The Tempest v. A Tempest, Views On Colonialism

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In Michel-Roth Trouillot’s Silencing the Past, he observes that the word history “offers us a semantic ambiguity: an irreducible distinction and yet an equally irreducible overlap between what happened and that which is said to happen.” (Trouillot 3) This “ambiguity” is implicitly shown in the circumstances surrounding the colonization of the Caribbean in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Aime Césaire’s A Tempest. Each playwright painted their own picture of their culture’s views toward the Caribbean in each of their respective times. The playwrights’ opposing views regarding colonization are portrayed in many different ways; through Caliban and Ariel’s actions, attitudes, and emotions, the two characters portrayals reflect very different understandings of the Caribbean and its colonization. To begin, in Shakespeare, Caliban, a slave, is portrayed as a savage, deformed monster while in Césaire, he is just a black slave. He was portrayed this way in Shakespeare because the European’s were unsure how to accept the unfamiliar looks and lifestyles of these newly found people of the New World. In Césaire, the author wants Caliban to be an example of black pride by making him more vocal and rebellious. This subtle difference in the character descriptions speaks volumes to how the views on Caribbean colonization changed over the 350 year time period between the releases of the plays. In Shakespeare’s time, the newfound natives of the Caribbean were known as cannibals to most of Europe. They were generally thought as monstrous, uncivilized beings who consumed the flesh of other humans. The character Caliban reflects this notion in The Tempest as his name is an anagram of the word “Cannibal,” he is native to the island Prospero lands on, and he is referred to many times as a monster throughout the play. In A Tempest, he is also conveyed as ugly and “a savage…a
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