SHAKESPEAREAND TRANSCULTURATION:

A& CESAIRE’SATEMPEST

PIER PAOLO FRASSINELLI

I

I n a recent discussion of ‘Globalizationand the Future of English’ published

in a special issue of PMLA on ‘Globalizing Literary Studies’, Paul Jay
argues that in order to survive the challenge of globalisation and its
progressive overwhelming of local subjectivities, identities and ideologies,
as well as the cultural forms historically defined by the boundaries of the
modem nation-state, English literature curricula ought to be reconfigured in
ways that move beyond the national(ist) paradigm which, especially in
canonical areas of the discipline, has been traditionally associated with the
signifier ‘English Literature’: the literature of England or Great Britain, or
American literature. Nor, Jay adds, is this just a matter of enlarging the
meaning of the signifier to include other regional literatures or literatures
produced in diasporic conditions-though this is per se a preferable option
to approaching the latter as culturally discrete, autonomous formations to be
positioned in sub-disciplinary locations defined vis-2-vis the traditional areas
of the canon. The syllabus reform called for by the increasingly globalised
context of our disciplinary endeavours should also, indeed primarily, involve
a revision of traditional models of literary history: grounded in the
understanding that globalisation is a long historical process that has been
evolving since at least the early modem period, this revision should aim to
give ‘primaryattention to the historical role literaturehas had in global systems
of cultural exchange and recognize that this exchange has always been
multidirectional’(42). This, however, does not mean doing away with regional
or national literatures once and for all, nor, for that matter, downplaying the
powerful cultural identities and attachments that the nation state still
represents in most parts of the world. Rather, the call here is for a properly
historicist approach that emphasises how national paradigms are historically,
politically and culturally constructed, functional rather than normative.
58 ENGLISH STUDIES INAFFWA47.2

Such proposals are, of course, not new: one is reminded, for instance, of
Edward Said’s suggestion, in Culture and Imperialism, that we reread the
Western cultural archive ‘not univocally but contrapuntally’, so as to
articulate on the one hand the interconnectedness between metropolitan
history and ‘those other histories against which (and together with which)
the dominant discourse acts’ (59), and on the other ‘how writers and scholars
from the formerly colonized world have imposed their diverse histories on,
have mapped their local geographies in, the great canonical texts of the
European centre’ (62). But they undoubtedly take on new urgency under the
rubric of globalisation, which demands that we rethink how we relate to the
cultural past in an attempt to cross the discrete national or regional boundaries
that have traditionally delimited the ‘territories of knowledge’ (Gunn 18) in
our disciplinary formation. Jay’s emphases on the long history of globalisation
and the multidirectional cultural processes that it has engendered are therefore
all the more apposite and worth retaining. They remind us that the project of
globalising English literary studies runs the risk (unwittingly or otherwise),
in the f i s t place, of replacing, as Said observes in an intervention included in
the same volume, ‘the old authoritative, Eurocentric models’ with research
and pedagogical agendas that no less problematically reflect the ‘new
ascendancy of a globalized, postmodem consciousness from which.. .the
gravity of history has been excised’ (66),and hence tend to erase or obliterate
the fact that cultural integration has often taken place, and still takes place,
under regimes of inequality, domination and epistemic violence; and, second,
of reproducing a one-dimensional, hierarchical, diffusionist ‘centre-
periphery’ model-autonomous development at the centre, diffusion of
development to the periphery-of globalisation as Westernisation, whereby
the periphery is reduced to a site of passive reception and consumption of
imported, globally hegemonic cultural forms.
Indeed, these suggestions and concerns are particularly relevant, I would
argue, to the area of study in the discipline that is now commonly labelled
‘postcolonial Shakespeare’, which, by focusing on the ways in which the
encounter between Europe, America, Africa and the East in the early modem
period contributed to the shaping of Shakespeare’sworks, the global presence
of Shakespeare under colonialism and imperialism, and the possibilities of
postcolonial critique, interpretation and reinvention of both the Shakespeare
text and the signifier ‘Shakespeare’,provides an ideal context for relocating
English literary history in an intercultural and transnational framework.’ In
this paper, which is intended as a critical contribution to this field, then, I
want to offer a reading of Aim6 Ctsaire’s play Une tempzte, subtitled d ’ a p r h
“la Tempite de Shakespeare-Adaptation pour un the‘citre n&gre ( A
”

Tempest: Based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest-Adaptation f o r a Negro

Theatre),* that attempts to grapple with the interpretative and pedagogical
problems involved in trying to account for the ‘multidirectional’ cultural
exchange that this work enacts.
SHAKESPEAREAND TRANSCULTURATION 59

