Aime Cesaire Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Throughout Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, Caliban utilizes a mixture of French (a colonial language), Yoruba, Creole, and Swahili to establish agency and identity. By employing this combination of traditionally hegemonically privileged versus disempowered (via European colonizers) languages, Caliban exerts authority in how he hails himself, although he cannot control how he is hailed by others, especially Prospero. Césaire illustrates, as he states in an interview added to the end of the book Discourse on Colonialism, the “struggle against alienation” which “gave birth to Negritude” (89). As Antilleans experienced shame over being identified as Negros and employed less negatively-connoted euphemisms, Césaire and others “adopted the word négre, as a term of defiance.” Similarly, in the play, Caliban utilizes defiant language in order to construct his identity and establish agency. A new language is not essentially formed, but a new attitude toward freedom is born through the intertwining of both already-present linguistic aspects of Caliban’s identity. Simultaneously, Prospero’s sense of identity and agency wavers, exposing inherent instability in the colonizer’s socio-linguistically constructed perception. Prospero’s limited colonial language only allows him to identify in binary terms of privilege versus disempowerment, and his cognitive dissonance cracks under the pressure of Caliban’s introduction of mixed language as empowerment.
This essay will examine the language mixture Caliban exercises in his quest for identity and agency in the midst of a rapidly-deteriorating colonial power (Prospero) that has long relied on unsteady, self-deconstructing rhetoric in the form of the colonial language to dictate Caliban’s identity and strip him of his self-authority. Emphasis will be placed on the ways in which these mixed-language terms evoke a sense of rebellious insubordination as a marker for a major shift in power in the colonized Caribbean, as well as in Africa. In addition to Césaire’s two texts and supporting articles which discuss Caliban as a speaking subject striving toward emancipation, I will also utilize Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as a way of illustrating the intricate link between “language and the community” and how, historically, the language of the colonizer (e.g., French) has been the one that “the black man wants to speak” – a history from which Césaire and Caliban are not exempt but must attempt to navigate (21). I will, as Brenda McNary does, draw from Judith Butler’s theory on performativity of language and how Caliban shapes and is shaped by the mixed language he speaks. The essay will start with a brief historical and cultural analysis of language and decolonization, then will move into a specific, contextualized, deconstructive inquiry into Césaire’s A Tempest.