T EMPEST IN THE

CARIBBEAN
TEMPEST IN THE
CARIBBEAN

JONATHAN G OLDBERG

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
London
Frontispiece: “Art and Nation: Things You Must Learn from Day One,” by Christopher Cozier. From
Work in Progress, The Art Foundry, Barbados, 1998. Reproduced courtesy of the artist.

Lines from “Nametracks,” by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, are reprinted from Mother Poem
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Lines from “X/Self ’s Xth Letter,” by Edward Kamau
Brathwaite, are reprinted from X/Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Lines from
“Caliban,” by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, are reprinted from The Arrivants (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1967). Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press.

Lines from “The Dream Sycorax Letter,” by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, are reprinted with per-
mission from Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 1, no. 1 (1996): 120–36.

Lines from “hard against the soul,” by Dionne Brand, from No Language Is Neutral (Toronto:
Coach House Press, 1990). Reprinted with permission from McClelland & Stewart Ltd., The
Canadian Publishers.

Lines from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, by Aimé Césaire, are reprinted from
The Collected Poetry, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1983). Reprinted with permission from the University
of California Press.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reprint previously published material in this
book. If any proper acknowledgment has not been made, we encourage copyright holders to notify us.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goldberg, Jonathan.
Tempest in the Caribbean / Jonathan Goldberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-8166-4260-5 (HC : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-4261-3 (PB : alk. paper)
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Tempest. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—
Adaptations—History and criticism. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Appreciation—
Caribbean Area. 4. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Knowledge—Caribbean Area.
5. Caribbean literature—20th century—History and criticism. 6. Caribbean Area—Intellectual
life—20th century. 7. Postcolonialism—Caribbean Area. 8. Caribbean Area—In literature.
9. Castaways in literature. 10. Islands in literature. I. Title.
PR2833 .G65 2003
822.3'3—dc22
2003015324

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Yes, Shakespeare, he used to write books, Moses, plays and poetry.
He made the English language reach up to the heavens, touch
the stars. He spanned the entire length and breadth of human
emotions, like Columbus, discovered new continents, populated
them with living creatures of flesh and blood and poetry. At a time
when the rest of his countrymen waited like jackals to rob the
Spaniards who returned with their blood-stained plunder from
the New World, he created men of grandeur, big villains, towering
heroes, new world men.
—Sylvia Wynter, The Hills of Hebron

To establish his own identity, Caliban, after three centuries, must

himself pioneer into regions Caesar never knew.
—C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary

The morning was uneventful enough: a girl spilled ink from her
inkwell all over her uniform; a girl broke her pen nib and then
made a big to-do about replacing it; girls twisted and turned in
their seats and pinched each other’s bottoms; girls passed notes
to each other. All this Miss Nelson must have seen and heard, but
she didn’t say anything—only kept reading her book: an elabo-
rately illustrated edition of The Tempest, as later, passing by her
desk, I saw.
— Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
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 CONTENTS
Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

A Different Kind of Creature 1

Caliban’s “Woman” 39

Miranda’s Meanings 115

Notes 149

Index 189
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 PREFACE

THE SCENE : AN UNINHABITED ISLAND .

Tempest in the Caribbean is an essay in cultural theory and literary analysis
situated at the crossing of Caribbean and early modern studies marked
by The Tempest and a number of twentieth-century texts that use Shake-
speare’s play for anticolonial purposes. “Tempest” in my title alludes to both
scenes of inscription, a despecification that matches the setting of the play,
an island notoriously unmoored and variously located: a place between north
Africa and Italy and yet an Atlantic locale, perhaps indeed situated in the
black Atlantic that Paul Gilroy summons up to figure the condition of moder-
nity.1 This lack of fixity, this multiplicity of unfixed locations, may well be, as
Brent Hayes Edwards has suggested to me, a condition of possibility for the
reinscription of Shakespeare in numerous sites of colonial translation: into
an English that refuses imperial ownership of the tongue, into French and
Spanish (and, indeed, into those “foreign” languages first, by Ernest Renan
and José Enrique Rodó, prompting later anticolonial reinscriptions). How-
ever, in the name of the character who has become a byword for anticolonial
riposte, Caliban—a character who is, according to the stage direction, not
there, for the island is “uninhabited”—one finds a supposed specificity of locale.
“The Caribbean” in my title points to anticolonial writing’s aim to write into
existence a being first named through an initial misdescription of a tribal soli-
darity characterized by the act of cannibalism that gives a name to Caliban.
“Caribbean” also points to a twentieth-century configuration, itself highly
contested and contestatory and certainly not yet realized: the Caribbean as
an area that might recognize itself through that name as a way of overcom-
ing the disparate conditions of colonization performed by the English, the
French, the Dutch, and the Spanish as they carved out the islands for colo-
nial control. The name “Caribbean” might overcome the ongoing divisions
between regimes that cling to these initial linguistic differences and that
continue to be riven by the tensions among settlers, descendants of slaves
brought from Africa, later immigrants from Asia, and native Indians who
managed to survive the holocausts visited in some domains but not in all.2
In writing from that past, in this present, to a possible future, I follow

ix
 x / P R E FA C E

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, seeking to read these anticolonial texts as per-

forming more than a reversal still bound within a colonialist binary, embracing
Spivak’s wariness of a “postcolonial reason” that reinscribes a colonial logic
as the global condition.3 The performative possibilities upon which I fasten
are assembled against that position of political despair, a position to be
found, for instance, in one of the most frequently cited studies of later uses of
The Tempest, an essay by Rob Nixon.4 Nixon reads the rewritings of the play
against the dead end of the collapse of movements for national independence
in their reinscription within neocolonial domination. This is the plot of global
capitalism that David Harvey calls the postmodern condition, an inescap-
able stranglehold. It is against such despairing reinscriptions of domina-
tion, following in the wake of J. K. Gibson-Graham’s inspiring model in The
End of Capitalism (as We Knew It), that this essay is launched, seizing upon
possibilities—and actualities—that cannot be reduced to the supposedly in-
vulnerable logic of a unidimensional economic analysis.5
I am prompted too by the agenda that Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd out-
line in their introduction to The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital,
where they caution against “a homogenization of global culture that radi-
cally reduces possibilities for the creation of alternatives.” Specifically, they
locate in the cultural sphere (in relative autonomy from the political or the
economic) a site of “alternative rationalities.”6 Against the denigrations that
attach to race, to poverty (to those Frantz Fanon called the wretched, the
condemned, “les damnés”), to women, to lesbians, to homosexuals (groups not
often solicited by the “classic” texts that reply to The Tempest by Aimé Césaire,
George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, and Roberto Fernández Retamar, but
on the agenda in the work of Sylvia Wynter and Michelle Cliff, for example),
and without arguing for an equation among the binds of racism, the forces of
compulsory heterosexuality, and the immiserations wrought by colonialism
and global capitalism, I aim in the pages that follow to articulate connections
that hold out the possibility of a future made by new social actors, a future
that necessarily will also have broken with an Enlightenment legacy of liber-
alism and the market that lends ideological support to colonialism, a future
that could resemanticize otherwise suspect terms, as Cliff does in titling a
1993 novel Free Enterprise.7
To delineate the possibilities in the “different kind of creature” made by
colonization (whose lineaments I begin to trace in the first part of this study,
following arguments and representations offered by Fernández Retamar and
by Lamming, whose phrase I quote), feminist responses to The Tempest, notably
those found in Wynter’s inspiring essays and in Cliff ’s novels and theoretical
writing, will prompt rereadings (in the second part of this book) of some clas-
sic texts (by Brathwaite and Césaire). These I situate within an expanded
framework of social history and queer writing of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora
(including texts by Hilton Als, Dionne Brand, Jamaica Kincaid, and Patricia
 P R E FA C E / x i

Powell) that represent alternative conditions of existence. In the final sec-

tion of this book, the limits of the Enlightenment will be engaged through
some consideration of John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and G. W. F. Hegel, as I
conclude this inquiry into race, sex, and gender in the Caribbean. Although
Shakespeare’s play will occasionally be mined for the resources it makes
available for this tradition of writing, The Tempest is not the inspiring force
in this book. It lies, rather, in these diasporic texts and the living possibilities
they represent.
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 A CK NOWLEDGMENTS

I have had the opportunity to offer lectures on this project to a number

of responsive audiences. I am grateful to Ann Rosalind Jones for an in-
vitation to Smith College (where it was an additional pleasure to have Julie
Graham in the audience); to Garrett Sullivan, for the opportunity to lecture at
Pennsylvania State University and to meet with his students and colleagues,
including Jeffrey Nealon, who urged me to think more about monsters; to my
dear friend Marcie Frank, for inviting me to deliver the 1998 Lahey Lecture
at Concordia University, and to her dear brother, Adam Frank, who arranged
for me to speak at the University of British Columbia (where I especially
valued Paul Yachnin’s engagement); to Bruce Boehrer, for inviting me to
Florida State University and for extending such warm hospitality; to Richard
Rambuss (almost the only person who could convince me to attend the Group
for Early Modern Cultural Studies [GEMCS]) for inviting me to Emory,
where I appreciated Natasha Barnes’s interest (and was overwhelmed by
Chuck O’Boyle’s culinary genius); to William H. Sherman, for an invitation
to the University of Maryland (and for presenting me with a copy of “The
Tempest” and Its Travels before it was available in the United States); to Peter
Stallybrass, for the chance to lecture at the University of Pennsylvania (and
to Tyler Smith, for making the arrangements and giving me such a warm
introduction); to Robert Cesario, for inviting me back to Temple University
(where the pleasure of seeing old friends like Tim Corrigan, Gaby Jackson,
Paula Robison, and Alan Singer was matched by the wonderful engagement
of Samuel Delany); and, finally, to Carolyn Williams, who kindly accepted me
as a fellow at the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at
Rutgers University in 2001–2, during which time I completed the final draft
of this book and had the opportunity to present parts of my project to my fel-
low fellows, among whom I am especially grateful for the suggestions offered
by Brent Hayes Edwards.
My thanks to Richard Morrison at the University of Minnesota Press, with
whom it has been such a pleasure to work again, for finding such sympathetic
and engaged readers; the advice of Josiah Blackmore, Karen Newman, and
an anonymous pair of readers has guided my final revisions. Thanks to
everyone at the Press who facilitated the publication of this book, especially
xiii
 xiv / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Kathy Delfosse, copy editor extraordinaire (and belated thanks to her for her
work on Shakespeare’s Hand, as well as to Rachel Cole for her work on the
manuscript). My thanks to Meredith Evans, for her assistance in preparing
this book for the press, and even more for her luminous intelligence and con-
geniality. Thanks to Jonathan Brody Kramnick for his reading of the manu-
script; although I am sure I have not handled to his satisfaction all the issues
he raised, I know that our friendship does not depend on seeing eye to eye. To
Michael Moon, as ever, I owe more than I can say.
I have learned most about the texts I treat in Tempest in the Caribbean
from discussions with students, undergraduates and graduates, at The Johns
Hopkins University and at Duke University, in courses I taught over the past
several years. Several are thanked in the notes for specific contributions. One
person named there—Andrew Kitchen—cannot receive this small tribute to
his immense gifts. Andy was one of the most brilliant students I have been
privileged to teach, a person of boundless generosity and wit. His death in
August 2002 is an overwhelming loss. I dedicate this book to his memory.
 A D IFFERENT
K IND OF C REATURE
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 A DIFFERENT
K IND OF C REATURE

’BAN, ’BAN, CA-CALIBAN

The role that The Tempest has played to articulate colonial relations and,
more important, as a site from which to launch anticolonial responses is,
by now, a well-surveyed field. From the fairly compendious account of “Colo-
nial Metaphors” in Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan’s Shakespeare’s
Caliban: A Cultural History or Rob Nixon’s much-cited essay “Caribbean
and African Appropriations of The Tempest” to a number of more specialized
treatments, rewritings and deployments of The Tempest have been examined
in New World Anglophone and Francophone writing, in Anglo-Canadian, Afro-
Canadian, Quebecois, African American, and Latino texts.1 My aim in the
pages that follow is not to offer yet another survey but to launch a more lim-
ited inquiry centered on some of the foundational revisionary texts produced
in the Caribbean by Roberto Fernández Retamar, Aimé Césaire, and George
Lamming, as well as on some that are less familiar by Michelle Cliff and
Sylvia Wynter, among others, and to open a discussion of questions of sexu-
ality that have not been broached in much of the critical literature on the
topic of deployments of The Tempest. Although criticism has moved beyond
seeing the Prospero-Caliban couple as a shorthand for colonizer-colonized
relationships to inquire into the position of Sycorax and Miranda—and even
of a black Miranda—and thereby valuably to raise questions of gender, these
interventions have rarely moved beyond heteronormative assumptions.2 It
is my aim to suggest the value of positing post- and anticolonial possibilities
and positions that exceed that norm.
While tying such an argument to rewritings of The Tempest, I also want
to show that the play can be of use to make such a point. Although I take it
as inarguable that The Tempest is shaped by and furthers a (proto)colonialist

3
 4 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

discourse and practice, the intentions of the play do not exhaust its potential
meanings. For that reason, in the pages that follow, I take up several moments
of textual trouble—frequently signaled by bibliographical problems—that, I
argue, fracture along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality. Recently, and
to my mind, disturbingly, criticism has been moving away from the view of
The Tempest that prevailed in 1980s and ’90s New Historicist and cultural
materialist accounts of the play as a colonialist document. An emphasis on
the Mediterranean and Old World Tempest now all but ignores such readings
when it does not seek to deny them (this despite the elegant argument in
Peter Hulme’s Colonial Encounters that showed the uses of Mediterranean
discourse for Atlantic ventures and insisted that the literal absence of a
straightforward colonial plot in the play was a representational strategy that
needed to be interpreted).3 Thus, in the introduction to their 1999 Arden edi-
tion of the play, as in Shakespeare’s Caliban, the Vaughans demur from the
widespread opinion that Caliban’s name derives from “cannibal.” It would
seem, for them, that for the name to fit, Caliban would need to be shown liter-
ally consuming human flesh.4 Such a view ignores an argument like Hulme’s,
who demonstrates tellingly that the ascription of cannibalism to the Caribs,
a claim made from Columbus on, did not rely on empirical evidence. Nor did
the similar attribution, in the course of the sixteenth century, of cannibalism
to virtually all native inhabitants of the New World.
Indeed, as Hulme shows, not only was the ascription of cannibalism made
in the absence of evidence, even the supposed coherence of the group to whom
it was at first applied, the Caribs, is equally suspect; it is as likely as not that
the name was one given to those resistant to colonial imposition rather than
one reflecting some ethnic or tribal solidarity. Like the characterization of can-
nibalism, such naming occurs in the service of a transformative encounter,
an attempt to draw definitive boundaries between colonizer and colonized,
groups that only came into being after the moment of contact. The Vaughans’
attitude toward Caliban’s name must be shaped by their desire to save the
play from a colonialist reading (hence their positing of colonialist readings of
the play as “metaphoric” and their insistence that Shakespeare could not have
intended Caliban to be read as a Native American, let alone as a Black). Yet
textual evidence for the derivation of Caliban’s name seems overwhelming:
Shakespeare borrows verbatim from John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s
“Des Cannibales,” after all, and only to refute its relativist attitude toward
“cannibals” (Montaigne’s name for Brazilians) with its portrait of a savage
Caliban, as Richard Halpern, for one, has demonstrated in an essay that will
guide me in the following pages.5 Moreover, Caliban plays with and reverses
the syllables of his name, “’Ban, ’Ban, Ca-Caliban / Has a new master—get a
new man!” (2.2.178–79), which, it seems clear, is an invitation to any audience
who may have missed it to recognize the anagrammatic play involved in the
name of the character.6
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 5

Yet such instability also might suggest a certain leeway between “Caliban”
and “cannibal,” spaces of ambivalence and contradiction of the kind that
Homi K. Bhabha and those who have followed his lead have taught us to
read. The representation of the colonized as savage and unmanageable could,
at the least, testify to resistance and the continuing failure of the colonialist
enterprise to do its work of “civilizing”/exterminating. On the sheerly nega-
tive ground of what the colonialist calls savagery and monstrosity, a platform
of refusal could be erected. Insofar as colonialism operates through domina-
tion, struggle in these terms seems doomed to be a dialectic caught within
colonialist discourse, however deep and broad its ambivalences and fissures
might be. Although, as Halpern argues, this may well be the case in The
Tempest, in many of the anticolonial texts I consider here, that impasse is at
the least recognized, and terms that exceed the dilemma are launched, in part
by finding unheard-of resources in terms of denigration, even the unthought
possibility (from a colonialist’s perspective) of embracing precisely what has
been reviled. These resources are located especially in supposedly monstrous
differences of race and sexuality, not so that they can be transcended in some
move “beyond” racial or sexual difference to a universal human sameness
but, rather, so that grounds can be enunciated for the “different kind of crea-
ture” glimpsed, for example, in the closing pages of George Lamming’s In the
Castle of My Skin, a creature that has refused Enlightenment values tied to
the “human.”7 It is toward versions of possible, represented, even lived differ-
ence that these pages are drawn.
I take as another warrant for this inquiry, one that supplies at lightning
speed the history that connects twentieth-century Caribbean responses to
The Tempest and the colonial situation it heralds, the striking claim that
C. L. R. James proffers in “The Making of the Caribbean People”: “[T]he African
who made the Middle Passage and came to live in the West Indies was an en-
tirely new historical and social category. He was not an African, he was a West
Indian black who was a slave. And there had never been people like that before
and there haven’t been any since.”8 Thus, in the pages that follow, I subscribe
to the program outlined by David Scott in Refashioning Futures: Criticism
after Postcoloniality, who argues that if “the redemptive project of overcoming
colonialism is to return the natives to themselves,” this project can be pur-
sued neither under the rubric of the recovery of some antecedent precolonial
identity nor under the aegis of some homogenizing and normativizing account
of “the native.” Rather, Scott continues, the question to be asked is, “Who ex-
actly are these ‘natives’? What is their gender? What is their ethnicity? What
is their class? What is their sexual orientation? What are their modes of self-
fashioning?” 9 Indeed, I would add, following James, new kinds of persons may
not be grasped so readily even in the multiple categories that Scott deploys.
New kinds of creatures reshape old categories. To reiterate: As Hulme suggests,
even a native category like “Carib,” which certainly comes to be a name for
 6 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

native belonging and identification, may be a post hoc nomination of groups

united only by their ability to irritate and thwart colonialist powers.

