reliant on the support of her lover as the Colchian Medea in Corinth. ¹⁶

It is Medea’s supernatural abilities, however, that serve as perhaps the strongest point of connection between transcultural memories of the sorceress and the plays’ setting in a Caribbean context. One of the abilities Medea was best known for in antiquity was her power to summon the dead; a power that further determined her status as an outsider since necromancers [psuchagogos] and evocators [goes] were typically Greek and male, two things Medea was not (Ogden, 2004: 95). ¹⁷ A character who raises ghosts or even the literal dead from their tombs is easy to integrate into Caribbean cultural spheres, in which spirits and spirit summonings have long been a popular theme. Many Caribbean religions, including variants of Voodoo and Obeah, involve rituals focussed on communicating with or invoking ancestral spirits; rituals whose popularity and cultural prominence inspired many works of theatre and literature in the Caribbean. ¹⁸ In the works of authors like Walcott, Patrick Chamoiseau and David Dabydeen, summoned – or even unwelcome – ghosts are commonly linked to ideas about shifting identities and fragile memories, reflecting how, in the words of Graham Huggan, the Caribbean region is ‘haunted by ghostly presences, reminders of a history seen as loss, distress and defeat’ (Huggan, 1998: 127). Famously, in Omeros’ (Walcott, 1990: 129ff.) katabasis ¹⁹ scene, Achille is confronted by the ghost of his father who shows him the abduction of his ancestors from Africa and their transportation to the Caribbean in a kathartic journey that allows him to formulate a new viewpoint on his Creole identity. Revisitations of the past by way of confronting its haunting spectres often describe the authors’ attempts to shape a prominent or even oppressive cultural memory, to ‘construct a kind of countermemory, in Foucault’s sense of the transformation of (linear) history into a different form of time’ (Huggan, 1998: 129). A Medea able to raise the dead from their graves thus becomes an evocative symbol in a Caribbean artistic scene obsessed with ways of resurrecting and restructuring the past.

Both Pecong and Medea in the Mirror refigure Medea as a woman who summons the spectres of the departed, whereby the plays’ preoccupation with a haunting past in some ways parallels the playwrights’ meta-textual negotiations with the memories of Medea and of the ‘classical tradition’. Triana’s María performs her summoning largely by accident when she participates in a supernatural ritual to regain her lover’s affection, but instead of the desired help, she inadvertently resurrects the spirit of her ancient alter ego Medea. Carter’s Mediyah, on the other hand, is a prolific sorceress who uses her power over the dead to her advantage. Towards the beginning of Pecong, she performs a Voodoo ritual to resurrect the spirit of Granny Root, who assists her throughout her quest to take revenge on Jason. The ritualistic nature of their sorcery is reminiscent of the importance of ritual within Caribbean theatre more generally. Okagbue (2009) describes how African-Caribbean theatre is

not just entertainment; rather, it is a communal act, a kind of ritual which enables the human community to explore and come to terms with itself, helps humans to explore and navigate those regions of their universe which lie hidden or beyond the everyday experience. (p. 147)

The plays’ own narrative and ancient refigurations, channelled through the sorceress’ rituals, will allow for just this exploration of the hidden regions of the universe, although not entirely in the way the Medea figures hoped for. But for now, it is worth noting that the importance both playwrights give to resurrection rituals is perhaps, meta-textually speaking, the most overt indication that neither Carter nor Triana’s plays are written as direct adaptations of Euripides’ popular tragedy. ²⁰ One of Euripides’ main changes in rewriting the myth of Medea was to de-emphasise her supernatural qualities. By doing so, he forced his audience to acknowledge the possibility that any woman, sorceress or not, is capable of killing her own children. Thereby, the ancient tragedian refigured the myth into a tale of warning, reinforced by the threat of Medea fleeing to Athens at the end of the play, the city in which most audience members would have watched the tragedy. Although Euripides’ Medea is the most well-known version of the myth, the supernatural narratives of Pecong and Medea in the Mirror break with the Euripidean tradition when they refigure Medea specifically as a necromancer.

