Joseph Hayworth

Honors English IV

13 January 2012

The Tempest: A Colonialoscopy

There is something sublimely, subversively essentialist about our fascination with Amerocentric post-colonialist readings of The Tempest. Something also, of course, very American about the way in which we allowsuch readingsto elbow out other reasoned interpretations in the classroom. Layer upon layer of more historically, and textually sound thought ignored so that we might discuss Prospero as English colonizer, Caliban as colonized noble savage, Prospero as master, Caliban as African slave in the New World.When according to H.G. Porter’s 1979 The Inconstant Savage: England and The Native American, 1500-1660, the first African slaves did not arrive in the North American colonies until the later end of August 1619(Marshall 379). If the First Folio was published in 1623 (with the play likely written in 1610), readings of Caliban as African Slave in the New World seem dubious. The native argument further fails in the face of all too apparent textual evidence that the monster and his motherare exiles from Algiers, no more indigenous to the island, no more brought there under the pretense of slavery,than fellow deportees Prospero and Miranda. These characters are all exiles and children of exiles, usurpers to the islands one true and named resident, a sprite fartoo familiar with cyclical patterns of conquest and reconquest. Ultimately, the text portrays a situation more akin to the struggle against the Ottoman Empire in Europe than to patterns of English colonialism in the Americas.

Yet Caliban as the Native American, the African Slave,with Prospero and Miranda the civilizing Europeans, this is the reading we are presented with; a reading that is so convenient, so direct, and yet so limiting, so oblivious to the play itself.

That the mooncalf and his mother herald from Algiers is clearly stated in the text.In a game of guilt Prospero asks Ariel where Sycorax was born, to which the sprite responds “Sir, In Argier[1]” (I.ii.261). As the conversation continues we learn that the witch was banished from her native land and brought, with child, by sailors to the isle of the plays setting. To call the pairthe islands aboriginal population at this point is aself serving argument, misleadingand indignant to indisputable evidence. No, Caliban and Sycoraxare clearly as foreign to Prospero’s island as Prospero himself. Contrary readings which suggest these characters as symbolic of native populations are so revolutionary in their ambition to explore “both the social presence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the world in the literary text”[2]that their efforts seem to defiantly demonstrate an utter lack of even the most basic level of attendance to the presence of the words on the page of thetextual artifact itself.At best Caliban is akin to a second generation Spaniard in the New World[3]. Otherwise if they weren’t born there they’re not natives. It’s that simple.

An exile herself, the blue eyed hag is as much an invading oppressor to the islands existent natives as the sorcerer who follows. Therefore her son cannot be considered the subject of colonial oppression. For the post-colonialist reading to display any logical consistency or rigor Caliban could hardly be viewed as anything other than the dejected remnant of a deposed colonial power himself, an identityfar different for our dark skinned friend than the one so often suggested as analogous to Indian populations and stereotypes of noble savagery.Is there any evidence that he’s a cannibal? No, what a poor anagram this is. Yet Caliban, from the gypsy cauliban, meaning “blackness”, seems much more likely in an Ottoman context, far more Moore than African slave (Marshall 387). What is proposed here is a reading of Caliban as that last lonely Turk left behind as a once controlled territory (under Sycorax) is ceded back to the Europeans (Prospero).

While the Ottoman Empire was arguably past its prime during the text’s milieu, and European trade had been established with the Turks in the 1580’s, the menace of Islam was not beyond Shakespeare’s consideration(Fuchs 55). Still, this is not to erroneously contemporize the issue. While a threat to protestant Europe, Islam, at least in its Moroccan varieties, was when convenient(due to shifting allegiances and ideologies), seen to be a lesser devil to the Catholic Church and Spain (56-57). So while hardly a leading constituent of modern day conceptualizations of an axis of evil, tensions and anxieties still thrived between east and west in Shakespeare’s era.Richard Knolles named the Turks “the greatest terror of the world” so mighty swelling that it may “overflow all” in his 1603 Generall Historie of the Turks. That we have the titular Othello fighting against his own people in said play and the vile activity of Tamora’s beloved and villainous Aaron in Titus Andronicusalsobothlend this argument additional weight. Further, pulling from The Tempest itself, Sycorax’s native Algiers and Claribel’s maritalhome in Tunis were both locations of repeated shifts in occupancy within the frame of reference for then contemporary audiences.Algiers had been captured by the Turks in the 1530’s. Charles V led an failed expedition to reclaim it in 1541, while Tunis was captured by the Spanish from the Ottoman Empire in 1572 only to be lost again to the Turks in 1574 (Fuchs 55).