O BRAVE NEW WORLD

Among New World responses to The Tempest perhaps Roberto Fernández
Retamar’s is the best-known to U.S. academics (in part because his 1971 essay
“Caliban” appeared in English in The Massachusetts Review a couple of years
later, and subsequently—in 1989—was republished by the University of Min-
nesota Press in a collection of Fernández Retamar’s essays with a foreword by
Fredric Jameson). The Vaughans fetch their epigraph from “Caliban” for their
chapter on “Colonial Metaphors,” citing a crucial sentence from Fernández
Retamar’s manifesto: “What is our history, what is our culture, if not the histo-
ry and culture of Caliban?” (Vaughan and Vaughan, 144; Fernández Retamar,
however, does not figure centrally in their chapter). And Nixon brings his
history of appropriations to its climactic close with Fernández Retamar. For
the project at hand, it is crucial to register that Fernández Retamar’s tract
is, from its first page on, a response to the question ¿Existen ustedes? (“Do
you exist?”) and that it offers an answer that seeks to describe the novelty of
a being hitherto assumed to be at best derivative and at worst a monstrosity
to be repudiated. The plurality that Fernández Retamar seizes under the
name of “Caliban” is a figuration for this novelty and multiplicity: “our mestizo
America,” as he calls it, citing José Martí’s phrase.10
The appeal of this argument is perfectly captured by Richard Halpern,
who frames his study of The Tempest through Fernández Retamar, arguing,
as Fernández Retamar does, that the play’s utopic and dystopic vision is of
a piece. Halpern notes how Fernández Retamar’s and Martí’s racially mixed
figure—bringing together Native American, African, and European into a new
configuration—represents a move beyond either accepting or repudiating
metropolitan culture. “Our America” is no derivative. Moreover, as Halpern
goes on to argue, Fernández Retamar’s mestizo “denies unique or delimited
points of origin, it replaces a monological conception of cultural discourse with
a dialogical or indeed disseminative one” (263–64), providing a theoretical map-
ping easily assimilated to various strands of poststructuralist thought. Yet, to
continue Halpern’s point, the force of this gesture is not merely theoretical; it
is bodily and historically grounded.
One historical ground for Fernández Retamar is, of course, the Cuban Revo-
lution of 1959, and “Caliban” is its cultural manifesto; another is to reestab-
lish José Martí, the late-nineteenth-century Cuban intellectual and revolu-
tionary, as a precursor to Fidel Castro’s regime, and as Fernández Retamar’s
forebear. From Martí, Fernández Retamar plucks not only his central concept
of “our America” (the title of a crucial piece of Martí’s cited often in “Caliban”),
but also Martí’s call for a new futurity linked to the mestizo past. Fernández
Retamar’s Martí “dreams not of a restoration now impossible but of the fu-
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 7

ture integration of our America” (“Caliban,” 20). There is no return to a “pure”

origin or a singularity, but there is the possibility of a future for which “Martí
is, as Fidel was later to be, aware of how difficult it is even to find a name
that in designating us defines us conceptually” (20). These gestures resonate
not only with the agendas we have noted in C. L. R. James or David Scott but
also with the historical situation of colonialism, as Hulme traces it, as an en-
counter that changes everything. And indeed, Fernández Retamar’s gesture
might be said to transcend James’s, if only because of its inclusiveness. It
reminds us that the history of colonialism is not one thing. There are places
in “our America” where the indigenous population was totally decimated and
replaced with African slaves; places where Africans and natives were both
present and exploited; places where Native American resistance made con-
quest all but impossible; places, like the Caribbean, where the end of slavery
in the nineteenth century marked a new influx of others—Asians—who, as
indentured servants, were virtual slaves.11 It is, moreover, the case that those
of European descent born in the New World were often suspect, as if they had
been “infected” by the tropics. “Our mestizo America” would seem the most
economical way to name all these conditions at once.12
Yet despite the capaciousness of this gesture, it is founded on some trou-
bling exclusions. Fernández Retamar’s desire to make “our America” a unique
case, for example, bars the applicability of the term to North America and to
the experiences of Native Americans or African Americans there (the United
States is, understandably, so much the enemy of the Castro regime that
Fernández Retamar seems unable to imagine such forms of solidarity).13 And
although conditions of mestizaje can be found in other colonial locales, these,
for Fernández Retamar, are merely accidents; they are not essential, as they
are in “our America.” Mestizaje is, rather, “the distinctive sign of our culture”
(“Caliban,” 4), he affirms. Thus, although it can be argued that everyone is
the product of mixture, Fernández Retamar wants the sign of inclusiveness
to function instead as one of exclusion and exclusiveness.
Halpern points to one intensely troubling way this is framed: the virtual
exclusion of women from the revolutionary view that Fernández Retamar of-
fers. In a role call of New World Calibans, only one woman is named (Violeta
Parra, the Chilean songwriter). Halpern is certainly right in noting that
Fernández Retamar’s imagining of revolution as an entirely male adventure
is hardly unique to him. And Rob Nixon, who also notes the masculinism of
Fernández Retamar’s account, suggests that The Tempest itself is another
masculinist text, one sign, for him, of the limits of the uses to which the play
might be—and, he claims, has been—put.14 Unlike Nixon, Halpern recog-
nizes that the embodiment of mestizaje is gendered and sexualized, and he
also sees the limits in Fernández Retamar’s view. Fastening on the figure
that Fernández Retamar deploys and defends against—of being a “distorted
echo” (“Caliban,” 3; “eco desfigurado,” 23) of European culture—he argues that
 8 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

Fernández Retamar offers the choice between an Echo tied to the Narcissus
of European self-reflection and a revolutionary Caliban, noting that “the
implicit opposition of Echo and Caliban clearly genders the resistance to cul-
tural dependence in a troublingly masculinist way” (Halpern, 264 n. 6).
The trouble, however, is not simply that such a masculinism erases femi-
ninity (or that it imagines sexual difference on the model of originary male-
ness and derivate femaleness); it also deplores femininity in men. That case
has been made by Ricardo Ortiz in an important essay that seeks common
cause with Fernández Retamar in order to further what Ortiz terms “revo-
lution’s other histories.”15 Desiring to expand the framework of what counts
as “America,” Ortiz ends his essay by advocating the work of two gay male
Latino American writers, urging recognition of the homophobia in Fernández
Retamar’s text upon those who have happily embraced the Calibanic vision
it offers without noticing this radical exclusion. As Ortiz details, Fernández
Retamar’s homophobia comes closest to articulation in his dismissive phrase
“the neo-Barthesean flutterings of Severo Sarduy” (“Caliban,” 36; “el mariposeo
neo-barthesiano de Severo Sarduy,” 68), where mariposeo is almost to say the
derogatory slang maricón.16 It’s there too in such gestures as references to
“writers like Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Severo Sarduy” (“Caliban,” 34) or
“the likes of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Juan Goytisolo” (“Caliban,” 36).
And it is especially there, as Ortiz details, through repeated figurations of
penetration: José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel is described as opposing the “North
American penetration” that Rodríguez Monegal welcomes in his “‘Nordo-
mania’” (“Caliban,” 15), the sign of which is a formalist “emasculation” of
Rodó in Rodríguez Monegal’s edition of his works; congruently, Domingo
Sarmiento’s admiration for the United States is characterized as “a never-
ending historical orgasm” (“Caliban,” 25). For Fernández Retamar, those who
wish to be penetrated by U.S. or European culture are definitionally non-
revolutionary artists who put themselves in the female derivative position
of Echo. Such a cultural position is also a homosexual stance in a cultural
milieu that defines “the homosexual” as a man who takes it up the ass.
Ortiz, responding to Fernández Retamar’s insistence that his text be read
contextually, deftly locates “Caliban” in its immediate history, the virulent ho-
mophobia of the Cuban regime, which had in the late 1960s incarcerated male
homosexuals. Although it no longer engaged wholesale in that practice by the
time Fernández Retamar wrote his manifesto, the 1971 National Congress on
Education and Culture, which predates Fernández Retamar’s tract by several
months (Fernández Retamar quotes Castro’s speech on that occasion), made
clear that revolutionary intellectuals could not be homosexual.17 The missed
chance represented by a text like “Caliban,” when restored to this context, is
caught by José Quiroga in Tropics of Desire, where he makes the important
points that Cuban homosexuals had been early advocates of the revolution
and that the revolution, moreover, was inspirational to those on the left in the
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 9

United States in the 1960s, including not only those in the Civil Rights move-
ment, which Fernández Retamar seems not to have noticed, but also feminists
and gay liberation theorists and activists.18 In Castro’s Cuba, particularly
in the 1970s, sexuality was viewed as a merely private, lifestyle choice nec-
essarily antithetical to the aims of revolutionizing society. In the particularly
dire economic situation of the early 1970s, gays were a target in a recogniz-
able diversionary tactic of drawing attention away from government and so-
cial failures by scapegoating them. Jesse Helms may hate Cuba, but he shares
one sentiment officially countenanced by Castro’s regime.
What is perhaps most pertinent here is not so much to decry Fernández
Retamar’s or Cuba’s sexual politics—neither is, after all, particularly unique
in “our America”—as to offer a more dialectical reading of “Caliban” that might
allow one to hold on to what remains inspiring in it and makes it a valuable
intervention in the readings of Shakespeare from the modern Caribbean that
I seek to investigate here. Following Ortiz, it is necessary to see how much
policing activity goes on in “Caliban”—and to question it, precisely in the
spirit of the inclusiveness heralded as “our mestizo America.” Fernández
Retamar proposes Martí to replace Rodó, specifically Rodó’s 1900 manifesto
Ariel, which had proclaimed that character in The Tempest as the model for
a reinvigorated Latin America culture.19 Rodó associated Caliban with the
United States. Fernández Retamar agrees with Rodó’s negative estimation of
U.S. aggressiveness and materialistic crassness (that is, its capitalist and co-
lonialist ambitions, not least in the southern hemisphere). He regards Rodó’s
association of Caliban with the United States as a fundamental error, one
indebted to Ernest Renan, who had rewritten Shakespeare’s play to make
Caliban embody everything wrong with democracy (Renan is the figure most
often cited in Ariel, a text whose mission in the service of “we Latin Ameri-
cans,” “a heritage of race, a great ethnic tradition” [Ariel, 73], nonetheless
never cites a single Latin American text in its cultural program). Throughout,
Fernández Retamar declaims a Calibanic genealogy (from Martí to Castro
and Ernesto “Che” Guevara) that excludes Europeanizers like Rodó, includ-
ing among them Sarduy, Rodríguez Monegal, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis
Borges, and their ilk. Although Halpern is right to claim that Fernández
Retamar would seem amenable to poststructuralist views, it is these that
Fernández Retamar explicitly deplores. Suspiciously French, they register
as signs of cultural emasculation; homosexual penetration is intimated.20
What makes this all the more disturbing, and potentially contradictory to
the aims of Fernández Retamar’s manifesto, is the fact that his figure for “our
America” is also an “alien” figure (as he admits [“Caliban,” 16]), elaborated
in and admitted to his text—indeed, titling it. “Our symbol then is not Ariel,
as Rodó thought, but rather Caliban” (14). “Our symbol,” like Rodó’s, comes
from elsewhere—indeed, from the same place, Shakespeare, an author whom
Fernández Retamar adores. He calls Shakespeare “the most extraordinary
 10 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

writer of fiction who ever existed” (5), and precisely because he somehow
knows “us” better than we do ourselves: “Caliban is our Carib” (9). Fernández
Retamar subordinates himself to Shakespeare by misreading Shakespeare’s
quietistic exposure of the complicity between utopic dreamer and monstrous
Caliban as revolutionary.
This creative misreading is of a piece, however, with the ways Fernández
Retamar reads his forebears throughout. Attempting to draw a strict line
between Martí and Rodó, he must ignore their shared status as founding
texts for Latin American modernismo. Indeed, Fernández Retamar’s text is in
line with a troubling foundational gesture for this movement that sought to
win all the prestige and glamor accorded late-nineteenth-century European
artistic currents and, at the same time, to purge them of their “decadence”
(that is, homoerotics).21 Ariel does not erase its relationship to French texts,
and it offers itself as a quasi-Platonic dialogue (an old teacher, nicknamed
Prospero, addresses his male pupils) in the service of a delibidinized peda-
gogy, one nonetheless that aims to plant “seeds” from the master’s mouth in
impressionable youths who are to shape themselves after the ideal of Ariel,
around whose statue they gather: “[A] young mind is hospitable soil in which
the seed of a single timely word will quickly yield immortal fruit” (Ariel, 32).
One could be reading Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Mr. W. H., or his declarations
at his trial, when he defended his relationship with Alfred Douglas as a
spiritual, Platonic affair like Shakespeare’s with his beloved in the sonnets.
Or, indeed, one could be reading Martí’s essay on Wilde, which similarly dis-
plays and defends against its swooning response to Wilde’s aestheticism and
antimaterialism.22
Fernández Retamar, predictably, does not mention Martí’s essay on Wilde.
He does allude in his preface to Caliban and Other Essays, however, to Martí’s
“great essay on Whitman,” which, like the essay about Wilde, as Sylvia Molloy
has demonstrated, participates in similar complicated gestures of solidarity
with Walt Whitman’s vision of male camaraderie and demurrals from the
sexuality that Whitman advocates through that dear love.23 But even the
moments in Martí admitted into Fernández Retamar’s text are more compli-
cated than he allows. He cites Martí’s admirable refusal at the close of “Our
America”—“[T]here is no racial hatred, because there are no races” (“Caliban,”
24)—but he suppresses the fact that Martí is urging this against a belief that
“there is a fatal and ingrained evil in the blond nation” (that is, the United
States) and not just in support of the Native Americans and Blacks of Latin
America.24 Martí does indeed value Native Americans and their culture;
Fernández Retamar cites from Martí’s “Aboriginal American Authors” but
fails to note that it is a review of a book by a U.S. scholar about these writers,
from which Martí fetches much information and which he praises.
Fernández Retamar, like Martí, imagines “our America” as a “brotherhood”
(“Caliban,” 37, emended at the end to include “brothers and sisters” [41],
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 11

which, indeed, goes beyond Martí’s masculinist vision), but he does not notice
how homoerotically (and misogynistically) charged this is in Martí. Martí
writes of Simón Bolívar, for example, that “he sears and enthralls” (“Simón
Bolívar,” 152): “[W]hile America lives, shall the echo of his name pass from
father to son in what is best and manliest in us!” (162). Or of Emerson, he
writes this: “Of other men one can say: ‘This is a brother’; of Emerson one
must say: ‘This is a father’” (“Emerson,” 235). Of Emerson. And also, “Why
should man envy woman because she suffers and gives birth, if a thought, in
its torments before birth and the satisfaction it brings afterward, is a son?”
(223). Emerson is the germinative father figure to his son Martí. “There is a
profound truth in Emerson’s paradox that demands that nations be judged
by the minority, not the majority, of its citizens,” antidemocratic Rodó writes
(Ariel, 60), but so, too, democratic Martí worries about the “sordid masses”
(“Our America,” 149) and about how to govern them according to the pre-
cepts of a “universal” spirit available to those who have risen above the flesh.
“Poetry . . . is more necessary to a people than industry itself,” Martí writes in
the Whitman essay (“Whitman,” 245), though any reader might have guessed
I was citing Rodó. “No man ever lived freer of the pressures of men or of his
moment,” Martí writes admiringly of Emerson (“Emerson,” 221). “Emerson
has made idealism human” (236); Martí writes, fraternally, as if to “another
self that is above fatigues and miseries,” as he says Whitman is when he
writes to and from his alter ego (“Whitman,” 253). His reader is his Echo. “He
awaits the happy hour in which the material [world] will depart from him,
and given up to the purifying airs, he will become germ and fragrance in its
swells, ‘disembodied, triumphant, dead’” (258).25 Is Martí Caliban, or Ariel?
I do not tally these resonances to deny that there is a revolutionary futu-
rity to be found and valued in Martí, to devalue his death in battle for Cuban
independence, or to erase the profound differences between Martí and Rodó.
Rather, I suggest that the roots of revolution are more complicated than
Fernández Retamar suggests, drawing his distinction (and not least in the
text by Shakespeare that Fernández Retamar venerates). Moreover, how-
ever much Fernández Retamar’s “Caliban” is a revolutionary manifesto, it
is also in many respects in line with its modernismo forebears. Take Martí’s
exclusionary gesture at the opening of “Our America” as he calls for the for-
mation of a revolutionary brotherhood: “Only the seven-month birthling will
lack the courage. Those who do not have faith in their country are seven-
month men. They cannot reach the first limb with their puny arms, arms
with painted nails and bracelets, arms of Madrid or Paris” (139). Those oth-
ers are effeminate, foreign, as in Fernández Retamar but also as in so many
nineteenth-century thinkers (so-called) who wished to taint homosexuality
as necessarily foreign, feminine (but whose denunciations inevitably showed
how many “natives” had succumbed).26 They are not “natural” men, the kind
of men that Martí praises in “Our America” and that Fernández Retamar
 12 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

endorses: “The natural men have vanquished the artificial, lettered men. The
native-born half-breed has vanquished the exotic Creole” (“Our America,”
141).27 This naturalization is, at the same time, a metaphysical, transcen-
dentalizing gesture—the oneness of nature that Martí finds in Emerson or
Whitman—inflected to naturalize the fantasy of sons produced by fathers
(often without mothers), that is, to naturalize a homosocial / homophobic
brotherhood always defended against its own homoerotics.28
Fernández Retamar makes an invaluable gesture toward Caliban—indeed,
toward Shakespeare’s Caliban—when he writes, “To offend us they call us
mambi, they call us black; but we reclaim as a mark of glory the honor of con-
sidering ourselves descendants of the mambi, descendants of the rebel, run-
away, independendista black—never descendants of the slave holder. Prospero,
as we well know, taught his language to Caliban, and, consequently, gave
him a name. But is this his true name?” (“Caliban,” 17). “Martí surpassed the
level of meaning, the verb to say; Martí was, he was that something, he was
Cuban reality.” Here, I do not cite Fernández Retamar but Severo Sarduy in
an exchange with Emir Rodríguez Monegal.29 But if, for a moment, my reader
supposed it was Fernández Retamar and now asks, “Is this his true name?” it
should be clear that the question needs to be asked again in a way that would
include those that Fernández Retamar would exclude from “our America.”

