Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Playing Caliban: Césaire's Tempest

1992; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/arq.1992.0020

1558-9595

Joan Dayan,

Caribbean and African Literature and Culture

JOAN DAYAN Playing Caliban: Césaire's Tempest FTER the Amerindians (Carib, Arawak, Taino, and Siboney), .the original inhabitants of the Caribbean, were annihilated, and nothing remained but a blankness waiting to be filled by African slaves, a name would remain. The name alone would stand for all that had been destroyed: "Cannibal" uttered by those who "civilized" the land would live on to justify the extirpation of a race and the conquest of a world. Black slaves, their names forgotten, their pasts obliterated, were renamed in the New World. But no matter their new names, they would, when it served the settlers' purposes, embody the figure of the deformed and language-less savage. Caliban, now defined in most dictionaries as an anagram of Cannibal, or as something nasty, brutish, and short, specifically the "grotesque and brutish slave in Shakespeare's Tempest" (American Heritage), evokes images of the fierce Caribs of the West Indies. It was Shakespeare who first used the term for his "lying slave" who spoke the most beautiful language in the play, when Prospero wasn't around. In the twentieth century, Caribbean writers reappropriated the name Caliban with all its negative connotations. Inheritors of a legacy of darkness, barbarism, and evil, those who bore the brunt of being the object of someone else's imagination used the name to signal reversal and revolt. René Depestre's "nègre-tempête" (tempest-nigger), once possessed by the vodoun gods, strides to the "Dixie pit" of the American South in his Arc-en-ciel pour l'occident chrétien (A Rainbow for the ChrisArizona Quarterly Volume 48 Number 4, Winter 1992 Copyright © 1992 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-161 1 26Joan Dayan tian West) to become the "Caliban determined—unashamed to assum< his 'Caribbean blood,' his cannibalism, his fighting calibanité."1 Thi; recognition marks yet another stage in the process begun by Aime Césaire and the négritude poets in the 1930s (négritude itself bein| coined from nègre, a term of abomination and abuse): "Because we hat« you, you and your reason, we appeal to the dementia praecox, of flam ing madness of unrelenting cannibalism" (Cahier d'un retour au pay: natal/Notebook of a Return of the Native Land).2 As counter in an argument ofextremes, the name Caliban tended tc replay the debate between those fighting for a "new" language and those trapped in the illusion of assimilation. Roberto Retamar's Caliban ("we claim with the ring of glory the honour of considering ourselves the descendents of the black man aroused, ofrunaway slaves, independence warriors, and never the descendents of slave owners") tried to supplant Rodo's mulatto Ariel. ' The master/slave relationship so brilliantly given voice by the brash "Caliban dialectician" of Césaire's 1969 Une tempête asserted protest with a vengeance.4 And some poets, Derek Walcott, for example, would find only one way to break out of what was for him the simplistic savagety of Caliban as "enraged pupil": to cast his lot with Prospero, to give the howl to Crusoe.5 Caliban's force, like that of his name, lies in ambiguity; he occupies a space somewhere in between the alternating fullness and vacancy of the colonial experience. Note that historians from Du Tertre and de Rochefort to Bryan Edwards found the Caribs a highly indeterminate and therefore fascinating race. Their fundamental and threatening unknowability made them a blank that could be filled by the intruder's projections. Alternately fierce and noble, the Caribs more than the Arawaks remain in most narratives the recipients of the colonizer's alternating disdain and idealization. Once decimated, the Caribs (before the name became synonymous with cannibal), could be treated as a golden romance, a timeless response to the everpresent Africans. As Gordon Lewis writes in Main Currents in Caribbean Thought, making a fortune in a profit-oriented plantation world depended upon regarding the slave as a "nonperson"— the dehumanization Césaire called "thingification" in Discours sur le colonialism—and that Depestre recognized as the needs of capital to convert color into commodity.6 Lewis explains: Phying Calibant 27 it is suggestive that the romanticizing literature seized upon Ie bon sauvage, rather than le bon nègre, as its hero figure: it would have been difficult to have seen the detribalized and deculturated African slave as the repository of Antillean innocence; that was a task left for the European abolitionist literature of the eighteenth century.7 In its transit through texts and histories, the name Caliban will merge Carib and African.8 But the merger itself remains ambivalent in its effects. In praise of Caliban, Retamar declares, "What is out history, what is our culture, but the history, the