Addicted to race: Performativity, agency, and Cesaire's A tempest

Cesaire ends his play with a final significant deviation from the Shakespearean text: Prospero chooses to remain on the island at the end of the play instead of returning to Europe with the other Italian nobles. The final scene therefore mirrors the opening, with Prospero the sole master of the island and its indigenous population. The dynamic, however, has changed, and it is a desperate Prospero who closes the play with a shrill tirade:

On jurerait que la jungle veut investir la grotte. Mais je me defendrai . . . Je ne laisserai pas perir mon oeuvre . . .

Hurlant

Je defendrai la civilisation!

II tire dans toutes les directions.

Ils en ont pour leur compte...Comme ca j'ai un bon moment a etre tranquille . Mais fait froid...C'est drole, le climat a change . . . Fait froid dans cette ile . . Faudrait penser a faire du feu . . . Eh bien, Caliban, nous ne sommes que deux sur cette ile, plus que toi et moi. Toi et moi! Toi-Moi! Moi-Toi! mais qu'est-ce qu'il fout?

Hurlant

Caliban!

On entend au loin parmi le bruit du ressac et des paillements d'oiseaux les debris du chant de Caliban. (Cesaire 1969b, 92) [One would swear that the jungle wants to infest the grotto. But I will defend myself. . I will not let my life's work perish . . . (shouting) I will defend civilization! (He fires in all directions.) That should take care of them.... This way I'll have some peace for a while . . . but it's cold . . . it's funny, the climate has changed. . cold on this island. . should think about making a fire . . . well, Caliban, there's just two of us on this island, just you and me. You and me. You-me. Me-you. What the hell is he doing? (Screaming) Caliban! (In the distance is heard, among the sound of the surf and the cheeping birds, the remains of Caliban's song.]

The text indicates that Prospero's language in this final scene becomes "impoverished and stereotyped." If Prospero continues to proclaim his role as the defender of civilization it is only by repeating an exhausted racist and racializing discourse. Earlier in this act, Caliban referred to Prospero as a vieil intoxique, an "old addict," and predicted that Prospero would be too "hooked" on his position as the master to ever return to Europe. The play leaves the spectator with the image of Prospero hopelessly strung out on his whiteness, while his speech degenerates into the babble of a confused pronominal opposition that, in the absence of one of the parties, no longer makes sense. Prospero's final cry represents a failed attempt to interpellate Caliban into the identity categories established in the prologue, to call him into existence as a savage, as a slave, and as a black man. The lack of response throws the colonial dialectic, and Prospero's identity as the white, civilized master, into crisis.13

Significantly, although Caliban effectively refuses to wear the mask of identity that the play so self-consciously imposed upon him in the prologue, the play denies the audience the spectacle of this liberating gesture. In contrast to the very visible imposition of the masks onto already racialized bodies in the prologue, the symmetrical unmasking of the end takes place invisibly in the wings. The body under the mask of race is very deliberately not identified with that of the performer who put on the mask in the prologue. Caliban's renouncement of racial identity is therefore double: he refuses to play the racialized role both of the character who is no longer willing to be Prospero's "savage" slave, and also of the racially specific black performer who assumed this role in the prologue. The play leaves the spectator no image of the liberated "unmasked" performer/subject who transcends or otherwise escapes from a racializing and racist discursive regime. As spectators, we cannot see the new Caliban, nor even understand his language, the language taught to him by Prospero, as it decomposes into debris. At the play's end the spectator is stuck with the familiar racial identities of the black performer wearing the white mask of Prospero, the emblem of a tired white/black racial binary. Caliban "kicks the habit"; Prospero does not, nor ultimately do the spectators for whom the deracialized subject remains an unimagined, unrealized dream.