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Rupsha Mukherjee

Professor S.Sen

A postcolonial re-telling of The Tempest

9 April 2014

Cesaire’s writing back to the canon: Une Tempete

Written in the 17th Century Elizabethan England, The Tempest has invited critics over centuries

to interpret the text based upon their contemporary cultural contexts and the Shakespearean play

itself has provided readers and commentators enough reasons to do so. The characterization of a

dispossessed yet some what tyrannical Prospero and the enslaved Sub-altern Caliban in the

‘source’ text has presented an opportunity before postcolonial thinkers and playwrights like Aime

Cesaire to write his own “A Tempest” or “Une Tempete” in 1969. According to Graff & Phelan,

“If Shakespeare is ambivalent towards Prospero and Caliban, he may be reflecting this clash of

attitudes in the culture at the time… this predated the arrival of postcolonial criticism…the

Elizabethan theatre often reflected the contradiction ‘between the medieval and the modern’

views of the world.”(97). It is the undercurrent in The Tempest that prompts Aime Cesaire to

respond to it when he writes Une Tempete, with a more aggressive and

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rebellious Caliban in place. According to Linda Hutcheon “Adaptations are so much a part of

Western culture that they appear to affirm Walter Benjamin’s insight that ‘storytelling is always

the art of repeating stories.”(2). She further adds that “like parodies, adaptations have an overt

and defining relationship to prior texts, usually revealing called “sources” (though) adaptations

usually openly announce this relationship”.(3). In case of Une Tempete, the play cannot be

merely seen as an intertextual adaptation of The Tempest into another language but as an

oppositional parody to it along with an attempt of “cultural surrogation” (Sarwoto 2) of the

problematized character of Caliban and also of other natives like Ariel. “By exposing inner

contradictions (of a text)…parody simplifies drama; it reduces these voices to two; in sharp

contrast here, racist authoritarianism versus liberationist protest.” (Porter 364). Cesaire’s primary

intent in the play is to highlight the clash between Prospero and Caliban and as a result of that,

the love story between Miranda and Ferdinand and also the primary revenge plot in The Tempest

has been given a secondary status in Une Tempete. According to Brenda Mcnary, “Césaire’s

vision of Caliban’s proximity to the “natural world,” when contrasted with Prospero’s detached

“cold reason” and “methodical conquest,” clearly reflects his outlook on the colonial system and

forms a consistent link with his larger anticolonial political views.” (12).

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The very first dialogue in Une Tempete gives an insight about how the text tries to

subvert the hegemony and the accepted norms, even though Gonzalo’s comment of getting “ to

the eye of the storm” for safety is taken in jest by his co-passengers in the ship. The Martinique

playwright had the exotic Caribbean island in his mind as a setting to the play can be gauged

from the epithets used to describe the island. Gonzalo calls the island “magic lands… so different

from our homes in Europe… Look, even the lightning is different!” In Act 3, Scene 2 Trinculo

remarks, “Ah! An Indian. You never know with these tricky races.” Stephano proclaims that “it

looks like a Nindian!”, thus giving indications about Caliban’s Red-Indian or New World

identity. Shakespeare on the other hand dealt with a nameless island, between Tunisia and Italy.

Thus Cesaire again seems to pick up on the loose ends and hints provided in the ‘source’ to

concretize his own. Prospero’s arrival on the island has been given a different reason in Une

Tempete. In Cesaire’s play it is said that Prospero discovered lands upon which many others had

their eyes set. Antonio and Alonso hatched a plot to snatch his yet-unborn empire from him.

They stole his charts and documents and dispossessed him. Hence, Cesaire shows Prospero’s

ambition of colonization from its very outset.

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Another interesting insight that the Cesaire play provides is of the power

hierarchy that pans out in the course of the narration. God occupies the topmost position,

followed by Prospero (the white emissary) and Caliban(the savage), occupying the lowest

position in the power pyramid. This equation though attains a dynamic nature with Prospero and

Caliban both challenging the status quo. Prospero in Une Tempete is charged with “heretical

perversion” as he tries to “insinuate and publish against God and his creation with regard to the

shape of the Earth and the possibility of discovering other lands.”, as claimed by the priests of

Holy Office (Act 1, Scene 2). Prospero challenges the ultimate authority of the Divine while

Caliban poses a threat to Prospero in order to re-claim what he thinks is rightfully his. According

to Laurence M. Porter, “Cesaire explains that it is the Europeans’ greed or ignorance or both,

which prevents them from recognizing that the other is in fact civilized, although

different.”(362). Language of the text is very modern and oftentimes profane, a far-cry from the

Shakespearean English of the 17th Century. In Act 2(Scene 3), a Masque is performed like in The

Tempest but with a difference brought about by an additional character called Eshu, the black

Devil God. He speaks in profane language, challenges the norms set by the Greek and Roman

Gods and Goddesses like Juno, Ceres and Iris. His blasphemous manner of speaking threatens

Prospero’s command over

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conjuring the spirits to entertain Ferdinand and Miranda, as Eshu arrives uninvited and disrupts

Prospero’s “noble assembly”. Eshu representing the aspirations of a black Caliban says that Eshu

“is not the man to carry heavy load”. Hence, it is a strong symbolic gesture to threaten the

colonizer’s authority. It makes Prospero fear that his “power has gone cold…like foam, like a

cloud,( it will) one day fade.” Caliban accuses Prospero of confining him to a “ghetto” or a

filthy cave. The modern trope of using an image of a ghetto can be connected to Cesaire recalling
“the thousands of French sailors stranded in the Antilles for many months after the Nazi invasion

of France.”(Porter 363).

Ariel has been projected as an obedient general to Prospero in The Tempest. His only

target is to earn freedom once Prospero grants it to him. Ariel in Une Tempete though has a more

sympathetic view towards Caliban and his cause. He questions Prospero’s actions at several

instances in the play and also says “ Sometimes I almost regret it…After all, I might have turned

into a real tree in the end.”, in response to Prospero’s claim that he freed him from the clutches of

the tree in which Sycorax imprisoned him. Thus Caliban and Ariel act as the two voices of the

freedom movement, whose methods are divergent while the cause remains the same. As a white

mulatto slave, Ariel has been given human emotions as he questions Prospero’s decisions and

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appears connected to the colonized sections including Caliban. Coming to the most critical

character in Une Tempete, that is, Caliban, one can see a significant difference in him from his

‘The Tempest’ counterpart. There are numerous verbal battles between Caliban and Prospero.

When Prospero calls Caliban an “ugly ape”, he retorts back by addressing him as “that big

hooked nose… old vulture.” He says that Prospero taught him language in order to get his own

work executed and accuses him of not sharing his scientific knowledge and magical insights with

Caliban. Prospero’s position is solemnly challenged as he says” I did not summon you here to

argue…Beating is the only language you really understand.”(Act 1, Scene 2).

The politics of language is highlighted when Caliban expresses his desire to be called X

(a nameless entity), as his colonizer master gave him the name of Caliban. He thinks that “Every

time it’s spoken, it’s an insult.” Prospero realizes that “Caliban is the (real) enemy” and not the

“people on the boat”, as they are men of his “race, and of high rank” (Act 1, Scene 2). Here

Caliban, like Ariel, sings many songs, unlike just one inarticulate song in a drunken state in The

Tempest. It alleviates his pain and ventilates his contempt for Prospero. Thus he is put on an
almost equal intellectual footing as Ariel. He does not say that “the isle is full of noises” in Une

Tempete , as opposed to that in The Tempest. He deciphers those noises here as he has been

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made intellectually stronger by Cesaire. He is ready to accept Stephano and Trinculo as masters

but he does not swear his allegiance to them in blatantly subservient and self-denigrating terms

like in The Tempest. He dreams of a revolution and abhors the tomfoolery that the two carry out

with colourful clothes in Act 2, Scene 4. Caliban enters the play with the native word “Uhuru”,

but his conversation with the other characters continue in their language, that is, French and in

English in the translated version of the play. Thus, Caliban as a postcolonial subject belongs to

what Homi K.Bhabha calls the “Third Space” (Bhabha 36). “The colonizer and the colonized

negotiate their cultural differences and create a culture that is a hybrid”( Bhabha) Thus,

Prospero’s decision to stay back in the island at the end of Une Tempete fuels the possibility of

this cultural hybrid to flourish even more. The self of Prospero needs the other Caliban to

validate his own existence in both the physical and the symbolic world. Cesaire communicates to

his audience that the colonization project is never-ending and the struggle for liberation for

people like Caliban continues.

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Works Cited

Cesaire, Aime, and William Shakespeare. A tempest: based on Shakespeare's The tempest :

adaptation for a Black theatre. New York, NY: Ubu Repertory Theater, 1992. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. A theory of adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Sarwoto, Paulus. The Figuration of Caliban in the Constellation of Postcolonial Theory A

Comparative Study. 1. Aufl. ed. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009. Print.

Shakespeare, William, Virginia Mason Vaughan, and Alden T. Vaughan. The tempest. London:

Arden Shakespeare, 2000. Print.

McNary, Brenda. "He proclaims Uhuru : Understanding Caliban as a speaking subject." critical

theory and undergraduate research journal on critical theory and occidental college 1

(2010): 12. CTSG. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.

Porter, Laurence. "Aime Cesaire's Reworking of Shakespeare : Anticolonialist Discourse in Une

Tempete." JSTOR. Version 3. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/40247009>.

Bhabha, Homi . "Homi Bhabha." Homi Bhabha. N.p., 20 Nov. 2000. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.

<http://rowenasworld.org/essays/newphil/bhabha.htm>.

Bhabha, Homi K.. The location of culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Shakespeare, William, Gerald Graff, and James Phelan. "why study critical controversies about

The Tempest." The tempest: a case study in critical controversy. Boston: Bedford/St.

Martin's, 2000. 97. Print.