[In the following essay, Rix offers various interpretations of Cêsaire's A Tempest.]

The Martinican malaise is the malaise of a people that no longer feels responsible for its destiny and has no more than a minor part in a drama of which it should be the protagonist.¹

What is this distinctive force of Fanon's vision that has been forming even as I write about the division, the displacement, the cutting edge of his thought? It comes, I believe, from the tradition of the oppressed, as Walter Benjamin suggests; it is the language of a revolutionary awareness that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a concept of history that is in keeping with this insight. And the state of emergency is also always a state of emergence. The struggle against colonial oppression changes not only the direction of Western history, but challenges its historicist idea of time as a progressive, ordered whole.²

ADAPTATION FOR A BLACK THEATRE

Aimé Césaire's last play, Une tempête, was written for a festival in Tunisia in 1969. After a period of exhilaration and optimism as African states began to gain their independence, Césaire used the process of adaptation as a method by which to probe emerging debates concerning colonialism. As can be seen from the first epigraph, Césaire believed that it was crucial for the colonized Martinican peoples to relocate themselves at the centre of the stage. The Tempest was adapted so as to ‘protagonize’ the colonized and to ensure that their voices were heard loud and clear from within the hushed citadel of Western culture. At the time, the very act of rewriting The Tempest was seen as an audacious literary siege; for Césaire it provided a potent strategy by which to throw aside the rules of colonial culture and to dramatize the destinies of the colonized. He rudely thrusts into Shakespeare's text in the same way that Eshu bursts, uninvited, into the prudish circle of Roman gods and goddesses.

Strangely, the first performance of Une tempête was set in pioneer America, using the motifs of the Western.³ Although this may seem incongruous in view of the play's references to Africa and, more specifically, to the Caribbean, the decision to set the play in America demonstrates the possibilities of alluding to, or even of integrating, a number of colonial dramas on one stage. Thus, Césaire's adaptation is as open to a variety of times and locations as Shakespeare's text. Despite attacks on Césaire's essentialist vision of négritude, the play itself displays flexibility and plurality. Although it is clear that Une tempête was written with the particular political situation of Martinique very much in mind, rather than reducing The Tempest to a series of closures, Césaire's adaptation opens up further possibilities of history, interpretation and location. As Césaire has said,

Demystified, the play [is] essentially about the master-slave relation, a relation that is still alive and which, in my opinion, explains a good deal of contemporary history: in particular, colonial history, the history of the United States. Wherever there are multiracial societies, the same drama can be found, I think.⁴

‘TURN WHITE OR DISAPPEAR’: INTERNALIZED RACISM

Césaire grew up within the particular colonial situation of Martinique, where he was born in 1913. French Caribbean colonies differed from those of Britain in that, after abolition (which occurred in Martinique in 1848), adult male ex-slaves were immediately made citizens of France. The right to vote was intermittently removed, but the concept of Frenchness came to be seen as a positive and integral part of ‘freedom’. The minority of powerful white settlers in Martinique had made every effort to create an abyss of difference between themselves and the black slaves whom they imported to work on the sugar plantations. The settlers' laws and attitudes worked to prevent slaves from in any way comparing themselves to whites. As Lilyan Kesteloot comments:

They [slaves] were not allowed to wear the same clothes as whites nor to work as anything but farm labourers, domestics etc. As a result, it became the main object of coloured men to resemble their masters as closely as possible. As long as the slave's condition was associated with a differentiation between slave and master, the black man would associate this idea of freedom with resemblance. Thus, after the emancipation of 1848, those few slaves who had the opportunity undertook by all and any means a race toward the assimilation represented by money, studies, marriages, intrigue.⁵

This drive towards self ‘whitening’ was, and perhaps still is, one of the most insidious obstacles to decolonization. Richard Burton points out that it was the French West Indians themselves who desperately sought to pay the ‘blood tax’ (l'impôrt de sang) by enlisting in the French army in 1914 and again in 1939. It was surely the pinnacle of assimilation: to die for la mère-patrie. In order to assert any sort of authority or authenticity in any aspect of life, blacks were forced to seek the validation of European culture, European customs, European politics.