In antiquity, references to Medea’s supernatural abilities would have been popularised largely through Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Seneca’s Medea. Carter and Triana’s plays do not recreate specific moments from the Roman versions of the Medea myth either, however – neither Medea’s famed escape on top of clouds, nor her dragon chariot make an appearance in the Caribbean plays. The playwrights draw on Ovid and Seneca in such a way that the travelling memories of Medea’s ancient connections to magic and necromancy are engaged with in an already decontextualised form, and then substantially refigured within a Caribbean setting. As with the Euripidean tragedy, what remains of the Roman texts are references and inspirations, signs of a refigured cultural osmosis rather than of a self-conscious relationality. The playwrights’ indistinct references to Medea’s supernatural powers are thereby emblematic of the ways in which the Medea myth itself travelled to Carter and Triana’s twentieth-century Caribbean: in the shape of a fluid mythical template whose supposed universality allowed for select classical references to most easily and creatively be integrated into the local, religious cultures of Cuba and Trinidad. ²¹ As memories of her necromantic powers were most compatible with a Caribbean cultural environment preoccupied with the past and its haunting return, the refiguration culture thus predetermined the shape which ‘Medea’ would most successfully take in the modern theatre of Cuba and Trinidad. ²²

In both plays, the spirit summoning scenes interweave memories of ancient mythology with descriptions of Caribbean Voodoo rituals. In Pecong, these references extend beyond the story of Medea herself and connect the heroine’s necromantic powers to other well-known stories of nekyia and katabasis in antiquity, most notably, the Odyssey. ²³ Many of the supernatural rituals of the play can only take place on Miedo Island: it encloses both the resurrection of Granny Roots’ spirit and Mediyah’s summoning of her long-forgotten ancestor, a climactic revelation of her true heritage. These journeys to visit the dead within a forbidden realm recall moments from classical mythology in which the hero seeks out the dominion of the dead to obtain information both about his past and his future. In one of the most famous moments from Homer’s Odyssey, for instance, Odysseus performs a necromantic ritual near the borders to the underworld to summon the spirits of his dead mother, war comrades, as well as that of the seer Tiresias, hoping the famed sage will guide his journey home. The sorceress Circe previously instructed him that this ritual could only be performed near the entrance of the underworld, as this space was already connected to the realm of death, but also that he would need to take certain precautions to not be harmed by the dead. Throughout Pecong, Miedo Island is framed in similar terms to ancient Hades, as everyone except for Mediyah and Granny Roots are not only scared of the island but positively unable to enter it. Jason’s near-death experience as he trespasses on the Isle of Fear reinforces the impression that the villagers’ fear is not fuelled by superstition, but by an awareness of the space’s supernatural powers. As it allows Mediyah to conduct necromantic summoning rituals while existing as an impassable, dreadful space for all others, Miedo Island echoes descriptions of Hades, a sacred, yet feared space inhabited by the dead and unbarred only to a select few.

Miedo Island is the location in which Mediyah resurrects the spirit of her grandmother at the beginning of the play. Granny Roots’ resurrection requires a ritual whose narrative function echoes those rituals bound up with ancient necromancy and katabasis, in which specific ritual ingredients had to be taken to the doors of Hades. Like Odysseus and Aeneas before her, Mediyah brings ritual offerings to the summoning, but unlike those of the ancient heroes, ²⁴ her offerings are those common to Caribbean Voodoo rituals: paralleling the animal sacrifices of Voodoo, for instance, Mediyah sacrifices a cockerel at Granny Root’s resurrection ceremony (Fenton, 2009: 14–15; Carter, 1993: 5). The religious context of the Voodoo ritual further works to reinforce the supernatural connotations around Miedo Wood itself. Mediyah travels to the island for ‘special herb and bush and root and t’ing and come back’ (Carter, 1993: 15), journeys that lead to the sorceress herself becoming ‘all herb and bush and root and air and fire and smoke and earth and wile forest’ (Carter, 1993: 86). In Shango, the local Voodoo tradition on Carter’s home island Trinidad, a belief in herbal remedies is often linked to the notion that practitioners are able to enter supernatural spaces, ‘often remote or underdeveloped parts of the island generally known as “the bush”’ (Vertovec, 1998: 251). Miedo Island is continuously framed as a supernatural, forbidden space, one which allows for rituals to take place that could not be held elsewhere. The template of the ancient underworld and of epic descent narratives reinforce these supernatural connotations, as local Trinidadian beliefs in Voodoo and its rituals are interwoven with classical echoes of forbidden spaces. While Carter does not adapt the Odyssey in his play, when he refigures the Medea myth within Pecong he also includes references to other well-known and culturally significant myths and moments from antiquity that suit the narrative and context of his own work. Thereby, he interweaves memories of antiquity in such a way that travelling and transcultural myths collaborate with local religious traditions to create and reinforce the supernatural nature of the fictional island.