A Tempest, the last instalment of a dramatic trilogy produced by the

Martiniquan poet in collaboration with the French theatre director Jean-
Michel S e r r e a ~ was
, ~ originally written for an international cultural festival
in Hammameth, Tunisia, in 1969. In the same year, two other West Indian
writers, the Barbadian Edward Brathwaite and the Cuban Roberto Fernhdez
Retamar, would respectively publish a book of poems, Islands, among which
there is one dedicated to Caliban, and an essay, ‘Cuba hasta Fidel’ (‘Cuba
until Fidel’), where the origin of the name Caliban is associated with the
Caribbean (Retamar, Cuba hasta Fidell2- 13).Along with George Lamming’s
collection of essays The Pleasures of Exile and Retamar’s widely acclaimed
article ‘Calibh’, to take the best-known examples, these are among the radical
re-readings and rewritings of The Tempest that, around the 1960s, by
refashioning Shakespeare’s character, the ‘salvage and deformed slave’
Caliban, as the symbol of nowEuropean identity and desire, marked a turning
point in the history of the reception of the play.“ Not only did these writings
offer a radically revisionist approach to The Tempest that brushed against the
grain of the then dominant, or ‘Prosperian’, interpretation of the text
(Bate 241), thus remaking the play into something altogether new, but they
also represent a complex and still challenging model of transcultural work:
the work of writers and intellectuals from colonial regions who, to adapt
Mary Louise Pratt’s definition of ‘transculturation’, created new cultural
products and phenomena by selecting and inventing ‘from materials
transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture’ (6).5
Within the embattled field of Shakespearean criticism and pedagogy, in
particular, the challenge presented by this body of work lies in its demand
that we return to the Shakespeare text (Pratt’s ‘materials’) not as a fetished
aesthetic artefact, but as a cultural object caught up in complex processes of
intercultural and transnational exchange, adaptation and transformation.6
CCsaire’s account of the genesis of his ‘adaptation’ of The Tempest is
especially interesting with respect to this. By his own admission, Ctsaire
had originally intended simply to translate Shakespeare’s play into French,
but, he notes, ‘When the work was done, I realised there was not much
Shakespeare left’ (‘Un pokte politique’ 3 1; my translation). This is no doubt
a playful statement-are we to believe that he became aware that he had come
up with a flagrantly irreverent, radical rewriting of the play only after the
fact?-nevertheless the proposition that A Tempest originated as a translation
of Shakespeare’s text raises a number of important questions regarding the
status of Ctsaire’s vis-a-vis Shakespeare’s play.
As recent translation theories suggest, translation is a mode of textual
intervention and displacement, a recoding and rewriting of the text akin to
literary criticism and interpretation which, crucially, involves much more
than language transfer: translation, contemporary scholarship in the field never
60 ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA 47.2

tires of reminding us, ‘is always embedded in cultural and political systems,
and in history’ (Bassnett and Trivedi 6). As such, it ‘involves questions of
power relations, and of forms of domination’, the ‘power structure of acts of
appropriation’ and the subject-object relation on which they are predicated:
‘Someone is translating something or someone. Someone or something is
being translated, transformed from a subject to an object’ (Young,
Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction 140-41). In AndrC Lefevere’s
words, translation has traditionally functioned, in the construction and
development of literary systems and cultural canons, as a form of
‘acculturation’used ‘to adapt what is “foreign” (in time and/or geographical
location) to the norms of the receiving culture’ (88). If CCsaire had intended
his translation in this sense, as a mode of cultural appropriation and
refamiliarisation, then the suggestion that the end result was ousting
Shakespeare from the text, getting rid of most of what was Shakespearean
about it, would seem to indicate that for CCsaire The Tempest had become
untranslatable, or, to be more precise, that the process of cultural translation
required abandoning Shakespeare’s text altogether. But in fact A Tempest
performs a more complex mode of cultural negotiation than the one delineated
by terms such as acculturation or appropriation; one that strives to do away
with or at least complicate the binary division between ‘foreign’and ‘receiving’
cultures, even as the political content of the play makes clear that, under
colonialism and neo-colonialism, this division is produced by and replicates
the violent asymmetries of the existing power relations and forms of
domination.
In an interview released before the opening night of A Tempest, CCsaire
stated: ‘I believe in the mixing of all cultures. A great work of art such as
Shakespeare’s play belongs to all humanity-and, as such, it can undergo as
many reinterpretations as do the myths of classical antiquity’ (quoted in
Belhassen 176). CCsaire understood his ‘reinterpretation’ of Shakespeare’s
text as the product of a cultural encounter. Accordingly, he drew attention to
the complex cultural transactions and transformations at work in his
engagement with Shakespeare by producing a multifaceted, self-reflexive
literary artefact that constantly foregrounds the intertextual relations with
The Tempest, while it undermines the latter’s status as the ultimate or master
text (so that, for instance, when in 1998 A Tempest was first produced in
England, at the Gate theatre in London’s Notting Hill, amidst wide critical
acclaim, it was described as ‘not simply a new reading of Shakespeare but an
original play of astonishing power’; quoted in Crispin 149).
In the same interview, CCsaire remarks:

I continually broke away from the original. I was trying to ‘de-

mythify’ the tale. To me Prosper0 is the complete totalitarian.
I am always surprised when others consider him the wise man
SHAKESPEAREAND T R A N S C U L . T I 0 N 61

who ‘forgives’. What is most obvious, even in Shakespeare’s

version, is the man’s absolute will to power. Prosper0 is the
man of cold reason, the man of methodical conquest-in other
words, a portrait of the ‘enlightened’European. And I see the
whole play in such terms: the ‘civilized’European world coming
face to face for the first time with the world of primitivism
and magic. Let’s not hide the fact that in Europe the world of
reason has inevitably led to various kinds of totalitarianism.
(quoted in Belhassen 176)

