" A Tempest " by Aime Ceasar 

Learning process is life long process. And learning to various resource person is the tradition of our Department of English. Every year we have different guests lectures on different subjects. Here I would like to include one more point that learning through technology is even more important. Corona crises gave us new chance to enhance our creativity and become more knowledgeable in technological field.

We had five days guest lectures on 

" Post Colonial Literature " by Dr. Balaji Ranganathan sir from central university of Gujrat. 

✒31st October 2020 : Discussion on " Black Skin white mask. 

✒1st November 2020 : Discussion on " Black Skin White Mask. "

✒2nd November 2020 : Discussion on " Orientalism " by Edward Said.

✒3rd November 2020 : Discussion on " A Tempest " by Aime Ceasar.

✒4th November 2020 : Discussion on some from " Imaginary Homeland " by Salman Rushdie. 

We are fortunate that it was totally a new experience. We learnt a lot from Dr. Balaji Ranganathan sir. On first day 31st October he started with Frantz Fanon's " Black Skin White Mask. "

On the fourth day of series of guest lectures, Dr. Balaji Ranganathan sir has discussed about the difference between " The Tempest " by William Shakespeare and " A Tempest " by Aime Ceasar. 

We can see " The Tempest " by William Shakespeare as a Post colonial play because, 

"The colonized is represented in regarding cultural hybridity in which the Self and the Other enlace the colonial experience" 

To make his point more clear he gave various examples like the text,

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad 

In this text Joseph Conrad very beautifully portrayed the picture of Colonizers and Colonized people of Africa. The situation of colonized people and the power and position of Colonizers. The another text is,

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe 

The text Robinson Crusoe very beautifully draws the picture of Master and Slave relationship of that time. How Master controls even the name of slave. Crusoe gives the name to his black slave, " Friday." 

Now let us come to the main point the difference between " The Tempest " and " A Tempest. "

♧ Difference between " The Tempest " and " A Tempest. " :-

 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 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).

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.

 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 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 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 beenmade 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.

♧ Post - Colonial reading of the text:-

After the Post-Structuralism came the readings of any particular works becomes more commentarial concerns, Shakespeare was a creator of a huge intensity in emotions and high profile tensions between not only the characters but also with readers and views as well. The way Shakespeare had portray might not be as important today. it's more to do with the commercial workplace or a kind of global capital in a way killing the nature of human relationship.

Post-colonialism has very important mode on methodology of how and in which ways you can criticize authoritarian structures and foundations of any particular work of art, 

So, in this way Shakespearean works are very disturbing at that time with the contemporary readings , Here we find few ideas the nature of Resistance and  the nature how leadership operates, post-colonial reading put a question that

" YOU CAN ONLY ACHIEVE GREATNESS THROUGH DEATH?"

Only if you die, you're gonna great?  you are die for your cause . so as we know by reading of tempest by Shakespeare , we get feeling that surely Shakespeare somewhere working within his imagination, for the post-colonial pursuit we need to find is CREATIVITY, which we need to be informed because at the end of the every work or a art there must be a material production. Every work of art has it own larger historical source , when we inquire in that source we realize that he's looking at Chronicles. may be Shakespeare was thought what can be better end for any happy work it must be the death one? 

The same way The Tempests also has a historical Foundations since around the same period . There was ship , they reports of it to sank, and then the ship was called Burmukes. So shipwreck happened in west indies. Whole staff within the shipwreck. then people marooned on an island and the whole story begins.      

♧References:-

   Cesaire, Aime, and William Shakespeare. A tempest: based on Shakespeare's The tempest : for a Black theatre. New York, NY: Ubu Repertory Theater, 1992. Print.                                   

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest . Peacock Books, 2006. Print.