Unlike many other Caribbean colonies, Martinique, from a very early stage, had a large mulatto population: by 1850, there were more mulattos than whites. This had a significant effect on future racial relations. In a process which is in some ways comparable to the racial situation in Brazil, Martinican mulattos made every effort to dissociate themselves from ‘blacks’. Carl Degler has named this phenomenon ‘the mulatto escape hatch’,⁶ and there is a similar phrase in Martinican Creole: peau chappé (escape skin). This was further complicated by class: to be rich, or to hold a high-status job, was to become ‘whiter’. The ideal of a colour-blind society was thus nothing but the ideal of assimilation to white French culture.

During the occupation of France in World War II, Admiral Georges Robert arrived in the island as representative of the Vichy government. Ten thousand European sailors were stationed in Martinique for four years. It has been suggested that it was the racism of these sailors that finally fuelled underlying resentment and facilitated the birth of a black Martinican consciousness. Most black Martinicans at this time believed themselves to be first and foremost French. The European servicemen, however, treated them as ‘niggers’. In 1943, in the face of massive demonstrations, Admiral Robert was forced to resign. Despite the unrest caused by the occupation, and the racism that black Martinicans faced both in their homeland and, particularly, when they travelled to France, the racial ideology of Martinique seems to have been deeply-seated in not only whites, but within the mulatto and black communities as well. The myth of racial harmony and the absence of legal segregation prevented black Martinicans from uniting in a focused struggle for racial equality. (The dispersal of French West Indian families on both sides of the Atlantic has also been discussed as a major obstacle to the formation of nationalist movements: Edouard Glissant, the Martinican cultural critic, has termed this ‘genocide by substitution’.)⁷ As Michel Giraud notes, there was no substantial difference in the way in which each racial group in Martinique perceived itself (auto-stereotype) and the way in which it was perceived by other racial groups (hetero-stereotype), which leads him to conclude that racism in Martinique was firmly internalized.⁸ It is easy to criticize the essentializing elements of the concept of négritude that Césaire employed as a means of overcoming this ‘escape hatch’ ideology, but the specific racial history that Césaire was confronting makes matters less straightforward.

‘TO HELL WITH HIBISCUS’: FINDING A CULTURAL SPACE

The Martinican literature produced during Césaire's childhood was, almost without exception, ‘traditional’ French literary production, what Léon Damas has termed ‘tracing-paper poetry’. This was one of the first aspects of black Martinique to be attacked in the Légitime Défense (1932), a journal published by a group of Martiniquan students at the Sorbonne that would have a profound impact on their struggle for cultural identity. It provided a clear indication of its opinion of the current West Indian literary tradition:

The West Indian writer, stuffed to bursting with white morality, white culture, white education, white prejudice, fills his little books with a swollen image of himself. Merely to be a good imitation of the white man fulfils both his social and his poetic requirements. He cannot be too modest or too sedate. Should you dare show natural exuberance in his presence, he immediately accuses you of ‘making like a nigger’. So naturally, he does not want to ‘make like a nigger’ in his poems. It is a point of honor with him that a white person could read his entire book without ever guessing the author's pigmentation.⁹

Even when writers were not employing traditional French imagery or classical subject-matter, they continued to express themselves in traditional ‘poetic’ French language, style, form and vocabulary. The poetry written specifically about Martinique was restricted to the view of the colonizer, who spoke only of the paradise of the island, thus textually erasing the squalor, poverty and racism caused by colonialism. This cultural bleaching culminated in an exhibition held in Paris in 1945 by the Ministry of Colonies. It was entitled ‘The Happy Antilles: in honour of all those who have dreamed of the Islands with a poet's heart’, and included poems from which the following quotations have been taken:

Ah! all the sweetness of my early childhood
Those languid nights in the port of Fort-de-France
A vegetable paradise
Long do you enchant me with your captivating play.
.....Coffer of kisses
Hummingbird to tourists
Geographic gem
Dear garden of small gifts
Ground for the supple footsteps
And ample stride of coloured women
Small circus of the hallway of my heart
Familiar jack-in-the-box.(10)