In a thematic echo of the ancient descent narrative that ends with the recovery of knowledge and the hero’s transformation, during the finale of Pecong Mediyah travels to Miedo Island once more to discover the secrets of her true ancestry, which her grandmother had kept from her. Like Odysseus who meets his mother Anticleia outside of Hades, and Aeneas who is reunited with his father Anchises in the fields of Elysium, Mediyah meets her ancestor in the midst of the forbidden, otherworldly island. Drawing on the underworld’s associations with revelation, lost knowledge and transformation, Miedo Island therein becomes the setting in which it is revealed that Mediyah is the offspring of the Voodoo god Damballah. Damballah-Wèdo, the serpent god, is one of the most popular Voodoo deities and he and his wife Aida-Wèdo are even said to have descended the ‘Voodoo revelation’ into ‘the spirit and the heart of those African Voodooists who established the religion practiced today by their descendants’ (Rigaud, 1953: 43; cf. also Métraux, 1972). The original conception of Voodoo itself is bound up with the figure of Damballah-Wèdo, whereby Mediyah’s ancestry both marks her as a chosen practitioner and re-enacts the origins of Voodoo with her as a stand-in for the first African Voodooists.

The revelation that Mediyah is the daughter of a Voodoo god, intermixes not only Caribbean religious beliefs with the structure of ancient descent narratives, but also invokes echoes of the deus ex machina device, which concluded the most famous versions of the Medea myth. Both Euripides, Ovid and Seneca end their tragic adaptations with a divine intervention that allows for the protagonist’s escape. Initially, the ending of Pecong seems to parallel these classic deus ex machina narratives: as Medea is rescued by her grandfather Helios, the god of the sun, Mediyah reunites with her own divine ancestor, who protects her from the retribution of the villagers. Carter’s ending goes further than this, however, as it permanently removes Mediyah from not only her own, but any human community. Mediyah realises that to fully become the embodiment of vengeance she needs to rid herself of all human attachments as well as of ‘all impulses of love, pity, and empathy’ (Marks, 2013: 41). While echoes of the famous deus ex machina devise from several versions of the Medea myth prefigure Mediyah’s escape through the help of a divine parent, Mediyah’s journey through the ancient underworld anticipates her removal from the realm of mortality and her ascension to the realm of the Voodoo Parthenon. The themes of discovery and transformation common to ancient descent narratives are thus, once again, refigured and interwoven into a Caribbean religious context, and like the katabatic heroes before her, Mediyah becomes more than an ordinary mortal through her last journey to Miedo Island. ²⁵ This is a notable change from particularly Euripides’ Medea, in which the possibility of the sorceress, in this version a more ‘ordinary’ woman than in others like Seneca or Ovid, escaping to another city and becoming part of another community contributed to the tragedy’s shocking ending. Since Carter does not only refigure Euripides but a number of ancient myths, this is not a deconstruction of an ancient ‘source’ as much as the result of a selective textual remembering of different classical narratives.