culture ofCaliban?" His injunction is at best mystifying, a tautological challenge that asks a question whose terms—history or culture—resist definition. Whether Shakespeare's Caliban is African, "this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine" (as Prospero says) or Caribbean, given the derivation of the name, or at any rate an inhabitant of the New World (since Shakespeare mates Sycorax with Setebos, a New World great devil), is not the issue here. What matters is how Shakespeare unlocalizes Caliban and begins the confounding of origins so marked in contempoary assumptions of the name. Let us take Caliban as a call to inquiry, and attempt to retrieve something of the power and magic of the name, its ability to disguise and to reveal. Given the haunting sublimity of The Tempest, its lurking ambivalences, its tough weave of beauty and defilement , imagine Shakespeare at work making his language. Familiar with Florio's translation of Montaigne's "Cannibales," Shakespeare might have formed an anagram of the name for the Carib nation. But we can go further. The word originates in some form of the name for the Caribs, kallinago, kalliponam, and several renderings of the name by New World explorers include as a first syllable, "Car—," "CaI-," and "Can—." Sounding out CaIi, a non-etymological spelling of Calli, formed of the Greek word meaning beauty, Shakespeare commands the name into being. The name contains the contradictions so much a part of those first narratives of the Indies. Cali-ban: to proclaim Beauty/to curse or prohibit Beauty. In his first words to Caliban, Prospero talks as summoner: What, ho! Slave! Caliban! thou earth, thou! Speak! 1 28Joan Dayan Come forth, I say! Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself Upon thy wicked dam, come forth! In summoning Caliban as earth or slave, Shakespeare's Prospero yet suggests the duplicity of the figure. As both summoner and transgressor, Caliban sings, '"Ban, 'Ban, Ca-Caliban. " Taking in the doubleness of ban, he, like Prospero, prohibits, curses, or forbids beauty. Thus Caliban , inviting and forbidding, bears within him the oscillation that will become his destiny: a something to be either disdained or claimed, cursed or celebrated. Shakespeare grasped the full irony of the colonial experience, and Césaire knew it. The Tempest begins with usurpation and exile. Extirpated from his native land by his brother Antonio and sent off to a strange island (as the Africans were exported to the Caribbean), Prospero enacts a second usurpation. He takes the island away from Caliban , an "inhabitant" who is so savage and inhuman that the island can be described in Shakespeare's stage directions as "uninhabited." Shakespeare 's play, like Césaire's, is shot through with a language of bondage, coercion, and liberation. The breaking of bonds, in Prospero's case especially, also implies a stripping away of masks, a removal of artifice that leaves Prospero weaker once his "charms are overthrown." And both plays interrogate history, call for origins, and summon remembrance . Asked by Miranda for her story, Shakespeare's Prospero then wonders: But how is it That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time? If thou rememb'rest aught ere thou cam'st there, How thou cam'st here thou mayst. The promise of knowing "How thou cam'st here" bears consideration in the context of the colonial drama. For Albert Memmi, the fact of the colonized is that he/she is outside "the game of history. " Frantz Fanon gives colonialism that special talent (as George Lamming says of Pros- Playing Caliban1 29 pero in The Pleasures of Exile) of "throwing the past in your face," but a past revised as grotesque.9 Prospero is wary ofboth Ariel's and Caliban's search for origins, and of course the past he gives us is his interpretation of history. Yet Shakespeare decenters Prospero's position as sole historian by also giving us Caliban's account of his origination. Shakespeare's subversive decentering of power and legitimacy also results from the indeterminacy of origins and locale throughout the play: the "blue-ey'd hag" Sycorax was exiled from Argier, Algiers, in the Old World, to the magic island. By mating the hag with Setebos, a Patagonian divinity, he further merges contradictory details. And the course of the voyage is not to the New World, "the stiP vexed Bermoothes ," but from Tunis to Naples. Truly magical, the island is a center for conflation, misrepresentation, and reversal. The dual topography of Mediterranean and Atlantic, Old World and New, and the slippages between these places, allows Shakespeare both to demonstrate the fictive attributes of any so-called "history" of exploration and to question any single, privileged source of value, determined by any single race or nation. Gonzalo's natives, "mountaineers/Dew-lapp'd like bulls . . . /men whose heads stood in their breasts," are as much figments of his imagination as any of the strange shapes conjured by Prospero. In