It was poetry of this type that Césaire wished to expose as blatantly perpetuating the colonial myth. He believed that it was essential to reveal the agenda of ‘colour-blind literature’ and to begin to create a cultural form in which to express the reality of racism and poverty that was lived by the majority of Martinican blacks. Published in a 1941 issue of Tropiques, Suzanne Césaire's poem ‘Misère d'une poésie: John-Antoine Nau’, epitomizes the attack on traditional French and exotic ‘touristic’ writing which she condemns as ‘Littérature de hamac. Littérature de sucre et de vanille. Tourisme littéraire …’ (Literature of the hammock. Literature of sugar and vanilla. Literary tourism).¹¹ Eventually, and perhaps paradoxically, it was a European literary movement that Césaire appropriated in his search for a poetry of defiance: Surrealism. The Surrealist movement temporarily seemed to fit neatly with Césaire's requirements for a movement of cultural resistance: it aimed to shock the prim bourgeoisie with a production of humorous, vulgar gestures that attempted to undermine the validity and authority of high-brow Western culture. As R. M. Albères states:

Surrealism set dynamite under these conventions and blew them up. New foliage grew in the ruined palaces of sentiment and rhetoric. A jungle of wild plants, their roots drawing strength from the unconscious and their strange shapes breaking all known rules of botany, fertilized the fields of rubble—the ruins of the ever heavier constructions of a civilization which, from a surfeit of rational humanism, had drowned in the habitual.¹²

This new literary credo offered Césaire a great variety of ammunition to turn against stagnant European traditions. The innovative method of foraging into the unconscious, and particularly the ‘black unconscious’, seemed an ideal way in which to start to delve into the ‘black memory’ and rediscover the beginnings of ‘black history’. Although today these terms are frequently branded as essentialist and therefore highly suspect, for Césaire and his contemporaries such categories provided a framework and a much-needed space within which black Martinicans could question their Euro- and ethnocentric education and begin to envisage a new and positive awareness of being ‘black’. As Sartre said of Césaire, ‘surrealism, a European movement in poetry [has been] stolen from the Europeans by a black man who turns it against them and gives it a well defined purpose.’¹³

THE LATER STAGE: TURNING TO THEATRE

After completing a model assimilationist education, mainly in Paris, Césaire returned to Martinique in 1939. After the war, he was invited to run on the Communist party ticket in the municipal elections and was elected mayor in 1945. The following year he successfully oversaw Martinique's transition from a colony to a department of France. This was something that he had long struggled for, and which he believed to be a positive change. However, it was to be the first disappointment in a long and often disillusioning political career. It actually resulted in the loss of the limited, but real influence that local people could bring to bear on colonial governors and officials. The whole decision-making process was transferred to Paris, and the colonial governors, who were often residents of Martinique, were replaced by prefects who were less sensitive to local needs. From 1958 to 1964, the sugar industry, which had produced almost all of Martinique's exports, went into serious decline and unemployment rose to 25 per cent. The riots of 1959 in Fort-de-France were directed ‘not against the local white Creoles, but against metropolitans … the metropolitan had, in scarcely more than a decade, become a popular scapegoat for the disruptions and disappointments of departmentalization’.¹⁴ Césaire formed the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais in 1958: its aim was not independence, but autonomy. The colonial legacy of social, economic and psychological destruction has left Martinique significantly dependent on France for financial support (in the 1970s, France was supplying half Martinique's revenue). Although nominally it has been abandoned, colonialism remains both overtly and insidiously in place, as Susan Frutkin notes: ‘French assistance has been along social rather than developmental lines, and, while a higher standard of living has accompanied the infusion of public funds, in reality it reflects an inflated state of welfare living rather than any improvement in the island's productive capabilities.’¹⁵

This was the political climate in which Une tempête was written, Césaire having turned to theatre for a more accessible cultural channel through which to communicate his views:

Blacks from now on must make their history. And the history of the blacks will truly be what they will make of it … a black writer cannot enclose himself in an ivory tower. There are things to be understood … it is necessary to speak clearly, speak concisely, to get the message across—and it seems to me that the theatre can lend itself to that.¹⁶