CCsaire not only reconfigures ‘the tale’ as a dramatisation of the colonial

encounter, but, importantly, in doing so he disentangles it from any specific
temporal and locational context-about which, to be sure, Shakespeare’s
‘original’ is also notoriously elusive-to reread the play through the lens of
a telescoped historical vision spanning the history of modernity all the way
to the present:

Demystified, the play [is] essentially about the master-slave

relation, a relation that is still alive and which, in my opinion,
explains a good deal of contemporary history: in particular
colonial history, the history of the United States. Wherever
there are multiracial societies, the same drama can be found, I
think. (quoted in Livingston 192)

The f i s t performance of A Tempest was set in the United States, using the
visual climate of the Western and also recalling, through the opposition
between Caliban and Ariel’s attitudes to Prospero, the contemporary debate
in the American black liberation movement emblematised by the figures of
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.’ But, as other commentators have noted,
the play, although ‘purportedly representative of black America, exhibits
elements of all three major theatres of the Africa homeland and diaspora’-
Africa, the Caribbean and the USA-so that ‘the central paradigm of the
colonizerkolonized relation, as it is constructed in A Tempest, embraces the
totality of the black experience in the new world’ (Davis, Aim6 C6saire 156-
57). It follows that the play demands that we put it simultaneously onto two
intertextual axes: one that connects it to the Shakespeare text and the history
of its reception, and another that relates it to contemporary international
debates and struggles over race and colonialism.
By the time Ctsaire wrote his adaptation, these axes had in fact already
crossed: most significantly in Octave Mannoni’s controversial study
Psychologie de la colonisation, published in 1950 and subsequently
translated in English as Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of
Colonization, which CCsaire’s former pupil, Frantz Fanon, trenchantly
62 ENGLISH STUDIES INAFlUCA47.2

criticises in Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks)

(83-108), and to which Ctsaire himself devotes some of the most pungent
polemical passages of his Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on
Colonialism)-where he dismisses Mannoni’s theory that colonialism can
be explained in terms of neurotic tendencies, ‘Prospero’s complex’ and
‘Caliban’s complex’, that lock coloniser and colonised in a relation of
reciprocal dependence, and that lead the colonised to accept and even require
the ‘paternal authority’of the coloniser, as a recycling and embellishing, with
the new vocabulary of psychoanalysis and existentialism, of the most ‘down-
at-heel clichts’ and ‘absurd prejudices’ (40). however, if both Fanon and
Ctsaire unequivocally reject Mannoni’s use of ethnopsychologicalcategories
to explain away colonialism’s racism and economic exploitation, they share
with him a concern with the psychosocial bond between colonised and
coloniser, which throughout Ctsaire’s career would remain one of the central
objects of his poetic, as well as political, activity.

m
It is in effect not possible to discuss Ctsaire’s poetic or dramatic work without
considering the concept of nkgritude, the term he first used in Cuhier d’un
retour a u pays natal (Return to My Native Land),8 whose first draft was
published in 1939, and which would subsequently become associated with
the eponymous cultural and political movement. As A Tempest helps to
illustrate, there are a number of tensions inherent in nkgritude, which has
been often criticised because of its alleged essentialism, anti-racist racism,
romantic nativism and political ambiguity. The phrase ‘anti-racistracism’, in
particular, comes from Jean-Paul Sartre, who, on the other hand, tried to
rescue nkgritude by describing it ‘as the minor term of a dialectical progress’
in which it represents the moment of negativity, the negation of white
supremacy, thus postulating its transitory, instrumental character, its being
‘the root of its own destruction’ (quoted in Fanon 132-33). This is in fact the
logic and historical movement poetically prefigured in Return to My Native
Land, where the initial indictment of Western civilisation and celebration of
non-European cultures are followed by Ctsaire’s hopeful vision of a
postcolonial future in which ‘aucune race ne posskde le monopole de la
beautt, de l’intelligence, de la force / et il est place pour tous au rendez-vous
de la conqugte’ (‘no race has a monopoly of beauty, intelligence, strength /
and there is a room for all at the rendez-vous of conquest’) (138-40); and
where, moreover, the perception of the new possibilities for liberation and
empowerment that constitutes the climax of the poem is accompanied by the
exclamation, repeated twice, ‘je dis hurrah! la vieille ntgritude
progressivementse cadavtrise’ (‘I say hurrah! /the old Negritude progressively
decomposes’) (142; translation altered).
SHAKESPEAREAND TRANSCULTURATION 63