Yet this colonialist reading of an Islamic Eastern Empire encroaching on Protestant and Catholic Europe too is troubled, as pregnant Sycorax is hardly the vanguard of Ottoman forces. Awitch,she’s as likely a Turkish enemy as Othello, with her “sorceries terrible / To enter human hearing”,“so strong / That could control the moon” (I.ii.264-65, V.i.270). The woman is more an adversary to mankind in general than to Christians or Muslims in particular. It is tempting to read her as representative of “a temporary presence rather than an effective Islamic conquest of the island” (Fuchs 61). But we can’t forget the role exile played in her rise to power. Further her allegiance is to Setebos and not Allah. Setebos is a truly strange presence in Algiers.This is the god of the mythological Patagonians (Khan 22). Aheavenly connectionthat draws stronger correlations to stories of Spanish or Portuguese conquest in South America, it distances us farther from ideas of Ottoman and English Imperialism.The very reliabilityof Sycorax and her son’s blackness comes into question with this new god, not stereotypicallyAfrican or Native American, instead implying blue eyed Sycorax and her web footed Caliban to be members of a race of giants reported by the Spaniards that likely never existed.

At first, it is easy to look see the insults lobbed at Caliban as consequences of the colonial mindset. Within mostpost-colonialist readings of the play, much of the negative language directed at Sycorax’s son can be written off as subjective, not reflective of his true character, the consequence of othering. To call Caliban a moon-calf,as Stephano and Triculo are want to do, likening him to the abortive fetus of a cow,or devil and demi-devil as is Prospero’s prerogative;in the discourse of colonialism, it’s the colonizers impulse to insist that the colonized always regard themselves as something less than the imperialist force which has brought them civilization. In this mindset such disparity is all that maintains an often tenuous hieratical power structure, Bhabha’s “reformed recognizable other, almost the same but not quite”.With his acquisition of the language, and desire for Miranda, we could see these tensions at work in Caliban. Within this framework many of insultslobbed by the other players can be written off as the poisoned result of their positions in both the master slave dialectic and the system of binary opposition evident in the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Yet what isn’t so easy to tackle in this colonialist context are Caliban’s webbed feet.For Trinculo to note his fishy smell might be a slight to the islander, but syndactyl digitsseem hardly the providence of Africa or the New World, not a common insult by any means.Instead they would appear very strongly to suggest Caliban as half human, and not half human as some kind of slur, but half human in a context so that the characterbecomes a “figurative and illustrative being,” an “animal other” and not a human one (Moses 1).

Where Sycorax’s eyes may have been blue to further exoticize her, to imply a complicated family tree not entirely Moorish, oreven a colorization representative of the tired flesh around her eyes.The blueness of this area can even be read as a symptom of great fatigue and pregnancy (Khan 20). For us the significance of thiscolorationseems nearly indeterminable. Certainly not a throwaway line, but one who’s implication has become increasing indecipherable with time. Yetthe web feet of Caliban, “legged like a man, his fins like arms” as he is described by the masterless men; more than his actions these features bring question to his humanity in a way indifferent to Colonialist discourses (II.ii.34). While Prospero honors him “a human shape” (I.ii.283), it may be a shape alone, with Caliban more likely a creature in the tradition of Bartholomaeus Anglicus' 1245 Encyclopaedia De Proprietatibus Rerum, than an icon for “hidden meanings apparent only to modern, sophisticated scholarship” (Moses 1).

Too little is written of the witch Sycorax to make any meaningful inference about the impact of colonialism upon her life prior to arrival on the island, or about her life in general. We don’t know her crimes, and we can at best only guess that her pregnancy was the reason that her life was spared. Yet to use this very absence of stage presence to say that she is representative of the silenced African woman, as Abena P. A. Busia does in her 1990“Silencing Sycorax: On African Colonial Discourse and the Unvoiced Female”, is as sensible as to say that Laius, equally dead and unvoiced before the start of Oedipus’ narrative, is representative of the silenced Theban man. Yet this is what Busia argues, adopting Sycorax as the prototypical silenced African Female, charting the path of her ideological offspring throughout the course of numerous subsequent texts.

Busia argues that “one of the primary characteristics in the representation of African woman is the construction [emphasis always hers] of her inactive silence”. Not necessarily physically absent, like Sycorax, but “essentially” absent from “any locus of dramatic action or power” (86). Later Busia writes that “Imperial fictions are choreographed to keep darker men and all women subject”. Conceding that “like the colonized country itself, the women, both African and European, become representative objects and desire… their conditions to some extent parallel”, nonetheless contending that “it is the singular and significant exception of their continued access to language in these works which clearly distinguishes the European from the African woman”(94). Yet, much as the response to assertions that Sycorax and Caliban are native to Prospero’s Island is simply “Algiers”. The response to the assertion that European women have a continued access to language that their African sisters do not in The Tempestis “Claribel”. Like Sycorax, her story is conveyed to us wholly through the dialogue of male characters, and like Sycorax she has no voice of her own.Married off to the king of Tunis just prior to the start of the play,his queen, “ten leagues beyond man’s life” can “have no note / unless the sun is post” (II.i.241-243). Not a marriage of choice for Alonso’s daughter, rather a political ploy leaving her “banished from [his] eye” with “wet the grief on’t” (II.i.121-25). Naples at least, presumablyon the border of the Ottoman Empire, this marriage rescues it from further Islamic attacks. Not that utopian Gonzalo doesn’t find final joy in the plays close as Ferdinand too is married off as a by-product of the same voyage that brought Claribel to Tunis, this daughter so utterly removed from the political picture of Naples that Sebastian needn’t hardly have considered her in his future political machinations beyond surmising that, very much like Sycorax, she was a non entity.