In Carter’s play, ancient Hades and the deus ex machina devise are removed from their original narrative frameworks, and adapted in ways that evoke only those themes, developments and concerns that suit a modern Caribbean context as much as – if not more than – a classical one. The ancient narratives are received as, and further reproduce, fragmented, transcultural templates that prefigure the developments of the modern play. Through invoking echoes of what is presented as a classical or even a decontextualised, ‘universal’ mould, Carter’s play summons some of the most famous memories of ancient mythology in a similar way as Medea summons the spirits of the past within the narrative. Through his selective interweaving of ancient references from different sources and cultural contexts, Carter is able not only to decontextualise his classical sources more easily, but he establishes an imaginative hierarchy between the Caribbean and Graeco-Roman antiquity: fragmented memories of antiquity travel to the Caribbean instead of framing the island’s characters, stories and developments as reflections of an ancient model. This is an important dynamic in the cultural climate of a postcolonial Caribbean, which had previously often been presented as a secondary echo of the European Mediterranean. Emily Greenwood describes how in old European travel reports of the Caribbean, for instance, the Greek archipelago and its cultural connotations served as imaginative frameworks for ‘reading’ the Caribbean, providing, as Greenwood (2010) phrases it, ‘coordinates that ensure that the traveller never loses his Odyssean plot line’, tying the Caribbean to Greece in the same way one would tie an adaptation to its source (pp. 21–24). Although Pecong’s story is made more universally recognisable and globally marketable though references to well-known classical myths, Carter integrates these references as templates encapsulating a unique, Caribbean story, not the other way around.

Medea in the Mirror establishes comparable parallels between its native religious contexts and the classical sources it is inspired by, through which decontextualised versions of Graeco-Roman characters, narratives and ideas become part of a recognisably Cuban setting. Unlike Carter who was mainly inspired by the Voodoo rituals of his native Trinidad, Triana adapts practices from his home in Cuba, where Medea in the Mirror is also set. Spiritualism, termed Espiritismo in Cuba, describes the belief in the ability of the living to communicate with the dead through practices such as table rappings, levitations and trances by persons called ‘mediums’ (Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert, 2011: 172). María’s nurse Erundina casually mentions a Spiritualist Centre in the play (Triana 2004 [1959]: 128) showing that Espiritismo retains an organic function in the Cuban society Triana depicts in the play. The spirit summoning ceremony at the dramatic climax also uses a version of Spiritualism, as the diviners Madame Pitonisa and Doctor Mandinga call upon such diverse powers as a spirit of purification, Beelzebub, and Alpha and Omega to help María with her revenge on her unfaithful lover (Triana 2004 [1959]: 170, 173, 175). Therein, they reference both the mixture of religious backgrounds that makes up Espiritismo, and the Greek and Caribbean influences that shape the play itself.

Mirrors are given a significant role during the summoning ceremony, as they are placed to surround María and therein foreshadow the appearance of her alter ego who will possess María’s body. Throughout Medea in the Mirror, the titular mirrors are continuously imbued with supernatural significance. María’s possession, for instance, is foreshowed when she interacts with, or even just thinks of them: ‘When María hears the word “mirror”, she repeats it mechanically. The Chorus achieves an ever-greater intensity. María, in a kind of swoon, searches for the mirror in the air’ (Triana 2004 [1959]: 149). The landlord Perico Piedra Fina calls María’s mirror a ‘mirror of death’ and implores Erundina: ‘Don’t mention the mirror’ (Triana 2004 [1959]: 165). Their dangerous power becomes particularly evident when María notes that her (ancient) reflection is imperative for the fulfilment of her revenge, claiming that ‘[b]lood is a mirror that saves me’ (Triana 2004 [1959]: 181). As during the Espiritismo ritual Medea is summoned from the space behind the mirror, this space is designated a space of death, an underworld that can be opened by the living. The connection between mirrors and death has existed in many folklore traditions, depicting mirrors as deceptive, treacherous or even dangerous spaces. In several cultures, mirrors thereby serve as the connection between this world and the underworld, allowing glimpses of the departed, or even a gateway for spirits to escape through (cf. Pulliam, 2016: 208 ff.). Perhaps the most famous example of this is Dr Dee’s ‘spirit mirror’, an originally Aztec obsidian and wood case covered in tooled leather, through which the Elizabethan magician carried out his research of the spirit world. In antiquity, there also existed some links between necromancy and mirrors (cf. Ogden, 2004: 255–256), but it is unlikely that these connections could have shaped a transcultural mnemonic tradition between ancient Greece and the Caribbean Triana’s play is likely to have been influenced by. Rather than adapting a specific necromantic scene from antiquity, Triana uses popular associations between mirrors and death to frame the space behind the María’s mirror as the underworld from which Medea is waiting to escape. ²⁶