YOU TAUGHT ME LANGUAGE

In the Calibanic genealogy that Fernández Retamar offers, George Lamming
is singled out as “the first writer in our world to assume our identification with
Caliban” (“Caliban,” 12). In 1971, the year “Caliban” appeared, Lamming was
set to publish what have remained, to date, his final novels. Over the course
of twenty years, Lamming published six novels that, as he acknowledged in a
1973 interview, could be regarded as a single, continuous story.30 After start-
ing with In the Castle of My Skin (1953), a novel of a colonial childhood, auto-
biographical in its inspiration, in which Lamming also charts the lived (if un-
recognized) experience of race and class, he then proceeded to The Emigrants
(1954), which captures the experience of a generation of emigrants (including
Lamming) from the Caribbean to London that took place in the 1950s, and
on to Of Age and Innocence (1958) and Season of Adventure (1960), novels set
on the island of “San Cristobal,” a locale that condenses various Caribbean
places as it depicts the failed attempts at independence in the region. Then,
as if completing this trajectory, Lamming returned to its point of origins, in
Natives of My Person (1972) composing a novel that reads doubly, at once an
account of the original colonial venture and the present neocolonial situation
of economic domination of the Caribbean, and in Water with Berries (1971)
returning to what he referred to in an interview as “my old Prospero-Caliban
theme” for a full-scale rewriting of The Tempest.31
In 1971, when Fernández Retamar hailed him, Lamming was on the point
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 13

of ending his exile in London to return to Barbados to take up the position of

public intellectual. Since his return, he has published essays and, equally im-
portant, he has appeared at numerous occasions (perhaps most powerfully at
the memorial service for Maurice Bishop; he also eulogized Walter Rodney) at
which he has spoken about the continuing effects of colonialism on the region.
As he did in his novels, he has pointed to the worker uprisings of the 1930s
as inspiring events and to the various betrayals of the “peasant” and “folk” by
a middle class created by a European educational apparatus that had served
to divide the inhabitants without in fact giving the new class any real rela-
tionship to the means of production.32 Like Frantz Fanon in The Wretched
of the Earth, Lamming decries this “lackey” class. In his opinion, this group
has served ongoing imperial powers, most notably, for instance, when the
U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983 was welcomed by any number of so-called
independent states. Lamming sees those states’ democratic processes as little
more than a way of furthering divisions of race and class, assuring exploita-
tion and Caribbean dependence. Against the new imperialism of the United
States, Lamming has held up the “miracle” of Cuba, and his speeches are at
times dotted with references to Martí and to Castro. Indeed, speaking at the
twenty-fifth anniversary of Casa de las Américas in 1984 (in whose journal
“Caliban” was published), he alluded playfully to Fernández Retamar, who, as
its head, must have been present on the occasion. Like Fernández Retamar,
Lamming writes frequently of the role the intellectual must play in revolu-
tionizing society, insisting that “it is the function of the writer to return a so-
ciety to itself ” (Conversations, 81). For Lamming, throughout his long career,
this has meant to represent the poor, black populations and to loosen the hold
of European education in order to allow the reclamation of buried experi-
ences so that the various forms of degradation and alienation that persist as
the colonial legacy can be surmounted at an individual and collective level.
Like C. L. R. James before him, Lamming too thinks that the Caribbean is a
unique place, with unique possibilities lodged there: “I don’t think there has
been anything in human history quite like the meeting of Africa, Asia, and
Europe in the American archipelago we call the Caribbean.”33 For him too it
is a place marked by “the signature of that sperm” (Conversations, 160), as
he somewhat graphically insists on the literality of miscegenation that char-
acterizes “our America.” And if this phrasing, like the language of Fernández
Retamar, is resolutely masculinist, here and there Lamming has acknowl-
edged this shortcoming, hailing “the women who fathered many a household,
nursed man and child without a wage and have remained to this day the last
surviving example of legalized slave-labour” (Conversations, 220), a view that
seems nonetheless to imagine women confined to their household tasks, a
point disturbingly confirmed when he lambasts middle-class women for their
exploitation of the lower-class women who do domestic work for them.34
The Lamming who confirmed in a 1978 interview what is apparent from
 14 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

reading his work—“I am a socialist,” he declared (Conversations, 269)—

would therefore seem an entirely logical name to be singled out by Fernández
Retamar. Fernández Retamar, of course, does not allude to Lamming’s pub-
lic, post-1971 career that I have briefly sketched, which has brought them
into proximity over the past quarter of a century; nor does he have in mind
Lamming’s career as a novelist. Rather, he refers to Lamming’s The Pleasures
of Exile, an ironically titled set of essays published in 1960. In these, not only
does Lamming make the Calibanic identification that Fernández Retamar
underscores, but like Fernández Retamar, he also provides a genealogy. In
Lamming’s case, it fastens on Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian revo-
lution as the inspiring model for the future, on the recent independence of
Ghana as the example from the present, and on C. L. R. James, whose Black
Jacobins recounts the history of the Haitian revolution, as a prototype for the
Caribbean intellectual and, indeed, for the situation of Caribbean intellectu-
als of that time, since James’s book had been out of print for twenty years, a
sign of how devalued indigenous intellectuals were (this was the reason for
Lamming’s emigration). Like Fernández Retamar, Lamming also weighs the
efforts of Caribbean writers of his generation who have furthered the work
of representation of the poor and racially despised—Roger Mais and Sam
Selvon, for example—against the efforts of those who have joined the middle
class and adopted European attitudes toward “peasant” experience, notably
V. S. Naipaul. Indeed, Lamming lambasts Naipaul’s “castrated satire” in a
rhetoric of emasculation akin to Fernández Retamar’s.35
Nonetheless, Fernández Retamar’s citation of Lamming in “Caliban” is not
entirely laudatory. To quote now the entire sentence: “Although he is (appar-
ently) the first writer in our world to assume our identification with Caliban,
the Barbadian writer George Lamming is unable to break the circle traced by
Mannoni” (“Caliban,” 12). Fernández Retamar says no more but, as is typical
throughout his essay, he provides a citation from Pleasures that presumably
speaks for itself. Its subject is language, the language that Prospero claims
to have taught Caliban (in this context it is worth noting that Fernández
Retamar’s sole citation from The Tempest is Caliban’s retort “You taught me
language and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse” [1.2.362–64, as cited
in “Caliban,” 6–7]). Pulling Lamming into the orbit of Octave Mannoni’s
Prospero and Caliban, which argues that the dependency that Prospero
induced was based on native psychology—that the native, Caliban, wanted
what Prospero had to offer, wanted to be colonized, and then despaired at
abandonment—Fernández Retamar allies Lamming with a colonialist (and
French) Lacanian psychoanalytic point of view.36 We know, by now, how to
read such a gesture.
Fernández Retamar’s ongoing ambivalent response to Lamming is also
shown in the rather conciliatory follow-up to “Caliban” that he published
in 1986, “Caliban Revisited.” It is conciliatory not in backing down from the
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 15

context in which “Caliban” had been written (the arrest of Heberto Padillo
for antirevolutionary writing, taken by many Western intellectuals who had
supported the Cuban Revolution as a sign of its increasingly totalitarian
nature; the Padillo affair was also entwined with persecution of homosexual
intellectuals) but in making friendly gestures to two authors excoriated in
“Caliban”: Carlos Fuentes and Borges (rather extraordinary concessions,
considering their politics). By 1986, Fernández Retamar certainly knew more
about Lamming than he presumably did in 1971. Not least, he must have
been familiar with the brief introduction that Lamming had provided to a
1984 reprint of Pleasures, in which he reminds readers that at the time of his
writing the book, the Caribbean was still an entirely colonized region, and
in which he hails the Cuban Revolution as the culmination of the promise
of Toussaint: “[L]ike a bolt from the blue, Fidel Castro and the Cuban revo-
lution reordered our history.”37 Nonetheless, in “Caliban Revisited” Lamming
appears merely as one of those in the Calibanic line; a footnote, adducing the
1984 edition of Pleasures, does admit that Lamming deserves more attention
than Fernández Retamar accords him. This intertextual history suggests an
ongoing conflictual relationship with Lamming; the charge against Lamming
serves as an apotropaic gesture of self-distancing.
Like Fernández Retamar, Lamming in Pleasures is responding to the ques-
tion, Do you exist? Like Fernández Retamar, he must answer in the language
of the colonizer: “Right now as we are discussing, as I am discussing with
those colonizers, how else can I do it except in one of their languages, which is
now our language, and with so many of their conceptual tools, which are now
also our conceptual tools? This is precisely the outcry that we read in a work
by perhaps the most extraordinary writer of fiction who ever existed. . . . ‘You
taught me language’” (“Caliban,” 5). Here is the passage from Pleasures that
Fernández Retamar cites as evidence of Lamming’s dependency:

Prospero has given Caliban language; and with it an unstated history of

consequences, an unknown history of future intentions. This gift of language
meant not English, in particular, but speech and concept as a way, a method, a
necessary avenue towards areas of the self which could not be reached in any
other way. It is this way, entirely Prospero’s, which makes Caliban aware of
possibilities. Therefore, all of Caliban’s future—for future is the very name of
possibilities—must derive from Prospero’s experiment, which is also his risk.
Provided there is no extraordinary departure which explodes all of Prospero’s
premises, then Caliban and his future now belong to Prospero. . . . Prospero
lives in the absolute certainty that Language, which is his gift to Caliban, is
the very prison in which Caliban’s achievement will be realized and restricted.
(Pleasures, 109–10; as cited in “Caliban,” 12–13)

It appears that Lamming’s Caliban, unlike Fernández Retamar’s, is not some-

one who returns a curse for the “gift” of language, a point that Lamming, in
 16 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

fact, explicitly makes (Pleasures, 15). But then again, neither is Fernández
Retamar’s “Caliban” reduced to cursing, for he too speaks the same tongue, de-
ploys the same concepts. Once again, we face here the problem of distinguish-
ing cultural mixture—mestizaje—from mere imitation. Fernández Retamar
and Lamming face a shared dilemma. Does the passage from Pleasures cited
by Fernández Retamar substantiate his charge of colonial dependence?
In the passage Lamming confronts the fact that “Caliban” is not the
name of some precolonial creature; it is the name for the colonized, a name
provided by the colonizer. The very naming is a performative gesture that
ushers “Caliban” into a new form of existence, one, as Lamming underscores
in Pleasures, that must have been a wrenching experience: “exiled from his
gods, exiled from his nature, exiled from his own name” (15). To take, now, the
name “Caliban” as one’s own is not to reclaim a territory that can be called in-
nate or primordial, but rather to revalue the very being made in the naming.
Lamming parts company with Fernández Retamar in denying that “Caliban”
is the name of “our Carib” (“Caliban,” 9), but it is for the sake of seeing that
“our Carib” is also a secondary formation produced by colonialism, a nec-
essarily mixed being composed through the encounter.
It could appear that Lamming is endorsing Prospero’s values, the particu-
lar avenue toward self-discovery and self-realization that he declares to be
“his way” and not Caliban’s. This is an admittedly difficult point, but it does
speak to the cultural situation that Lamming addresses. The simplest way
to put it would be to note that Lamming is a novelist—that is, he works in a
form that is definitionally European—and that although he aims to make the
novel the repository for kinds of experiences hitherto unavailable to it, he is
nonetheless staking out a territory that cannot really be called indigenous
but that must retrospectively recast the terms of what counts as cultural pro-
duction. As he says several times in Pleasures, the point is that “English is no
longer the exclusive language of the men who live in England” (36); it is also
a West Indian tongue.
As Lamming ventriloquizes Prospero’s belief—that the language he has
given Caliban will only serve to limit him; that it will make him aware of
his unbreachable difference from Prospero, of the impossibility of achieve-
ments matching Prospero’s—he is tracing the contours of a lie, the lie of “that
language with which Prospero tried to annihilate the concrete existence of
Caliban” (Pleasures, 180). It was, as he admits (as does Fernández Retamar),
a lie lived as slavery and self-hatred, and still lived. The being that Prospero
conferred on Caliban, giving him language, was to name him as a deformed
slave, a monstrosity incapable of thought. It was to reduce him to the condi-
tion of mere labor, to brutish nature, to “the role of Thing, excluded, devoid
of language” (166). It was also to offer Caliban an opening to a blocked futu-
rity, and it is Calibans like Lamming who have superseded the block, seen
through the lie. “Will the Lie upon which Prospero’s confident authority was
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 17

built be discovered?” (117). It is toward that project and its continual unfold-
ing (since, as Lamming sees it, “the Lie” has not ceased to exert its hold on
the Caribbean) that Lamming works.
“Caliban has got hold of Prospero’s weapons” (Pleasures, 63). If the weap-
ons meant are the ability to wield language, to write, far more than that is
at stake. “The old blackmail of Language simply won’t work any longer. For
the language of modern politics is no longer Prospero’s exclusive vocabulary”
(158). Indeed, the ability to see through that language and its false pretenses
has long been available; it exists in the work of C. L. R. James, in the man
he made a hero: “[W]e shall never explode Prospero’s old myth until we
christen Language afresh; until we show Language as the product of human
endeavour; until we make available to all the result of certain enterprises
undertaken by men who are still regarded as the unfortunate descendants of
languageless and deformed slaves” (118–19). The moment in which Lamming
writes is governed by the principle that “colonisation is a reciprocal process”
(156). Caliban arises from the colonial encounter, but so too does Prospero. In
the discovery of what was made then and what might be made from it lies a
future in which Prospero either must cower or with which he must come to
terms. What Lamming suggests, moreover, is that the terms will necessarily
be new ones, since the old lie of language was based on Caliban’s exclusion
and oppression. If language has been seized by the colonized and has been
seen through as “the Lie,” the point is for Caliban not simply to reverse the
dialectic but to exceed it and to usher Prospero into a future that he no longer
can imagine he controls.

. . . AND THEN I LOVED THEE

Is Lamming nonetheless in the grips of the dependency complex that Mannoni
described? Such would seem to be the belief that guides the Vaughans in
their chapter “Colonial Metaphors” in Shakespeare’s Caliban, where they
summarize (with utter equanimity and approval) what they take to be the
gist of Lamming’s argument: “[L]anguage was Caliban’s ‘prison.’ . . . it is
Prospero’s language and therefore largely Prospero’s vision of the future that
Caliban must accept” (166). Nixon implicitly answers Fernández Retamar’s
charge that Lamming is caught in “the circle traced by Mannoni” by claiming
that through Caliban Lamming urges decolonization of “the area’s cultural
history by replacing an imposed with an endemic line of thought and action”
(“Caribbean and African Appropriations,” 569).38 Although it is certainly
the case that Lamming wishes a revitalization of the Caribbean that in-
volves “endemic” and indigenous cultural traditions (Pleasures opens by in-
voking the Haitian Ceremony of the Souls, for example; Lamming announces
that his race is not a chip on his shoulder but a mountain on his back),
Nixon’s account considerably simplifies Lamming’s position and also deploys
 18 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

the terms used by Fernández Retamar, of suspect foreign influence that must
be repudiated.
Lamming certainly claims the identification with and as Caliban that
Fernández Retamar and Nixon take to be the significance of his work: “I am
a direct descendant of slaves, too near to the actual enterprise to believe that
its echoes are over with the reign of emancipation,” he writes (Pleasures, 15).
But he makes another claim as well: “Moreover, I am a direct descendant of
Prospero worshipping in the same temple of endeavour, using his legacy of
language—not to curse our meeting—but to push it further, reminding the
descendants of both sides that what’s done is done, and can only be seen as
a soil from which other gifts, or the same gift endowed with different mean-
ings, may grow towards a future which is colonised by our acts in this mo-
ment, but which must always remain open” (15). That is to say: Lamming,
like Fernández Retamar, depends upon a notion of cultural mestizaje; and
if, like Fernández Retamar, this is imagined as a largely male-male enter-
prise, it is here figured through an impossible act of sexual intercourse,
two fathers, Caliban and Prospero, producing this son. Vera Kutzinski has
recently charged that Fernández Retamar’s “Caliban” works in a similar
way: “Fernández Retamar’s cultural mestizaje, which legitimates him as an
Hispanic-American intellectual and as a first-person narrator, is born not from
heterosexual violence but from the homoerotic embrace of Caliban and Ariel
across their respective race and class differences.”39 In other words, Fernández
Retamar’s tropes are tainted by his virtual exclusion of women in “Caliban”
and his failure to recognize that the mestizaje he celebrates literally depends
upon violence against native and black women. For Kutzinski, it renders him
(homo)sexually suspect.
If a homophobic suspicion is similarly deployed in Fernández Retamar’s
charge against Lamming’s dependency complex, it could be motivated, more-
over, by the way Lamming ends his discussion of The Tempest in Pleasures:
wondering whether Caliban’s expressions of “ingratitude” awaken in Prospero
“the knowledge that he really deserves such ingratitude” (116). Lamming’s
terms could seem to echo Mannoni, who moves in one brief discussion of The
Tempest from Caliban’s lines on language to “the real reason” for Caliban’s
antagonism. Mannoni cites the speech from The Tempest that Lamming also
quotes at the end of his discussion of the play:

. . . When thou camest first

Thou strok’dst me, and mad’st 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 lov’d thee . . .
(1.2.332–36, as cited by Mannoni)
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 19

He goes on to paraphrase it: “[A]nd then you abandoned me before I had time
to become your equal. . . . In other words: you taught me to be dependent,
and I was happy; then you betrayed me and plunged me into inferiority.”40
Lamming, too, talks of “Prospero’s betrayal of love” (Pleasures, 114), of how
Caliban “haunts” Prospero “in a way that is almost too deep and too intimate
to communicate” (99).
Even if remarks like these cause Fernández Retamar to place Lamming
into Mannoni’s orbit, I think it would be far more accurate to recognize that
Lamming’s thought runs, rather, along the track laid out by Fanon, in his
redescription (and refusal) of Mannoni’s thesis in Black Skin, White Masks.41
Fanon repudiates Mannoni’s claim of innate dependency and utterly anni-
hilates the racist ruse of a benign colonialism. The native of whom Mannoni
talks, Fanon underscores, “has ceased to exist” (94); the Malagasy are, rather,
the creatures made by colonial exploitation. If they are dependent, it is be-
cause they have been made dependent. Although Fanon insists on the actual
material, economic circumstances glossed over by Mannoni—the brutaliza-
tion and immiseration that produced dependency—he is most concerned,
as is Mannoni, with describing a colonial psychology. For Fanon, as is well
known, the “native” (that is to say, the colonized) has suffered a total psy-
chological destructuration. His ego ideal is white, a condition of impossible
identification. (In Black Skin, White Masks, “his” is the necessary gendered
marker of the colonized; as Fanon writes, he knows nothing about the woman
of color [179–80]).42 Like Fanon seeking “the liberation of the man of color
from himself ” (8), Lamming too wants to bring to the surface these deep
deformations of psyche that are the colonial legacy, the false consciousness
of the white mask that he wishes covered his black skin. Both authors seek
the contours of a new identity.43 When Lamming admits the affective in-
tensity of the relationship between Prospero and Caliban, he points beyond
the material circumstances of Caliban’s robbery (the island taken from him)
and the supposed compensatory “gift” of language toward the deep psycho-
logical level on which this intensity is based. In this account, his aims are
akin to Fanon’s, tracing a colonial psychology. Indeed, the psychology Fanon
describes is not all that far from Mannoni’s—with the crucial caveat that it is
not supposed as “indigenous” and is certainly not in any sense validated, as
it is in Mannoni.
Moreover, the psychology of Black Skin, White Masks is a “deep” and almost
unspeakable one: Fanon does not offer ego psychology but a psychoanalytic
model. This means, as Fanon insists, that “considerable attention must be
given to sexual phenomena” (160). As is well known, these take the form of
interracial sexual relations between “the woman of color and the white man”
and between “the man of color and the white woman” (the topics of the second
and third chapters of Black Skin, White Masks). As Fanon describes them,
they are necessarily perverse, and chapter 6 details the psychopathology of
 20 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

colonial sexual relations. There Fanon rewrites the Freudian scenario of a

child being beaten into that of the white woman dreaming of being raped by
the black man. Given the fantasmatic nature of the black man, Fanon opines
that ultimately “it is the woman who rapes herself ” (179). She has sex with
herself—a masturbatory fantasy that perhaps, for Fanon, qualifies as lesbian.
The white man similarly dreams about the black man. Fanon keeps discover-
ing and deploring the “homosexual territory” (183) he encounters, notoriously
averring that there is no homosexuality indigenous to the Antilles (not even
in the cross-dressing men whom he knows about but who, he assures his read-
ers and himself, “lead normal sex lives” [180 n. 44]).44 The black man, whether
with a white man or a white woman, is nothing more than a penis, and a cas-
trated one at that—which is to say, in these Freudian terms, a woman.
Who is this black man in Fanon if not Caliban? This white man and this
white woman if not Prospero and Miranda? Although Fanon barely mentions
The Tempest in his rebuttal of Mannoni, he does in fact credit Mannoni’s
“Prospero complex,” citing Mannoni’s definition of it: “[T]he racialist whose
daughter has suffered an [imaginary] attempted rape at the hands of an in-
ferior being” (Fanon, 107, citing Mannoni, 110). “Toward Caliban, Prospero
assumes an attitude that is well known to Americans in the southern United
States,” Fanon continues. “Are they not forever saying that the niggers are
just waiting for the chance to jump on white women?” This fantasy Lamming
too fastens on in his reading of The Tempest. He calls the rape charge “The
Lie” (Pleasures, 102), twinning it with the accusation about language, draw-
ing together thereby the intimate relations that (de)structure Caliban—
with Prospero and with Miranda.

WOULD’T HAD BEEN DONE !