Although Césaire here stresses the importance of transmitting ‘the message’, the particular form of theatre to which he turned was actually one of great flexibility. It seems that what may be interpreted as a desire to find a more transparent medium resulted in the discovery of a highly diverse and shifting site of performance. Jean-Michel Serreau, who collaborated with Césaire on all three of his plays (Césaire has said that Serreau's death contributed to his decision not to continue writing drama), sought ‘an open or exploded scenic space, overtly constructed rather than self-enclosed, an environment for registering rhythmic movement rather than capturing a static scene’.¹⁷ In making explicit the process of construction and impermanence, this theatre could be mobile and provisional: it could adapt itself to an individual environment rather than the audience adapting themselves to the institutional stasis of traditional theatre. The message, then, becomes an integral part of the dramatic process, as Césaire highlights in the opening masking scene of Une tempête. In this scene, what was originally intended to be an entirely black cast dons masks in order to designate the race of each character. Césaire suggests that the allocation of masks (and therefore race) is an arbitrary process by showing each actor to be choosing his or her mask:

Come gentlemen, help yourselves. To each his character and to each character his mask. You, Prospero? Why not? His is an unfathomable will to power. You, Caliban? Well, well, that's revealing. You, Ariel! I have no objections. And what about Stephano? And Trinculo? No takers? Ah, just in time! It takes all sorts to make a world.¹⁸

One of Césaire's pointed changes to Shakespeare's cast list was to specify Caliban as a black slave and Ariel as a mulatto slave. Prospero's race and nationality are left unspecified and, although the obvious assumption is that the actor will don a white mask, Césaire avoids any assumption that ‘white’ is a neutral or normative race—because every actor wears a mask, the white race is displayed as equally constructed and performed. As Robert Eric Livingston comments: ‘The effect of the maskplay is to de-essentialize the construction of race, to set up a tension between the racial script and its performance’.¹⁹ From the outset, therefore, Césaire undermines his own racial stereotyping of a black Caliban as the violent rebellious slave (the ‘Malcolm X’ figure) and Ariel as the ‘whitened’, Christian ‘Uncle Tom’ mulatto, who hopes to assert change through non-violent means (the Martin Luther King figure). The overlaying of a specifically American colonial situation (which Césaire himself posited and which is evident in the echoes of the US black leaders' speeches in the speeches of Caliban and Ariel) adds to the play the contemporary politics of the Black Power movement. This compression of colonial history (remembering that the first performance of the play was set in pioneer America) produces a reinforcing of the simultaneous commentary offered by the play on both the historical condition of slavery and its effect on contemporary Martinique. Universal themes of power and colonialism are shown to be locked in constant combat with specifics of time and locality. As Homi Bhabha points out in this essay's second epigraph, the disruption of the traditional Western teleological conception of history offers one way of levering open the holes and voids of the colonial story.

Re-tracing ‘black history’ on the stage reveals what Glissant has observed to be a vertiginous process: ‘For history is not only absence for us, it is vertigo. The time that was never ours we must now possess. We do not see it stretch into our past and calmly take us into tomorrow, but it explodes in us as a compact mass, pushing through a dimension of emptiness where we must with difficulty and pain put it all back together.’²⁰ Césaire's choice of dramatic form destabilizes authorial control and rejects the concept of uncontaminated reading. As Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins note, ‘most postcolonial criticism overlooks drama, perhaps because of its apparently impure form: playscripts are only a part of theatre experience, and performance is therefore difficult to document.’²¹

Despite Césaire's achievement of both beginning to develop a specific space for ‘black’ culture and, at the same time, highlighting the constructed nature of racial identity, there remain apparent racial clichés in the play that are less straightforward to explain or justify. For example, Western culture is characterized as the height of Enlightenment rationalism (epitomized by the measured dance and mannered speeches of the prudish Olympian goddesses) and ‘black culture’ is portrayed in an equally hackneyed manner, as a vibrant glorification of chaos and untamed nature, personified by Eshu (the Yoruba god of boundaries between worlds):

ESHU
… Eshu is a feisty lad, and with his penis he smites,
He smites
He smites …
CERES
Well! Iris, don't you find this song obscene?
JUNO
Disgusting! Intolerable … If he carries on, I'm leaving!

