Month: April 2020

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New Irish Literature and Literary Studies

New Irish Literature and Literary Studies

Our ND Irish Studies Librarian and the Curator of Irish Studies Collections, Aedín Ní Bhróithe Clements, has a blog that keeps track of new and relevant books. You should check it out!

There’s a book listed that I had not heard of before and I have just added it to my list! Hollywood Cemetery, by Liam O’Flaherty. If you are writing about The Informer / Uptight, you might want to check it out. O’Flaherty spent time in Hollywood while Ford was making the film. The novel recreates his time there from a satirical pov and supports my reading of the film as noir (I think). Very interesting development. It seems the novel was banned in Ireland and only survived one printing.

Aedín also included this note: Please don’t hesitate to ask if there are books or articles you need. There is so much information about online resources and services that I’d rather pass it along selectively as needed, but you can find it all in the ‘COVID 19 Service Continuity’ link on the library home page.

So again, if you have trouble finding materials while you write your research papers, please let me know. I will do my best to help you locate the texts you need to finish your papers.

Happy reading and writing!

New Irish Literature and Literary Studies

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Gonzalo

One of the things I appreciated about Cesaire’s version of “A Tempest” was his interpretation of Gonzalo. Gonzalo, in the original “Tempest”, was a kind-hearted old man who made sure to do his duty to his king and the princess. He was written as a charming optimist, meant to be lovable by all those who are not active evil-doers. In Cesaire’s “A Tempest”, this view about Gonzalo doesn’t change much – excepting one major point. Gonzalo is still a kind-hearted old man. And yet, in this play, he is explicitly made a white kind-hearted old man, who believes that white skin inherently means superiority. The first sign we see of this is when he’s discussing with the others he is ship-wrecked with about the possibility of the island having inhabitants. He wants to be careful to “civilize” them “properly”; he literally uses the term colonization. And again we see at the end of the play, Gonzalo makes an attempt to “save” Caliban with religion; but Caliban’s rejection of this action “forces” Gonzalo to leave him to the secular arm. This redefining of Gonzalo was, I believe, one of the most poignant parts of the play. It showcases the very dilemma that Ariel and Caliban are trying to force Prospero to face, but for the audience’s perspective. Gonzalo’s “kind actions” are not kind at all; they are a way of controlling those who he considers inferior to himself, under the guise of kindness and “civility.” He represents the white savior complex.

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Questions on A Tempest

Some questions I had about Cesaire’s “A Tempest” were, why in the end did Prospero remain on the island? He was about to return to his home with his daughter, and to regain his kingdom. And yet, he didn’t. He stayed on the island in order to make sure that Caliban was not free. Why? What is the point of this change in the play?

 

I also wondered, why didn’t Ariel return to Caliban in order to help him escape as well? He bore only good-will toward Caliban, as evidenced by his warning earlier. So why did he not return to help Caliban also become free?

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Walcott’s Caliban & Césaire’s Caliban

In Walcott’s interview with Bill Moyers he mentions Caliban from The Tempest. Walcott explains that Caliban is not talked about like Tarzan. He says the best poetry – besides Prospero’s speech – is spoken by Caliban in the end. For Walcott, this is where the greatness of Shakespeare is because he gives Caliban a musical language. Caliban learns from Prospero. Walcott provides Caliban from The Tempest as an example of his ideal of sharing rather than dependence between colonizer and colonized.

Césaire’s A Tempest offers a very different view on Caliban’s language. Caliban does not speak in beautiful poetic forms like in The Tempest. He tells Prospero “You didn’t teach me a thing! Except to jabber in your own language so that I could understand your orders” (17). Caliban uses his language to curse and spurn Prospero, while Prospero responds, “Beating is the only language you really understand” (19). In Césaire’s adaptation, there is no beautiful, shared language – there are only ugly words spoken between Prospero and Caliban. Prospero does nothing to teach Caliban, hiding his knowledge of science and magic from him and only sharing this with Ariel. Prospero’s language is the instrument which takes away Caliban’s freedom and it is forced upon Caliban to make him understand orders. The language Prospero and Caliban speak is not a true sharing because it is unwillingly done so.