This brings us to a point that Richard Halpern has emphasized: There is a
major stumbling block—or there should be—to the easy embrace of Caliban
as cultural hero and founder of a race of mixed-bloods. It implicitly validates
the charge lodged against Caliban in The Tempest: that he is a would-be rap-
ist. As Halpern goes on to say, the charge is a trap and an ideological lure. On
the one hand, it effaces the much more usual direction of colonial violence
perpetrated by white heterosexual males; on the other, it forces anyone who
claims Caliban to exonerate rape. “Retamar’s choice of a rapist as an anti-
colonial hero not only betrays a striking indifference to matters of gender, but
falls into an ideological trap set by The Tempest,” Halpern concludes (“Picture
of Nobody,” 283). Commentators in the Calibanic line who follow Fernández
Retamar (Nixon would be one of them) simply ignore the question of Caliban
as rapist. Nixon goes further, however; his own inattention to questions of
gender and sexuality leads him in his summary of Pleasures to fail to mention
the fact that Lamming is indeed aware of the problematic accusation of rape
and of the problematic validation of the rapist. As Peter Hulme has remarked
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 21

on more than one occasion, one of the most extraordinary things about
Lamming’s Pleasures is that it devotes an entire chapter to an anticolonial
reading of The Tempest, one that anticipates a critical practice that would
become familiar among literary academics—almost all of them unaware of
the Caribbean tradition of responses to and deployments of the play—fifteen
or more years later.45 In a 1991 essay, Hulme fastens on the page devoted
to the rape accusation in Lamming’s chapter “A Monster, a Child, a Slave”
(in Pleasures) as a significant moment in Lamming’s anticolonial argument.
Taking Lamming’s reading of the rape as an instance of his refusal of the
notion that Shakespeare might be assumed to be an unquestionable locus
of cultural authority, Hulme concludes that Lamming’s reading of the play
“is decisively better” than that offered by traditional, worshipful readers of
Shakespeare. It shows “that Prospero’s behaviour towards Ariel and Caliban
is indefensible, that his determination to inflict humiliation on Alonso is, to
say the least, unpleasant, and that his exchanges with Miranda and Caliban
reveal a whole series of psychic anxieties.”46
Prospero accuses Caliban of attempted rape, and Caliban responds,

Would’t had been done!

Thou didst prevent me—I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans
(1.2.348–50)

Hulme cites Lamming’s analysis:

What an extraordinary way for a slave to speak to his master and in his daugh-
ter’s presence. But there is a limit to accepting lies and it was the Lie contained
in the charge which the man in Caliban could not allow. “I wish it were so.” But
he does not wish it for the mere experiment of mounting a piece of white pussy.
He goes further and imagines that the consequence of such intercourse would be
a fabulous increase of the population. . . . Is there a political intention at work?
Does he mean that he would have numbers on his side; that he could organise
resistance against this obscene, and selfish monster. . . . Did Caliban really try
to lay her? This is a case where the body, in its consequence, is our only guide.
Only the body could establish the truth; for if Miranda were made pregnant, we
would know that someone had penetrated her. We might also know whether or
no it was Caliban’s child; for it is most unlikely that Prospero and his daughter
could produce a brown skin baby. (Pleasures, 102, cited in Hulme, “Rewriting
the Caribbean Past,” 180)

Hulme remarks on the “spectre of incest” (181) raised by Lamming’s analysis;

in fact, this is a specter also raised by Mannoni’s reading of the same mo-
ment and follows from his understanding of the psychic mechanism of white
racism: that Prospero has projected onto Caliban his own desire and has then
 22 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

painted it black, as the desire of the other. This is one way “the Lie” is formed,
and it rhymes with that other lie: that Caliban is a deformed, languageless
monster who would naturally rape his daughter. Hulme demurs from the
sacrilege in Lamming’s use of the West Indian vernacular “pussy” in his re-
phrasing of Prospero’s charge against Caliban: “No doubt, thirty years on, we
wish that Lamming had found a different way of making the gesture” (181).
No doubt; for whereas Lamming reads the lines as perhaps implying
that Prospero’s imputation tells us more about what is on his mind than
on Caliban’s, the vernacular here seems explosively misogynistic. In part,
this comes from Lamming’s view of Miranda as a “brainwashed” subject in
the grip of her father’s “propaganda” (Pleasures, 105). Although Lamming
imagines that once, in the past, Miranda and Caliban were two innocent
children, Miranda and Caliban have been separated by Prospero, he exiled
to his languagelessness and bestiality, she to an inviolable purity that is the
mirror of her father’s belief in his total separation from the monster he has
made. As brainwashed subject, Miranda evokes little sympathy in Lamming.
Nonetheless, even as he responds to the political purposiveness of Caliban’s
response—his seeing that miscegenation would be the way to gather strength
against Prospero (strength too against Prospero’s belief in the unbreach-
able divide that separates master and slave)—Lamming demurs, at least
momentarily, from the mere reproduction of Calibans that Caliban desires.
Hulme omits from his citation these sentences: “But why, we wonder, does
Caliban think that the population would be Calibans? Why would they not
be Mirandas? Does he mean that they should carry their father’s name? But
these children would be bastards and should be honoured no less with their
mother’s name” (Pleasures, 102).
In other words, for Lamming—as for Fernández Retamar as well, we
might recall—the very possibility of naming the colonial subject is in ques-
tion. Lamming seizes upon “bastard” as a kind of honorific, a naming akin to
mestizo insofar as it suggests illegitimate mixture, a condition not unrelated
to Lamming’s own claimed genealogy of two fathers and no mother, if only
in offering yet another form of sexual union outside of normative hetero-
sexuality. Moreover, if Lamming catches Caliban in the grips of a patriarchal
fantasy in his belief in a line of Calibans, he perhaps means to suggest that
Caliban is displaying one of the effects of colonial education, for Caliban here,
like Prospero, thinks of the sexual relationship as a property relationship.
Indeed, one reason to focus on the rape accusation (and not just in Lamming)
is that it ties together what have recently been seen as alternative possibili-
ties in reading The Tempest—either as a colonial text or as European. For the
bar placed between Caliban’s and Miranda’s sexual union is meant to ensure
for her precisely a marriage with another European royal (to make sure that
the kind of marriage forced on Claribel, which has shipwrecked the court
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 23

party, never happens again). The two plots are knotted at this juncture.47
It is therefore not only because Lamming is misogynist but also because he
sees that Miranda is a kind of pawn in male-male exchanges that she quickly
fades from view in his analysis.
What this also means, however, is that more is going on than the incest
that Hulme and Mannoni find in this moment. For—to pick up just after
the place where Hulme stops his citation—Lamming continues by noting
that the specter of the brown-skinned child would mean something made by
Miranda and Caliban that lies outside Prospero’s control, something nonethe-
less that is “the result and expression of some fusion both physical and other
than physical: a fusion which, within himself, Prospero needs and dreads!”
(Pleasures, 102).
What is this dread and need? It is, in part, a recognition of bodiliness that
is grossly distorted in Prospero’s enslavement of Caliban, which has made
him into mere body, the bodiliness that Prospero would seem to repudiate
for the sake of his self-representation as mind divorced from matter: “It is
in his relation to Caliban, as a physical fact of life that we are allowed to
guess some of Prospero’s needs. He needs this slave” (Pleasures, 98). It is
the labor that Caliban is forced to perform and that the aristocrat disdains.
It is, in these ways, a part of himself that Prospero has cut off and then re-
marked in the divisions he makes: between those who are bodies and those
who are minds, those who have language and those who do not. (Miranda’s
virginity puts her on the side of Prospero.) It is the part to which Caliban
gives evidence, the “natural generosity” (107) of his gifts—of food, of showing
all the wealth and resources of his island and offering them to Prospero in
exchange for his paltry teaching, “this original tendency to welcome which
gets Caliban into trouble” (114). It is what Caliban continues to house in
himself despite all the deprivations and accusations, a spirit of “freedom”
(101), an innate “seed of revolt” (98) that is the sign of an “original rooted-
ness” (101) that Prospero cannot ever finally deny him. The island is his, but
his in a form of belonging that is not the possessiveness and proprietariness
of Prospero. Rather this belonging is an originary state before ownership, a
state that would make all its inhabitants bastards. In this way, the political
gesture that Caliban wrests from the rape accusation resonates beyond even
the notion of gathering an army behind him. It is, in a word, that “love” that
Caliban says he felt at first and that Prospero has violated. In some other
world, some other time, Miranda and Caliban “could be together in a way
that Miranda and her father could not. For Prospero is alone. He hates and
fears and needs Caliban” (115).
Lamming thus locates the intensity of the male-male relationship that
lies beneath the rape accusation in the splitting of Prospero that is the coun-
terpart to his deformation of Caliban, his “Calibanization” (cf. Pleasures, 157).
 24 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

With a forthrightness rarely matched in subsequent anticolonial criticism of

the play, Lamming describes Prospero as “an imperialist by circumstance, a
sadist by disease” (Pleasures, 112); the “monster” in the title of his chapter
on the play is not Caliban but this raging “old man,” an “obscene and selfish
monster” (102). And the sign of his disease is his inability to love, his “loath-
some habit of cutting people down” (113). The rape accusation is central to
Lamming’s analysis because it ramifies everywhere: “Caliban is . . . the occa-
sion to which every situation, within the context of the Tempest [sic], must be
related. No Caliban no Prospero!” (108). The refusals of Caliban, the charges
against him, ramify to Prospero’s retirement from rule, showing he never
cared for his people; to Antonio’s fault, Prospero’s doing; and especially to
something to which Lamming returns repeatedly, the absence of Prospero’s
wife, mentioned only once in the play, not even remembered by her daughter
(104): “It is likely that he had never experienced any such feeling towards his
wife” (113), and “Who, we are left to wonder, was really Miranda’s mother?
And what would she have had to say about this marvellous monster of a
husband who refuses us information?” (115). Lamming connects this absent
figure to another one, Caliban’s mother, whom Prospero insists on calling
“a so-and-so” (116). And, thus, Lamming speculates as to whether Miranda
may have been a bastard and whether Prospero’s claiming that Caliban is a
“bastard” is how he all but tells us about his own relationship with Sycorax.
“We ask ourselves why a Duke should debase himself to speak in such a way
[about Sycorax]. The tone suggests an intimacy of involvement and concern
which encourages speculation” (116). The rape accusation is spoken by a mon-
ster who never loved his wife or his daughter. Prospero’s “disease,” ramifying
in every direction, implies sexual failure, sexual anxiety as his hidden truth,
as well as the “deepest and most delicate bond” that ties him to Caliban (109),
a “fusion” he “needs and dreads” (102). The thread of language; the accusa-
tion of rape. “Caliban haunts him in a way that is almost too deep and too
intimate to communicate” (99).
Love may be the secret of the bond, but love is not the form the bond mani-
fests. Lamming’s Prospero is a “malevolent old bitch” (99), and the veiled ac-
cusation of same-sex desire is probably just that, an accusation. Nonetheless,
Lamming’s bastard vision of a future (which would also connect to the past
from which Prospero cuts Caliban—and himself—off ) could not be a site of
mandatory heterosexuality, of the marriage relationship with its legitimation
of property and its making of women into property. The unspeakable desire
toward which Lamming points but which he never names is at once an alter-
native political/social formation, neither colonial nor capitalist, and an alter-
native sexual formation populated by bastards born of forbidden mixtures:
across race, but also athwart gender, queer (male and male producing male).
Might Lamming subscribe to the vision that Fanon has toward the end of
Black Skin, White Masks?
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 25

On the field of battle, its four corners marked by the scores of Negroes
hanged by their testicles, a monument is slowly being built that promises to be
majestic.
And, at the top of this monument, I can already see a white man and a black
man hand in hand. (Fanon, 222)

Fanon’s sentences are almost impossible to read. As a monument to the

lynching/castrating of black men, a black man and a white man hold hands.
Is this the terrifying vision of the complicity of the white-masked black man,
the abhorrent spectacle (for Fanon) of male-male intimacy that is the cou-
pling of two castrated males, one black, one homosexual? Or is it the vision
of a desired future, beyond difference and alienation, of mutual recognition?
“Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the
other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself ?” (231). As Fanon him-
self has argued throughout Black Skin, White Masks, nothing could be more
fraught than what he ends by calling simple.

WATER WITH BERRIES IN ’ T

Lamming may glance back at a past, before colonization, when Caliban
was quite other than he is now, and he may hope that something of that
native love and generosity may yet serve into the future. In a chapter in
Pleasures, “In the Beginning,” recasting a scene from his 1958 novel Of Age
and Innocence, Lamming provides a myth of origins, in which property is
shared (“lan’ didn’t belong to nobody” [Pleasures, 19]), in which there is an
immediate connection to the land, and in which the sexual division of labor
is already in place: “Their wife cook and make bed, an’ the land begin to take
a human shape, turnin’ soft, an’ sheddin’ new food wherever the Boys put
down their fingers, tendin’ seed an’ tiny plant for what we call harvest” (19).
No doubt, this serves as a model of utopic futurity, and not least because it is
narrated by a group of boys who represent the various racial/ethnic/national
strains of the Caribbean: Black, Indian, Chinese (and English in the scene
in the novel). The possible future toward which Lamming gestures, however
much it may be governed by this (masculinist) fantasy, a group of boys who
may replicate the original Tribe Boys, must also be founded on the new kinds
of people made by colonialism. Although these are paradigmatically called
Prospero and Caliban, the model of the mixed, illegitimate being does not
necessitate these gendered terms. To phrase this differently: The coupling of
Prospero and Caliban cannot in any simple way produce normatively gen-
dered figures. Even in the utopic originary moment in Pleasures, the family
unit is extended: “An’ it seem that what we refer to as family was not a mere
man an’ woman with the result thereof, but animals too” (19).
Lamming’s 1960 novel Season of Adventure depicts further possibilities
outside the scope of his more usual masculinist representations. The novel is
 26 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

about a revolution that would reestablish relations to the land, to the peas-
ant class, to Africa. Throughout, drums gather secret forces; the Haitian
Vodun Ceremony of the Souls is celebrated. Although the revolutionaries are
a cast of male characters—“Boys,” in Lamming’s privileged parlance—they
are joined by Fola, a woman who seeks to break with her European education
and her middle-class foster father, who holds a position in the “independent”
government. To propel her forward, Fola pursues a “backward glance” toward
the origins from which she has been cut off, a search to discover the identity
of her father.48 Throughout the novel, it remains undecidable whether he was
white or black. Fola is unavoidably double, and her coming to revolutionary
consciousness is formulated in her recognition that she is “Fola and other
than Fola, meaning bastard” (174). Bastard: Fola shares Caliban’s condi-
tion; doubly fathered, she also shares Lamming’s. In the course of the novel,
this double and unknown father is painted by the artist Chiki as the very
image that draws support for the revolutionary cause. By placing paternity
in doubt, Lamming puts into question the apparatuses of institutionalized
heterosexuality.
Nonetheless, even as Fola is included as one of the “Boys from Forest
Reserve, the original and forgotten bastards of the new republic” (292), she
pays a price for this inclusion, virtual rape by one of the revolutionary lead-
ers (she may become the mother of a bastard). Moreover, Fola’s paternity
cannot be established because her mother had sex sequentially with a white
man and a black man, one of whom fathered Fola. The white man was, for
her mother, a fantasy object come true; the black man raped her: “And so
Fola became that beauty and cherished burden which Agnes had always
borne! Fola, now fugitive as the double fatherhood no certainty can sepa-
rate” (343). Lamming’s genealogy for Fola may be meant to expose the way
in which “the Lie” is internalized and perpetuated. Nonetheless, his way of
imagining women outside of normative social/sexual relations involves an
abjection in which he appears to participate (a complaint justly made by
Lamming’s feminist critics, one that finds a parallel in criticism of Fanon’s
treatment of women of color). I would also argue that it serves as a site for
authorial identification.49
That doubled valence can be seen in Of Age and Innocence, where Shephard,
the revolutionary leader, takes an instant antipathy to Penelope, a white
woman, and violently repudiates her. Yet Penelope comes to recognize herself
in and through Shephard. Just as he must win through his own racial abjec-
tion, she must reclaim her own repudiated sexuality. Penelope is a lesbian.
She formulates the connection: “To be Shephard in spite of . . . To be Penelope
in spite of . . . To be a man in spite of . . .”50
Penelope’s recognition through Shephard is matched in the novel by that
of another character, Mark, a black man returning to San Cristobal after Euro-
pean emigration. Mark is similarly mesmerized by Shephard. Like Penelope,
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 27

he keeps a diary, and his attempts to come to political consciousness are

matched by hers to affirm her lesbianism. Mark remains trapped in his at-
tempt to transform buried truths into political action. Penelope is at least
able to articulate her situation. Here is a crucial entry from her diary:

I shall always feel the mark, “in spite of,” branded on my presence. Penelope in
spite of . . . Penelope in spite of . . . It would be better to lose one’s status com-
pletely and be seen wholly as a new thing; much better than to have one’s status
granted with a certain reservation. . . . I believe this is what those people who
are called inferior experience, and find resentful and intolerable. . . . The Negro,
the homosexual, the Jew, the worker . . . he is a man, that is never denied, but
he is not quite ready for definition until these reservations are stated, and it is
the reservation which separates him from himself. He is a man in spite of . . . I
shall be Penelope in spite of . . . (151)

Penelope’s diary entry could be read to mean that she wishes for the
“mark” of her stigma to be removed, that she wishes she could overcome the
split produced by the “reservation” signaled by the phrase “in spite of,” as if
being lesbian or black or homosexual or a worker were a condition one sought
to transcend in order to be fully human—“a man” no longer divided. But, in
fact, her point—and Lamming’s—is just the opposite. It is, rather, that this
difference must be accepted even if it means one must demand to be seen as
a “wholly new thing.” When Penelope and Shephard reconcile, it is through
the recognition that he offers: “My rebellion begins with an acceptance of the
very thing I reject, because my conduct cannot have the meaning I want to
give it, if it does not accept and live through that conception by which the oth-
ers now regard it. What I may succeed in doing is changing that conception of
me. But I cannot ignore it” (205).
That Lamming is speaking through Shephard and Penelope is evident
from the echo of their words in a passage in “The Negro Writer and His World,”
a piece first delivered at the First International Congress of Black Writers
and Artists in Paris on September 21, 1956, on a podium that Lamming
shared with Fanon.51 Lamming speaks there of the stigmatized position of
race that he occupies; fixed in the gaze of the Other, in “a category of men
called Negro,” the consequence is that “the eye which catches and cages him,
has seen him as a man, but a man in spite of . . .”52 The way “out” of this
prison (which can be assimilated to the situation of linguistic placement that
Lamming develops in Pleasures) is to reoccupy this terrain of stigma.
Lamming’s point is not that he “is” black in some preordained, essential
way (so much is suggested by Penelope’s parallel categories, when “worker” is
thought of as analogous to a sexual or racial/ethnic position); rather, it is that
one must embrace the lived fact of race (or class or sexuality). This is not a
matter of mere identity politics, but it is certainly political. Its most stunning
realization can be found in the climactic moment toward the end of In the
 28 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

Castle of My Skin (1953), a conversation that the protagonist G has with

his friend Trumper, who has returned to Barbados from the United States.
Trumper plays G a recording of Paul Robeson singing “Go Down Moses” and
identifies with the “people” in that spiritual.

“What people?” I asked. I was a bit puzzled.

