Imitation versus Contestation: Walcott's Postcolonial Shakespeare

Abstract

A great deal has been written already on the topic of Shakespeare and the postcolonial. A number of postcolonial writers and theorists have marked out positions vis-a-vis Shakespeare, and one can make two broad generalizations concerning this body of material. First, postcolonial theory has largely presented the postcolonial as in opposition to the classic. Salman Rushdie, in a famous phrase, referred to how the “Empire writes back,” and this implies a position of antagonism or contestation, of a critical stance toward the European/colonial past, including the literary past. 1 A major theme of postcolonial literature has indeed been to “write back” against the European descriptions of the postcolonial world, whether that be Achebe’s and other African writers’ critique of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Coetzee’s and other writers engagement with Daniel Defoe, especially Robinson Crusoe, or a variety of Indian reactions against Kipling and Forster. For writers in English, it is perhaps not too much to say that the figure of the literary past is Shakespeare, so a general stance of contestation vis-a-vis the literary past should lead directly to a stance of contestation toward him. Yet it is perhaps worth noting that the purest example of writing back against Shakespeare is not found in Anglophone literature, but rather in the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, which is a chilling retelling of Othello written in Arabic and set in contemporary England and the Sudan. The other key site of such a critical engagement with Shakespeare can be found in the involvement of many Caribbean writers with the themes of The Tempest, again an involvement which expresses itself in the work of Aime Cesaire and Roberto Fernandez Retamar as well as Anglophone writers such as George Lamming. 2 Nonetheless, the stress on contestation, on writing back, found in postcolonial theory does not do full justice to postcolonial literature. I would like to suggest that postcolonial theory has been far more committed to the notion of antagonism between the postcolonial and the European literary tradition than the writers have themselves. To rewrite a text means necessarily to have a complex set of attitudes toward the model one is rewriting; contestation alone in my view does not ever fully explain the traffic between the original and the rewrite. The way many postcolonial writers take off from classic texts, rewriting them with a complex mixture of motives and emotions, is in crucial respects a continuation of the heritage of modernism. 3 Joyce is a particularly useful reference point here: in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the young Stephen Dedalus is committed to an aesthetic of ‘writing back,’ as is expressed in the famous scene with the Dean of Studies where they discuss the word tundish. As Stephen subsequently reflects when thinking about the scene later: