Reading World Literature

Seminar 7: Reinventing Caliban in Caribbean Writing

Part 1: Context: the Caribbean, postcolonial literature and rewriting

Part 2: Close reading of two Caribbean reinventions of Caliban
Part 3: Possibilities and limitations of rewriting as challenge to colonial structures

Objectives:
• Gain an understanding of postcolonial literature and its connection to world literary studies
• Understand the importance of rewriting/reinventing canonical or Urtexts in postcolonial literature and
also discuss some possible challenges within this approach
• Practise close reading of two Caribbean reinventions of Caliban – Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest and Edward
Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘Caliban’

•Caribbean region inhabited from around 8000/9000 BCE

•In 1492, Christopher Columbus claimed the region for Spain
•British, French and Dutch follow at the start of 17th Century
•European diseases, overwork, violence kill millions (potentially 80-90%) of indigenous population
•Slave trade kidnaps est. 12 million people from West Africa, sending them on ships across the Atlantic in
often-fatal conditions (the middle passage) to labour for free on plantations

Abolition of slave trade in Britain and France in early 19th Century

Colonial rule in Caribbean continued for another hundred years, until 1960s or beyond
Black population had no rights to vote and often no right to purchase land
Repression of African heritage and language – imposition of colonial education system
Continued repression and codification of racial difference – structural racism.

Post-colonial Caribbean
• Decolonization movements gain power in Caribbean after WW2, as colonial power fades
•Beginning with Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago (1962), most of British Caribbean gains full
independence in 1960s and 1970s
•French colonies ‘incorporated’ in France as overseas territories

“Every post coloniality is situated, and therefore different.” (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Nancy Condee,
Harsha Ram, and Vitaly Chernetsky, "Are We Postcolonial? PostSoviet Space."

- Martinique - French colony, became a French overseas department in 1946. Fight for independence
continues in 20th Century. Languages French and Martinican Creole

- Barbados - British colony, gained independence in 1966. Became a Republic in 2020. Languages English
and Bajan Creole

“Naming the world as ‘postcolonial’ is, from Indigenous perspectives, to name colonialism as finished
business.”

Limited reparations and continued structural inequalities Neocolonialism – much of Caribbean remains
dependent on trade, tourism, policy, aid, from Europe and US

•Salman Rushdie: “The Empire Writes Back With a Vengeance” – writing and rewriting a means of
challenging/upending power dynamics between colonized and colonizer
•European language, religion and ‘elite’ culture imposed on colonized countries – indigenous languages
and culture repressed
• Western canonical texts as ‘foundational’ is problematic. In many African cultures, oral storytelling and
drama were ancient practices that developed without influence from Ancient Greece
•Alienating experience of colonial education – “the snow was falling on the cane fields”.

“Rewriting thus entails both writing palimpsestically, sedimentarily, in draft form, and writing toward an
original, both an aboriginal and an unusually creative form. As such, it does not imitate. […] Rewriting
changes what the text intends to tell us. […] Overall, rewrites do share with parodies this form of exorcism
in that they aim at freeing themselves from that which they rewrite, and they share the same paradox—
the simultaneous ability to authorize and critique the texts and traditions to which they allude.”

Why rewrite The Tempest?

- Part of a colonial education – part of the literary heritage of many postcolonial authors, although one that
was imposed rather than chosen
- Themes - exile, migration, loss/search for home, interactions of different cultures, slavery, colonisation are
key themes for postcolonial writers…
- Shakespeare’s language - for Anglophone postcolonial authors, it is both foundation and connected to
forms of colonial oppression of their indigenous languages
- Postcolonial authors offer complex approaches to cultural heritage of The Tempest–transposing in time
and place, shedding new light on characters/themes, playing with language
- These “alter-native” plots serve to dismantle narrative authority and to reorient the circulation of
knowledge. The singular, punctual Tempest is ousted by Tempests, which accommodate the multiple
instabilities of contemporary texts and contexts.”

Key figure: Caliban

• Secondary figure in The Tempest - shifted to protagonist/hero
• Allows an exploration and inversion of the master/slave, civilized/barbarian dichotomy at the heart of The
Tempest
• “In Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Australia, and Québec, Caliban becomes the inexhaustible
symbol of the colonized insurgent.”
• Caliban given a voice and language beyond the one imposed on him by Prospero in The Tempest “You
taught me language and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse : the red plague rid you For learning me your
language”. The Tempest, I, ii, 6-9.

Aimé Césaire 1913 – 2008

Martinican poet, playwright, activist, politician
Educated in Paris, returned to Martinique in 1945 to fight for decolonization and independence
Cofounder of Negritude, an influential movement to restore and reclaim the value of the cultural identity of
black Africans.
Texts reinvent European classics (Odyssey, The Tempest) using African imagery and mixing French with
African and Creole languages
Explore slavery, imperialism, decolonization, African heritage, exile and homecoming

Written in 1969 in French for a ‘un théâtre nègre’ – first performed in Tunisia, later France.
Translated in 1985, updated in 1992. Premiered in 1991 in New York.

