ABSTRACT
(Electra turns to her mother’s ghost suspended before her.) Electra . Look now, look now, our mother’s ghost. Her nightmare speaks . . . Clytemnestra . I dreamed I gave birth to a snake. I wrapped it. I gave it my breast to suck. I screamed in my sleep. Night after night. 10 For God’s sake, I want only to be forgiven. Electra. My brother . . . see him there, walking through town. Old ladies see him. They call. “For God’s sake boy, you cannot kill your own mother.” Electra. At the wake of the dead, after the funeral, there are times when the clan explodes. Mad men, mad women, driven mad by grief, rain rocks down upon their heads. Look there. Look there . . . my mother’s spirit again, speak. Clytemnestra. See this wound and say – whose was the knife? Listen you powers of the deep earth, and understand. The man who killed me . . . Let him not escape. Electra. My brother said – “When my father died. There came a man. He took care of me. He instructed me in law. He gave me a knife.” And this – listen to this – my brother said . . . “There are in my skull two countries. In the one, these furious mothers. A warm dark music here. It suckles me. My sorry mother, wronged and murdered, requires right action. I ask no exception to that rule.” “There are in my skull two countries . . . Here (my brother said), sharp-edged men call for retribution. Two laws at war in my skull.” So said my brother Oreste. Electra pauses. – she gazes into the line of ghosts of the women in her family. Her mother Clytemnestra, her sister Iphygenia, Helen, Aerope, Pelopia, the daughter of Thyestes. I see a long line of ghosts. Look, that poor young mother hanging there. Pelopia. How many murders flowed into your womb . . . How many flowed out? Look there; look there . . . long lines of family trouble.
