Une Tempête

Une Tempête (English:"A Tempest"[2]) is a 1969 play by Aimé Césaire. It is an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest from a postcolonial perspective, set on an island in the Caribbean. The play was first performed at the Festival d'Hammamet in Tunisia under the direction of Jean-Marie Serreau. It later played in Avignon and Paris. Césaire uses all of the characters from Shakespeare's version, with some additions and new renderings of the original cast. In this version, Césaire specifies that Prospero is a white master, while Ariel is a mulatto and Caliban is a black slave.[3] These characters are the focus of the play as Césaire foregrounds issues of race, power, decolonization, and anti-imperialism.

Une Tempête
Written byAimé Césaire
Date premiered1969[1]
Place premieredthe Festival d'Hammamet in Tunisia
Original languageFrench

Characters

Prospero - the rightful duke of Milan, powerful magician, and slave master

Ariel - a "mulatto slave" and fairy

Caliban - son of Sycorax and Black slave

Miranda - Prospero's daughter

Eshu - a Yoruba god

Ferdinand - the son of Alonso and Miranda's love interest

Alonso - the King of Naples

Antonio- the Duke of Naples and Prospero's brother

Gonzalo - Alonso's counselor

Trinculo - the King of Naples' jester

Stephano - the King of Naples' butler

Synopsis

The action in the play closely follows that of Shakespeare's play, though Césaire emphasizes the importance of the people who inhabited the island before the arrival of Prospero and his daughter Miranda: Caliban and Ariel. Both have been enslaved by Prospero, though Caliban was the ruler of the island before Prospero's arrival.

Caliban and Ariel react differently to their situations. Caliban favors revolution over Ariel's non-violence, and rejects his name as the imposition of Prospero's colonizing language, desiring to be called X.[4][5] He complains stridently about his enslavement and regrets not being powerful enough to challenge the reign of Prospero. Ariel, meanwhile, contents himself with asking Prospero to consider giving him independence.

At the end of the play, Prospero grants Ariel his freedom, but retains control of the island and of Caliban. This is a notable departure from Shakespeare's version, in which Prospero leaves the island with his daughter and the men who were shipwrecked there at the beginning of the play.

Critical Response & Analyses

Along with much of Césaire's other work, Une Tempête is amongst his most oft discussed. Scholars such as Ania Loomba, take some issue with the idea of reappropriating tales of imperialism and constructing them into anti-imperialist pieces. She speaks for many when she comments that this style of response is potentially counter-intuitive to progress. Her main point is about the danger of reconstructing imperialist works and changing the narrative not only takes away from the legitimacy of the non-European world, but furthermore, weakens the response by the sheer need to use the source material, in a sense. Furthermore, she goes as far to imply that the need to be in conversation with the original text also implies that there is some aspect of truthfulness in that work, and almost affirms Eurocentric ideology.

On the other hand, scholars like Russell West, like the idea of speaking directly back to the source material. Moreover, he believes the play has a specific focus on assimilation and that the play grapples with the concept in a compelling way. He also sees the value in assessing the work critically, and agrees with Loomba's initial skepticism, but essentially comes to the aforementioned conclusion about assimilation.

However, there are many who agree with Loomba, famously including Maryse Condé, who even go as far as to say the creation of a movement like Négritude, where this work would fall under, legitimizes many of the problematic ideas that colonialism itself created. She laments that the need to facilitate an explicitly Black cultural movement really just affirms Western ideologies and prevents larger scale progress. [6]

Influences

Death of a Salesman (1949) by Arthur Miller is directly referenced. The original French of Une Tempête reads, "l’orange pressée, on en rejette l’écorce," which Richard Miller translated to, "Once you've squeezed the juice from the orange, you toss the rind away!" These exclamations by Caliban to Prospero are a nod to the quote from Death of a Salesman where Willy exclaims, "You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away— a man is not a piece of fruit!"

Bibliography
  • Césaire, Aimé (1969). Une tempête [A Tempest]. Collection Théâtre, 22 (in French). Paris, France: Éditions du Seuil. ISBN 9782020314312. OCLC 9435845.[7]

References
  1. Catherine Silverstone (6 February 2012). Shakespeare and Trauma. Routledge. pp. 79–. ISBN 978-1-135-17831-4.
  2. Gale, Cengage Learning. A Study Guide for Aimé Césaire's "Une Tempête". Gale, Cengage Learning. pp. 3–. ISBN 978-1-4103-9275-6.
  3. Porter, Laurence M. (1995). "Aimé Césaire's Reworking of Shakespeare: Anticolonialist Discourse in "Une Tempête"". Comparative Literature Studies. 32 (3): 360–381. JSTOR 40247009.
  4. Ritz, Brooke (Spring 1999). "Cesaire". Department of English. Atlanta, GA, USA: Emory University. Retrieved September 20, 2012.
  5. McNary, Brenda (2010). "He Proclaims Uhuru — Understanding Caliban as a Speaking Subject". CTSJ: Journal of Undergraduate Research. Los Angeles, CA: Occidental College. 1 (1). ISSN 1948-5832. OCLC 455328764. Retrieved September 20, 2012.
  6. West, Russell (2007). "Césaire's Bard: Shakespeare and the Performance of Change in Césaire's "Une Tempête"". Journal of Caribbean Literatures. 4 (3): 1–16. ISSN 1086-010X.
  7. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower; Peter Hulme (24 February 2014). Postcolonial Film: History, Empire, Resistance. Routledge. pp. 298–. ISBN 978-1-134-74727-6.

"A Tempest by Aimé Césaire: A Curriculum Guide for Postcolonial Educators".


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