Sartre is thus correct when he speaks of a dialectical progress, in that

CCsaire’s construction is distinctively Hegelian, striving, through the labour
of the negative, the negation of the negation, towards the universal of non-
racialism, or what Robert Young suggestively describes as ‘a third space in
which the antithetical values of racism and anti-racism produce a society
without racism and a new humanism in which the human would be at last
universally defined’ (Postcolqnialism: An Historical Introduction 266). In
Ctsaire’s own words, ‘if ntgritude involves taking root in a particular soil
[un enracinementparticulier], negritude is also transcendence and expansion
into the universal’ (quoted in Davis, Aime‘ Ce‘saire 53). This soil is the
rediscovery of the history and heritage of African and Negro civilizations, a
rediscovery that corresponds to ‘a concrete rather than abstract coming to
consciousness’ (Ce‘saire, ‘An Interview’ 77), an historically situated, self-
consciously construed cultural lineage and identity which, as Benita Parry
notes, ‘is not a recovery of a pre-existent state, but a textually invented history,
an identity effected through figurative operations, and a tropological
construction of blackness as a sign of the colonized condition and its refusal’
(45). In other words, this construction, as CCsaire would often be at pains to
explain,did not involve nostalgia for pre-colonial lost origins or a metaphysics
of identity manifesting itself as ethnic essentialism. Rather, at least for
Ctsaire, ne‘gritude,through the positive reaffirmation of a distinctive identity
that is denied dignity even as it is reified through racism and erased by
assimilation, prefigures the possibility of a new, culturally inclusive and
socially advanced synthesis:
For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt
to repeat the past, but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that
we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for
exoticism. Nor is it the present colonial society that we wish
to prolong, the most putrid carrion ever rotten under the sun. It
is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our
brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of
modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days.
(Discourse on Colonialism 31)
Yet Ce‘saire’s understanding of nkgritude as a historical and cultural concept-
as opposed to LCopold Senghor’s more essentialist, biologically determined
version-oexists in a complex way with the affirmation of a more existential
and emotional side to this term that resists theorisation and political
rationalisation. As Ctsaire put it, recalling his early affinities with Senghor,
‘You either felt black or did not feel black‘ (‘An Interview’ 78). Furthermore,
although strategically deployed to counteract the Eurocentric claims used to
justify the civilising mission of the West that CCsaire excoriates in his
Discourse-‘They talk to me about civilization,I talk about proletarianization
64 ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA 47.2

and mystification’ (22)-his conception of distinctive African and Negro

civilisations claims to be historically rooted in the salient and unique traits
that distinguish them, such as ‘the rejection of abstraction’ and the consequent
‘very African affirmation of the feeling of the primacy of life’ (quoted in
Davis, Non-Vicious Circle 19), or the notion that these civilisations were
intrinsically anti-capitalist, democratic, cooperative and fraternal (Discourse
on Colonialism 23).
The same political tensions and theoretical impurities that inform CCsaire’s
earlier articulations of nkgritude also resurface in A Tempest, where the list
of dramatis personae designates Caliban as an ‘esclavenbgre’ (‘negro slave’),
while Ariel is identified as an ‘esclave, ethniquement un mulltre’ (‘slave,
ethnically mulatto’), and also includes an addition to Shakespeare’splay, ‘Eshu,
dieu-diablenbgre’ (‘Eshu, a negro devil-god’).As I mentioned above, Ctsaire
said that for him ‘the tale’ enacts the encounter of Western civilisation with
the world of primitivism and magic represented by Caliban, ‘the man who is
still close to his beginnings, whose link with the natural world has not yet
been broken’, and who ‘can still participate in a world of marvels, whereas
his master can merely “create” them through his acquired knowledge’ (quoted
in Belhassen 176). The play thus revisits what is perhaps the defining topos
of Ctsaire’s poetics, the one most famously elaborated in the much
anthologised lines from Return to My Native Land, where, after the long
journey of self-discovery narrated in the earlier sections of the poem, the
speaker is finally able poetically to apprehend a positive conception of
nkgritude, which is first introduced in negative terms, as the other of ‘le
monde blanc / horriblement las de son effort immense’ (‘the white world /
horribly fatigued by its immense efforts’) (1 18-19), and then dialectically
turned into (self-)affirmation:

Eia pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien invent6

pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien explor6
pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien domptC

mais ils s’abandonment, saisis, B l’essence de toute chose

ignorants des surfaces mais saisis par le mouvement de toute
chose
insoucieux de dompter, mais jouant le jeu du monde
vtritablement les fils aints du monde
poureux B tous les souffles du monde
aire fraternelle de tous les souffles du monde
lit sans drain de toutes les eaux du monde
Ctincelle du feu sacrC du monde
chair de la chair du monde palpitant du mouvement mSme du
monde!
Tibde petit matin de vertus ancestrales
SHAKESPEAREANTI TRANSCUL,TURATION 65

Eia for those who invented nothing

for those who have never discovered
for those who have never conquered

but, struck, deliver themselves to the essence of all things,

ignorant of surfaces, but taken by the very movement of things
not caring to conquer, but playing the game of the world
truly the elder sons of the world
porous to all the breath of the world
fraternal space of all the breath of the world
bed without drain9 in all the waters of the world
spark of the sacred fire of the world
panting with the very movement of the world
Tepid dawn of ancestral virtues (117-19)

In A Tempest the basic antithetical dualism that produces the thesis-

antithesis sequence of this dialectical movement is represented through
Caliban’s insurrection, here portrayed as the revolt of the forces of nature
against a Prospero who, in Caliban’s own phrase, has become ‘anti-Nature’:

Arribre, vipbres, scorpions et htrissons! Toutes b&tespiquantes,

mordantes and perforantes! A dad! A fibvre! A venin! Arribre!
Ou si vous y tenez, pour me ltcher, dtcouvrez-vouz une langue
favorable, tel le crapaud dont la pure bave sait me bercer,
propice, des songes charmants du futur. Car c’est pour nous
tous, que j’affronte aujourd’hui l’ennemi commun. Oui,
htrdditaire et commun.. .Tiens, un htrisson! Mon doux petit.. .
Qu’un animal, si je puis dire, naturel, s’en prenne B moi le jour
ou je pars B l’assaut de Prospero, plus souvent! Prospero, c’est
l’anti-Nature.Moi je dis: A bas l’anti-Nature! Voyez, B ces mots,
notre htrisson se hCrisse? Non, il rentre ses piquants! C’est
Fa, la Nature! C’est gentil, en somme! Suffit de savoir lui parler!
Allons, la voie est degage: En route! (74-75)

Away, vipers, scorpions and porcupines! All stinging, biting,

stickingbeasts! Sting, fever, venom, away! Or if you really want
to lick me, do it with a gentle tongue, like the toad whose pure
drool soothes me with the sweet songs of the future. For it is
for you, for all of us, that I go forth today to face the common
enemy. Yes, hereditary and common.. .. Look, a porcupine!
Sweet little thing.. .. How can any animal, any natural animal, if
I may put it that way, go against me on the day I’m setting forth
to conquer Prospero, unimaginable! Prospero is anti-Nature.
And I say: down with anti-Nature!And does the porcupine bristle
66 ENGLISH STUDIES INAFIUCA47.2

his spines at that? No, he smoothes them down! That’s nature!

It’s gentle, in a word! You just need to know how to talk to it!
So come on, the way is clear: off we go!

Caliban, the supposedly quasi-animalistic slave, in A Tempest embodies the

synthesis of culture and nature, or better a culture that can still harmoniously
coexist with nature, and that is rooted iq.the repressed African animistic
religious mythologies and traditions that return to haunt the island in the
form of the Yoruba god Eshu, who, singing obscene, priapic songs-‘Eshu
est un joyeux luron, / de son pknis il frappe / I1 frappe / I1 frappe.. .’ (‘Eshu is
a feisty lad, / and with his penis he smites / He smites / He smites.. .’) (70)-
disrupts the masque organised by Prospero to celebrate Miranda and
Ferdinand’s wedding.
But at the same time the assumption that these qualities represent the
attributes of a particular race or civilisation is undercut by the play’s depiction
of racial identity as performance. This is foregrounded at the outset, in the
prelude, where ‘le meneur de jeu’ (‘the master of ceremonies’) invites the
actors to choose a character and the corresponding mask:

Allons, Messieurs, servez-vous.. . A chacun son personage et h

chaque personage son masque. Toi, Prospero? Pourquoi pas?
I1 y a des volontks de puissance qui s’ignorent! Toi, Caliban?
Tiens, tiens, c’est rCvClateur! Toi, Ariel! Je n’y vois aucun
inconvenient. Et Stkphano? Et Trinculo? Pas d’amateurs? Oui!
A la bonne heure! I1 faut de tout pour faire un monde. (9)

Come gentlemen, help yourselves. To each his character and

to each character its mask. You, Prospero? Why not?
Sometimes the will to power is unconscious.LoYou, Caliban?
Well, that’s revealing. You, Ariel? Fine with me. And what about
Stephano,Trinculo?Nobody? Ah, just in time! It takes all kinds
to make a world.

Even though it prescribes an all-black cast and specifies Caliban and Ariel’s
racial identities, through the use of masks the play denaturalises the
construction of race by drawing attention to the non-identity between
performers and characters, and therefore to the artificial mechanisms through
which identity is constructed onstage-that is to say to the play’s performance
of (racial) identity. The political implications of this staging manoeuvre, in
the context of CCsaire’s rewriting of The Tempest as an allegory of the colonial
encounter and the mastedslave dialectic,ll appear quite straightforward: by
highlighting the constructedness of racial identity, the masks, as Timothy
Scheie notes, ‘serve to reveal race as a historical regime of power relations,
and to alienate the characters’ assumption that the status quo of race relations
SHAKESPEAREAND TRANSCULTURATION 67

on the island is somehow “natural”’ (Scheie 22-23). The masked performance

is therefore fully part of CCsaire’s attempt to ‘de-mythify the tale’, which,
crucially, involves the demystification of Prospero’s white magic, the
ostensible source of his power in Shakespeare’s version, that in A Tempest is
turned into a technologically advanced repressive apparatus-‘Son arsenal
antiBmeteus’ (‘his anti-riot arsenal’) (77).
Having been stripped of his mage’s aura and capacity to control nature
through his purportedly benevolent art, CCsaire’s Prospero becomes the
embodiment of the materialistic side of Western civilisation, of a post-
enlightenment world of cold, instrumental reason that, CCsaire remarks, ‘has
inevitably led to various kinds of totalitarianism’ (quoted in Belhassen 176).
The salient traits of this characterisation are brought immediately to the fore,
during Prospero’s first exchange with Miranda, when he rehearses for her
the story of his usurpation. The rapture in ‘secret studies’ that in The Tempest
had led to Prospero’s deposition (1.2.74-77), in A Tempest is dissociated
from the high humanist ideals of the ‘liberal arts’ and pursuit of knowledge,
and reinscribed instead in a narrative of naked power struggle and imperial
conquest:

quand ils surent que par mes calculs,j’avais situC avec prkcision
ces terres qui depuis des sikcles sont promises h la qu&tede
l’homme, et que je commenqais mes prkparatifs pour en prendre
possession, ils ourdirent un complot pour me voler cet empire
h naitre. (20)

when they learned that through my studies and experiments I

had managed to discover the exact location of these lands many
had sought for centuries, and that I was making preparations to
set forth to take possession of them, they hatched a scheme to
steal my as-yet-unborn empire from me.

As in Caliban’s case, however, CCsaire’s deceptively simple portrayal of

Prospero as a callous, self-righteous colonial oppressor driven by will to
power and his own sense of displaced entitlement opens up a number of
interpretative possibilities: is this version of Prospero one that has always
been latent in the play?I2 Or is it a product of colonial history, the
representation of a later, more aggressive phase of colonialism and
imperialism than the one documented by the early modern colonial narratives
that, as much recent criticism of the play insists, ‘provide The Tempest’s
dominant con-texts’ (Barker and Hulme 198)? Moreover, as Prospero is
performed by a black actor presumably donning a white mask (although
Prospero’s race is not specified, this is the obvious assumption; see Rix 242),
is this Prospero as he is perceived and reinterpreted by his racial and
civilisational other?
68 ENGLISH STUDIES INAFRICA47.2

I would argue that in fact one of CCsaire’s main achievements is that he

resists foreclosing the interpretative possibilities that these questions
generate: Prospero is, of course, Shakespeare’s character; as well as the
subject of a colonialist discourse that has been dissociated from whatever
legitimating narrative it could have produced at its inception as journey of
discovery or civilising mission; and he is seen through, produced by, the
gaze of the other-CCsaire, a black actor, Caliban-turned into a stereotyped
characterisation so as to show ‘how colonization works to decivilize the
colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word’ (Discourse on
Colonialism 13). But the latter does not represent a simple reversal or
negation of Shakespeare’sversion. Rather, CCsaire’s adaptation, as it revisits
The Tempest from the oppositional perspective of the colonised, constantly
re-enacts and complicates its relation to the Shakespeare text, refusing ‘easy
dichotomy’ (Dayan 129), and asking instead that the two versions of ‘the tale’
are read in conjunction, so that the possibilities for their mutual articulation
of meaning, interpretation and history are kept open.13

A Tempest’s most critical deviation from Shakespeare is probably the ending

of the play, where the ‘psychodrama’announced in the opening stage direction
comes to a head. Challenged by Caliban-‘Je suis sQrque tu ne partiras pas!
/ Ca me fait rigoler ta ‘mission’ / Ta ‘vocation’! Ta vocation est de
m’emmerder!’ (‘I am sure you won’t leave! / You make me laugh with your
‘mission’/ your ‘vocation’! /Your vocation is to give me shit!’) (89)-in the
final scene Prospero is unable to abandon the island and return to his dukedom
with Miranda and the other Italian nobles. ‘Mon destin est ici’ (‘My fate is
here’), he declares, ‘Je ne le fuirai pas’ (‘I shall not run from it’) (90). And as
he is left alone with Caliban, he threatens ‘Et maintenant, Caliban, h nous
deux! / ...je forcerai ma nature indulgente et dksormais h ta violence / je
rkpondrai par la violence!’ (‘And now Caliban, it’s you and me! / ...I shall set
aside my indulgent nature / and henceforth will answer your violence with
violence!’) (91). But his defiant mood rapidly turns into despair. The stage
directions read:
Du temps s’e‘coule, symbolise‘ par le rideau qui descend b
demi et remonte. Dans une pe‘nombre, Prospero, l’air veilli
et las. Ses gestes sont automatiques et e‘trique‘s, son langage
appauvri et ste‘re‘otype‘. (91)
Time passes, symbolised by the curtain being lowered
halfway and reraised. In semi-darkness, Prospero, aged and
weary. His gestures are jerky and automatic, his language
impoverished and stereotyped.
SHAKESPEAREAND TRANSCULTURATION 69