writing Une tempête Césaire turns back to The Tempest in order to retrieve and sustain his voice in a context that defies easy dichotomy. The problem with the ongoing argument about the Caliban complex is the incarceration of the militant, heady Caliban as icon in the academy : a move as dangerous as Leopold Senghor's vague "essence noire," what Despestre calls his "totalitarian négritude." Houston Baker, responding to the issue of Critical Inquiry entitled "'Race,' Writing, and Difference" (Autumn 1985), argues for an explosion of "the venerable Western trope of Prospero and Caliban . . . the rationalist and the debunker, the colonizer and the indigenous people."10 In an attempt to break out of a cult of the either/or, leading to yet another canonization of Caliban, I want to consider how Césaire's Tempest demands a full politics and poetics of deformation and démystification. It seems to me that it is not so much naming, but remembering that matters: an act of 130Joan Dayan naming that carries with it the burden of the past. The liberated Caliban in taking on his name drags the residue of bondage behind him; he sheds the name as he takes on and fully inhabits his history. Yet in choosing to confront Shakespeare's Tempest, Césaire takes on a name and a history that might not be seen as his own. He makes no claims for originality. The title page presents "Une tempête: d'après la Tempête de Shakespeate—Adaptation for a black theater." In place of a list of characters he writes simply: "Ceux de Shakespeare," with "Deux précisions supplémentaires" (Two additional qualifications): Ariel, "a slave, ethnically a mulatto," and Caliban, "a black slave"; and "Une Addition" (One addition), Eshu, "a black devil-god." Césaire's adamant refusal to give his work some illusion of primaryness is crucial to our understanding of what might first seem to be mere celebratoty rebellion. Howling for an instrument ofreconnection, CaIiban /Césaire does not simply negate. Instead, he recognizes the force of mutuality, the knot of reciprocity between master and slave, between a prior "classic" and his response to it. This labor of reciprocity accounts for the complexities of Césaire's transformation: a labor that defies any simple opposition between black and white, master and slave, original and adaptation, authentic and fake. In denying his text the status of original, Césaire teaches us how to return to the Shakespeare "original," to reread it and know the possibilities for reversal inherent in a drama too often treated as a dramatization of the opposing claims of nature vs. nurture, art vs. nature, or civilization vs. savagery. Although a discussion of "influence," of the anxiety of returning to the givens of a prior text, might be a means of approaching Une tempête, it oversimplifies the nature of Césaire's bold superimposition. Ifwe take Césaire at his word and read his play as an adaptation, not as a disavowal or destruction of what preceded it, then we begin to understand how both texts are complicated through mutual adaptation or convertibility . What might have seemed to be a case of simple rebellion becomes instead an accommodation that puts the stuff of legend (the romantic gesture of rebel or conquerer) in a dialogue so powerful that it implicates both colonized and colonizer. Césaire's Tempest is a difficult play to read. Not because of a complicated language (it lacks the hermeticism of much of Césaire's poetry), but because of an apparent acceptance of a Caliban shouting "Free- Playing Caliban131 dorn," and a Prospero calling upon "civilization." Yet if questioning, the pulverization of facile dualism and false empowering constitutes the real drama of Shakespeare's play, I will argue that Césaire's adaptation asks questions that undermine any possible pleasure in revolt. Like most of Césaire's writings and his political career, Caliban's play is beset by contradictions that work beneath the surface polarities to undo, interrogate , and warn. Césaire knows that it is as misleading and as distorting to idealize the black nay-sayer as to praise the Eurocentric establishment. Dramatizing the dangers of any counter-mythology, Line tempête confronts the ambiguities we have discussed. In his experimentation with different kinds of poetic and political rhetoric, whether Ariel's fanciful neosymbolism or Caliban's bald negations, Césaire proves that the lapse of language into cliché threatens the black rebel, the mulatto lackey, and the white master. Just as Césaire's "revision" of Shakespeare's Tempest must be dealt with not in terms of easy essentialism, but as a procedure of continuing complications, we will analyze Césaire's play as an inquiry into power, power viewed as a contagion capable of involving every character in a damning reciprocity. Apart from such technical changes, additions, or displacements as the gathering of five acts into three; the appearance of the African gods Eshu (the "player of tricks") and Shango (force of thunder and lightning ); and the transformation of Ariel into accommodating lyricist, the real break with Shakespeare's text occurs in the continuing dialogue between Prospero and Caliban. Césaire's drama turns on their mutuality , their reciprocal recognition: their relationship is an exercise in whose language matters, who has the last word. In stressing the labor of language in the play, Césaire demands that we consider claims other than the literary. Dramatizing competing theories about the colonial encounter, he hopes to instruct people in the question of revolution, its possibility in the contemporary Caribbean . Works like Fanon's Block Skin, White Masks (1952), his own Discourse on Colonialism (1955), Mannoni's Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1956), and Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) provide a ground for understanding Césaire's Tempest. These texts form a significant dialogue on the status of the articulation of the self as subject, a formation that depends upon language, desire, and recognition." t32Joan Dayan For Césaire a concrete "prise de conscience," the activity of expression , is key to recognition. The task of awareness, however, depends upon recognition by what denies or disallows it: the magus Prospero's words silence, distort, or ignore Caliban's attempt to devise speech. Yet Caliban initiates a new discourse and engages Prospero in a new text. Marx recognized that "Hegel . . . seizes Labor as essence, as what proves good the essence of man." Labor is the fact of Caliban's existence . To Prospero's words about teaching him language ("you should be able to bless me for having taught you how to speak"), Caliban simply responds: "You've taught me nothing at all. Except, of course, to jabber your language in order to understand your orders: cut the wood, wash the dishes, catch fish, plant vegetables, because you're too lazy to do it."12 Fundamentally, the conditions of the play show that given the limitations of a situation where everything seems stacked against you, there is still possibility of conversion. And that possibility Césaire bluntly grounds in Hegel's delineation of the tense bond, the unerring reciprocity between he who calls himself master and he who responds as slave. What matters in Hegel's discussion in his Phenomenology is his analysis of convertibility: "just as lordship showed its essential nature to be the reverse of what it wants to be, so, too, bondage will, when completed, pass into the opposite of what it immediately is: being a consciousness repressed within itself, it will enter into itself, and change round into real and true independence."13 The possibility of such a "revolution" inspired Césaire's creation of Caliban, whom he describes as "a rebel— the positive hero, in a Hegelian sense. The slave is always more important than his master—for it is the slave who makes history."14 In this tempest Caliban makes history both by participating in a world of marvels and by articulating himself in a context inimical to him. The force of the Hegelian dialectic is that by realizing the will of the master, cutting wood or washing dishes, Caliban generates a transformation of matter that allows him to succeed where Prospero fails. How does this happen? As early as his Discourse on Colonialsim, Césaire knew how the colonial relationship chains both colonizer and colonized in implacable dependence. "First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word"; "colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man."15 If "colonization = thingification," then the Tempest will demonstrate how Playing Caliban133 Prospero, the magus ofWestern art and civilization, turns into a thing— a reduction dramatized as a failure of language. Caliban can claim a history and name himself because of Prospero's involvement in their mutual discourse, a dialogue that is not granted Ariel. Ariel's songs, unlike Caliban's, are not accompanied by labor. Prospero mocks their emptiness, their lyrical resistance to change and evasion of action. "It's always like that with intellectuals . . . what interests me are not your fears but your deeds." Or later in the play, "Say here, you're not going to set fire to the world with your music." Caliban's works songs are dedicated to Shango, the fiery storm-god who recalls Shakespeare's stage direction for the first act of his Tempest: ? tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard. " Nowhere do we get so full a sense of the necessity and the peril of a struggle that is also key to recognition as when Ariel warns Caliban, "you know that in that game [war] Prospero is unbeatable." Caliban answers: Better death than humiliation and injustice. . . . Besides, the last word belongs absolutely to me. . . . The day I feel all is lost, let me steal barrels of infernal powder, and this island, my possession, my work, from the heights of the empyrean where you like to soar, you'll see it explode in the air, I hope, with Prospero and me in the debris. The choice of death hete is no empty rhetoric. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon writes, "Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him." Taking his source in Hegel, he recognizes that the "double process ofboth self-consciousnesses" in the relationship between master and servant does not apply to the white master and black slave. "One day the White master, without conflict, recognized the Negro slave."16 For Fanon, this recognition—coming without conflict—lacks the reciprocity necessary for full consciousness of self. The fear of death—not the longing for love—alone gives freedom. And while Ariel is willing to say "Yes, master," until Prospero fulfills his "promise" of freedom, Caliban will risk his life to become part of that world Fanon describes as "a world of reciprocal recognitions." Placed irrevocably on the outside of mutuality, Ariel remains lost in the position of grateful child, recipient of the good will and gifts of a 134Joan Dayan master who continues to be master. Now, Césaire's Caliban answers such abstractions as "conscience," "patience, vitality, love" by denying an "easy freedom." He undermines Ariel's liberal cant (his "exalting dream" of "a marvelous world" of "brotherhood") by recognizing, not ignoring a history of outrage, violation, and loss. In the most critical addition to Shakespeare's text, Caliban remembers, and renames himself . When Caliban tells Prospero, "I will no longer be Caliban. . . . I'm telling you that from now on I will not respond to the name of Caliban," Prospero falls automatically into the role of renamer. He cannot remain unengaged in the dialogue that Caliban initiates. How about Cannibal, Prospero mocks, re-anagramatizing Caliban, and thus inverting the move from Cannibal to Caliban. Or he tries again, Hannibal , adding, "They all love historic names" (collapsing Caliban's identity into the plural, anonymous "they"). Caliban will choose X—for the man without a name—a sign for what has been taken away. That fact, he says is history. "You talk about history . . . well, that's history, and everyone knows it! Every time you call me it reminds me of the basic fact that you've stolen everything from me, even my identity!" But Caliban sees immense possibilities in what has been unnamed, submerged, and violated. His attempt to recall, to summon forth a past that can convert nothing into a source of affirmation, is nowhere so effective as when he remembers his mother Sycorax. Prospero has warned, "There are some genealogies it would be better not to brag about. A hag! A witch from whom, thank God, death has delivered us!" Caliban resists this attempt to degrade his origins. Dead or living, she is my mother and I will not renounce her! Besides, you believe she's dead, because you believe the earth is a dead thing. . . . It's so much more convenient! Dead, when you stamp on her, dirty her, trample her under your conquering foot! Me, I respect her, because I know that the earth lives and Sycorax lives. Sycorax my mother! Serpent! Rain! Lightning! Prospero can only respond to his slave's tough recollection by attempting to persuade him that his words are nothing but "witchcraft," and he thus implicitly acknowledges their power. Playing Caliban135 Césaire intends that we understand the colonial situation, and he presents a Caliban who not only engages Prospero, but who somehow stops short of revolution. Act III represents a strangely thwarted confrontation . Following the failed attempt to overthrow Prospero with the laughable Trinculo and Stephano, Caliban blames himself for thinking that "paunches and bloated faces could make a Revolution!" He toasts Prospero: "Prospero, to the two of us!" Weapon in hand, he rushes at Prospero who has just appeared, and Prospero responds in a way that could be performed as farce: "Strike, well, strike then! Your master! Your benefactor! You're not even going to spare him!" But Caliban does spare him: he lifts his arm, but then hesitates. How do we interpret this deliberate hiatus? The scene ends up being nothing but gesture. Prospero tells Caliban, "You're just an animal: you do not know how to kill," and Caliban answers Prospero, "Defend yourself! I'm not an assassin." Both have been trapped by language and implicated by it. As Prospero sends Caliban to prison, he says, "Stupid like a slave! Now the comedy is complete." But the comedy is not over, and that is Césaire's point. There remains one more scene to be played: a mutually willed confinement that leaves master and slave alone in a profusion of words. The ending of Césaire's play sustains the dialogue between Prospero and Caliban. In Shakespeare's Tempest we assume that Caliban resumes control of the island, as Prospero, having laid aside his book and his staff, returns to Naples. But Césaire's Prospero chooses to remain on the island. After ten years, he still needs to talk to Caliban. He wants to "make peace," urging "We've ended up being compatriots!" Caliban refuses, saying that he will continue the struggle. But the fight can only be sustained through language, as Caliban inquires into his past, activates his own history, and denounces Prospero: Prospero, you are a great illusionist: deception you know well. And you've lied so much to me, lied about the world, about yourself, that you've ended up imposing on me an image of myself: underdeveloped, as you put it, ?