This opposition feels uncomfortable because it seems to perpetuate stereotyping that was, and continues to be, employed by colonialists. However, read within the context of a play that Césaire specified as having the ‘ambience of a psychodrama’, to simplify his treatment as stereotyping or essentialism would be reductive. In fact, by placing such blatant stereotypes on the stage, Césaire reveals and displays internalized and entrenched racial images, and thereby provokes discussion.

Additionally, the manner in which Césaire juggles and undermines rôles and characters ensures that an atmosphere of impermanence and humour is maintained. From the very start of the play, Prospero's role as theatre director is usurped by the mysterious ‘Messeur de jeu’ who supervises the random distribution of actors' parts and who also generates the tempest itself. Thus, despite Prospero's later rantings about conducting the score of the island, during the first scene we see him relegated to an anonymous actor. Not only are racial rôles displayed as being constructed through masking, but the play is also frequently interrupted by characters usurping the rôles of others: Césaire himself takes Shakespeare's place; Eshu intrudes into the Western pantheon; Ferdinand plays at being a slave and Stephano and Trinculo at being kings and generals. Rôles and subjects are exploded and temporary, they can be taken or handed out; despite Césaire's desire to write the black subject into existence, the play's self-conscious treatment of performance tends repeatedly to shake off the potential solidification of racial essence.

Une tempête is also an urgent play of protest, written at a time when Césaire could see the possibility of autonomy for Martinique (let alone independence) slipping further and further out of reach. Although négritude and its association with a return to African roots has been heavily criticized for its reductionism, Césaire needed to maintain the momentum of a waning struggle. He was well aware that négritude's creation of Africa was a textual process: ‘Of course my knowledge of Africa was bookish; I and my whole generation were dependent on what whites wrote about it’.²² The very textuality of Africa enables its appropriation to an anticolonialist cause. As Benita Parry observes:

As I read them [Césaire and Fanon], both affirmed the invention of an insurgent, unified black self, acknowledged the revolutionary energies released by valorizing the cultures denigrated by colonialism and, rather than construing the colonialist relationship in terms of negotiations with the structures of imperialism, privileged coercion over hegemony to project it as a struggle between implacably placed forces, an irony made all too obvious in enunciations inflected, indeed made possible, by these very negotiations.²³

Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) provides an analysis of the dilemma of négritude that offers much to supplement a reading of Césaire. As Bhabha points out, it is particularly surprising that in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon rarely historicizes the colonial experience:

There is no master narrative or realist perspective that provide a background of social and historical facts against which emerge the problems of the individual and the collective psyche. It is through image and fantasy—those orders that figure transgressively on the borders of history and the unconscious—that Fanon most profoundly evokes the colonial condition.²⁴

This observation could productively be applied to Une tempête, in which the use of masks and the specified atmosphere of ‘psychodrama’ create the pre-conditions for a gap between performer and rôle, thus undermining a realist perspective. Similarly, location and historical moment are implied by Césaire, but never made explicit. As Parry suggests, négritude was not the regression to, or recovery of, a pre-existent state, but a textually invented history, ‘an identity effected through figurative operators, and a tropological construction of blackness as a sign of the colonized condition and its refusal’.²⁵

Fanon's frustration with Sartre's critique of négritude as being ‘anti-racist racism’ is telling: ‘I needed not to know’, Fanon tells us, ‘I needed to lose myself completely in négritude’.²⁶ Sartre, in an essay entitled ‘Black Orpheus’ had written:

négritude appears as the minor term of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical assertion of the supremacy of the white man is its thesis; the position of négritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity … Thus négritude is the root of its own destruction, it is a transition and not a conclusion, a means and not an ultimate end.²⁷

