Last April, while I was in France, Martinique-born French poet/politician Aimé Césaire died and had a public funeral. I was a bit surprised at the state funeral by President Nicolas Sarkozy, whom Césaire had refused to meet when he was alive. I was more surprised that Césaire was not already dead, as the other founder of the Negritude movement, Leopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001), was president of Senegal for the first two decades after its independence. (Césaire was born seven years after Senghor and died seven years after Senghor).
A copy of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, first published in 1939), I’m pretty sure I read in translation. I certainly read Discourse sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism, 1953) in the English version. I knew that Franz Fanon had been a student of Césaire in Martinique and that Césaire had been a communist – not only a stooge of Stalin’s French branch, but a member of the French parliament of the communist party, until the invasion of Hungary in 1956, when he himself officially left.
In 1969, after France had withdrawn from the occupation of Algeria and colonies further south in Africa, Césaire adapted Shakespeare’s (1611) The Tempest “for the black theater” as A Tempest. I was reminded of that in the middle of John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire in which he recalls the first autobiographical writer ascending to some version of power black Tempest when he was a master of the game in the Philadelphia ghetto.
I have to say that the part of Shakespeare’s plays which deals with the conspiracies of Antony and Sebastian is not very interesting, and the condensation of Shakespeare’s play into something like a version That cartoon works somewhat for me, although Césaire also condenses a lot of the parts of everyone other than Caliban and gives a shot of Shakespeare’s poetic language to Prospero, Miranda and Ariel.
Although Prosper, the deposed duke/rector of Milan, remains, Césaire island prosper rules somewhat south of the island, where he is the paternal soul of sub-Saharan East Africa. Césaire’s Caliban rejects Prospero’s claim to turn him from a beast into a talker. that Caliban spoke only without a language in which to command his servant. He had to learn the language of his master, but his mother had a native tongue (although he is the only native of the island). Césaire made Ariel a Creole (the house n___ more than the fields n___.).
Caliban is not a rebel, but a rebel. The rebellion with Stephen and Trincle is too sketchy to be sure that Caliban is not a Leninist, but he finally objects to Prospero at the end of the play:
For years I bowed my head
I took it for years, everyone;
your insults, your ingratitude
and the worst, baser than all the rest;
your dignity
…
You just lied to me
of the world, of myself;
as it ended up being imposed upon me
my image;
underdeveloped, in words, undercompetent
that’s how you made me see myself! …
This is not significantly more subtle, but it is a larger message that Césaire, a former student of Fanon, made in his critique of colonialism of subaltern minds.
Caliban also preaches that Prosperus will not leave the kingdom he ruled “like those guys who founded colonies and who now can’t live anywhere else.” In his opinion, Prospero Césaire maintains his image as a civilizer:
Without me this island is dumb.
My duty, this, is here;
and I will stay here.
Ariel will make sure that Miranda and all the castaways make it home safely. Prosper ceases to dominate, indeed as if Robinson-Crusoe had refused to stay to dominate Friday. Latin letter is Michel Tournier’s Michel Tournier’s Friday ( Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, first published in 1967, i.e. before A Tempest), telling a story from an indigenous perspective. Jean Rhys (1966), born in Rochester, Dominica, wrote Late Sargasso Sea with his most Caribbean western Jane Eyre.)
Although it is not likely that Shakespeare will supplant the play in tables (either in French or in English), it can be given a subaltern eloquence and Césaire’s play requires little time to read, even with a biographical introduction by Robin Kelley.
Report:
- www.associatedcontent.com/article/1322095/ a_note_on_caliban_after_rereading_the.html?
- www.epinions.com/content_460686331524 (review of Wideman’s “Philadelphia Fire”)