“My People,” said Trumper. . . .
“Who are your people?” I asked him. It seemed a kind of huge joke.
“The Negro race,” said Trumper. (295)

G is puzzled by this answer; although he understands the racial label, he does

not know that it applies to him: “I understood the Negro race perfectly, but I
didn’t follow how I was involved.” Trumper explains: “The blacks here are my
people too, but they don’t know it yet. You don’t know it yourself ” (295).
Racial identity in this formulation is something one might partake of and
yet not know it; something that others might know and stigmatize a person
for without that person even recognizing racial identity as the cause of the
stigma. The reclamation of “My People” at this moment stands against the
use of the phrase earlier in the novel, “low-down nigger people,” “the enemy
was My People” (26–27), words that starkly demonstrate the effect of colonial
power to divide the oppressed from each other, to lead them to misidentify
themselves as the source of their misery. The Barbados of Castle is a tense
site of unrecognized class and racial division; black supervisors and overseers,
a bureaucratic class of middlemen, constantly shield the white landlord from
the people, who are mystified about their lack of self-possession and their
powerlessness and translate it into attempts to hold on to their small shreds
of misguided dignity, some spurious sense of self buried deep within the castle
of the skin (as if, somehow, moral bearing explained or would ameliorate
their immiseration), while they direct the violence properly due the land-
lord against all those who exercise more immediate power over them (any-
one positioned differentially, which is to say, potentially anyone). They live
the truth that one character states: “[N]o man like to know he black” (104).
These divisions of race and class are experienced through a constant sense of
being scrutinized that produces self-division and stultification. Trumper cuts
through all this when he delivers his “new word” (227).53
In other words, lack of knowledge of race and of the role it plays in their
oppression functions in much the way that a sexual secret would. In Castle,
the two are connected. Virtually the first scene of surveillance discovers boys
masturbating (30); soon after, there is a brutal scene of violence, as the head
teacher beats one of the boys: “ ’Twasn’t what you could call a natural beat-
ing” (43). He does not beat the boy for some supposed infraction of the rules
of behavior that are constantly being enforced to erect divisions and to cause
humiliations or because the boy has failed at some miserable piece of the cur-
riculum designed to keep the students forever ignorant of their history. He
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 29

beats the boy because the boy knows (or is assumed to know, since his mother
works for the head) that the head has been beaten by his wife (she is, or is
thought to be, promiscuous). For pages, Lamming details the intensities of
scenes of watching, of spying out such secrets of sexual/racial/class humilia-
tion. Later in the novel, the mystified matriarch of the village, Ma, assumes
that the landlord is selling his land because of the attempted violation of his
daughter by one of the boys. The attempt is a lie—“the Lie” in fact—it was a
white sailor who tried to rape her. Such bad behavior by “My People” has not
in fact motivated the landlord; he has been bought out by Slime, a black man
who will do to his people what the colonial powers did before. Earlier in the
novel, Slime is mistaken for a Moses or a Jesus. He also is propelled on his
career when he is fired by the head teacher because he is suspected either of
having slept with the head’s wife or of knowing the person who has.
It is against the error of holding on to one’s private secrets that Trumper
speaks, against the mistaken belief “ ’bout a thing be what you make it an’
think it is” (293). Trumper has a sense of systematic oppression, of external
causation and connections that he arrives at through the experience of a rac-
ism in the United States more direct than anything he has known before in
Barbados. As he explains to G, in the United States, a Black is called a “nig-
ger,” whereas at home, he is called “a nigger man”; the absence of one word—
“man”—and the turning of the adjective of denigration into a substantive
makes all the difference. As long as “man” is said, it could be assumed that
there is a commonality; without “man,” the fact that the universalizing noun
is anything but becomes starkly clear. To embrace “My People” as one’s own,
as identity, is to know that one “ain’t got no time to think ’bout the rights o’
Man or People or whatever you choose to call it. It’s the rights o’ the Negro,
’cause we have gone on usin’ the word the others use for us, an’ now we are a
different kind o’ creature” (297). “A different kind of creature”: G spends two
pages pondering this difference and what it would take to know it. The new
name here—Negro—and the new existence it entails is a version of the em-
bodiment called “Caliban.”
This embrace of difference, of the reviled self as the product of a condi-
tion that is shared, not only explains why a character like Penelope, whose
lesbian desires are known to no one, nonetheless experiences her secret as
stigma, but also shows how what D. A. Miller terms the “open secret” struc-
tures racial identity in a phobic world.54 (Fortuitously, Lamming uses the
phrase “open secret” in Castle [25] to refer to the history of slavery that lies
right before anyone’s eyes—if it could be seen by the villagers—in the sugar
fields where they work.) Lamming’s novel delivers a colonial psychology
comparable to Fanon’s in its sense of a subject destructured under the fully
alienating gaze of an Other. The mystifications of colonialism, of racial and
class oppression, are experienced as an opacity, a buried truth that functions
as a sexual secret. And like the open secret, it is worn on the skin and yet not
 30 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

known, imagined to reside in a “castle of the skin” as secret shame that needs
to be guarded rather than claimed as a site of strength, not abjection.
The demand here is not to “come out” but to be. It translates into more
immediate sexual and gendered terms. For among the divisions of this world
are the separations of men from women that lead to the “masculinism” of
Lamming’s vision. For him, as for Fanon, the black woman is virtually un-
known. Indeed, paradigmatically, in a scene close to the end of the novel, and
just as G is meditating on the castle of his skin (261), he visits a prostitute.
Rather than having sex with her, he tells her a story about a boy who liked
to give other boys a stick covered with shit. G does not pause to explain the
story to the woman; perhaps he can’t. It is a scene of humiliation between
boys, but also of connection precisely through anal abjection, and perhaps a
way of naming a secret of male-male intensity. It is certainly juxtaposed to
a failed or refused scene of heterosexual encounter. Elsewhere in the novel,
colonial powers work to try to regulate heterosexual relations, to “normalize”
them in ways that violate “promiscuous” relations that are themselves also in
part the legacy of slavery. This legacy also produced G’s mother, “who really
fathered me” (11). Determined to protect him from “bad” influences, to propel
him (through education) away from the village (and in fact, as he comes to
see, into the position of those who use their distance as a way of maximiz-
ing this minimal difference into a site of power), G’s mother is certainly no
revolutionary. Unknowingly working to continue colonial divisions (of gender
and class), she is nonetheless in her doubly gendered position, as a mother
who fathers, the counterpart to the absent and doubled father of a novel like
Season of Adventure.
The conflicted state of consciousness that Lamming represents in his
alter ego G, whose racial identity is a secret to himself but not to those who
are responsible for his systematic oppression, follows W. E. B. Du Bois’s crucial
concept of double consciousness and echoes (or perhaps anticipates) Fanon’s
configuration of black skin and white mask. Deeply psychologized, it is not
a form of identitarianism that would have at its end self-reclamation or the
reinforcement of normativizing social relations. It could be related to the self-
making enjoined in the stunning sentences with which Fanon concludes The
Wretched of the Earth: “Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseat-
ing mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man,
yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of
their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.”55 Like Fanon, Lamming
aims at a recovery of “the whole man” (Wretched, 252), at a “new history of
Man” (254) that will produce the “new man” that Fanon hails as the final
word of The Wretched of the Earth (255). And while this recovery involves, it
appears, a wholesale repudiation of Europe, that is not quite Fanon’s point.
His point is, rather, a refusal of a mimicry that would repeat the crimes of
European civilization (the prime example would be the repetition of exploi-
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 31

tation in the newly formed “independent” states run by the bourgeoisie, ex-
emplified in Castle by Slime and in Season of Adventure by Fola’s stepfather
Piggott, whose nickname is “Piggy”), a refusal of European mimicry but not
necessarily of what Fanon calls “the sometimes prodigious theses which
Europe has put forward” (Wretched, 254). For Fanon, like Lamming, has been
shaped by and continually engages this inheritance (call it Marx or Hegel or
Lacan or Sartre). We approach, once again, the mestizo condition enunciated
by Fernández Retamar, but not, it is worth noting, as it appears in his latest
formulation of the Calibanic condition.
In “Caliban Speaks Five Hundred Years Later,” originally delivered as a
talk at U.S. universities in 1992, Fernández Retamar widens the scope of
what it means to speak as Caliban and embraces “a post-Western society,
authentically planetary, brotherly and sisterly, of human beings.”56 After the
massive exclusions of “Caliban,” it is welcome to find him speaking of “the
discovery of the total human being”—which he believes was made possible by
the “indispensable encounter” of 1492. This totality embraces “man, woman,
pansexual, yellow, black, redskin, paleface, mestizo, producer (creator) rather
than consumer, inhabitant of humanity, the only real mother country (‘Patria
es humanidad,’ Martí said, restating a Stoic idea), without East or West,
North or South” (171). If this sounds momentarily like Penelope’s list, now
extended even further, its utopic call is not made in the name of some “new”
and “different” form of “humanity,” as Lamming’s and Fanon’s are, but in a
rapturous assimilation of difference into a universal sameness. This new his-
tory, if it is that, Fernández Retamar announces as “the end of pre-history
and the beginning of the almost virginal history of the soul,” a terrain
avowedly poetic, lodged in the imagination. The conflict between Caliban and
Ariel is overcome: Fernández Retamar hails Che as “the most Calibanesque
of the Ariels I have ever personally met and loved,” and he ends his exhorta-
tion invoking “Saint Teresa the illuminated” (171). Fernández Retamar tells
all: Marxist humanist, spiritual pluralist, a multiculturalist at home in the
United States.
Has Fernández Retamar become what he claimed to see in Lamming? At
the least, he demonstrates something Lamming has never ceased to insist
upon: that colonialism is not simply over. Here is how Lamming put it in a
1973 interview, in the context, in fact, of a discussion about Water with Berries,
the novel in which he rewrote The Tempest and to which I turn in conclusion
in the pages that follow:

[T]he colonial experience is a living experience in the consciousness of these

people. And just because the so-called colonial situation and its institutions
may have been transferred into something else, it is a fallacy to think that
the human-lived content of those situations are automatically transferred into
something else, too. The experience is a continuing psychic experience that has
 32 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

to be dealt with and will have to be dealt with long after the actual colonial
situation formally ends.57

Lamming fetches the title for Water with Berries from the lines from The
Tempest that he cites at the close of his discussion in Pleasures:

. . . When thou cam’st first,

Thou strok’dst 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.
(1.2.332–36, as cited in Pleasures, 117)

Water with Berries also answers some of the questions posed in Pleasures.
Returning to his old theme of Prospero and Caliban, Lamming substitutes
Prospero’s wife for Prospero. Lamming has discussed this alteration in in-
terviews, claiming that through Mrs. Gore-Brittain he represents the “im-
potence” of empire; claiming as well that the violence directed against her
(she is killed by Teeton, one of three Caliban figures in the novel) really is
meant for Prospero.58 This attempt at ameliorating violence that is nonethe-
less directed at a female character—and she is not singular in this respect,
since no woman in the novel is treated any better—rings hollow. So, too, those
who have followed Lamming’s analysis, and read the novel as a colonial al-
legory, have been able largely to evade what Peter Hulme, for one, notes in
his discussion of the novel, that Lamming is significantly like Mannoni in
highlighting the component of colonialism Hulme calls “sexual anxiety.”59
Hulme thinks the conjunction of Lamming and Mannoni fortuitous (implic-
itly taking up thereby a position in the charged field of Fernández Retamar’s
accusation). In Water with Berries, sexual secrecy is all but coincident with
the highly sexualized structure of occlusion through which Lamming regu-
larly represents the colonial condition.
Dependency is Teeton’s condition. He lives in a room in Mrs. Gore-Brittain’s
house in the London suburbs, and as the novel opens, we are told “he loved
this room.”60 From its first page, Teeton is trying to find a way to tell the Old
Dowager (the name most usually applied to Mrs. Gore-Brittain) that he plans
to return to San Cristobal. It takes him two hundred pages to get up the
nerve to break up a living arrangement characterized by highly elaborate and
evasive games, protocols in which as little is said as possible: an “unspoken
partnership” (14), “their friendship had achieved the force and delicacy of
a secret,” “that concealment which continues to work when everything is
known; remains transparent to all” (38). Teeton believes the old woman loves
him like a son (he calls her “Gran” affectionately). She, however, sees her
dead husband (“Prospero”) in him; he makes her feel young. Teeton is bound
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 33

to her in a guilty, shame-provoking way that he recognizes after he has told

her he will leave: “[H]e was ashamed, felt sunk in shame. And it seemed to
him, in the extreme lucidity of the moment, that this shame was an atmo-
sphere in which he had always lived” (205).
Teeton comes to recognize his dependency; moreover, he comes to see it
as of a piece with his entire life, beginning with “the earliest, invisible fun-
gus of birth” (205). The shame is connected to a sense of hiding and secrecy,
which he seeks now to break in returning to San Cristobal and continuing
actively to pursue the work of the Secret Gathering, the revolutionary group
to which he belongs and with whom he has been meeting in London during
his seven years of exile. Although this secret political membership is one
that Teeton guards from the Old Dowager, it is not the ultimate secret of
the novel. Perhaps, by casting the Caliban-Prospero relationship as a male-
female couple, Lamming invites us to read the cross-sex relationship as a dis-
simulation of a same-sex relationship. He certainly invites comparison of the
relationship to the other sexual relationships in the novel. For each Caliban
in Water with Berries has a troubled relationship with women.
Teeton, Roger, and Derek are Calibans in the register of Pleasures, Carib-
bean artists who fled to England: Teeton is a painter finally abandoning his
career to sell his paintings to finance the Secret Gathering. Roger, a composer,
copies scores. Derek, an actor, plays the part of a corpse in play after play, re-
duced to a mute. Although once, at Stratford, they had some success—Derek
playing Othello, Teeton painting sets, and Roger providing occasional music
for a scene—they seem successful no longer. As the sole citation from The
Tempest included in the text suggests, they have been playing the part of
the dead Indian that Trinculo and Stephano discuss (2.2.27ff., cited 159–60),
monsters on display to make men.
In the course of the novel, as Teeton struggles to find a way of telling
Mrs. Gore-Brittain that he is leaving, Roger wrestles with his wife Nicole’s
pregnancy. He believes, or claims to believe, that he is not the father of the
child. In a privileged moment of access to Nicole’s thoughts, we are led to
believe that Roger’s Othello act is similarly delusionary. Rather, it appears
that Roger, an Indian, cannot bear the thought of the “impurity” that would
be evident in the child that his white American wife would bear. Roger’s fear
of racial mixture is thereby a version of Teeton’s dependent affection for Mrs.
Gore-Brittain: Roger left San Cristobal in part because “he had inherited
this horror of impurity” in revulsion against a place that “seemed to take a
mad delight in celebrating the impure” (70). Nicole flees Roger—to Teeton’s
room—where she is discovered dead, presumably a suicide.
The discovery of Nicole’s corpse precipitates Teeton, in the care of Mrs.
Gore-Brittain, to fly north. Her corpse doubles one that is revealed to him in
the middle of the novel, and that revelation makes apparent the structuring
secret of the text, that the characters are in the grip of the (rewritten) sexual
 34 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

plot of The Tempest. Midway in the novel, Teeton has a meeting with Jeremy
Rexnol Vessen-Jerme, a cultural attaché from San Cristobal. Teeton thinks
Jeremy is hoping to ferret out some secrets about the Secret Gathering, as he
tries to lure him (and by extension, the other Calibans) back to San Cristobal,
an appeal labeled a “tropical variation of the treason of the clerks” (92). The
scene abjects Jeremy. His “enigma of colour” (86), his presumed attempt to
pass, his lackey relation to the spuriously “independent” regime—all abject
him through the various charges lodged in his elaborate name: royalism,
pseudo-British/aristocratic hyphenation; vassalage; disease (“germ”). Jeremy
has not come to find out about Teeton’s political affiliates, however; rather, he
has come to deliver the news that Teeton’s wife, whom he left when he left the
island, has committed suicide.
This is the corpse that Jeremy delivers. Teeton’s wife is named Randa, a
truncated “Miranda.” His history of abandonment of her coincides with his
“desertion” (18) of the Secret Gathering. Seven years before, he had been ap-
prehended and faced long-term imprisonment, perhaps death.61 Randa had
saved him by sleeping with the American ambassador; he had fled from her
“betrayal”; he had betrayed his comrades. Thus, Teeton’s political relation-
ship, his guilt about it, is related to his guilt about Randa, whereas her “guilt”
(sleeping with the enemy) would seem to replay Miranda’s threatened cross-
coupling (as well as Nicole’s supposed adultery). Teeton has never talked
about his wife to anyone. No wonder, then, that Mrs. Gore-Brittain sees her
husband in him, for he too was someone who never minded his wife (as we
know and as Lamming underscores in his reading of Prospero’s character).
Moreover, her Prospero got his perverse sexual thrills by putting his wife in a
coffin and glimpsing her naked body beneath the funeral veils (182). Jeremy
delivers such a corpse to Teeton; Nicole deposits hers in his room.
The heated atmosphere of these sexual revelations goes even further. For
however much Lamming has claimed that Jeremy should be read as a figure
of all that would be repellent in someone who sold out politically, he is also
a figure of intense interest.62 The scene with Jeremy, like many elsewhere in
Lamming’s works, is fraught with the unspeakable, evasive remarks, intense
stares: “Teeton couldn’t keep his eyes away” (87). “‘I’m glad to see you again,’
said Teeton, and immediately regretted what he had said” (88). There is an
old “friendship” between them (87) adding weight to Jeremy’s sentence “You
never wrote me” (96). As Jeremy delivers the news of Randa’s death and
forces Teeton to speak about his wife’s sexual relationship with the American
ambassador, Teeton lashes back at Jeremy, accusing him of having had sex
with the German ambassador. Jeremy admits he was tempted but denies the
charge (his overdetermined name, however, seems to deny the denial).
What is the force of this homosexual accusation? In part, it functions the
way scenes of abjected sexuality do in Lamming’s 1954 novel The Emigrants.
The malaise of new Caribbean immigrants in London is registered sexually;
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 35

in unhappy marriages, infidelities, and, especially, in nonheterosexual forms

of behavior: for example, a white man who can only get excited when in bed
with a black man; his female partner in this ménage à trois who prefers
women; lesbianism that leads to murder. In the usual plotting device of a
kind of national romance that has been often noted in so-called Third World
novels, sexual relations gone awry allegorize the sociopolitical situation. (Lam-
ming, however, never writes a novel in which normative monogamous hetero-
sexual relations signify national health; the marriage plot is not his).63 But in
the case of Jeremy, more than abjection seems involved:

The pearl was about to find its owner. Teeton heard some previous knowledge
return; and recognised, for the first time, the echoes of sexual torment he had
aroused by hinting at an intimacy which Jeremy had shared with the German
ambassador. Teeton felt a trifle embarrassed. (101)

If these sentences mean that Teeton sees Randa’s behavior in Jeremy’s, the
charge against Jeremy recoils onto Teeton. But the sentences do not quite
deliver that equation; they remain opaque even as they claim to offer a rec-
ognition and a restoral of the pearl to its owner. Whose sexual torment has
been aroused? Do the sentences imply that Jeremy would have slept with the
enemy, as Randa had, in order to save Teeton? That the “friendship” of Teeton
and Jeremy was a sexual union? That Jeremy betrayed Teeton by his attrac-
tion to the German? Is Teeton recognizing how far astray he went when he
abandoned his wife, his friend, and his comrades and fled to England and the
bosom of Mrs. Gore-Brittain?
Teeton’s response to Jeremy is further flight, to Hampstead Heath. There,
in a hallucinatory scene in which he recalls meeting Randa at the Ceremony
of Souls and in which Jeremy’s face bears down upon him, he meets another
woman with a past. She is Myra (named much later in the novel), the other
half of Randa, and her story furthers The Tempest connection. She tells of her
years on the island, her father’s tutelage, the arrival of a stranger, the attack
and murder of her father, the attack upon herself organized by her father’s
“servant” (neither the name “Prospero” nor the name “Caliban” ever appears
in the novel), and her gang rape, including rape by his dogs.
Myra’s abjection moves Teeton; he identifies with her story, recogniz-
ing in her motherlessness his own fatherlessness (147). Aroused by her, he
nonetheless refuses to give in to sexual impulse: “[H]e would abandon the
ordinarily accepted role of masculine initiative. It was a foolish notion at any
time” (148). Lamming has it both ways, of course: engineering the scene of
Myra’s abjection as well as of her redemption (or, more to the point, Teeton’s)
through a “sacred” act of abstention. Myra would seal their nonsexual union
by thrusting Teeton’s hand into her womb, she thinks, guiding it “cruelly into
the barren grave of her cunt so that he might discover for himself the future
 36 / A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

of skeletons which he was now so eager to idolise” (153). There is no going

back, nor can they go forward through a heterosexual embrace.
What follows are even more revelations about the skeletons in the closet.
After Mrs. Gore-Brittain carries Teeton off, he learns that Myra had been
abducted to San Cristobal by her father in retaliation for his wife’s adultery.
To Miranda’s question in The Tempest, Lamming answers no: He was not
her father; his brother was. The brother, who pilots Teeton and Mrs. Gore-
Brittain on their northward flight, is named Fernando, at once “Antonio” and
“Ferdinand.” Not only has he slept with his brother’s wife and fathered the
bastard Myra, but Myra has slept with him. Fernando retells Myra’s story to
Teeton, adding more lurid details:

Perhaps you can imagine how they made the hounds violate her sex. The
animals. The very creatures which had been her fondest pets. Those monsters
stirred up the animals’ lust for her; and let them loose over her body. Just as
they had seen their master do with some of them. His own field servants. Oh,
yes, my brother, come from the same blessed loins, the same privilege and blood;
my brother himself had made this devil’s crime a common sport upon his ser-
vants. Male and female alike. Trained his hounds to mount a human sex. That
monster. (228)

The sliding syntax of Fernando’s speech attempts to make what “Caliban”

did to “Miranda” a reenactment of Prospero’s own perversity, as he made his
servants—male and female alike—have bestial, sodomitical sex, the devil’s
crime. Fernando’s accusation is akin to other explosions late in the novel,
racial reviling, for example, that stings Derek because he had not been pre-
pared for it (215). As in Castle, Lamming delays the surfacing of the violence
that underlies the tense opacities of the situations in which his characters
move as if in a fog. Derek, it should be noted, ends his act as a corpse by com-
ing alive on stage and attempting to rape an actress there.64
The recoils in Fernando’s speech, the loops of abjection and monstrosity
that catch Prospero and Caliban and that are enacted on the body of Myra,
parallel the scene with Jeremy, the crosshatching of his homosexuality with
Randa’s abjected act of sexual betrayal/salvation. The abjection of such desires
as monstrous cannot be separated from the terrifying appeal of untoward
couplings. Fernando’s speech traces the circuits of monstrous contact that
circulate through the body of the violated woman who serves as the conduit
joining Prospero, his brother, and the natives. Here, Prospero and Caliban are
one, monstrously alike. This monstrosity is, arguably, another way of naming
the different kind of creature more hopefully embraced at the end of Castle. It
glimpses, however horrifically, a different future, a world where fathers are in-
determinable, in which female desire, ravaged and rampant, is not bounded by
marriage. The production of bastards, cross-race and cross-species couples, and
the lesbianism of a Penelope are among the possibilities of such a future.65
 A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE / 37

In such highly conflicted ways, Lamming makes it possible to imagine the

generation of Caliban outside of normative modes of social/sexual reproduc-
tion. If Caliban was born in the relationship with Prospero, and made in ab-
jection, bondage, and slavery, the future cannot simply reclaim a time before
colonialism nor aim for its simple reversal; rather, it seeks a reordering that,
from the point of view of colonial powers, must appear as the very refusal of
the terms of colonial order and a rejection of the abjection and stigma that
it places on alternatives. In Lamming’s works, these alternative social and
sexual arrangements follow from the union of Prospero and Caliban, love
offered and refused, and are manifest in the Secret Gathering of the Boys,
or the even more secreted lines of identification with figurations of violated
female sexuality. This futurity has a past that Lamming is reclaiming and
rewriting; it is found in The Tempest.
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CALIBAN ’S “WOMAN ”
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 CALIBAN ’S “WOMAN ”

. . . THE SON THAT HE DID LITTOUR HEERE

Fernando names “Prospero” a monster in Water with Berries (as does Lam-
ming in “A Monster, a Child, a Slave” in Pleasures of Exile), invoking the word
used most often in The Tempest to describe Caliban. The transfer to Prospero
is heard faintly in the play when Alonso responds to Prospero’s punishing
torments with “it is monstrous, monstrous” (3.3.95). The thirty-four uses of
“monster” in The Tempest are unprecedented in Shakespeare’s corpus; no
other play has more than half a dozen.1 This repeated nomination makes
Caliban an apt site for monster theory (to recall the title of an anthology
edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen), since the character embodies many of the
points Cohen elaborates in the seven theses on monster culture that he of-
fers.2 Monster difference may begin with the illegibility of bodily shape, but
it quickly attaches itself to racial and sexual difference and to violations of
gendered norms and licit forms of coupling.
In Shakespeare’s Caliban, the Vaughans respond to the repeated use of
“monster” and the descriptions of Caliban that associate him with a variety
of nonhuman forms by asking whether Caliban is human.3 It is a question
with obvious pertinence to the discussion G has with Trumper in In the Castle
of My Skin: Is “the Negro” human, a man, or “a different kind of creature”
altogether? In Fernando’s virulent characterization in Water with Berries,
inhumanity is associated with bestiality, with forms of sexual coupling across
species and without regard to gendered, heterosexual propriety. Such accusa-
tions, prompted by The Tempest, are sites across a wide range of twentieth-
century Caribbean texts for revaluing the possibilities of the new kinds of
persons (outside the orbit of the human) created by colonial encounters.
Maintaining that Shakespeare’s Caliban is human despite the vilification

41
 42 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

to which he is subject throughout the play, the Vaughans adduce as proof

the lines in which Caliban is first described in The Tempest, as Prospero and
Ariel discuss the circumstances of his birth. It was in fact their discussion
that drew my attention to a hitherto uncommented-upon crux in the Folio
text of the play, its sole authoritative source. The Vaughans print the Folio
lines as follows:

. . . Then was this Island

(Save for the Son that [s]he did littour heere,
A frekelld whelpe, hag-borne) not honour’d with
A humane shape

depending for the bracketed s in “[s]he” on an emendation, which, they note,

Nicholas Rowe first supplied in 1709.4 The Vaughans take these lines to es-
tablish that Caliban (unlike his mother, presumably) is the first “humane
shape” to inhabit the island. The lines are somewhat more equivocal, how-
ever, as Hulme points out in Colonial Encounters, since they admit Caliban’s
humanity by way of “an eminently misreadable double negative.”5 Moreover,
as Hulme argues, when Miranda tallies how many other humans she has
seen, Caliban counts as human the first time (at 1.2.446) but not the sec-
ond (3.1.50–51), leaving Caliban in the position of being “a man and not a
man according to Miranda’s calculations” (107). Hulme’s phrasing echoes
Lamming’s: “Caliban is Man and other than Man.”6
What is further striking in this context is the fact that, at least as printed
throughout the seventeenth century, Caliban’s birth is ascribed to a mother
who has become male in gender in the lines describing the moment of par-
turition (elsewhere there is no question of her gender). If Caliban is born
human, he is born from a mother who is not. Sycorax lacks a “humane shape,”
and littering is not a human form of giving birth; her inhumanness would
seem to be underscored by the gender change. Were one to take the male
pronoun seriously, it would necessarily call into question at least one biblical
definition of the human: man, born of woman. Caliban’s humanity would not
be assured if his mother was not a woman. A monster begets a monster.
That it is possible to take the Folio line seriously (that is, not simply to
regard “he” as a printer’s error that Rowe corrected) is attested by the textual
history of the play as seen in the subsequent seventeenth-century folios. For
if this is merely a mistake, it is remarkable that it was not until Rowe that
it was caught. As Matthew W. Black and Matthias A. Shaaber argue, “[T]he
three later folios are not imperfect reprints of F1, F2, and F3 respectively, but
critical editions in exactly the same sense that Rowe’s is a critical edition.”7
The anonymous editors of 1632, 1664, and 1685 each consulted the previous
folio for the basic copytext, much as Rowe based his text on F4. Each, more-
over, was unlikely to have had much, if anything, in the way of authoritative
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 43

textual material in support of emendations to the previous texts. That is, in

most cases, changes in the subsequent folios (when they are not new errors)
are emendations, many of which modern editors happily accept, that can be
chalked up to common sense, to what Black and Shaaber refer to nicely as “the
fitness of things” (25). A “mistake” of the kind that appears at this moment in
the Folio text of The Tempest is exactly the type of error one might have sup-
posed would have been caught in one of the later seventeenth-century folios,
which, Black and Shaaber argue, were especially good at catching obvious
typographical errors (even if some new ones inevitably were introduced as
well) and correcting the kind of solecism the misgendering of Sycorax would
seem to represent.
Here are the lines as they appear in the seventeenth-century folio editions:

Then was this island

(Save for the Sunne that he did littour heere,
A frekelld whelpe, hag-borne) not honour’d with
A humane shape.
(F2 [1632])

Then was this Island

(Save for the Sun that he did littour here.
A frekelld whelp, hag-born) not honour’d with
A humane shape.
(F3 [1664])

Then was this Island

(Save for the Sun that he did littour here.
A frekel’d whelp, hag-born) not honour’d with
A human shape.
(F4 [1685])

The fullest modern collation can be found in Frank Kermode’s 1954 Arden
edition: “282. son] Sunne F2; Sun F3, F4. she] Rowe; he F, Ff,”8 and it barely
suggests what the seventeenth-century texts reveal: that these lines were
not printed unchanged from edition to edition. Although the pronoun “he”
does remain constant, instead of correcting that “obvious mistake,” a new
“mistake” was potentially introduced in the lines, the replacement of F1’s
“Son” with the “Sunne” of F2, modernized in spelling to “Sun” in F3 and F4. If
the change from “son” to “sun” was an attempt to relocate birth from a mortal
male to an appropriately mythological level (Zeus gives birth to Athena, for
instance, as does Adam to Eve), that response would seem less to register
the “wrongness” of the gender than to want, somehow, to accommodate it.
More to the point: Changes in punctuation (which serve, in fact, to confuse
 44 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

the sense of the lines, another sign that the “obvious” mistake of “he” for “she”
was not perceived as such), in capitalization, and in the spelling of “frekelld,”
“hag-borne,” and “humane” make it evident that these lines were not merely
reset from folio to folio. Each time, changes were made; in every instance,
therefore, there was the opportunity to correct “he” to “she.” That Rowe first
did it, then, is not quite to be ascribed to common sense.9
How, then, to account for the persistence of this “error” in seventeenth-
century editions of The Tempest? Perhaps by appealing to the “fitness of
things” that Black and Shaaber invoke, the fitness, that is, that necessi-
tates that the monstrous offspring of a witch (in these lines, bestially born
[whelped and littered] and freakishly marked [freckled]—a maculate concep-
tion) must be prodigiously and unnaturally mothered, but perhaps, too, by
seeing that this gendered change has its counterparts elsewhere in the play.
Stephen Orgel has described some lines from Prospero’s narration of the past
to Miranda earlier in this scene as articulating a birth fantasy: Miranda’s
saving presence on board their vessel of exile is turned by Prospero into the
instrument by which he gives birth:10

MIRANDA : Alack, what trouble

Was I then to you!
PROSPERO : O, a cherubin
Thou wast that did preserve me. Thou didst smile,
Infused with a fortitude from heaven,
When I have decked the sea with drops full salt,
Under my burden groaned, which raised in me
An undergoing stomach to bear up
Against what should ensue.
(1.2.151–58)

“Burden,” Orgel notes, “is the contents of the womb,” and “groaning is a lying
in.” Throughout the play, Orgel argues, Prospero does his best to efface and
to denigrate women and to appropriate their powers.11 (In some tension with
this erasure and appropriation, Miranda is in the angelic position, spirit to
his matter, strength and fortitude to his tears; she seems not merely respon-
sible for “infusing” him but also for his final erection, as he reports himself
“raised” and bearing “up.”) The lines, therefore, much as they appropriate
femaleness (or, more specifically, maternal function),12 also would seem to
be giving and taking maleness to and from Miranda. Orgel explains it this
way: “The women of Shakespeare’s plays, of course, are adolescent boys”
(57)—hence Shakespeare’s identification with nominally female characters.
Such gender dislocations as these, Orgel suggests, might be relocated by re-
membering the fact that Miranda was played by a boy and that thus these
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 45

exchanges between genders are nonetheless exchanges between persons of

the same gender.
In the context of such an argument, the gendering of Sycorax as male at
the moment of her delivery of Caliban might mirror Prospero’s seizure of
female territory, or the stage that, Orgel reminds us, only appears to offer a
world of “he’s” and “she’s.” Rowe’s emendation, then, especially as it is printed
by the Vaughans—“[s]he”—nicely brackets and subordinates the female to
the male. Their proper bibliographic form is Prospero’s plot in small. If, as we
have seen, modern readings of The Tempest from an anticolonialist position
are “masculinist,” they might be said to repeat the masculinist plot of the
play—a plot, as we have seen (and will be seeing further), that requires inter-
rogation rather than emulation.
And yet nowhere, save in the line Rowe emended, is Sycorax anything
but female. If the Folio line is not a mistake, its “fitness” would lie not in the
naturalizing of gender that would remind us that all of Shakespeare’s ac-
tors were genitally male but in the “fitting” of monstrous birth to monstrous
womb, which would suggest a different plot altogether. This is not to deny
Orgel’s suggestion that Prospero indulges in a birth fantasy and, by exten-
sion, encroaches on female/maternal powers. That suggestion is not merely
borne out in the lines from act 1, scene 2 cited above but can also be seen in
many of the assumptions of his power, whether he is delivering Ariel from
a tree (something Sycorax, he claims, could not do, and in which he acts as
a midwife in a scene reminiscent of the birth of Adonis from Myrrha, his
incestuous mother: “It was mine art, / When I arrived and heard thee, that
made gape / The pine and let thee out” [1.2.291–93]) or uttering lines in the
monologue in act 5, scene 1 (originally spoken by Ovid’s Medea), lines that
mark his closest moment of identification with Sycorax. If, then, the male
gendering of Sycorax is to be explained, one route might lie through the iden-
tification of magicians in the play, cutting across the denials that structure
Prospero’s assumptions (or those of Kermode’s introduction to his Arden edi-
tion, with its detailed discriminations of black and white magic).
It has to be remembered, however, that Prospero has two seemingly op-
posing but actually congruent gender strategies in the play. One involves
strongly marking gender difference and denigrating females (this is espe-
cially the case with Sycorax, but it is there when Prospero turns on Miranda
and calls her his foot); the other is through the erasure of gender difference,
the subsumption of women into his part, as in the lines we have already con-
sidered, in order to produce identification—or the “brainwashing” Lamming
reads in Miranda’s vilification of Caliban (or in her falling for the man her
father has chosen for her). Hulme struggles in Colonial Encounters to drive
a wedge between Prospero’s play and The Tempest. In much the same way,
to read the crux about the gender of Sycorax only as another instance of the
appropriation of female under the sign of male and the erasure of gendered
 46 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

difference is to fold one play into another and thereby to subscribe to a patri-
archal phantasm.13 If one were to treat the Folio’s “mistake” as not mistaken,
it would be with the aim of preserving and exploring what is monstrous in
this moment rather than seeing it as part of the way Prospero’s seamless
power overrides all opposition, including gendered difference. Such a critical
gesture would be congruent with an anticolonialist seizure of the territory of
denigration as a site of reclamation.
Equally important would be this: The genital identification between adult
male actor and boy actor is not necessarily a bottom line; that boys could play
women’s parts has everything to do with the fact that there was a strong iden-
tification between boys and women that depended not on genitals but on con-
gruent positions of social subordination. Boys are not simply male but neither
are they female.14 This gender lability, secured by social hierarchy, may reflect
on the monstrosity of Sycorax and her son, but it is certainly not equivalent to
Sycorax’s monstrosity, nor does it explain it. Hence, Sycorax’s violation of the
biological function that differentiates males and females cannot be equated
with Prospero’s appropriative violation of that same boundary from the oppo-
site direction.15 At the moment that Sycorax performs the uniquely female act
of giving birth, she encroaches on territory that Prospero claims for himself;
her monstrosity is registered as gender change and recorded in the form her
offspring takes. Were she to serve as a mirror of Prospero at this moment, it
would not bolster the assurance of male power, the subordination and incor-
poration of the female within the male. Rather, it would suggest something
quite different: not the opposite of female monstrosity (for that opposition is
included in the masculinist plot) but a monstrosity whose excess is registered
in female masculinity and in the equivocal shape of its progeny. I return to the
initial question: Is Caliban human? Is he properly male?
I do not know whether such questions vexed Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
and John Dover Wilson in their editorial labors for their 1921 Cambridge
edition of the play,16 but Dover Wilson is quite adamant about the inappropri-
ateness of the lines we have been considering. Here is how they appear in the
Cambridge edition:

Then was this island,

(Save for the son that she did litter here,
A freckled whelp, hag-born) not honoured with
A human shape.
ARIEL : Yes: Caliban her son.
PROSPERO : Dull thing, I say so: he, that Caliban
Whom now I keep in service.