Although both Fanon and Césaire may have sympathized with the last part of this critique, negating négritude as the minor antithesis of white supremacy was a formation that undermined négritude's potential for opening a space (albeit transitory) in which black culture could develop. Furthermore, it seemed to destroy any sense of the agency of black resistance. Sartre continued, ‘Today let us hail the turn of history that will make it possible for the black men to utter the great Negro cry with a force that will shake the pillars of the world (Césaire)’. To which Fanon responded

And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me. It is not out of my bad nigger's misery, my bad nigger's teeth, my bad nigger's hunger that I will shape a torch with which to burn down the world, but it is the torch that was already there, waiting for the turn of history.²⁸

However, although Fanon does not comment on this point, it is Sartre's distinction between race and class that seems to be the most problematic part of his argument. ‘The first (race) is concrete and particular, the second (class) is universal and abstract; the one stems from what Jaspers calls understanding and the other from intellection; the first is the result of a psychobiological syncretism and the second is a methodical construction based on experience.’²⁹ This hierarchization of class over race employs adjectives that are close to those frequently used in describing white superiority. Sartre seems to suggest that race is subordinate because it is a ‘particular’ issue—that of non-whites—whereas class is a universal issue. This distinction falls easily into the statement that everybody has a ‘class’ whilst only non-white people have a ‘race’.

REPLAYING THE CANON

In ‘Misére d'une poésie’ Suzanne Césaire writes: ‘La poésie martiniquaise sera cannibale ou ne sera pas!’ (Either the poetry of Martinique will be cannibalistic or there will be no poetry in Martinique). The word ‘cannibale’ is coyly translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy as ‘done with them’, which ignores its most literal connotations and force. The term suggests not merely that the ‘cannibal’ could be appropriated as a symbol of colonized people, but goes further to imply that the poetry itself should be ‘cannibalistic’. For writers so long force-fed European literature, the time had come to devour and digest this same literature in a self-conscious manner and be empowered to spew out whatever they chose not to swallow. When Prospero asks Caliban what he would do alone on the island, Caliban answers: ‘I'd rid myself of you, first of all … I'd vomit you up, all your pomp and designs! Your white poison!’ This can be seen as an analogy for the very process of adapting canonical texts. Taking the canon to task enables writers to destroy any apparent European monopoly on representation and, like Eshu, to interrupt and intervene in established social conditioning. Cannibalistic intertextuality allows a replaying of fiction that rejects claims to transcendence or to the supposed universality of Shakespeare's self-evident worth.

Césaire highlights the issues of hunger, consumption, force-feeding and power during the scene in which Prospero torments Alonso, Gonzalo and Sebastian by tempting them with a delicious meal and then removing it. The first time the food vanishes, Alonso says, ‘I firmly believe that we have fallen into the hands of powers that are playing cat and mouse with us. It's a cruel way of making us appreciate our helplessness.’ But, as soon as the unfortunate men decide not to touch the meal, Prospero asserts his control:

PROSPERO
(Invisible) I don't like this refusal, Ariel. Torment them until they eat.
ARIEL
Why should we put ourselves out for their benefit? It's their look-out if they won't eat; they'll die of hunger.
PROSPERO
No, I want them to eat.
ARIEL
That's despotism. A while ago you made me snatch it away from their drooling mouths; now that they refuse, you are ready to force-feed them.
PROSPERO
Enough quibbling! My mood has changed! They would wrong me by not eating! Let them experience eating out of my hand like chicks. I insist upon this sign of their submission.
ARIEL
It's as evil to play their hunger as it is their anguish and their hope.
PROSPERO
That is how power is measured. I am Power.

Here, the hungry trio are forced, unknowingly, to submit to Prospero's crazed desire for power. The process of being forced to consume Prospero's language and culture leads Caliban to want to vomit Prospero's ‘white poison’; and Césaire's text, in a comparable gesture, is produced through a controlled consumption of Shakespeare's text.