To contradict the simplistic colonialist reading of Caliban the Slave, Caliban the New World Native, or even the less explored notion of Caliban the Turk, Sycorax the Silenced African Woman, to relegate these characters to the role of monster does not demonstrate a lack of imagination.Merely an eye to historical contexts (The DPR, traditions of European wild men) which seem much less popular today than the ones we are so obsessed with. Yet contexts that allow the play to maintain an identity of its own, rooting it in figurative and illustrative traditions pervasive in other of Shakespeare’s works, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, rather than drowning it in the colonialist discourses which never seem to cleanly fit. Had the island not already had a sentient occupant in the person of Ariel, had it been barren prior the arrival of the pregnant Sycorax,then it might be easier to adopt the mooncalf as an allegorical figure representative of native populations invaded and oppressed by imperial powers, or as the remnants of an imperial power himself. But Ariel was already there, and likely by Caliban’s birth already refusing the hag’s “earthy and abhorr'd commands” declining her “grand hests” (I.ii.273-274). In this regard, if anyone has been colonized it’s the sprite. But thankfully less has been written associating him with one population or another. Perhaps he is the “co-opted native”, the colonizer’s fantasy of a plaint, essentially accommodating and useful subject” (Fuchs 53). His eventual reward of freedom merely the play bating indigenous people’s into good behavior. Aimé Césaire does reduce the sprite to the role of capitulating mulato in contrast the potent rebellion of black Caliban in his 1969 Une Tempête. But perhaps the best response to repeated cycles of occupation is to peacefully bide one’s time until the occupiers lose interest and leave, in this behavioral association the idea is not to connect Ariel with individual populations but with all those in similar situations who have benefited from similar plans of behavior, rather than lose lives to a hopeless insurrection.

As a discourse, colonialism is pervasive, similar modes of thought infusing the literature even when no large colonialist projects are in progress. Returning to the DPR Bartholomaeus has made observations about the way in which the human language of fauns is empty. These a kind of creature very similar to Caliban both in their lecherous intent and assignment of animal parts, recalling Bhabha centuries before he ever wrote, Bartholomaeus describes the bestes as mimicking man, speaking not with their own language but in the tongues of others knowing not even their own meaning (Moses 3-4).

The play doesn’t need colonialism let alone narrow colonialist readings to find meaning. Caliban clearly knows the meaning of the language he has acquired, and the position in which it has put him. This is why he relishes in curses. I cannot deny the social constructivist implications of how the poor creature has been categorized. Still when scaffolding an interpretation of The Tempest on Post-Colonialist theory one is doomed to construct a reading that survives only because it sweeps inconvenient details from the text under the carpet, even those less common arguments of a conflict of colonialist powers between the Ottoman Empire and Europe or of Sycorax as a prototype silenced African woman suffer a similar fate. All are equally as troubled by inopportuneminutiae the minute connections are made to a particular population to the exclusion of others, the moment we try to nail down Caliban or Sycorax as representative of one people in one particular situation. Parallels can be drawn, but coincidentally. Even Trinculo’s plans to display Caliban as others have dead Indians liken him more to an oddity than to a particular culture (II.ii.34).

I recall a professor of Cold War Studies. For every movie, for every novel encountered, be it Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a Bond film, or The Spy that Came in From the Cold, she would make the argument that the text posited women as evil. It didn’t necessarily mean that she believed the argument. It was just an exercise for her, a game. In English scholarship we tend to make anything about anything we want, simply because we can, because we have the rhetorical prowess. But this doesn’t mean that those arguments are as relevant as we’ve convinced ourselves that they are. I fear that in our zeal to find contemporary meaning we lose the very character of a work with which we should be regarding it to understand its original value.

Bibliography

Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man, The Ambivalence of Historical Discourse.”

Modern

Literary Theory. Ed. Philip Rice & Patricia Waugh. New York: OxfordUniversity Press

inc, 2001. 380-86.

Busia, Abena P.A. "Silencing Sycorax: On African Colonial Discourse and the

Unvoiced Female."

Cultural Critique 14 (Winter 1989-90): 81-104.

Fuchs, Barbara. “Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest.”

Shakespeare Quarterly 48.1 (1997): 45-62.