Walcott said in the interview that he likes to focus on the present rather than his past. He was brought up in what he describes as a benign colonial situation, but the history of his family would not have looked like his present. It is a present and positive view which he brings to his writing, but it is also confined and tested by works like A Tempest, as Césaire challenges Walcott’s interpretation of the beauty of Caliban and his learned language.

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Walcott and the Sea

Walcott physically embodies the Caribbean’s hybridity and translates it into his work. This hybridity can be seen very clearly in his use of the sea in his works, which is responsible for the hybrid identity of the Caribbean people in the first place. The characters’ connections to the sea explore the ideas of hybridity, its connection to the sea, and how identities are connected to and are constantly being altered by the water. 

In The Sea at Dauphin, both the livelihood and identity of the people of St. Lucia are dependent upon the sea. On a basic level, Dauphin is a fishing village that is full of fishermen who work to catch food that helps to feed their families and the town. The sea, however, also was the source that helped to shape the mixed language and culture that make up their identity. The characters in the play speak a mixture of Creole and English, a language reflecting those of the real Caribbean inhabitants. This language is the result of the native islanders’ interactions with the French and English colonizers, who came to the island via the sea and forever changed their identity and that of the island. While older characters such as Hounakin are not as directly connected to the physical sea, the younger characters are all directly connected to the sea in some way. This suggests that the future of the islanders and their identities are even more inherently connected to the sea and the hybridized identity that it brings than the older generation had been. 

 In “The Schooner Flight,” Walcott explores what effects traveling the sea has on Shabine’s hybridized identity. Shabine leaves behind his home and ventures out to the unfamiliar sea. This is different from The Sea at Dauphin, where people venture to sea to fish but further travel is not mentioned. As a result of this, Walcott gives the reader a closer look into what happens to the already hybridized identity of a Caribbean person when they venture off of their island. Shabine’s experience depicts how one carries their identity with them, even when they leave, and how it comes to be affected and even further hybridized through travels. While Shabine is leaving behind the island physically, he carries the memories of it—most notably in his constant reminders of his lover, Maria. No matter what Shabine does or how far he travels, he is unable to shake the memory of her and his longing to return. His identity, as well as his remembrance of her shifts, however, as he gains a greater sense of the colonizer’s religion. Maria and this religion become intertwined and his travels on the sea work to alter and form a greater sense of hybridity within his identity. 

 As Heaney mentions, Walcott gives space in his works to explore the different facets of identity. In these works, we see examples of the Caribbean’s hybridized identities in both those who stay and those who choose to venture away from the islands. In both cases, the sea not only was the initial source of mixing in the Caribbean that brought about hybridized identities, but the place that continues to bring about further mixing. Walcott’s use of the sea and his clear connections to how it comes to mix the identity of the people has helped me not only to understand the hybridized identity of the Caribbean, but also to better realize the functions of sea on all identities—especially in relation to groups that we have looked at this semester.

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Imperialism and the “White Savior” Complex in “A Tempest”

While Caliban stands out as the figure most associated with Cesaire’s adaptation of Shakespeare, I found his use of Prospero and a conqueror and slave master equally fascinating.  In his opening scene, Prospero finds comfort in his “books and instruments,” clear signs of European civilization or “whiteness,” in the “disgusting place,” which he nevertheless wishes to own and possess for his own sake.  Even when Prospero openly criticizes the land and calls its natives beasts, he feels compelled to bring his white perspective and bring it out of what he supposes to be filth, according to his own conceptions of civility.   His claims to Ariel that he’ll have his desired freedom “when I’m good and ready” also show this extreme narcissism and self-importance seen in our previous discussions of colorism and “readiness.”  Because Ariel is lighter skinned and does not wish to resort to violence as Caliban does, Prospero looks slightly more kindly upon Ariel, despite his continued efforts to form them to his own conceptions of humanity and proper behavior, acting as a “white savior” to these people he deems to be sub-human until he can correct them or wipe them out.