Peter Hulme has suggested that Shakespeare's Tempest is structured by a series of replays or re-enactments, most signally Prospero's staging of a fantasized version of the original conspiracy that overthrew him with the difference that, this time, he will defeat the conspirators, led by Caliban.³⁰ What happens, then, when a writer who has forged a political identification with Caliban, adapts the play, thus replaying the replays? If, for Prospero, a psychopathic series of repetitions placates him with the satisfaction of victory over a powerless subject, for Césaire the replay is not so simple. When Prospero sets in motion his re-enactment, he is certain that his plan to resume his dukedom will be successful (although at times his grand plan seems fragile and superficial). However, as Césaire replays Shakespeare, the end to colonialism in Martinique was not close at hand. Thus Césaire, unlike Prospero, does not even appear to ‘win’ at the finish of Une tempête: the struggle between colonized and colonizer remains unresolved. Significantly, Césaire appears to allow Caliban the chance to defeat Prospero, which he refuses to take. Whereas Shakespeare's Caliban is portrayed as completely powerless against Prospero, Césaire's Caliban faces a crucial moment in which destiny appears to be in his hands. In a complex twist, Césaire suggests that at this moment Prospero is both fallible and simultaneously invincible. He is not purely a magician (Césaire stresses this by transforming the majority of his powers into military and technological ones), and yet his power and its aftermath are strong enough to prevent a reversal of his position. Caliban is unable to wave goodbye to the oppressors and reclaim his freedom because he and Prospero remain trapped together on the island (‘Prospero: Ah well, my old Caliban, we're the only two left on this island, just you and me. You and me! You-me! Me-you!’). Joan Dayan links this reciprocity with the strategy employed by Césaire to undermine the notion of Shakespeare's Tempest being the ‘original’. Césaire refuses to give his work any illusion of primariness, and thus avoids a reductive reversal. ‘Instead, he recognises the force of mutuality, the knot of reciprocity between master and slave, between a prior “classic” and his response to it. This labour of reciprocity accounts for the complexities of Césaire's transformation: a labour that defies any simple opposition between black and white, master and slave, original and adaptation, authentic and fake.’³¹

Here, Dayan is also alluding to the ‘dependency theory’ promulgated by Octave Mannoni, to which Césaire had strongly objected in his Discourse on Colonialism. But, despite Césaire's complete rejection of the concept that particular races were inherently predisposed either to the rôle of colonizer or the rôle of colonized, he was influenced by the idea that dependency established following colonization could be psychological and not exclusively economic. An economic dependency due to de-forestation and soil erosion of the island is implied in the text (‘Sebastian: A pity that the ground's barren in places. Caliban: That isn't mud … It's something Prospero's conjured up’), but complex psychological reasons are also suggested for Caliban's refusal to murder Prospero. It is not clear whether Prospero is genuinely physically defenceless, but in any case he manages to paralyse Caliban's action merely with words. Firstly, he orders Caliban to strike him. This immediately maintains the master-slave relation: Caliban's act of freedom would thus be to obey his master's orders. Second, Prospero refuses to arm himself, placing Caliban not only in the rôle of slave, but also in that of assassin—he allows Caliban no civilized way out. By denying him the typically Shakespearean duel, he also refuses to treat Caliban as an equal human being. Unlike Prospero, who is content with a sham victory over a powerless and unaware victim, Caliban yearns for a ‘real’ victory. Despite his scorn for Ariel's struggle to ‘free’ Prospero and give him a conscience, in the final hour it seems that Caliban is not content with a cold-blooded murder that would implicate him in a reductive reaction rather than any genuine solution. Caliban is nearer to approaching a positive position with his lucid articulation of the process of colonization and his verbal attack on Prospero that finally leads Prospero to admit: ‘you are the one who made me doubt myself for the first time’. But Césaire makes it quite clear that lengthening colonial dependence, in whatever form (Gonzalo's speech suggests the neocolonial behaviour of the tourism industry: ‘They must stay as they are: savages, noble savages, free, without complex or complication. Something like a pool of eternal youth where we would come at intervals to revive our drooping urban spirits’), cannot be seen as a victory for the colonizer. Prospero's final degeneration and loss of the precious order of his ‘civilization’, the disintegration of his mind and of his language, reveal Césaire's belief in what he called the ‘boomerang effect’—the phenomenon by which colonialism poisons and dehumanizes both sides. As Fanon puts it, ‘The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.’³² While Caliban has found a reductive form of freedom and Prospero's rantings are drowned by the noises of the island, a rotting colonialism continues to fester, reminding us, in Dayan's words, that for many peoples the era of ‘postcolonialism’ has not yet dawned, and for Martinique Une tempête serves as a ‘painful reminder of what has not happened’.³³ Furthermore, the form of neocolonialism that remains in Martinique is particularly entrenched because racism and financial dependence are masked by an apparent understanding and unity between colonizer and colonized.

