Last April, while I was in France, the Martinique-born French poet/politician Aimé Césaire died and was given a state funeral. I was a bit surprised by the state funeral attended by French President Nicolas Sarkozy whom while alive Césaire had refused to meet. I was more surprised that Césaire had not already died, as had the other founder of the Negritude movement, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001), president of Senegal for the first two decades after its independence was. (Césaire was born seven years later than Senghor was and died seven years after Senghor did.)
I have a copy in French of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, first published in 1939), though I’m fairly sure that I read it in translation. I definitely read Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism, 1953) in English translation. I knew that Franz Fanon had been a student of Césaire in Martinique and that Césaire had been a communist – not just a stooge of Stalin’s French branch, but a Communist Party member of the French parliament, until the invasion of Hungary in 1956, when he very publicly left it.
In 1969, after France had withdrawn from its occupation of Algeria and colonies further south in Africa, Césaire adapted Shakespeare’s (1611) The Tempest “for a Black theatre” as A Tempest. I was reminded of that by the middle section of John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire in which the autobiographical protagonist writer recalls mounting something of a black power version of The Tempest when he had been a Philadelphia ghetto schoolteacher.
I have to say that I find the part of Shakespeare’s play involving the connivings of Antonio and Sebastian not very interesting, and the condensation of Shakespeare’s play to something like a cartoon version of it somewhat works for me, though Césaire also much condensed the parts of everyone other than Caliban and jettisoned the poetic language Shakespeare gave Prospero, Miranda, and Ariel.
Although Prospero remains the deposed duke/ruler of Milan, Césaire has moved the island Prosper rules considerably south, where the ancestral spirit is sub-Saharan East African. Césaire’s Caliban rejects Prospero’s claim to have turned him from a beast into a speaking being. Rather than having been without language, Caliban had not spoken the language in which his enslaver gives order. He had to learn the master’s language, but had an indigenous mother-tongue (though he is the only indigine on the island). Césaire has made Ariel a Creole (house n___ rather than field n___.).
Caliban is a rebel not a revolutionary. The rebellion with Stephano and Trinculo is too sketchy to be sure that Caliban is not a Leninist, but he rails at length at Prospero at the end of the play:
For years I bowed my head
for years I took it, all of it-
your insults, your ingratitude-
and worst of all, more degrading than all the rest,
your condescension.
…
You lied to me so much
about the world, about myself,
that you ended up by imposing on me
an image of myself:
underdeveloped, in your words, undercompetent-
that’s how you made me see myself! …
This is not notably subtle, but is a major message that Césaire’s former student Fanon made in his critique of the colonialism of subalterns’ minds.
Caliban also predicts that Prospero will not leave the realm he has dominated “just like those guys who founded the colonies and who now can’t live anywhere else.” Sententiously, Césaire’s Prospero maintains his self-image as civilizer:
This isle is mute without me.
My duty, this, is here,
and here I shall stay.
Ariel will ensure that Miranda and all those shipwrecked make it safely home. Prospero stays to dominate, rather as if Robinson Crusoe had refused rescue to stay to dominate Friday. (Another French revisionist version of canonical English literature is Michel Tournier’s Friday (Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, first published in 1967, i.e., before A Tempest), telling the story from the native perspective. I’d also throw in the (Creole) first Mrs. Rochester in the Dominica-born Jean Rhys’s (1966) Wide Sargasso Sea with its mostly Caribbean setting riffing off Jane Eyre.)
Although not likely to supplant Shakespeare’s play on the boards (either in French or English), giving the subaltern the eloquence can be interesting and Césaire’s play requires little time to read, even with the biographical introduction by Robin Kelley.
Reference:
- www.associatedcontent.com/article/1322095/a_note_on_caliban_after_rereading_the.html?
- www.epinions.com/content_460686331524 (review of Wideman’s “Philadelphia Fire”)
