Esi Eshun Postcolonial Tempest
In this inaugural Discuss + Decolonise event, I’ll be presenting a short introduction to the topic of postcolonialism, by way of the work of a few contemporary artists, together with an open discussion on the highly charged debates around the restitution of museum holdings and the legacy of colonialism they represent.
Given the largely polarised nature of the debate, I’ll start the talk from a relatively uncontroversial angle, by looking at the colonial context itself through the lens of one of Shakespeare’s last plays, The Tempest - a work which, since the inception of the idea in the 1960s independence era, has proved especially compelling to postcolonial thinkers.
Written around 1610, just three years after Britain established its first permanent colony in the American settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, The Tempest plunges us into a brave new world, peopled with monsters, magic and monarchs. For all its lack of naturalism, however, it provides an insight into some of the likely perspectives on colonialism at the time, its themes of territorial dispossession, indigenous subjugation and colonial language imposition proving still pertinent today.
Reportedly inspired by the essay Of Cannibals by French philosopher Montaigne, it was also influenced by accounts of a wreck, in 1609, of a ship heading to Virginia, owned by a company charged with the twin mission of carrying supplies for the settlers, and of claiming land on behalf of the British Crown. Running aground off the coast of Bermuda, the survivors - stranded on the island for the following nine months - declared Bermuda the first British colony in the Caribbean, staking a claim to a region, which, until then, had lain firmly under the control of Spanish and Portuguese authorities.
For a broader view, it’s worth noting that in the early seventeenth century, Britain, together with France and the Netherlands, lagged far behind Spain and Portugal in the scale of their colonial conquests. While Britain’s imperial adventures were only just beginning, Portugal and Spain had seized possession of large tracts of South America and the Caribbean as well as parts of Asia and Africa, expropriating land for plantations and mining - becoming, in the process, the two wealthiest nations in Europe.
Their success came at enormous human cost however. Forced to labour for their new masters, the indigenous Caribbean peoples died from disease, overwork, maltreatment or warring, in such astronomical proportions that, in the Spanish colony of Hispaniola alone (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) estimates suggest that numbers plummeted from around a million in 1492 when Columbus arrived, to approximately 30,000 in 1514, while other figures put the number of original inhabitants left alive in 1510 at just 500. Not long afterwards, the colonists began to forcibly import Africans as slave labour instead.
Over the course of the next century, Britain vastly expanded its operations, setting up a number of trading posts around the world run by state sponsored enterprises such as The East India Company and the Royal Africa Company, quickly becoming, through a combination of wars, raids and negotiations, the world’s richest economy, responsible for the largest number of colonies and the largest quantity of slave exports. By the nineteenth century, the British Empire famously spanned a quarter of the globe, with colonies now subjected to a network of political, legal, militaristic and cultural apparatuses aimed at reinforcing the superiority of British authority, interests and values.
But to return to The Tempest. A postcolonial reading centres on the dynamic between two of the central characters, Prospero and Caliban, whose stories coalesce around issues of power, sovereignty and treason. Before the play begins, Prospero, the former Duke of Milan - recently usurped by his brother - is cast off in a rackety boat with his toddler daughter Miranda before being shipwrecked off the coast of a distant island, a virtual terra nullius, inhabited only by the witch, Sycorax - who has died by the time the play begins twelve years later - by her son Caliban, whose name is an anagram of cannibal, and by Ariel, a spirit. Claiming the island as his own, Prospero declares himself master of all he beholds. He makes Ariel the equivalent of an indentured servant - promising to set him free eventually – and, similarly, enslaves Caliban, forcing him to work via constant threats of bodily punishment, while confining him, by virtue of his superior magical powers, to a barren rock on the outskirts of the island.
Variously described as misshapen, deformed, filthy, hag-born, a savage, and of a vile race, Caliban’s looks and demeanour provoke, on the part of the other characters, combinations of horror, outrage, fear, curiosity, pity, and in a couple of cases, a kind of mercantile cynicism. Not fully human, and ruled, at times, by base appetites, he is, in equal measure, naive and cunning, wilfully resentful of his status, yet ready to subjugate himself to a new master when the opportunity arises. Indeed, it’s possible to see Caliban as an unusually articulate prototype of the ‘troublesome native’, whose tendency towards truculence and rebellion must be ruthlessly suppressed through ever present threats of violence. And yet, he also has aspects of the ‘noble savage’ about him, exciting sympathy from the audience for his poetic sensibilities and his appreciation of beauty, expressed, in the passage below, in his heightened attachment to nature and his heartfelt lament at his own predicament.
This island’s mine, by Sycorax, my mother,
Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first,
Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in ’t, and teach me how
To name the bigger light and how the less,
That burn by day and night. And then I loved thee,
And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,
The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile.
Cursed be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax - toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o’ th’ island.