Notes

1. Aimé Césaire, quoted in Richard D. E. Burton, Assimilation or Independence? Prospects for Martinique (Montreal, 1978), p. 1.

2. Homi Bhabha, ‘Remembering Fanon’, in Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London, 1986), p. xi.

3. Noted in Robert Eric Livingston, ‘Decolonising the Theatre: Césaire, Serreau and the Drama of Négritude’, in J. Ellen Gainor, ed., Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance (London, 1995), pp. 182-98.

4. Quoted in Livingston, ‘Decolonising the Theatre’, p. 192.

5. Lilyan Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (Philadelphia, 1974), p. 242 (my italics).

6. Carl Degler, Neither Black nor White (Wisconsin, 1971), esp. pp. 205-64.

7. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville, 1989), p. xix.

8. Michel Giraud, ‘Dialectics of Descent and Phenotypes in Racial Classification in Martinique’, in Richard D. E. Burton and Fred Reno, eds, French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadaloupe and French Guiana Today (London, 1995), pp. 75-85.

9. From Légitime défense, quoted in Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, p. 19.

10. René Maran and Gilbert Gratiant, quoted in Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, pp. 31 and 33-4:

    Ah! toute la douceaur de ma petite enfance
    Ces languissantes nuits du port de Fort-de-France
    Paradis végétaux
    Enchantez-moi longtemps du jeu de vos prestiges.
    .....Coffre à baisers
    Colibri du tourisme
    Bijou géographique
    Cher jardin des petits cadeaux
    Sol pour les démarches souples
    Et l'ample enjambée des femmes de couleur
    Petit cirque des corridors du coeur
    Familière boîte à surprise.

11. Suzanne Césaire, ‘Misère d'une poésie: John-Antoine Nau’, Tropiques, no. 4 (1941).

12. R. M. Albères, L'Aventure intellectuelle de XXe siècle (Paris, 1959), quoted in Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, pp. 38-9; cf. Michael Richardson, ed., Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (London, 1996).

13. Sartre, quoted in Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, p. 45.

14. Richard D. E. Burton, ‘The French West Indies à l'heure de l'Europe: An Overview’, in French and West Indian, pp. 1-19.

15. Susan Frutkin, Black Between Worlds: Aimé Césaire (Miami, 1973), p. 9.

16. Césaire, quoted in Frutkin, Black Between Worlds, p. 47.

17. Livingston, ‘Decolonising the Theatre’, p. 184.

18. All quotations from Une tempête are taken from Philip Crispin's forthcoming translation, published by Oberon Books.

19. Livingston, ‘Decolonising the Theatre’, p. 193.

20. Glissant, quoted in Benita Parry, ‘Resistance Theory/Theorising Resistance, or Two Cheers for Nativism’, in Francis Barker et al., eds, Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (Manchester, 1994), pp. 172-96.

21. Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Postcolonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London, 1996), p. 8.

22. Césaire, quoted in A. James Arnold, Modernism and Négritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge, MA, 1981), p. 44.

23. Parry, ‘Resistance Theory/Theorising Resistance’, pp. 179-80.

24. Bhabha, ‘Remembering Fanon’, p. xiii.

25. Parry, ‘Resistance Theory/Theorising Resistance’, p. 182.

26. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 135.

27. Sartre, Black Orpheus, quoted in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 133.

28. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 134.

29. Sartre, Black Orpheus, quoted in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 133.

30. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London, 1986), p. 121.

31. Joan Dayan, ‘Playing Caliban: Césaire's Tempest’, Arizona Quarterly, 48/4 (1992), pp. 125-45.

32. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 60.

33. Dayan, ‘Playing Caliban’, p. 138.