And here is Dover Wilson’s comment on them:

 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 47

(1) This passage is a violent digression. (2) Omit it and the context flows straight
on. (3) The F. has a comma after “in service,” which is absurd. . . . Is it possible to
avoid the conclusion that these five lines are an addition, a piece of patchwork,
designed to compensate for a rent elsewhere in this section? The reason for
their introduction is not far to seek; Caliban is to enter at l.321, and this is the
first mention of his name! (83)

Dover Wilson maintained (unconvincingly to most subsequent editors) that

F1 preserves a text of The Tempest reworked for court performance and that
this is especially apparent in act 1, scene 2, where Prospero’s prolix narra-
tions replace an earlier play that dramatized what he narrates. Nonetheless,
this is the only passage that Dover Wilson explicitly and vehemently declares
to be not merely an awkward covering over of the earlier text but a spuri-
ous segment in need of excision. Although his comment does not address the
she/he problem dutifully noted elsewhere in the edition, I assume that Dover
Wilson is exercised by the monstrous birth of Caliban in this passage. He
would have the discussion flow “straight on” without introducing the birth
of Caliban as an object of contention between Prospero and Ariel. “Omit it”;
then there could be no echo of the birth of Caliban in the birth of Ariel from
the tree. Then, one could not hear that Prospero’s threat to “rend an oak / And
peg thee in his knotty entrails” (1.2.294–95) reverses and echoes Sycorax’s
delivery. The tree to which Prospero would return Ariel is gendered male; the
spot in which Ariel would be confined, “his knotty entrails.”
What exercises Dover Wilson here is perhaps revealed in the gloss he sup-
plies for 2.2.163–64 (Cambridge edition lineation): “An abominable monster!
Exclamation perhaps caused by a glimpse of Caliban from behind, as he
bends to kiss Stephano’s foot.” The Vaughans, we recall, cited the lines de-
scribing Caliban’s birth in order to argue that however monstrous Caliban is,
he is nonetheless human, and they detail for pages the various configurations
that haunt this claim: Caliban as tortoise or fish as well as, more generally,
Caliban as bestial, as being of demonic origin, and the like, not to mention
the stage traditions in which Caliban has appeared in various non- or sub-
human forms. Nowhere, however, does the play seem to suggest that Caliban
is particularly monstrous when seen from the rear, and although what Dover
Wilson presumably has in mind is the degradation and abasement of his
offer of service to Stephano (as compared, presumably, to the propriety, in the
Cambridge editor’s eyes, of his service to Prospero), this political abjection
is described in charged physical terms. This is Dover Wilson’s fantasy, his
glimpsing of a monstrosity that I would be willing to credit, not as a “fact” but
as a consequence of the line of associations that I have pursued here: Caliban
born from a male mother, a witch, born monstrously and as a monster, born in
a manner that is echoed in the threatened return of Ariel to his origins in the
entrails of a tree; Caliban, in short, as sodomite.
 48 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

Fernando, in Water with Berries, had been an imprisoned spectator forced

to watch “this devil’s crime” enacted on Myra’s body. It is just such a crime
that Dover Wilson glimpses in the offing, as Caliban abominably, monstrously
debases himself. This association is perhaps not all that surprising given
colonialist discourses of Shakespeare’s time. For as often as it was assumed
that all natives were cannibals, another charge was leveled: “[T]hey are all
sodomites.”17 Charges against “natives” are multiply determined (by political
and theological discourses). Insofar as “evidence” for sodomy was produced, it
seized upon a sign of inhumanity akin to the he/she crux: various indigenous
forms of male cross-dressing, which, we might recall, Fanon reports in the
Martinique of his youth. Fanon’s remark begins to suggest that the claim that
all natives are sodomites is not a charge simply to be relegated to the early his-
tory of New World colonization. As M. Jacqui Alexander suggests in her impor-
tant essays on the role of laws regulating sexuality in the modern Caribbean,
the accusation remains foundational, and its deflection persists in the minds
of legislators bent on claiming heterosexual propriety, limiting women’s rights
and agency within marriage, and cordoning all forms of nonmarital and non-
heterosexual behaviors to a zone of the criminally unnatural.18
As Alexander demonstrates, 1990s legislation outlawing as “sodomy” con-
sensual relations between adult same-sex couples is a form of neocolonialism,
and not just because it continues colonialist denigrations of same-sex sexuality.
Legislators seek to tie the legitimacy of “independent” states in the Caribbean
to a male-dominated, heterosexual, middle-class fantasy of a norm that is
not merely domestic but imbricated in economic relations to international
capital: “Making the nation-state safe for multinational corporations is com-
mensurate with making it safe for heterosexuality,” Alexander argues (“Erotic
Autonomy,” 67). These ongoing socioeconomic consequences also point back
to the period when The Tempest was written. Witches were invariably poor
women, often single women removed from male supervision.19 And although
sodomy accusations may have spectacularly lighted on the bodies of aristo-
crats like the Earl of Castlehaven in 1634, they were, as Alan Bray suggests
in “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,”
most likely to fall upon those of lower-class origins who were thought to have
been raised to power in illegitimate ways (Gaveston in Christopher Marlowe’s
Edward II would be a most telling literary example). “Sodomy” was a way to
police social mobility against a rising class.20 It was also an accusation ready
to seize on foreign bodies; in Homosexuality in Renaissance England, Bray
reports the case of “Domingo Cassedon Drago a negro” and assumes that “the
colour of his skin” made him a likely suspect.21 Valerie Traub has found simi-
lar instances surrounding the “tribade.”22
“Sodomy,” in these examples, functions as a proto-racial marker, as does
the claim that “they are all sodomites.” Modern Caribbean repudiations
of the sodomite are, in this context, akin to the remark of the character in
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 49

Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin who avers that “no one like to know he
black”—a response that arises when Blacks are represented as “low-down
nigger people” and believe this to be true.23 Similarly, when same-sex sex is
represented as rape and as degradation that is claimed to be indicative of na-
tive nature and being, identification with so-called sodomites would seem im-
possible. The point here—as with the accusation that Caliban was a would-
be rapist, which, in Water with Berries, is entangled with the ascription of
sodomy/ bestiality in the scene of Myra’s rape—would be to imagine these
forms of sexuality apart from their colonialist representation as monstrosity.
Much as mestizaje is not necessarily an act of unacceptable violence or one
of supine passive acceptance, being black is not some sign of moral failure, a
stigma one would wish to have removed. The alternative, in all these cases, is
to erase the “in spite of,” to refuse the regulatory colonial/sexual norm, and to
embrace the term of denigration. These possibilities, as we shall soon see, are
available in twentieth-century Caribbean texts.

A FREKELLD WHELPE, HAG - BORNE

The he/she “error” in Prospero’s speech comes in the midst of his vehe-
ment attempts to fix in Ariel’s mind the condition of imprisonment in which
Prospero discovered him, to remind him of something that Ariel says he
cannot forget, “the foul witch Sycorax” (1.2.257). “Witch” is, of course, the
accusation made over and again, “this damned witch Sycorax” (1.2.263), and
her monstrous maternity is on Prospero’s lips a moment later when he de-
mands that Caliban appear: “Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself /
Upon thy wicked dam, come forth!” (1.2.319–20). The damned “dam”: As with
“litter,” Sycorax’s maternity is demonized as animal procreation.24
Just as the he/she “error” exceeds the normative limits of gendered differ-
ence in conjuring up the monstrosity of Sycorax’s maternity, similar tactics of
the unspeakable surround her powers:

This damned witch Sycorax,

For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible
To enter human hearing, from Algiers
Thou know’st was banished.
(1.2.263–66)

Thus Prospero “reminds” Ariel (of what Ariel had in fact told him), holding
back from the audience what “mischief ” she had performed or what she did
that remains too terrible to hear. Albeit late in the play, Prospero does name
some of her powers: She “could control the moon, make flows and ebbs, / And
deal in her command without her power” (5.1.270–71). These specifications
are perhaps only possible once Prospero has, earlier in the same scene, in the
lines derived from Ovid’s Medea, claimed such powers as his own (5.1.33–57).
 50 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

But more often, the power of Sycorax remains unspeakable, as are the acts,
whatever they may have been, that Ariel refused to perform: “[T]hou wast a
spirit too delicate / To act her earthy and abhorred commands” (1.2.272–73).
Likewise, her ability to escape the death punishment that her deeds appeared
to warrant in Algiers hangs on an elusive “one thing she did” (1.2.266).25
When, retrospectively, Caliban is introduced, the “one thing” seems to trans-
late into “she was pregnant” (as Orgel glosses the line), and Sycorax’s ability
to conceive is brought into the orbit of things that cannot be mentioned rather
than being recognized as something that women uniquely can do.26
When the witch Sycorax is brought into the domain of the unspeakable,
she would seem to enter the charged terrain of sodomy, a crime definition-
ally not to be spoken of among Christians.27 To understand further the logic
at work in The Tempest, one wishes that the conjunction of witchcraft and
sodomy had been the subject of sustained historical scrutiny. Arthur Evans’s
Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture 28 has these ambitions, but it is deeply
flawed by its desire to prove a transhistorical identity between witches and
homosexuals as part of an ages-long subversive counterculture. While there
is little to be said for this thesis (neither witches nor “homosexuals” consti-
tuted a self-conscious collectivity), some of Evans’s references to moments
when the two crimes coincided are indisputable. For example, the inquisitors
in Avignon in 1582 condemned as “sodomy” fornication between men and
succubi and between women and incubi.29 As Jeffrey Richards notes, by the
mid–thirteenth century, “homosexuality became an inevitable concomitant of
accusations of heresy and witchcraft,” no doubt thanks in part to the Papal
bull Vox in Rama (1233), from which he quotes this description of the witches’
Sabbath: “[T]hose present indulge in the most loathsome sensuality, having
no regard to sex. If there are more men than women, men satisfy one an-
other’s depraved appetites, women do the same for each other.”30 E. William
Monter, in his several studies of the Inquisition in various locales during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has supported these linkages, noting,
for instance, that of fifty-eight witches convicted in Fribourg in the early
seventeenth century, eight were condemned as sodomites (there seems to
have been no distinction between male witches and sodomites). Accusations
of witchcraft, sodomy, and infanticide, Monter further concludes, circulate
differentially, as ways of policing the category of the “unnatural.”31 What
makes this connection easy can be gleaned from one description of a sod-
omite as someone “committing heresy with his body,”32 for it suggests how
the bodily act of witchcraft—sex with the devil—that preoccupies Prospero
and many other commentators might easily overlap with the category of sod-
omy (not least because witchcraft was most usually a charge leveled against
women, sodomy against men). Paul Brown has commented on Prospero’s
sexual obsessiveness and his desire to regulate others’ sexuality, and this
feature of the character—the way his “project” plays out in the realm of
sexual behavior—perhaps bears comparison with the fevered imaginations
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 51

of those who described the supposed goings-on at the witches’ Sabbath. As

G. R. Quaife summarizes, these scenes regularly included “anal and oral sex,
homosexuality, bestiality, mutual masturbation, group sex and incest.”33
These connections were not confined to the Continent or to the fantasies
of the Catholic church. As Retha Warnicke has pointed out, the first person
condemned under the sodomy statute passed in England in 1533 (the statute
that made sodomy a felony rather than a matter of church control), Walter
Lord Hungerford, was found guilty not only of having had sex with his male
servants and with his daughter but also of having plotted against the king
with the help of witches.34 This particular configuration is, in certain respects,
no surprise, insofar as sexual crimes in the period are regularly linked to
state crimes. Warnicke summons up the 1540 case against Hungerford in the
context of her study of the fall of Anne Boleyn, arguing that the queen’s de-
livery of a monstrous, abortive fetus sent Anne Boleyn to the block. Warnicke
details the “sexual heresy” that surrounded these events, in which charges
of incest, adultery, and sodomy (between the queen’s supposed lovers) fol-
lowed upon this monstrous birth. The fetus, that is, did not just represent
the queen’s infidelity to the king, and therefore her treason; the other sexual
charges followed upon it and served to explain the monster. We are close here,
I think, to the imagination that links the witch Sycorax with the monstrous
Caliban.
We are also in a position to see that the charge explicitly lodged against
Caliban—the attempted rape of Miranda—would not, in these contexts (as
it would be presumed to do in a more modern instance), obviate a charge of
sodomy. The category “sodomy” was capacious enough to include virtually
any form of sexual union that exceeded the regulatory norm of procreative
sex between married partners. Indeed, as Alan Bray has stressed, sodomy is
thought of as an uncontrollable excess of sexual desire, a debauchery that
is not defined by the gender (or species) of the object chosen.
I would not argue for an equation so much as for a relay from witchcraft
to sodomy in the monstrous conception and birth of Caliban. The connection
was a point of some contention in the literature on witchcraft. For although
the witches’ Sabbath often was viewed as a feverishly sexual event, there was
much debate about whether actual physical union between a (mortal) witch
and the devil was possible, and, if so, whether such unions were capable of
producing offspring. (Reginald Scot, in arguing against these sexual possibili-
ties in The Discoverie of Witchcraft [1584], nonetheless provides a fair sam-
pling of the arguments made on both sides.) When such unions were deemed
possible, the sex acts of witches (as well as acts of bestiality performed by
sodomites) were thought to result in monstrous births.
Bray pursues these associations in Homosexuality in Renaissance England,
pointing both to the ways sodomy overlapped with demonism (in terms of as-
sumptions about destructiveness, heresy, and the like), especially in the “per-
sistent motif that the child of the witch’s diabolical union is a sodomite” (21),
 52 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

and to the ways witchcraft and sodomy diverged. One of his main examples
for the latter point is, significantly for the discussion here, Michael Drayton’s
“Moone-Calfe.” The term, of course, is applied repeatedly to Caliban in The
Tempest to indicate his monstrous, abortive appearance. In Drayton’s poem,
the devil fathers monstrous offspring, twins who are masculine-feminines,
androgynes and hermaphrodites.35 The male twin is explicitly a sodomite,
and the devil, frightened by the monster (line 170), appears to share the di-
vine disgust at the sin of Sodom (lines 317–24). Bray argues that Drayton’s
devil expresses a commonplace; insofar as demonic offspring were nonethe-
less the product of heterosexual unions, sodomy suggested a form of sexual
relationship that exceeded what was already a kind of demonic parody of
proper sex. This point is made in the Malleus Maleficarum, that handbook of
beliefs about witchcraft, where it is claimed that “nowhere do we read that
Incubi and Succubi fell into vices against nature,” for sodomy is a sin of such
“very great enormity . . . that all devils, of whatsoever order, abominate and
think shame to commit such actions.”36 Sodomy and witchcraft cannot be
equated; they touch at a border of abomination and of the unspeakable.37
In this context, it is worth recalling, too, that the pregnant wombs of con-
demned witches were opened to reveal within them horrific and deformed
spawn. These assumptions are most fully in play around the trial of Anne
Hutchison in early seventeenth-century New England. Charges of heresy are
materialized in her body as well as in her followers’, who are also revealed as
witches by their abortive and monstrous offspring (one of whom, like Caliban,
is described as having horns, claws, and scales). “Mistris Hutchison . . . brought
forth not one . . . but . . . 30. monstrous births or thereabouts, at once; some
of them bigger, some lesser, some of one shape, some of another; few of any
perfect shape, none at all of them (as farre as I could ever learne) of humane
shape.”38 Next to the birth described by this Puritan minister, Sycorax’s
“littering” is almost demure, and the equivocal declaration that her offspring
bears a human shape is almost humane. Yet he is also insistently called
monster and mooncalf, just as his mother is never anything but a witch, one
whose crime Prospero cannot name.
Sex with the devil, the accusation Prospero can utter, may therefore eu-
phemize what remains unnamable and unspeakable about what Sycorax did,
what she brought forth. A “demi-devil,” Prospero ultimately calls Caliban
(5.1.272), only half a devil, and thus “a bastard one” (5.1.273). “Bastard”
names that horrific condition of mixture; but of what? “This thing of dark-
ness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1.275–76). Is Caliban born of Prospero and
Sycorax, as Lamming speculated? (Orgel, in his gloss to 1.2.266, notes of
Prospero’s “one thing she did” that “the problematic element in the passage
is not its meaning, but the obliqueness of Prospero’s reference to it,” as if,
perhaps, he has something to hide.) Or is he born of the devil and Sycorax, as
Prospero charges? And what of the remark that Sebastian makes as Prospero
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 53

whispers to him and Antonio that he knows that they plotted together to kill
Alonso. How does he know? Because he put the idea in their heads? Because
Ariel told him? “The devil speaks in him” (5.1.129) is Sebastian’s response to
Prospero’s preternatural knowledge. Has Prospero encroached so far (even
into the treasonous and sodomitical plotting of Sebastian and Antonio) that,
rather than being in control of the unspeakable, he has come to embody it, as
Lamming’s Fernando suggested when he saw “Caliban” and his dogs doing to
Myra what “Prospero” had done to his servants, male and female?
The relay from sodomite to witch may remain a subject for further histori-
cal scrutiny. But one path of connection between Sycorax and Caliban that
ramifies into the present survives. As Makeda Silvera points out, in Jamaica
the term for “strong women,” for independent women, and for women who
love other women is “man royal” or “sodomite.” The former term masculin-
izes; the latter, Silvera assumes, is fetched from Genesis, applied from colo-
nialist religious discourse of condemnation of the “natives” to a word spoken
by Jamaicans in disparagement of other Jamaicans. “Dread words. So dread
that women dare not use these words to name themselves. These were the
names given to women by men to describe aspects of our lives that men nei-
ther understand nor approved. . . . How could a Caribbean woman claim the
name?” she asks, and not merely rhetorically.39
If Dover Wilson’s recoil at the “abominable monster” is, then, a recoil at
what is most abominable—the sin beyond all others—he turns from ass-
kissing (metaphorically, to spell out what foot-licking means at 2.2.143) to
even more unspeakable acts, literalizing in his presumed view of Caliban’s
bottom the horror that he sees him performing. (Ass-kissing is the devil’s
kiss, the sign the witch makes of her devotion to her master, a sign of political
allegiance, just as Caliban’s is.) There is, however, another moment in the
play that prepares and makes “fit” Dover Wilson’s reaction to the abominable
monster. Here is how Prospero describes what Antonio did:

bend
The dukedom yet unbowed—alas, poor Milan!—
To most ignoble stooping.
(1.2.114–16)

Dover Wilson’s gloss on Caliban inadvertently glosses these lines, and the
implications here are complex, not least because “Milan” is at once the name
for both Antonio and Prospero in the substitution that has as yet not quite
differentiated one from the other. (As Prospero is the rightful holder of the
dukedom, it is in his interest not to make that distinction.) The lines thus
represent the submission of Milan to Naples as either Antonio’s voluntary or
Prospero’s enforced violation. Here Dover Wilson’s reading of Caliban’s ab-
ject position finds a more immediately plausible object: this scene of “ignoble
 54 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

stooping” does invite a view from the rear; indeed, it suggests that Milan
has been taken from behind, mastered anally. The connections between
sodomy and treason make this implication utterly unexceptionable.40
Dover Wilson’s reading of the scene of Caliban’s submission to Stephano
thus ramifies another way in which betrayal of political propriety is registered
in the play as sodomitical submission. It also connects back to the equivocal
description of Caliban’s birth. Finally, it connects to an episode in the play in
which Caliban is represented as anally receptive and as anally productive. In
act 2, scene 2, Trinculo creeps under Caliban’s gaberdine. “Misery acquaints
a man with strange bedfellows” (2.2.38), he remarks as he does so, using a
word that can refer to same-sex sleeping partners. Stephano comes across
this four-legged figure, and assumes that “this is some monster of the isle”
(2.2.63). Yet the monstrosity here (the reiterated use of “monster” begins in
this scene), although initially registered by Trinculo in terms of the animal/
human nature of Caliban and by Stephano in terms of the Mandevillian
man of Ind, lies in what Stephano finally sees, Trinculo and Caliban making
the beast with two backs, “an incarnation of the monstrous in lovemaking,”
as David Sundelson comments, not distancing himself from what he takes
Stephano’s attitude to be.41 Stephano euphemizes the situation when he
regards the four-legged creature before him as doubly mouthed, though he
marks one mouth as forward and the other as backward. His exchange of
mouth and anus fits nicely with a figure whose name respells “cannibal”
or with colonialist allegations that all New World inhabitants are cannibals
and sodomites. At the moment when Trinculo emerges at Stephano’s com-
mand to “come forth” (2.2.98; the line echoes Prospero’s delivery of Ariel as
well as his first command to Caliban [1.2.315]), Stephano asks, “How cam’st
thou to be the siege of this mooncalf? Can he vent Trinculos?” (2.2.101–2). In
witnessing an excremental birth, Stephano seems to imagine that Caliban
has swallowed Trinculo and now is delivering him whole. Alimentary canal
and birth canal meet in a fantasy of anal delivery that we have already seen
in Prospero’s threat to return Ariel to the entrails of the tree from which he
was delivered. This scene of venting realizes the “mistake” about Caliban’s
origins that the seventeenth-century folios repeated and that Rowe “cor-
rected.” Here a male mother, the mooncalf who is the abortive and monstrous
child of the witch, gives birth anally. Orgel is one of the few editors to record
that “siege” means “excrement” and “vent,” “defecate.” Only George Steevens,
in a note to the line in his 1778 edition of the play, registers (phobically, to be
sure) any sense of what is going on here: “Siege signifies stool in every sense
of the word, and is here used in the dirtiest.” Is it any wonder that when we
last see Caliban in the company of his coconspirators Stephano and Trinculo,
they have been mired in a pool of “horse-piss” (4.1.198)? It is a fitting end for
the “foul conspiracy / Of the beast Caliban and his confederates” (4.1.139–40);
exit pursued by dogs.
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 55