In the last few lines, Prospero repeats to himself, in an increasingly desperate

attempt to hold on to both his power and sense of self, ‘Mais je me
dbfendrai.. .Je ne laisserai pas pCrir mon oeuvre’ (‘I shall stand firm.. .I shall
not let my work perish’), and then, whilst ‘I1 tire dans toutes les directions’
(‘Hefires in all directions’), ‘Je dCfenderai la civilisation!’ (‘I shall defend
civilisation!’). But he is aware that ‘le climat a changt’ (‘the climate has
changed’). Meanwhile, ‘On entend au loin parmi le bruit du ressac et des
piaillements d’oiseaux les dCbris du chant de Caliban. LA LIBERTE OHE,
LA LIBERTE!’ (‘In the distance, above the sound of the surfand the chirping
of birds, we hear snatches of Caliban’s song. FREEDOM HI-DAY,
FREEDOM HI-DAY’) (92).
This rewriting of The Tempest’s dinouement clearly points to the
allegorical side to CCsaire’s adaptation, ‘where the address is outwards, either
historically or politically’ (Hulme 224). This is in fact how the finale of
A Tempest has usually been read: either as a didactic statement that celebrates
colonialism’s imminent demise and the success of ‘Caliban’suncompromising
strategies’ (Nixon 573); or, much more convincingly, as a pessimistic
assessment of the legacy of colonialism and the pitfalls of decolonisation
and neo-colonialism, a ‘painful reminder of what has not happened’
(Dayan 138), that ‘for many peoples the era of “postcolonialism” has not yet
dawned’ (Rix 249). But what is most interesting for my argument here is the
link between the allegorical dimension of the ddnouement and CCsaire’s own
engagement with Shakespeare’splay.
Anticipating one of the major planks of later ‘political’ criticism of The
Tempest (see, for instance, Brown 68-69; Greenblatt 570-7 l), CCsaire
construes the relationship between coloniser and colonised in terms of a
complex and conflicted but deep bond through which Prospero and Caliban’s
identities become interstitial: ‘Eh bien, mon vieux Caliban, nous ne sommes
plus que deux sur cette ile, plus que toi et moi. Toi et moi! Toi-Moi! Moi-
Toi!’ (‘Ah well, my old Caliban, there is just two of us on this island, just you
and me. You and me! You-Me! Me-You!’) (92). As Joan Dayan has suggested,
Ctsaire ‘recognises the force of mutuality, the knot of reciprocity between
master and slave, between a prior “classic” and his response to it. This labour
of reciprocity accounts for the complexities of CCsaire’s transformation: a
labour that defies any simple opposition between black and white, master and
slave, original and adaptation, authentic and fake’ (Dayan 130). Indeed, the
complexities of this transformation still challenge us to find an adequate
critical and theoretical vocabulary and pedagogical practice-as is shown by
the ongoing debate over the conceptualframework we should employ in reading
the body of revisionary work to which CCsaire’s play belongs.
In his influential article ‘Caribbean and African Appropriations of The
Tempest’, that first introduced these writings into Anglo-American
Shakespeare studies, Rob Nixon spoke of ‘transgressiveappropriations’(558)
in order to emphasise that radical anti-colonialintellectuals such as Lamming,
70 ENGLISH STUDIES INAFRICA47.2

CCsaire or Retamar re-used The Tempest for indigenous political interests

and cultural needs, to amplify their call for decolonisation, thus integrating a
Western canonical text into their struggle (see also Bowen). Peter Hulme,
on the other hand, has more recently pointed out that the category
‘appropriation’ has been conveniently used by ‘the institution of Shakespeare
studies.. .to sidetrack “anti-colonial” readings of The Tempest...(in effect
saying “very interesting but not actually speaking to the real Shakespearean
text”)’. And I agree with Hulme that there are significant ‘pedagogical and
political advantages’ in maintaining that these readings speak to the ‘real’
text-‘intervening in a key area of the educational system and tackling
mainstream literary criticism on that criticism’s chosen ground’ (233).
Appropriation,however, makes its presence felt in different ways: Jonathan
Bate’s best-seller The Genius of Shakespeare, for instance, includes a
discussion of ‘the remarkable creative’ work done around The Tempest in the
1950s and 1960s by ‘self-proclaimed West Indian Calibans like George
Lamming, Edward Kamau Brathwaite,Aim6 CCsaire, and Roberto Fernindez
Retamar’ (241), where the key argument is that The Tempest has lent itself to
be reinvented as the literary expression ‘of a recovered black identity’ (250).
In fact, Bate further suggests that this work is testimony ‘to Shakespeare’s
continuing centrality to cultural understanding even as the dominant
Eurocentric tradition comes under attack’, so that ‘[plerhaps the most
astonishing thing about Shakespeare’s achievementis that it contained enough
for him to become...a voice of what we now call multiculturalism’ (248).
Shakespeare’s universality triumphs again.
But the interesting aspect is what happens to Shakespeare in the process:
how, for instance, CCsaire’s rereading of The Tempest through the lens of
nkgritude reinserts the play in new cultural frames of reference and
intertextual constellations. As I have tried to show, the suggestion that anti-
colonial and postcolonial appropriations of The Tempest bear witness to the
play’s cross-cultural appeal needs to be supplemented with a more nuanced
theory of transculturation: the point is not simply that Shakespeare’s play
presents such a universal theme that it can absorb a whole range of new
meanings and cultural references, nor that A Tempest represents a labour of
destruction that disintegrates the original. Rather, in critical and pedagogical
practice, Ctsaire’s play calls for a recognition of what at the beginning of
this paper was described as the ‘multidirectional’cultural exchange that this
work performs, one in which Shakespeare’s text and cultural capital are not
so much destroyed as refashioned, transculturated, turned into the agents of
a transformative process in which the pre-existing oppositions-between the
canonical text and its anti-colonial adaptation, between Western and peripheral,
coloniser and native cultures-are put under pressure. CCsaire’s ‘labour’,
then, invites us to revisit Shakespeare’splay itself, The Tempest, as a cultural
object that belongs to, and has been transformed by its encounter with a
multiplicity of transnational cultural formations: not just as a Western
SHAKESPEAREAND TRANSCULTURATION 71

canonical text that gets appropriated in non canonical ways, but as something
more complex and interesting, something which we may call a transcultural
text.