At the height of the ritual, María calls upon a ‘spirit from hell’, asking it to ‘put your powers at my service, in order to torment [Julián] and make him disappear’ (Triana 2004 [1959]: 177). Through this invocation, the ancient spirit of Medea escapes through the hellish mirrorscape and possesses her alter ego María. Erundina recognises that something about her ward has changed, that ‘something’ is ‘stuck inside [María’s] head, and she won’t leave it as long as she lives’ (Triana 2004 [1959]: 129). Medea’s possession seems to destroy María’s original personality and free will, and turns her into a puppet through which the ancient sorceress can re-enact her revenge. This possession shares characteristics with Caribbean myths around zombies, which describe the creation of a zombie as specifically an act of possession. In this possession, the soul of the zombie is consumed by an agent with ‘greater spiritual power than that possessed by the victim’ (Lewis, 2003: 162). In Triana’s version Medea is easily able to overwhelm her victim, both through her ancient fury and determination, and because, unlike her alter ego, María holds no supernatural powers of her own. Medea is able to overwhelm not only María’s mind, however, but also causes the rest of the community to fall into a kind of trance, which allows her to execute her revenge uninterrupted. Once Medea has fully conquered María’s body, she also makes her presence as an outsider explicit: ‘(Beginning to recognise herself in the mirror.) I have a body. There it is. That is how I look. (She laughs bitterly.) My body is the mirror’ (Triana 2004 [1959]: 176). By equating her body to the mirror, the connection to the underworld, Medea not only emphasises her own status as an invading spectre but implies that now María herself has become a portal to Hades, foreshadowing the many deaths she will cause within her community.

Like Carter, Triana’s uses schematic references to the Greek underworld, to Medea’s supernatural powers, and her rage against those who have wronged her, to frame a tale of revenge against Cuba’s white oppressors. After causing the destruction of this play’s version of the house of Creon, the white landlord and his daughter, María/Medea slays both Julián and her children in effigy in a voodoo ritual that involves the custom stabbing of a doll; a ritual which foreshadows their deaths in reality. After she has gone through with murdering her children and starts to cry repeatedly ‘I am God’, the final scene shows Julián rushing to kill her as she is surrounded by a communal chorus. It remains unclear whether the chorus is helping her escape her lover’s wrath, echoing the deus ex machina escape of the ancient sources, or whether the chorus has surrounded María/Medea to take vengeance for those she killed. As Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos (2012) has noted, the last word of the Spanish original is dios [god], whereby it closely resembles the way Seneca’s tragedy ends in deos (p. 31). Medea in the Mirror thus ends in a verbal echo, mnemonic in both shape and effect – no detailed deconstruction and rewriting of the ancient play’s themes, but a single-word exclamation whose sound creates and/or reinforces a decontextualised recollection of Seneca. In the same way, as he does not commit to adapting a single version of Medea’s story – or a single mythological context – as he concludes his tale of revenge, Triana is unwilling to commit to a clear ending for his heroine: do the play’s final words lift her up to the divine proportions of her ancient counterpart or are we shown a crazed woman who sees herself as a God, now permanently removed from the material and moral concerns of mere mortals? ²⁷ Like Carter, whose ending permanently removes his heroine from the mortal sphere, Triana does not present an unequivocally positive outcome for Medea’s revenge in the modern Caribbean. Although both plays rework the ancient power dynamic between the foreigner Medea and the Greek city she inhabits in expressly racial terms, neither ending presents the violent revenge of their protagonists as a productive resolution of an oppressive, (neo-)colonial situation.

In both Pecong and Medea in the Mirror, the protagonists turn to spirit summoning to gain the power to fight the racially oppressive and patriarchal situations they find themselves in. Next to their destructive potential, the plays’ rituals also invoke hopes for their protagonists to regain a sense of identity through the memories recovered in the summoning ceremonies. Both Mediyah and María are in some way separated from their parents or ancestors at the beginning of the plays: in Pecong, Mediyah is unaware for much of the play’s duration that she is the descendent of a Voodoo deity. Likewise, in Medea in the Mirror María is orphaned and raised by her nurse until she re-encounters her mother’s ghost during the Espiritismo ritual. In both plays, it is the spirit summoning rituals which alleviates this disconnect as the Medea figures are reconnected with their lost family members; Granny Root and Damballah in Pecong, and María’s dead mother in Medea in the Mirror. The protagonists’ disconnect from their past and their parentage may be a reference to the larger cultural amnesia caused by the colonisation of the Caribbean. As Louise Fenton describes, when the Caribbean was first colonised, those involved in the slave trade attempted to cut any ties the slaves had to their homeland by erasing their memories of African culture. As they arrived on Caribbean soil, they were given new names and distributed among the plantations, systematically intermingled with members of tribes other than their own. The owners believed that this would lead to them losing their original identity, ‘as the obliteration of previous memory and culture would give them a new start as commodities, not as people’ (Fenton, 2009: 45–46).

Carter and Triana’s plays explore the theme of reconnecting with a lost past specifically through their religious rituals, as both interweave references to ancient necromancy and descent narratives with Voodoo and Spiritualism; referencing classical stories of journeying into the past while including perhaps the most popular Caribbean religions to centre on the summoning of ancestral ghosts. In Caribbean history, Voodoo rituals were seen as a last connection to the slaves’ pre-colonial past, and played a practical role in anti-colonial revolutions (Fenton, 2009: 62). The African roots of many Voodoo rituals aided a form of social creolisation, integrating elements from both indigenous Caribbean and African traditions into the colonial or postcolonial society, and offsetting the attempts of colonisation to establish a singular, homogenised Caribbean culture. In plays like Carter and Triana’s, the ancestral summoning rituals become emblematic of attempts to resurrect a half-forgotten Creole identity and cultural history. They outline a way to recover traditions lost through slavery and colonialism rather than, echoing voices like Eric Williams or V.S. Naipaul, painting a pre-colonial past as permanently lost and forgotten. The performer of the spirit ritual is thus given – or, at least, supposedly given – a sense of agency to reconnect with their lost ancestry. While Carter and Triana’s spirit summoners thematically recall the classical heroes, who braved katabasis journeys and nekyia evocations to regain information about the past, the religious frameworks of Voodoo and Spiritualism are undoubtedly the dominant ones, both politically and contextually. Rather than subordinating Caribbean narratives to Graeco-Roman contexts, as was often the case during colonialism, Carter and Triana interweave specifically fragmented and decontextualised classical memories with Caribbean religious rituals and contexts in a manner usefully contextualised as a mnemonic palimpsest. In the words of Max Silverman (2013), ‘palimpsestic memory [. . .] is a figurative “staging” of memory by which memory traces overlap, intersect and are transformed’ (p. 22). The delicate ways in which classical templates and connotations are integrated into the ritual frameworks of the two plays undoubtedly acknowledge the complicated place influences from the European canon and ‘its’ classical literature occupy in twentieth-century Caribbean culture. ²⁸ Memories of Graeco-Roman antiquity are carefully envisioned as, at most, merging with and shaping the stories of Trinidad and Cuba, providing mnemonic templates without the risk of the classical references dominating the local narratives.