Once Caliban enters the scene, Prospero’s instincts truly emerge, feeling threatened by Caliban because of his darker skin suggesting his “never-readiness” to enter the world of Prospero and his preference of violence and direct activism to counteract the oppressive tactics of the white slaver.  Prospero again shows his need to impart his white ways upon the black natives when he criticizes Caliban “mumbling his native language again,” as if he can no longer act as he is accustomed to in his own land after Prospero has come in with the intent to whitewash or destroy the natives and their culture to promote the spreading of his own perceived civility.  And even when Prospero does pass on pieces of knowledge and culture, Caliban points out that they are only things which can barely harm the authority of the white imperialist, keeping science and higher ideals deliberately from the natives so as to maintain his own dominance over them.  As a result, Caliban effectively weaponizes the English language, one of the few things Prospero has passed to him besides instruction on slavery, to use it against his captor.  Yet, Prospero disregards this clear sign of humanity and intelligence in Caliban, who even knows more languages than his colonizer, and resorts to the use of violence to keep Caliban under his thumb, subtly indicating to the audience that perhaps these harsh practices reveal the beast within Prospero and Caliban’s rejection and embracing of humanity show his higher status.

In the ending scene of the play, Prospero has this status ripped from him, as he decides to stay with Caliban, valuing his apparent imperialism over leaving the island.  In this way, Prospero has allowed imperialism to corrupt him, as he is consumed by the desire to control and rule over others in  a foreign land than to return to his own.  With the script flipped. Caliban now becomes the master in a sense, gaining his land back for himself where he can thrive, while Prospero struggles to maintain his crumbling “civilization” on the island.   Once he must fend for himself, Prospero realizes he is doomed, “Have to think about making a fire,” at which point he finally begins to think of Caliban as his companion and equal when he cannot live on his own.  Unable to “let [his] work perish,” Prospero loses his power when his illusion of empire fails, while Caliban is able to survive by his own means, showing that native peoples, both within the work and the real world, are able to persist and survive without the interference and “advancements” of white civilization.  As Caliban ends the work celebrating his freedom, Cesaire delegitimizes any notion of the “white savior” while the former conqueror Prospero freezes and starves and the native Caliban is able to reclaim his former way of life.

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The Complexity of Identity

I was most struck by our reflections on hybridity this week and the various ways it manifested in the different works we looked at and the ways it complicates identity. Walcott, unnecessarily pointed out by Heaney, clearly interacts with the intersections of history and identity within his work and Heaney’s characterization of this hybridity is conventional and mundane, despite the beauty of the language he communicates it in.  His view of Walcott’s work plays into tropes about the Caribbean and the Atlantic experience, that I think some of us were skirting around activating in our descriptions of Walcott’s poetry and its flow – tropes of lyricism encoded in the language and people, that, while maybe not entirely inaccurate, fail to grasp the true dynamics of hybridic identity. Heaney says of Walcott “From the beginning he has never simplified or sold short. Africa and England are in him.” (Heaney, 6).  This statement is its own unintentionally ironic and blunt simplification of what we know to be the complex histories at work here and as I believe Alexis pointed out, who is Heaney, as an Irishman, to be the judge of how Walcott expresses his hybridic identity. The Irish too have their realm of hybridity within their sphere, which I think we can see Heaney attempting to reconcile in his own work about the Troubles, but that does not privilege him to assign value judgements for the expressions of another’s identity. How does he truly know that Walcott’s activations of both the Caribbean and Egypt are “risky” or “large appropriations” and even if they are, with what experience does he legitimize them?       

I’m curious to know how we would have read Heaney’s assessments of Walcott had we not had the collective aha moment last week about the nature of comparisons between the Black and the Green and the fundamental distinctions between them and if we would have come to the came conclusions. 

Heaney’s comment about Africa and England is interesting too based on what we have discussed about the ideas of a homeland and how the memory of a homeland becomes unique to those that hold it.  There is a change of time and distance and I think that plays into hybridic identity too – history and identity aren’t static or easily separable. We can see this, the idea of hybridity as exchange and ultimately change within A Tempest too.  As we, and the text, attempted to point out, the process of colonization changes the colonizer as much as it changes the colonized – you can’t dehumanize someone else without losing some of your humanity in the process – and Prospero’s cruelty is a marker of that.  In the same way that The Tempest couldn’t be translated to French without Cesaire imbibing himself, and the subsequent English translation for our version of A Tempest would have lost some of Cesaire. Once again, that was rambling, but I’m essentially trying to assert that identities can’t be distilled into stock categories.  There is change in the creation of hybridic identities that can’t fully be quantified, but should be appreciated.

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Living Within The Color Line But Along the Color Spectrum

In Derek Walcott’s Sea at Dauphin, the characters use a mix of Creole and English when speaking with each other. For instance, early in the play, Afa, speaking with Gacia, says, “Merci…Ay, ay, boug. ‘Ous riche, a whole one? Is only natural for wind to blow so hard, but to turn, and turn (47).” This mix of language is remarkably fluid; the characters speak both languages to everyone and even switch back and forth over the course of a sentence.

Walcott was known as an exceptional presenter of hybridity. This language is one example of that. Hybridity is natural in the Caribbean, rather than terrifying. Take, for comparison, the depiction of hybridity in The Octoroon by Boucicault. The phrase “octoroon” is a desperate attempt to retain the color line. By defining this person in exact proportions (1/8 black, 7/8 white), society attempts to keep that division between black and white. Yet Walcott doesn’t abide by that division; where white, colonial society ends and Black society begins is nearly impossible to tell. Rather than starkly divided, the two sides are fluidly united.

Yet, while Walcott’s work may present a Caribbean that does not stick to the color line, Césaire introduces the reader to a color spectrum. In A Tempest, Prospero treats Ariel, a mulatto slave, and Caliban, an African slave, completely differently. When he first speaks to Ariel in the play, Prospero calls him an “intellectual (16).” In his first interactions with Caliban, he calls the slave “an ugly ape” and “a savage” (17). While these conversations are not the first time Prospero has interacted with the slaves, and thus their previous interactions could have contributed to widening the discrepancy between these two depictions, it is impossible to view Prospero’s words without looking at the race of the two slaves. If anything, these scenes show that whiteness still has some value in the Caribbean even if the color line is not as prominently defined as in the United States. As Ryan helpfully pointed out, Ariel has access to Prospero’s magic and Caliban does not. Additionally, Ariel ends the play deserving of freedom while Caliban does not. Whiteness carries privilege even if it is not full whiteness. Looking at Walcott and Césaire together, we see that hybridity is celebrated as an integral part of the Caribbean experience yet a color spectrum still remains in which one’s closeness to whiteness provides certain privileges and advantages.

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“White Magic” in A Tempest

In A Tempest, Caliban describes Prospero’s powers specifically as “white magic.” This white magic is portrayed as a force opposing the natural order of the island in the way that invasive technologies of colonizers had in the real world. Caliban even complains about Prospero’s technology and civilization that he brings to the island. I believe that Cesaire intended to equate the blend of white technology and culture into the force of “white magic” in order to give the power of white colonizers a name that is descriptive both of its other-worldliness to less technological cultures and its opposition to natural order. 

Prospero’s colonization of the island is unnatural both to the natives of the island and the drunks who attempt to colonize it themselves, but for different reasons. When the drunks complain to Caliban of the rough nature of the island, he replies that the nature is unnaturally wild due to Prospero’s white magic. But Caliban and the drunken colonizers are, in reality, complaining about two separate problems. Caliban is merely upset at Prospero’s control of the island whereas the colonizers are upset at the island itself. Caliban blames their despair on Prospero simply so they help him reclaim the land. This scene shows that there is no “white magic” in actuality, but Prospero’s technology still makes him a stronger opponent than Caliban. The two drunken whites that intend to colonize the island are not stronger than Caliban, however, because they are cut off from their technology, and therefore cannot control the unruly nature of the island.

“White magic” is a direct tool of the civilizing mission that Prospero describes throughout the play. It is not magic itself, but the ability to use technology to modify and control nature to one’s desire. Prospero cannot control Caliban or Ariel themselves, but his technological power threatens them enough to make them follow his orders. I think that Cesaire’s use of the “white magic” theme ultimately points to the unnaturality of slavery. It is a system that is imposed on the world by those meaning to bend nature, and is therefore unnatural and otherworldly. Prospero’s very existence on the island is forced due to his exile from his home country, showing that his “civilized” way of life does not truly belong in the natural world.