NOTES

This paper was written under the auspices of a PostdoctoralFellowship funded

by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I wish to thank David Attwell and Shane
Graham for their comments, and Alexia Vassilatos for her help with the
translation from French.

1. As Jay notes, globalisation ‘is, after all, a process deeply connected

with the shifting fate of the nation under colonizationand decolonization’
(45).
2. Although I have consulted and often rely upon Richard Miller’s original
English translation (see CCsaire, A Tempest), I have altered those
passages where I find it unsatisfactory. In his version, for instance, Miller
translates ‘nkgre’ as ‘black’, thus editing out the reference to CCsaire’s
concept of nkgritude.
3. The first two parts are La tragkdie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of
King Christophe), a dramatisation of the political career of Henri
Christophe, the Haitian anti-colonial leader turned into tyrant; and Une
saison au Congo ( A Season in the Congo), which portrays the rise and
fall of the Congolese and Pan-Africanist politician Patrice Lumumba.
4. These were not, to be sure, the first readings that connected The Tempest
to colonial questions. As Barbara Bowen reminds us, ‘The earliest work
in the tradition is by the Nicaraguan poet Rubin Dm’o, whose “El Triunfo
de Caliban”, an indictment of US imperialismin Latin America, appeared
in 1898’ (95). But it is in the decade of the 1960s that, at least in
Caribbean anti-colonialist intellectual circles, ‘the new reading of The
Tempest established its hegemony’ (Retamar, ‘Caliban’ 13).
5. Pratt speaks, specifically, of ‘subordinated or marginal groups’ (6).
Whether these finely educated, mostly middle class intellectuals can be
identified with, or even be said, in an unproblematic way, to ‘speak for’
any such group, is of course debatable. But I still find the term
transculturation helpful in this context, for it conveys the idea of a
dynamic model of cultural exchange that resists homogenisation through
the absorption of one agent of the exchange into the other. The term
was originally coined, in 1940, by the Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz,
who, in Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, chose it to ‘express
the varied phenomena that come about in Cuba as a result of the extremely
complex transmutations of culture that have taken place here’ (98).
6. Peter Hulme has remarked that the institution of Shakespeare studies
72 ENGLISH STUDIES lNAFRICA 47.2

has for many years ignored or marginalised this body of work, thus
missing the radical opportunities that it affords (233). I support Hulme’s
observation and shall return to it in my conclusion. Even now, although
in discussions of postcolonial approaches to The Tempest CCsaire’s play
is regularly acknowledged, no more than a handful of readings, as
opposed to passing references, have appeared in English.
7. ‘The dominated can adopt several attitudes. One is Caliban’s revolt.
Another is Ariel’s, whose path is more complicated-but is not
necessarily one of submission, that would be too simple.. .. If you want
me to specify.. .I’d say that there is Malcolm X’s attitude, and then there
is Martin Luther King’s’ (CCsaire, quoted in Livingston 192).
8. The title of the poem has been translated in various ways: Notebook of a
Return to the Native Land, Statement of a Return to the Country Where
I Was Born and Journal of a Homecomirtg. I,use the title adopted in the
authoritative bilingual edition published by Editions Prksence Africaine.
9. I take this curious phrase to mean something like ‘undrained river bed’,
but I have not altered Snyder’s translation because the original French
also sounds rather strange and uncommon.
10. Cf. the reference to Nietzsche in Discourse on Colonialism: ‘Therefore,
comrade, you will hold as enemies-loftily, lucidly, consistently-not
only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only prefects who torture
and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, check-licking politicians and
subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous
journalists, goitrous academicians, wreathed in dollars and stupidity,
ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian
theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of
Nietzsche’ (33).
11. ‘Caliban is also a rebel-the positive hero, in a Hegelian sense. The
slave is always more important than his master-for it is the slave who
makes history’ (CCsaire, quoted in Belhassen 176).
12. See, for instance, Paul Brown’s influential essay “’This Thing of Darkness
I Acknowledge Mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’,
where Prospero’s magic is interpreted as a discursive mediation that
serves to reinscribe his story in a colonialist narrative: ‘Prosper0 f ist
tells of his loss of civil power and then of its renewal, in magic, upon
the.margina1space of the island. This reinvestiture in civil power through
the medium of the non-civil is an essentially colonialist discourse’ (59).
13. The multiple levels of transculturation and displacement taking place
between the two texts raise a number of questions regarding historical
and geographical contexts that are beyond the scope of this paper. Some
of these, however, must be kept in mind: Shakespeare’s play, often read
as an allegory of early English colonialism, involves not English lords
but Italian aristocrats, and is set on an unspecified and remote island;
moreover, Ctsaire’s adaptation of The Tempest translates the play not
SHAKESPEAREAND TRANSCULTIJRATION 73

merely from metropole to colonial periphery, and not merely from

English to French, but also from the British empire to the French colonial
system, which are marked by significant historical and strategic
differences.

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