• “The translation of Aimé Césaire's Une Tempete presented more challenges than usually arise in the
transfer of a play from one language into another (differences in cultural background, tone, milieu and so
on). Although Césaire has denied attempting any linguistic echo of Shakespeare, the transposition of his
play into English inevitably calls up such echoes, for the literate English/ American playgoer cannot help but
"hear," behind the language of the play, the original text resounding in all its well-known beauty, its
familiarity.”
• “violence resides in the very purpose and activity of translation: the reconstitution of the foreign text in
accordance with values, beliefs and representations that pre-exist it in the target language, always
configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, always determining the production, circulation,
and reception of texts”

“As with any rewriting dealing with decolonization, Césaire’s Une tempête both departs and draws from
Prospero’s language and Old World literature”.
Key alterations:
• Title – A not The – why?
• Condenses five acts of The Tempest into three
• Characterization – Caliban as hero, Prospero as anti-hero
• Additions from Yoruban religion and culture - Eshu and Shango (Yoruban deities); Yoruban masks
• Ending – Prospero remains on the island – why?

“Caliban is at once Césaire’s mouthpiece, the embodiment of the concept of Négritude as well as the Afro-
Caribbean and African American colonized subject. He also documents all to himself the shift from Caliban
as native Indian/ Caribbean/cannibal to Black African/colonized slave on to the triumphant Third World
revolutionary of the late sixties.”

CALIBAN: Uhuru!
PROSPERO: What did you say?
CALIBAN: I said, Uhuru!
PROSPERO: Mumbling your native language again! I've already told you, I don't like it. You could be polite,
at least; a simple "hello" wouldn't kill you
CALIBAN: Oh, I forgot ... But make that as froggy, waspish, pustular and dung-filled "hello" as possible. May
today hasten by a decade the day when all the birds of the sky and beasts of the earth will feast upon your
corpse!
PROSPERO: ‘Since you're so fond of invective, you could at least thank me for having taught you to speak at
all. You, a savage ... a dumb animal, a beast I educated, trained, dragged up from the bestiality that still
clings to you.
CALIBAN: In the first place, that's not true. You didn't teach me a thing! Except to jabber in your own
language so that I could understand your orders: chop the wood, wash the dishes, fish for food, plant
vegetables, all because you're too lazy to do it yourself. And as for your learning, did you ever impart any of
that to me? No, you took care not to. All your science you keep for yourself alone, shut up in those big
books.’
CALIBAN: ‘[…] you think the earth itself is dead ... It's so much simpler that way! Dead, you can walk on it,
pollute it, you can tread upon it with the steps of a conqueror. I respect the earth, because I know that it is
alive […]
PROSPERO: If you keep on like that even your magic won't save you from punishment!
CALIBAN: That's right, that's right! In the beginning, the gentleman was all sweet talk: dear Caliban here,
my little Caliban there! And what do you think you'd have done without me in this strange land? Ingrate! I
taught you the trees, fruits, birds, the seasons, and now you don't give a damn ... Caliban the animal,
Caliban the slave! I know that story! Once you've squeezed the juice from the orange, you toss the rind
away!
CALIBAN: It's this: I've decided I don't want to be called Caliban any longer.
PROSPERO: What kind of rot is that? I don't understand. […]
CALIBAN: Well, because Caliban isn't my name. It's as simple as that.
PROSPERO: Oh, I suppose it's mine!
CALIBAN: It's the name given me by your hatred, and everytime it's spoken it's an insult.
“Caliban translates canibal, which translates an unknown Native American term through the European term
anthropophagi. And in this case the translation is a pure translation, or translatio, for it has lost its place in
its proper, or, domestic, meaning.”

CALIBAN: Call me X. That would be best. Like a man without a name. Or, to be more precise, a man whose
name has been stolen. You talk about history ... well, that's history, and everyone knows it! Every time you
summon me it reminds me of a basic fact, the fact that you've stolen everything from me, even my identity!
Uhuru!

Malcolm X - African American leader and prominent figure in the Nation of Islam.
- Articulated concepts of race pride and Black nationalism in the early 1960s.
- Took the surname ‘X’
– rejecting surname imposed by white slave traders
- Criticised non-violence of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement (echoed in contrast between
Caliban and Ariel in A Tempest)

Prospero: ‘Well, Caliban , old fellow, it’s just us two now, here on the island ... only you and me. You and
me. You-me . . . meyou ! What in the hell is he up to? (Shouting)
Caliban! In the distance, above the sound of the surf and the chirping of birds, we hear snatches of
Caliban's song: FREEDOM HI-DAY, FREEDOM HI-DAY!
Echo of earlier moment in The Tempest: “‘Ban, ‘Ban, Ca-Caliban/Has a new master—get a new
man!/Freedom, high-day! High-day, freedom! Freedom, high-day, freedom!” (2.2.179– 181).
Why does the play end like this?

Edward Kamau Brathwaite 1930-2020

-Poet and academic from in Barbados – former British Colony
-Changed his name – Kamau means ‘quiet warrior’ in East African Kikuyu language
-Themes of language, power, place, displacement – the Caribbean, its history, colonial legacy, slavery
-Like Césaire, turns to African forms and traditions in much of his work, but also rewrites classics of colonial
education (especially The Tempest)
-Innovative language and form – use of oral forms, jazz and folk rhythms etc