“This Island's Mine”

Abstract

In Une Tempete and Otra Tempestad, Caribbean playwrights Aimé Césaire and Raquel Carrió re-imagine Shakespeare’s Tempest, transforming the plot and the characters into powerful postcolonial statements. The psychology of colonization is part of the characterization in both plays, and both playwrights also use their Shakespearean setting to develop ecocritical arguments in their portrayals of the island, its native inhabitants, and its colonizers. By aligning Caliban with nature and Prospero with the exploitation of the natural world, Carrió and Césaire merge their commentary on the postcolonial and the environmental to create a brave new world of performative criticism. Césaire emphasizes the adversarial relationship between Prospero and Caliban to create a play of binary oppositions: white/black, colonizer/colonized, wrong/right, natural/unnatural. Carrió’s text takes a more mestizo approach to colonization and ecocriticism, and she suggests that the environment can be threatened or protected by colonizers or colonized alike. The defiant assertion of Shakespeare’s Caliban that “this island’s mine,” has been treated as a battle cry by postcolonial criticism of The Tempest, a challenge by the landless colonized to the usurping colonizers. Aimé Césaire and Raquel Carrió re-examine the phrase by questioning the implications of land ownership itself. Césaire’s Caliban, like Shakespeare’s, uses the words to challenge Prospero’s claim to the island and declare that Caliban himself should be the king of the island. But Césaire’s Caliban takes the words further by challenging the entire concept of owning land. For Césaire’s Caliban, taking control of the island means entering into a partnership with it and caring for it rather than imposing his own will on it as Prospero does. Carrió re-inscribes the words by taking them away from Caliban and giving them to Prospero when he is at the height of his destructive power. When Carrió’s Prospero claims the island as his, he is not identifying himself with the island; he is asserting the rights of a conqueror to dispose of the island and its inhabitants in any way that he wishes. But the play goes beyond establishing Prospero as a villain who wants to dominate the island. The island is a complex blended civilization caught in the conflicting forces of preservation, destruction, and transformation. For both Carrió and Césaire, the island is its own entity, changing in response to the arrival of the colonizers as much as Caliban or the other colonized characters do. The contrast between the straightforward combative relationship portrayed in Césaire’s text and the chaotic amalgam presented by Carrió is indicative of the shifts made in discourse on postcolonialism, globalization, and environmentalism.