Does hospitality consist in interrogating the new arrival? Does it begin the question addressed to the newcomer [. . .]: What is your name? [. . .] Or else does hospitality begin the unquestioning welcome, in a double effacement, the effacement of the question and the name?- Jacques Derrida, Of HospitalityToward the end of Othello, the Moor of Venice momentarily reappropriates the power of narration: Soft you, a word or two before you go (5.2.336). He invites the by-standers/readers to relate the unlucky deeds (5.2.339) that have just been performed in Cyprus. He calls for a just retelling of his story, for some kind of re-ad-justment that cannot but take into account what he-essentially-is: Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,/ Nor set down aught in malice (5.2.340-41). Yet he also simultaneously evokes the multiplicity of positionalities he has inhabited, and still to a large extent inhabits: the pagan sub-Saharan black slave, the Christian Venetian general, the base Indian (5.2.345) or Judean, the Arabian, the Turk (5.2.351). Othello actively solicits a responsible and just reading or rewriting of his story as well as of his self.1 But how does one reconcile his emphasis on the singularity of what he-essentially-is his concomitant highlighting of the range of positions he occupies, of the proliferation of masks he also is? Moreover, as he continues to address the future, he keeps on producing aporetic constructs:Set you down this,And say besides that in Aleppo once,Where a malignant and a turbanned TurkBeat a Venetian and traduced the state,I took by th' throat the circumcised dogAnd smote him-thus! (5.2.349-54)Bringing his past into contact the present of the staged event, and thus uncannily mixing temporalities, Othello offers a dangerous supplement to his invitation to retell his story: a bleeding body that is at one and the same time the body of a cruel Turk and that of a Christian Venetian general, simultaneously double and divided. This is a body that affects representation- it poisons sight (5.2.362)-and is hardly re-presentable; it is in excess of any linear narration, the body of a trauma that one might be able to relate, but only heavy heart (5.2.369).In this article, I focus on Caryl Phillips's complex retelling of Othello's story in one of his bleakest and most innovative novels, The Nature of Blood, a retelling that is alert to the complexity of Othello's invitation to relate. My basic assumption is that Phillips's response is a writing back to Othello that is also willing to write with it, to share a discursive space a text that similarly articulates the question of the foreigner, in all its possible senses, as an open question that can neither be evaded nor easily reappropriated.2 Moreover, I argue that the Othello-like figure in The Nature of Blood connects, by means of an underground sharedness made of echoes, repetitions and ghostly traces, other figures of dis-location, across time and place. It is through these connections that The Nature of Blood raises questions of home and hospitality, identity and belonging, memory and history. These questions haunt the various historical moments the novel fictionalizes (i.e., fifteenth-century Portobuffole, Renaissance Venice, pre-war Nazi Germany, post-war Britain, late twentieth-century Israel), and still speak to our present. They are, in fact, amongst the most pressing concerns for Phillips's diasporic ethics and aesthetics.3There are many implicit and/or explicit references to Othello in Phillips's work. As early as 1980 one finds Errol, the black protagonist of the play Strange Fruit, speaking to his white girlfriend Shelley as follows: Your wonderful parents can't handle the idea of their virginal lily-white maiden possibly falling prey to the lascivious clutches of an old black ram. Othello, page sixtyone or whatever (34). …
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Jan 1, 2007
Monica G Turner + 6
Open Access