As they envision the outcomes of the necromantic summonings, Carter and Triana also emphasise the destructiveness of their heroines’ means of recovering their own and, by extension, the Caribbean’s lost past. At the end of both plays, the island communities are all but destroyed and the Medea figure herself is either excluded from her community, mad and/or under threat of death. This negative ending is perhaps most clearly foreshadowed in Pecong: as Mediyah’s growing power steadily brings her closer to the revelation of her past and ancestry, Granny Root never fails to stress the importance of hatred for the use of her powers. For example, in their ritualistic invocations, Mediyah and her grandmother call upon both the ‘old God of Greatness and Blackness’ and the ‘God of Hell’ (Carter, 1993: 20, 77). And in both plays, it is the moment when the Medea figure has reached the pinnacle of her powers when she commits the atrocity of killing her children, turning her restorative invocations into forces of vengeance and murder. Restoring the past – both her personal memories and her ancestral powers – through powers dependent on hatred, vengeance and death is shown to ultimately transgress systems of human morality, and ends with the Medea figure banished from her mortal community. Both plays to some extent invoke typically postcolonial concerns around racial oppression and the recovery of cultural traditions, and particularly the story of the Medea figures’ resistance against her white oppressors may invoke parallels to the anti-colonial négritude and the Black Power movements, as well as the criticism those movements received. ²⁹ The destructive power of remembrance both Carter and Triana invoke within the plays’ postcolonial context is in some respects a deconstruction of the concept of a nostalgic ‘nativism’, as they problematise the ‘potent images of what a people or community was supposed to be before colonialism’ (Crow and Banfield, 1996: 10) – the Medea figures ascent to power does not restore an imagined prelapsarian utopia before racial oppression took hold on the island, but her violent acts of revenge only cause further destruction within the plays’ communities. The narratives of empowering remembrance Mediyah and María are drawn to and involved in fail their restorative purpose within the (neo-)colonial storyworlds of Carter and Triana’s plays wherein cultural amnesia cannot be overcome by the resurrection of a single fragment of the past, and which require the Medea figures’ dehumanisation in their fight against racial oppression. Therein, the genre of ritual drama is an especially evocative context to explore the failures and dangers of nativist remembrance, as invocations of a supposedly uniform, prelapsarian past typically dominate the genre (cf. Crow and Banfield, 1996: 14–15).

But the plays’ cautioning about the perils of restoring the past is not limited to deconstructions of nativist tendencies: Medea in the Mirror also includes the telling set-up of classical Medea as the spectre whose invocation ultimately causes the downfall of the Cuban community Triana depicts; showing the potential destructiveness not only of a return to a pre-colonial past, but of the (over-)reliance on the ‘classical tradition’. The exploration of possible and destructive relationships with the past lie at the core of Carter and Triana’s plays, which are, after all, preoccupied not only with the memories of their protagonists but have to meta-textually contend with the memories of antiquity they revive within their text and performances. Overall, however, Pecong and Medea in the Mirror include only sparse references to their respective political contexts, few more specific than to draw attention to the racial politics in the conflict between the alter egos of Medea and Jason. Instead, they engage with the idea that remembrance is not always a positive, healing or ethical practice on a level that is only so specific as to acknowledge that remembrance can come with additional complications in postcolonial contexts. The sparsity of specific engagements with colonialism, racial dynamics in the twentieth-century Caribbean or négritude and the Black Power movements cause the modern Caribbean narratives of Pecong and Medea in the Mirror to, in some ways, resemble the antiquity Carter and Triana textually remember. Like its Graeco-Roman referents, the two plays have also decontextualised those stories of racial oppression and revenge that are relevant to their postcolonial environments; Mediyah and María’s stories, too, are played out on universal scales rather than related to political events and movements specific to twentieth-century Trinidad and Cuba. As the plays take on a more recognisable significance in a global literary sphere through the universally recognisable stories of racial oppression as well as the classical templates that shape the revenge narratives of their respective heroines, Pecong and Medea in the Mirror lose some of their local specificity and potential for inspiring focussed political change.

This article has discussed some of the ways in which memories of the classics are refigured in Caribbean theatre. Plays that use the characters, structure and themes of the Medea myth as well as references to the Graeco-Roman underworld were shown as evocative set pieces for postcolonial explorations of class, race, the loss of ancestral traditions and an enforced cultural homogeneity. Caribbean religious rituals therein became a haunting centre-point of narratives in which the playwrights interwove cultural references from both ancient Greek mythology and African religions. The classical echoes of Pecong and Medea in the Mirror were taken from a transcultural memoryscape in decontextualised and universalised forms, as templates for stories of a modern and Caribbean nature, rather than as adaptations trying to actualise specific narratives and cultural environments of antiquity. Although both plays establish hierarchies in which the scales between classical and local allusions were clearly tipped to favour Caribbean narratives, their political allusions also lose much of their specificity in favour of telling a universal story of racial and patriarchal oppression and revenge. Carter and Triana refigured the travelling memories of antiquity to create narratives in which both local and global referents lost their clear boundaries, and which foregrounded ‘universal’ themes rather than those specific to a postcolonial Caribbean.

In recent perspectives on memory studies, more and more scholars have proposed that the modern era has turned into a ‘presentist regime of historicity’, also termed présentisme by François Hartog (2003). This implies a reframing of the concepts of time and history, wherein the past is no longer seen as a linearly caused progression of different events, and the future cannot be directly extrapolated from the past. Instead of an ‘irreversible past’, as Eelco Runia (2006) phrases it, the focus has shifted to a ‘persisting or haunting past’, a process that conceives of history not as an unreachable object, but as an ongoing process (p. 1, quoted in Tamm, 2015: 2). As Jan Assmann writes, ‘[t]he past is not simply “received” by the present. The present is “haunted” by the past and the past is modelled, invented, reinvented, and reconstructed by the present’ (Assmann, 1997: 9, quoted in Tamm, 2015: 3). More recently, Max Silverman (2013) has presented a comparable model which I have drawn on in this article, that of palimpsestic memory, wherein ‘[t]he relationship between present and past therefore takes the form of a superimposition and interaction of different temporal traces to constitute a sort of composite structure, like a palimpsest’ (p. 3). In this presentist climate, classical antiquity is less and less usefully conceptualised as a tradition that ranges back millennia, and that can be observed as a historical archive. Instead, many ancient myths, characters and narratives become popular memories that exist in the present as much as in the past, its templates and frameworks overlapping and giving shape to modern ideas.

Silverman (2013) continues that to ‘understand the nature of racialized violence and horror, the perception of interconnections between different moments of violence was an important part of the reappraisal of the human in the wake of extreme terror’ (p. 4). Indeed, the violence Medea underwent in Graeco-Roman mythology has become an evocative memory in Caribbean theatre and elsewhere, to explore racial oppression. But as we analyse the integration of classical echoes into modern cultures through the models of palimpsestic and multidirectional memory offered by scholars like Silverman and Rothberg, we need to recognise that these processes of integration often still negotiate with the mnemonic hierarchies that exist within an increasingly globalised world, and the – often externally imposed – competitive interactions between the classical referents and the local contexts they are integrated into. As useful as it is to move away from the model of competitive memory in its indiscriminating shape, and to understand the organic, multidirectional journeys memories undertake, especially in postcolonial contexts it is also imperative to understand that the ways in which authors consciously shape, position and integrate classical memories are influenced by antiquity’s complex, imperialist heritage.

Whether the classics are intentionally refigured as decontextualised and universalised schemata by postcolonial authors like Carter and Triana, or simply received as such due to an increasingly waning classical education, the field of memory studies has much to gain from exploring the multidirectional travel of Graeco-Roman antiquity and its myths. The selection of how and why such long-lasting images, characters and myths continue to be refigured within certain contexts can provide insights into ‘the relation between memorability, aesthetic power, and cultural longevity’, memory processes, as Ann Rigney noted already in 2008, into which more research is still needed (Rigney, 2008: 347). Which role memories of antiquity play in today’s increasingly globalised memory cultures is now more than ever an important question, with classical Greece and Rome being invoked in increasingly fragmented and decontextualised shapes as foundations for anything from war propaganda to far-right cults like the ‘Golden Dawn’ in modern Europe. And in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries alike, the ‘regime of presentism’ renders the conceptual framework of memory a compelling one for the study of long-lasting, travelling and increasingly universalised classical schemata.