But if Prospero’s civilising mission partly succeeds at first, it is severely derailed when - as we’re told - Caliban seems to revert to type by attempting to violate Miranda, causing Prospero, in an outpouring of fury, to jail and enslave him. For his part, Caliban rails bitterly against such perceived tyranny, and when a shipwreck, conjured up by Prospero, brings the duke’s old adversaries to their shores, Caliban plots with them to kill his enemy.
Caliban’s rage is not devoid of self-pity or of a sliver of self-hatred. But for the most part, he is unrepentant about his own crimes, regretting only that he failed to populate the island with his and Miranda’s offspring. Whatever the rights and wrongs of his behaviour, it’s worth noting that a postcolonial critique of the text might point to his portrayal as a familiar type of brutishly oversexed native, while directing attention to the original dispossession of his land and autonomy, and the manner in which he’s conceived as not fully human, a characterisation - rooted in Biblical, Renaissance, and Enlightenment thinking - which has long been used to rationalise the assumed inferiority and subjugation of colonised peoples around the world.
Although Caliban and Ariel are often seen as representatives of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean - indeed references are made to Indians in the text - one noted postcolonial rewriting, Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969), sees them both as slaves in the plantation economy - with Caliban, as a black slave, subjected to harsher treatment than Ariel, who, as a mixed race figure occupying a slightly higher position in the social and racial hierarchy of the colony, adopts a more quiescent stance towards his enslavement.
A one time President of the former French colony of Martinique, Césaire (1913-2008) is perhaps best known as an anti-colonial activist and celebrated poet, co-founder of the influential mid-twentieth century literary movement Négritude, which advocated for an Africanised aesthetic in contrast to the predominant European influenced style of colonial writing. In Une Tempête, he envisages Caliban as a radical civil rights activist, his angry resistance to political, social and psychological domination, resonating strongly with the times, while other aspects of his character seem to bear comparison with traits outlined in another key text, Black Skin White Masks (1952) by one of the foremost theorisers of decolonisation and postcolonialism, Martiniquan born activist, psychiatrist and one time student of Césaire - Frantz Fanon.
In his book - a published version of a rejected doctoral thesis - Fanon analyses the alienating psychological impact of the colonial civilising mission, in which the Caribbean person, inculcated with assimilationist ideals, is schooled to believe that they are French, and only socially acceptable if they adopt the manners, attitudes, and belief systems of the colonisers. It is only, however, upon coming into close contact with white society, as when travelling, that the colonised person is forced to confront the dehumanising reality of their status as racialised inferiors, and, unable to reconcile themselves to the extent of their otherness, they become even more estranged from themselves, lacking the means to forge a potentially liberatory sense of individual or collective identity.
But while Black Skin White Masks provides undeniable insights into the psychological wreckage of colonialism, another of Fanon’s works, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), suggests a possible means to counter its effects. Published a few months after his death at the age of 36, and written while working as a psychiatrist in Algeria, during its bitter, protracted war of independence against France, the book provides gruelling clinical case studies of traumas suffered by both Algerian fighters and civilians during the war. But it also paints a picture of the brutal realities of a starkly divided settler colonial society in which the French community keep the colonised under constant military and police control, enforced by the use of rifle butts and napalm.
Where the colonists’ sector is described as ‘a sector built to last, all stone and steel... a sector of lights and paved roads’, the Algerian sector meanwhile, otherwise known as ‘the “native” quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation’, is viewed as ‘a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. It's a world with no space, people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly together. The colonized's sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light’.
The system Fanon describes, then, is one recognised by subjugated peoples the world over, a system so manifest in its expression of violence, that, for him, only the corresponding exercise of violence is equal to the task of overcoming it.
In this earliest incarnation therefore, postcolonialism is equated with nationalist struggles for independence, with dreams of personal and political sovereignty, with securing possession of mind, body, spirit, culture, society and land. And yet, the hopes for decolonisation embedded within such dreams of nationhood turned out, in reality, to be illusory. Far from bringing about the level of freedom, equality and development that the newly independent nation states had hoped for, the end of Empire led instead, as Fanon and others had warned, to a new configuration of colonialism - known as neocolonialism - whereby the most Western educated strata of society took over control of the levers of state in much the same way as the colonisers had done before them, while the former imperial powers found other more indirect ways to maintain influence and control over local populations and resources.
Today, with global financial institutions ensuring that most formerly colonised countries remain in a permanent state of debt and dependency, and while the cultural hegemony of the West remains decisive, it’s fair to say that postcolonialism as a political reality remains little more than a transition state between colonisation and decolonisation, and that the notion itself functions best on a theoretical level, as a means by which to critically assess the multiplicitous legacies of colonialism still present today.
This essay is an adapted extract from a talk on Postcolonialism and Art delivered at The Exchange on 4 June 2021.
© 2021 Esi Eshun