Time passes, they read the type of text, dissected, destroyed. Suddenly, in the age of literary criticism, a new theory arises. Schools of thought form and shape and eventually find themselves in the subconscious of the reader, who now has the ability to understand his literature with a new interpretive strategy. One of the new schools though, which is slowly developing in academic circles, is post-colonial theory. The post-colonial method does not pass into the shallow end. Talk about exclusion; examination of the point zero between the relation of the colonist to the colonist; restricted disturbance; the discovery, or unearthing, of emotion. Time is passing enough: Shakespeare must meet Othello perhaps now at the deep end of this method of submerging, the possibility of death after colonization above the eyes of the West. This paper will explore the ways in which Othello represents the other – what Spivak calls the “subaltern” – gyroscopic nature of his character and the machinations of the Blues that ultimately kill him.
The tragedian in Othello echoes the Aristotelian warning: “The imitation of an action is serious and also, as having greatness, perfect in itself.” For Othello’s subordinate, however, Anouilh’s Chorus in Antigone is more appropriate: “The machine is in perfect order, since the time it began it has been greased, and it runs without friction.” Othello’s case, defiled by grace, is unseemly, yet in the last scene;
You are soft; a word or two before you go on.
state some service I did, and they don’t know.
There is no life itself. I pray you write;
When they mention these unfortunate deeds, etc.
Speak of me as I am; to diminish nothing;
Malice is not assumed.
(V.ii.333-343)
When the voice that speaks is not his own, the voice remains unheard, that is poetically. The voice, close to her death, which she gave her mastery over, is an example of Gayatri Spivak’s great work, “Should the Subaltern Speak?” Here, he asks: “With what voice can the subordinate speak? Their proposal, after rewriting all the development of the nation’s consciousness. Intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss. Time reverses itself, flips, we find Desdemona’s father, working Othello to explain his film:
Father loved me, he called me often.
I was still looking for the story of my life
From year to year – battles, investments, fortunes
That I passed.
(I.iii. 128-131).
And though Othello reveals the past, caves and deserts and rugged hills, cannibals and slaves and slavery, Brabant’s appetite for the exotic can never be satisfied, the gassy-eyed inertia of his heterochromatic spoonful attraction can never be filled. Othello, as an underling, can never fully come to terms with his past. Especially to the white man, who represents the face of cruelty, obsession. Othello can never truly bear his soul. Gerald Early’s The Culture of Bruising depicts the Afro-American as one whose intellectualism rarely believes without the white man’s interference. “The blacks are neither fully permitted citizens nor fully alienated” (Early, 249). On the one hand, Othello is a noble Brabant warrior, trained in battle as he is in storytelling, on the other, Othello is a slight deceiver. the rapturous magician, the “black ram,” who gibbers his father’s “hot lamb.”
As you are, he sang it;
For I refer myself to all senses;
If the magic chains are not attached
Whether the handmaid is so tender, beautiful, and blessed;
He was so opposed to marriage that he fled
the rich of our beloved nation are locked up
Run from the guards to the pocket of soot
It is the kind that you fear, not delight.
(1.ii.63-71)
Othello is mistaken: While he tries to win Brabant with an honest and cooperative voice and spirit, he only removes the sanctity of his self. he will have to subjugate himself not only to Brabant, but also to the whole of Venice. Othello appropriates his own identity to the preordained exclusion, from which he isolates himself, thus a half-formed body with many, while the sores and wounds of his own birth do not seem to heal: “I bring my life and being / From men. of the royal siege” (I.ii.20-21 ). Caryl Phillips makes a sharp point: “Othello has no clue that his black friends are eating African food, speaking no language other than theirs .. From what has been handed down to us, it is clear that he did not respect the past. For Othello, this denial is part and parcel of social stability. It is a dangerous plan and a slippery way of working hybridization, defined by Bakhtin “as a mixture of two social languages within the limits of one speech, an encounter, within the arena of speech, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from between each other…through social difference” (Bakhtin, 358). Hybridity therefore acts as a motivic construction: the faction of the two Othellos. But this binary is poor, a flaw in the mirror of humanity, because neither is fully formed, because we do not know the voice of even one man. His marriage to Desdemona can be seen as part of this evil: “She loved me because of the dangers I had passed/ And I loved her to have mercy on them” (I.iii.167-168)
To completely refute A.C. Bradley’s opinion (“Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic of Shakespeare’s heroes [Bradley, 139]), Othello’s marriage is more or less a necessity of hybridity, a necessity. Survivial. This is not romance. not a gift, but a machine she suffered), and succumbs to the vices of prejudice, a harsher judgment on Venice (not from envy).
Let’s hear some warnings.
Brian Eno: “Culture is all that we don’t have to do. We have to eat, but we don’t have kitchens, Big Macs, or Rossini Tournedos (Eno, 317).
Frantz Fanon: “To speak…” is first of all to assume culture, to support the weight of civilization” (Fanon, 17-18).
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o: “In my opinion, language is the greatest vehicle through which power fascinates and holds the soul captive” (Thiong’o, 9).
If the reader has these characteristics in mind, they can be compared with the chronological language of Othello – from the harshness of the first two acts, to the glottic crack and the third and fourth, and finally to the omission, incurable. speeches in the end, the post-colonial argument can be traced as the person who chose language as a tool to initiate himself within the boundaries of the western culture, who later assumed the assumptions of the culture, and who he is. in the end, he himself was completely punished. There is nothing to win after the colony.
As Habib asserted in his glorious Shakespeare and Race, “In the noble voices of Othello, the argument is always monologic, closed, finite, not inviting words, but obstacles” (Habib, 137). The language he uses (or borrows, really) gives a great degree of his exteriority: Othello’s statement, although monologic and halting, is also very beautiful, poetically disturbing and painfully finished;
I am a tyrant, the most serious senators;
He made the flint of the iron of war
My bed was thrown down three times. I suffer
By nature and ready enthusiasm
I find in hardness; and to undertake
This war against the Ottomans.
Very humbly approaching your state;
I want my wife suitable;
Due to the location and exhibition report
With such accommodation and besort
As in the author’s book.
(I.iii. 229-239);
Here, in the face of the mayor (Othello against the leader and the senate, who is “proven” to manage the Othello-Desdemona union moments before the table questions about the Turkish fleet in Cyprus), Othello’s poetic grace does not grow with the language. his whole, placed by the bending of the tongue as cues. It is almost as if, if he chose a language, it would become part of a larger rehabilitation, so that it would become part of a journey already full of steam. Tragedy is that which condemns itself (Habib, 123). The further Othello strives for identity, the less aware he is that he is exposed to Iago’s tricks. It is argued that Cassio-Desdemona is not a union that drives him into a rage, but from a person, that from the emaciated post-colonial member already erred in the cannon of convenient hybridity. .
Iago: Stand a little apart;
But check yourself on the patient list.
while you are listening, you are troubled with sorrow
(Passion is so fitting for man)
Mary, patience;
Shall I say all liene y’are;
There is nothing.
Othello: You hear, Iago.
may I be found most clever in my patience;
But you hear very bloody.
(IV.i.74-91)
This is when Othello’s position as a hybrid (neither standing tall, nor having completed the path) finally reveals itself, and reaches its full depth of exposure, finally succumbing to the weight of its own identity, its inversion. history – which in this part is late.
“Put yourself in this;
And say, moreover, that once upon a time in Aleppo;
Where the evil and troubled Turk
Blue, and translate the republic;
And I took th’ throat from the circumcised dog
And he struck him thus.
(digs himself)
(V.ii.351-356)
Works cited
Bakhtin, M.M. Dialogic imagination. Texas: University Press, 1981.
Bradley, A.C. “Noble Othello.” Casebook on Othello. Ed. F. Leonardus dean. New York: University of Connecticut, 1961, p.
Morning, Gerald. Bruising culture. Hopewell: The Ecco Press, 1994.
There, Brian. Annus Swollen Appendices. London: Smith and Smith, 1996.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1982.
Habib, Imtiaz. Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the Early Modern Period. New York: American University Press, 2000.
McLendon, J.Y. ‘Fables Round Unvarnished:’ (Mis) Reading Othello or African Conspiracies Dissent. “Othello: New Essays by Black Writers a>.
Phillips, Caryl. The tribes of Europe. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987.
Shakespeare, William. River Shakespeare. Gen. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
Spivak, Gayatri. “Can you speak Subaltern?” Naevii et Culturae interpr. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. London: Macmillan, 1988.
Thiong’o, Ngugi Wa. Cultivate the mind. Portsmouth: Heinemann Educational Books, 1986.