$6Joan Dayan a sub-capable, that's how you made me see myself, and I hate this image! And it's false! and I know myself too! Prospero calls this Caliban's "inverted world," suggesting that their relationship has been reversed, that the tables have turned. Caliban lectures about the truth of the colonizer's "mission" or "vocation": "You've got a chance to make an end of it:/You can beat it!/I'm sure you will not leave!/Your 'mission' makes me laugh/your 'vocation' !/Your vocation is to give me shit!/And that's why you stay here,/like those sods who created the colonies/and who now can't live anywhere else." Without Caliban's labor the island becomes protagonist: "dirty nature " takes its revenge on the white magician. But only after Césaire has made sure we hear yet again the two competing voices. Caliban sings a song to Shango—"Shango marches powerfully/across the sky, his pathl" as Prospero proclaims his transformative powers: I've uprooted the oak, raised the seas, shook up mountains, and bared my chest to adversity, I've answered Jupiter thunderbolt for thunderbolt. Better yet! From the noise, from a monster, I have made man! But oh! To have failed to find the path to man's heart . . . Prospero then turns to Caliban: "Well, I hate you tool/Because you're the one who first made me doubt myself." The uncertain, troubled old man ofShakespeare's play here justifies himself to the departing nobles: Hear me well. I am not a master in the banal sense of the word, as this savage believes, but the conductot of a vast score: this island. I alone taise up voices, And chain them as I please, arranging out of confusion one intelligible line. Playing Caliban137 Without me, who would know how to draw music from all that? This island is mute without me. My duty, then, is here. Here I will stay. And once left alone with Caliban, Prospero says, "Now, Caliban, to us both!" Césaire's final imaging of Prospero surrounded by the vermin, insects , and reptiles that have infested his cave reveals his defeat by the material world that Caliban's labor had commanded, shaped, and controlled . By the end ofthe play, Prospero, in a stupor ofself-coincidence, aged and weary, is reduced to automatic gestures, and his language fails. It's odd, but for some time now we've been invaded by possums . . . . Some Mexican hogs, wild boars, all this dirty nature ! But mainly possums. . . . Oh, those eyes! And that base grin on their faces. It's as though the jungle wants to beseige the cave. But I will defend myself. ... I will not let my work perish! He screams, "I will defend civilization!" to an unresponsive nature, to an unanswering Caliban. The play ends with a powerless Prospero suffering alone in his decrepitude, while Caliban gets the last word. He proclaims his new-found freedom, with the sound of surf and the chirping of the birds as background to his song, "freedom ohé, freedom!" Caliban's "Uhutu" (meaning "Independence" or "Freedom" in Swahili ) has punctuated Césaire's drama; indeed, the play turns on the question of what constitutes freedom. Yet Césaire leaves the question unresolved. The end of his play remains ambiguous, Caliban and Prospero two voices shouting in the tempest. What is Caliban's future? Why in his final declaration of freedom does he change from Swahili to French, "la liberté, ohé, la liberté!"? In the context ofCésaire's two earlier history plays (both fables and inquiries), Une Saison au Congo and La Tragédie du Roi Christophe, the final shout of freedom becomes less than hopeful. He knows that the struggle to sustain an ideal of freedom is far more difficult than its mere proclamation. We should not forget that Césaire wrote his Tempest not only as a 138Joan Dayan response to the upbeat spirit of black assertion in the sixties (the moves toward independence in Africa and the Caribbean), but out of the torpor that is contemporary Martinique, ever-stagnant in its ongoing role as accommodating child of France (an overseas département of France since 1946). Indeed, in contemporary Africa and the Caribbean , Caliban's call for "freedom" is a painful reminder of what has not happened, a summons that once placed in the context of contemporary events sounds out its status as hollow cliché. Césaire knows, even as he creates his militant Caliban, that his "Uhuru" could be nothing more than a spurious affirmation: for the question is not independence, but what follows. This crucial question Césaire omits from the Tempest, leaving a hollow at the center of his rhetorical celebration. Césaire's Tempest makes us attend to failure, to what might be an aberrant ta