SO RARE A WONDERED FATHER, AND A WIFE

As we have seen, it is not Caliban’s birth but his alleged rape attempt that
is the charged site in anticolonial readings of The Tempest for mixtures that
may entail new—and monstrous—combinations. Significantly, a recognized
(and much discussed) crux in The Tempest speaks to this charge; it can also be
connected, or so I would argue, to the problematic “he/she” of 1.2.282. I refer
to the line spoken by Ferdinand at his betrothal to Miranda and to “a read-
ing whose time has come,” to cite the final words of the “bibliographic coda”
to Orgel’s “Prospero’s Wife” (64). Orgel endorses the bibliographic evidence
presented by Jeanne Addison Roberts to the effect that Ferdinand’s lines
during the masque in act 4, scene 1, “So rare a wondered father, and a wise, /
Makes this place paradise” (the reading to be found in virtually all previous
twentieth-century editions of the play), originally read “So rare a wondered
father and a wife / Makes this place paradise” (the reading adopted in Orgel’s
edition at 4.1.123–24).42 Orgel summarizes Roberts’s findings in his note to
line 123: “[E]arly in the print run, the cross-bar of the f broke off, transform-
ing ‘wife’ to ‘wise’. Several copies of the Folio show the letter in the process
of breaking.” This explains why most copies of the Folio read “wise,” why
the variant “wife,” when recorded, has seemed merely a variant, and hence
why most modern editions of the play read “wise.” Orgel’s endorsement of
Roberts’s work is not made only on the bibliographical grounds that “wife” is
what F1 read originally and authoritatively; it is also part of a “collaborative”
effort of the kind that he remarks throughout his essay, the understanding
that what makes for the “rightness” of a reading is never simply the facts but
the climate in which they are available and visible. Orgel’s reading marks a
time when feminist readings allowed one to see things that were formerly
invisible, and the restoration of “wife” in these lines thus restores Miranda to
the scene of celebration. It marks her presence, whereas the traditional read-
ing had absented her from Ferdinand’s rapt response, which begins, after all,
“Let me live here ever” (4.1.122).
This commendable endorsement of the feminist impulse arguably to be
found in Roberts’s essay (it is not stated explicitly) requires some further
consideration. One must keep in mind that Ferdinand’s response at this mo-
ment in the betrothal masque might serve to measure him against Miranda’s
“suitor” who has been summarily rejected as a rapist, that it is the Caliban in
Ferdinand who has been charged as a usurper and demeaned to do servile labor
and whose own rapacious sexual impulses for Miranda (graphically registered
even as they are ostensibly repudiated at 4.1.23–31), and for the city-state she
represents, have been legitimized by this betrothal. As Mark Thornton Burnett
remarks in an essay on the discourse of monstrosity in The Tempest, Prospero’s
warnings to Ferdinand about his potential to violate Miranda hold up the
specter of the “loathly” issue of such illegitimate intercourse (4.1.21), thereby
 56 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

recalling Caliban’s projected progeny of Calibans as well as the monster birth

of fecal matter in the scene when he vents Trinculo.43 Miranda herself enthu-
siastically endorses the terms of her marriage to Ferdinand, as is suggested
by her response in the chess-playing scene to her future husband’s empire
building. (The “masculinization” of Miranda in Prospero’s account of her saving
powers may find its terminus in her willingness to call whatever false power
grabbing Ferdinand pursues “fair play” [5.1.175].) The “feminist” gesture that
would include Miranda more visibly in this marriage would in these respects
further the marriage plot that casts Caliban (and with him, non-Europeans
and nonaristocrats) as an impossible, monstrous mate.
In “Prospero’s Wife,” Orgel claims that the variant “wife” was lost before
Roberts found it: “[A]fter 1895 the wife became invisible: bibliographers lost
the variant, and textual critics consistently denied its existence until Roberts
pointed it out” (64). The variant is occasionally recorded (for example, in
Morton Luce’s 1901 Arden edition and in Northrop Frye’s Penguin text);44
it is simply not adopted. Frank Kermode has it both ways: He places a ques-
tion mark after noting the variant and recommends “further inquiry,” but he
ends his gloss by commenting that “the true reading may be wife after all.”
Kermode did not have before him the evidence that Roberts presents. He
relied, instead, on the easy mistake of confusing f and long s in the printing
process, and lacking hard evidence, he only allows “wife” in his note, not in
the text. Howard Horace Furness, in the 1892 variorum edition of the play,
cites with approval one Grant White, who opines that to print “wife” here
would “degrade the poetical feeling of the passage” and then goes on to make
the revealing comment that in his own copy of F1 he cannot tell by looking
whether the line reads “wife” or “wise.”45 How he comes to print wise fully
supports Orgel’s contention that we see only what we are prepared to see:
“Personally,” Furness writes, “seeing that I much prefer wise, I incline to be-
lieve that it is ‘wise’ in my copy.” Presumably editors after Furness who print
“wise” have shared his preference.
What preference is this, however? Not the one Kermode records in his
note: “[W]e may think that in this Adam-like situation, Ferdinand must have
said wife,” nor the preference to be found in all eighteenth-century editions
from Rowe on, which, in fact, print “wife.” Rowe probably did not emend the
line on the basis of consultation of a copy of F1 that read “wife”; his emenda-
tion was made on what Orgel calls “logical grounds” (“Prospero’s Wife,” 63),
the logic, presumably, that Kermode suggests: that it is difficult to believe
that at the moment of his betrothal, having declared a desire to live in para-
dise forever, Ferdinand would omit Miranda.
It is this logic, however, coupled with the fact that eighteenth-century
editors invariably printed “wife,” that must lead us to ask what time has
come when the line reads “wife” in Orgel’s edition. Eighteenth-century edi-
tors, who assumed that Shakespeare wrote “wise,” were not restoring his
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 57

intended meaning but modernizing the text, and indeed, doing so in ways
that I would argue parallel the normalizing of gender that Rowe performed
in assigning a feminine pronoun to Sycorax at the moment of her delivery of
Caliban. The eighteenth-century readings of the play, that is, are not feminist
interventions. They put “wife” there to assure the domestic relationship and
the propriety of Ferdinand’s remarks. They make his future wife present in
order to police the male-male relations between Ferdinand and Prospero.
Ferdinand’s celebration of his “father” is only saved from excess within the
context of marriage. This must be granted at least as a caveat against the
assumption that restoring “wife” restores a woman to the text; “wife” is not
Miranda’s name but her function. Although she has been given the illusion
that she has freely chosen Ferdinand, she marries him as part of her father’s
designs. (Ferdinand is Prospero’s choice, and it is his desire that his daugh-
ter enacts and makes legitimate.) As Orgel astutely argues, Prospero’s aim
in marrying them is to legitimize what Antonio did, placing Milan beneath
Naples; now Milan will not fall to “ignoble stooping” because of the marriage
alliance. What this further assures is the propriety of male-male relations,
and it manages the hierarchy between Naples and Milan through the homo-
social configuration that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identified in Between Men.46
What Rowe and his followers presumably heard in Ferdinand’s espousal of
his “wise” father was the possibility that his desire for Prospero repeated
Antonio’s for Alonso.
This “danger” is not entirely removed when the correct reading is restored.
“And a wife” is, at best, an addition, and “so rare a wondered” seems primarily,
if not exclusively, to refer to Prospero. As “wife,” Miranda is clearly in a
subordinate relationship to her husband-to-be and to her father. Moreover,
as Orgel notes, as do other editors as well, “wondered,” as an adjective de-
scribing Prospero, echoes Miranda’s name, an object of admiration subject to
such punning elsewhere in the play. If “wondered” means someone who can
produce wonders, then Prospero’s magic show and his magical daughter are
equated. They are both wonders that he produces. What Ferdinand is cele-
brating in the lines is Prospero’s art and his production of a child, his male
maternity. Miranda is, as it were, already in the phrase “rare a wondered,”
and her separation out in “and a wife” is almost as redundant and self-
referential as the line would be if it read “and a wise.” Putting “wife” in the
line—as presumably Shakespeare did—hardly ensures her independence or
her existence outside the patriarchal arrangements being celebrated here as
Prospero hands her over to his chosen son-in-law.
The difference between eighteenth-century texts and the original F1
reading “and a wife” is that Rowe and his followers presumably believed that
by supplying “wife,” the intensity of the male-male bond had been diluted
and made acceptable; F1 does not quite have those guarantees. In the sex/
gender system in which Shakespeare writes, the choice between male and
 58 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

female lovers is not as supposedly exclusive as it comes to be imagined in

the eighteenth century. The facts that in these lines these two relations come
together as one and that the emphasis is on the father (he gets the adjec-
tives; he comes first in Ferdinand’s utterance) are also marked by the verb
form “makes”: Father and wife are here a single entity. Rowe and subsequent
eighteenth-century editors emend “makes” to “make”; this separation, the
grammatical propriety of making father and wife two subjects, furthers the
work of heterosexual propriety. Shakespeare’s more fluid grammar cannot be
taken unequivocally to be making father and wife a single subject, but it can-
not be ruled out either.
Hence, the modern reinsertion of “wife” in this line does not by itself
mean that some time of enlightened gender relations has necessarily arrived.
Rather, as Orgel argues, it is only within a certain climate of reading that the
line would have feminist force. But to my mind, it is not enough simply to get
Miranda back into this line. A feminist reading of the lines might well involve
a critique of the limits under which Miranda appears here (as that append-
age called wife) and of the kinds of class and racial proprieties being secured.
Such a reading might seek to underscore the work that this heterosexual
arrangement is being called upon to do: making acceptable male intimacy
that might otherwise give (homophobic) critics pause. The lines, of course,
have a further caution for the critical project I pursue: To note that F1 here
marks the difference between the properly homosocial and the overcharged
and dangerously sodomitical (which it seeks to situate everywhere but in
Prospero’s relations with men) through Miranda’s body means that one can-
not simply celebrate Shakespearean sexuality for the ways in which it takes
male-male and male-female relations in stride, as complementary and not as
mutually exclusive. There are hierarchies of power in these lines: between
father and child, between men and women. Some men (above all, Caliban)
and some women (Sycorax) stand outside all these forms of “order” as sites of
“monstrous” inhuman excess. The elucidation of the possibilities of gendered/
sexual relations has already bracketed what remains unspeakable.
To Ferdinand’s ecstatic lines, Prospero replies, “Sweet, now, silence!” (4.1.124),
a gentle and affectionate command at which some editors have balked (Dover
Wilson assigns the line to Miranda), although Orgel quite usefully points out
that men do call each other “sweet” in Shakespeare. Dover Wilson reassigns
the lines, but like all other modern editors, he prints “wise” here too (the
“variant” “wife” does not appear in the Cambridge edition). This returns us to
a question raised above: Why have modern editors preferred “wise” to “wife”?
It is not, presumably, because it allows the eros of the situation between
Prospero and Ferdinand to be registered. Indeed, when Grant White claimed
that printing “wife” would constitute a “degradation” of “poetic feeling,” one
can see that the presence of “wife” for him would necessarily introduce a
sexual element and thus mar “poetic feeling” between men, which presumably
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 59

cannot ever be supposed to have an erotic component. Here Kermode’s re-

mark on the “Adam-like situation” of Ferdinand-in-paradise could be further
glossed. In this line, Prospero is, as it were, the sole source of Miranda, just as
in the biblical myth woman comes from man. This is the paradisial version of
what, were Sycorax male, would be the abomination of Caliban’s monstrous
birth, and it is a component of the version of the misogyny that led Andrew
Marvell to write, “Two Paradises ’twere in one / To live in Paradise alone”47
and, indeed, also of the ages-long Christian tradition that lays the blame for
the Fall on woman and that yearns for the time before the creation of Eve,
when Adam’s only playmate was his creator. White’s recoil at “wife” is a re-
sponse to these yearnings for a paradise of male solitude. Kermode’s more
tempered remark about Ferdinand in paradise participates in eighteenth-
century normativizing heterosexualization. The time that has come, when
“wife” appears in these lines, certainly disputes the virulent misogyny of
White; however, it remains in danger of simply reproducing heterosexuality
and thus also insisting upon limits for women (they were meant for mar-
riage) and for men (relations between them could never be sexual ones).
It thus seems necessary to recognize the limits of interventions in the
name of feminism or of gay affirmation that can be made by way of the
Shakespearean text and to recognize, moreover, that these adjudications tac-
itly suppose that the sexuality of a Sycorax or of a Caliban would be beyond
the pale. Nonetheless, within its modest limit as a political move, Orgel’s res-
toration of “wife” and his declaration that it is a reading whose time has come
would seem utterly unexceptionable. Could anyone after Orgel print “wise”?
The answer, of course, is yes. In the single-volume Shakespeare produced for
Oxford by Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells at the same moment that Orgel was
preparing his Oxford edition of The Tempest, 4.1.123 of The Tempest reads
“wise.” John Jowett provides the explanation for that decision in the 1987
textual commentary for the edition. His note is worth reprinting here:

Roberts . . . showed that there was progressive damage to the crossbar of “f”
during printing. Error is none the less so easy that the matter does not end
there. Whereas previous critics were divided as to what F actually read, almost
all preferred “wise” as the more convincing reading. F’s pararhyme is suspi-
cious; wise / paradise is a Shakespearian rhyme. “Wife” gives trite sense and
demands two grammatical licences: that “So rare a wondered” is extended to
qualify “a wife”, and that “Makes” has a plural subject.48

This is an extraordinary note. Though it seems to start by accepting

Roberts’s findings, it immediately introduces an unspecified sense of “error.”
One presumes that Jowett has in mind something like Kermode’s note on
how easily f and long s can be confused in the printing process. What is extra-
ordinary here, then, is that Jowett appears to accept the fact that F1 origi-
nally read “wife,” but he also wants to entertain the possibility that it did so
 60 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

in error (presumably as a compositor’s error). Thus, he in essence argues that

even though what Roberts saw really did happen, that is beside the point.
What would normally be accounted a strong bibliographical demonstration
is policed, I assume because of the context that Orgel adduces: that Roberts’s
work supports a feminist agenda. (It hardly needs to be pointed out that
the field of bibliography has been and remains heavily male-dominated.)49
Although Jowett’s category of “error” is the closest he comes to making a bib-
liographic objection to Roberts, the logic of his claim leads to an undermining
of any bibliographic protocols. If any reading of a text could be in error (and,
of course, any can), then the textual/ bibliographic evidence, even when it ap-
pears incontrovertible (that F1 originally read “wife”), can only be subject to
interpretation. It is, then, presumably (though this is unstated) the “bias” in
Roberts’s presumed interpretive stance that Jowett questions.
Having established “wife”/ “wise” as variants (rather than “wife” as the
reading and “wise” as a variant produced by mechanical breakdown), Jowett
appeals to “previous critics” who have found “wise” more “convincing.” Here,
as with “error,” who or what is involved goes unspecified. It is not really a
matter of criticism that is being determined here; rather, it is a matter of edi-
torial practice and of the overwhelming numbers of editors (“almost all”) who
can be mobilized on the side of “wise.” “Convincing” is of course a question-
begging term: convincing in terms of the bibliographic evidence? Surely not,
unless the fact that more copies of F1 read “wise” than “wife” (which must
be true) is taken as constituting a bibliographic fact. Convincing from some
critical predisposition? Presumably, but that is not where the note concludes.
It concludes, rather, on questions of what is genuinely Shakespearean at the
level of writing practice.50 Yet one must suspect any claims to know what is
Shakespearean, especially, as here, when the rhyme is so heavily loaded se-
mantically. Things that rhyme should, and “wife” does not.
Speaking as some masculinist embodiment of the law, Jowett takes extra-
ordinary license, although he is probably right that “rare a wondered”
does not extend to “wife.” This is the only moment where Jowett’s reading
coincides with my own, and it points to the limits, as I have remarked, of re-
claiming the line and “wife” in the name of feminism. Indeed, it just might be
that Jowett will not have “wife” because if the word were there, it would show
that Shakespeare did not have a properly modern, liberal, and egalitarian
view of women. I have already addressed the point about “makes.” It is amaz-
ing that a Shakespearean editor has not noticed how often Shakespeare’s
subjects and verbs do not agree—has not noticed, that is, that Shakespeare
had not learned eighteenth-century grammar. For of course, what is remark-
able about Jowett’s note is that it goes beyond the eighteenth-century editors
in demanding from the lines grammatical propriety of the kind Rowe and
his followers provided by changing “makes” into “make.” In short, much as
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 61

Jowett’s reading is motivated by an animus against Roberts and the collabo-

rative efforts that Orgel endorses in positing the time that has come, his
eighteenth-century editorial procedures (he does not rely on F1 as his copy-
text here; rather, he relies on the weight of tradition; he expects Shakespeare
to use modern grammar) are also aimed at a propriety of gendered relations.
Because a wife should be praised at least as much as a father-in-law and
should be an independent subject (and not just grammatically), the line
must read “wise.” Otherwise, Shakespeare might have been a misogynist and
a patriarchal poet. Jowett’s reading, then, is also a product of the time that
has come.
That time may have passed. For the Vaughans’ 1999 Arden edition of The
Tempest (as well as the 1999 Pelican edition) prints “wise.” Although the
Vaughans indicate that they “would like to read the word as ‘wife’” and that
they believe Shakespeare probably intended that word, “wise” is neverthe-
less, they claim, what F1 reads, perhaps because of a handwriting error in
transcribing the text; perhaps because of a compositor’s error in reading the
manuscript; perhaps because of a slip of the compositor’s hand as he went
to fetch an f and instead drew a long s from the neighboring box; perhaps,
indeed, because an f, so easily indistinguishable from a long s, had been
misfiled.51 Still, as far as they are concerned, F1 reads “wise,” and they must
follow their copytext: “We opt for the Folio’s ‘wise’ because there is no compel-
ling reason to alter a word that is as plausible as the alternative in syntax
and logic, more feasible in rhyme and more compatible with the technology of
Jacobean type-founding” (138).
The last item on their list points, in fact, to why they have been led to re-
ject Roberts’s claims. In his introduction to the second edition of the Norton
Facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare, Peter Blayney has asserted that
the two copies of F1 in the Folger collection (numbers 6 and 73) that Roberts
claimed had “wife” do not:

As a typographer I cannot agree that what resembles a crossbar in Folger cop-

ies 6 and 73 is in fact part of the type at all, or that the marks in the supposedly
intermediate copies were impressed by the remnants of the crossbar. But the
way in which ink is deposited by metal type on damp paper is too specialized
a subject to examine in detail here, and proper resolution of the matter must
await a much more thorough discussion.52

Orgel had announced a reading whose time had come. But in the face of
Blayney’s assertion of expertise, time seems to have stopped in awe at the
male’s mastery and at the secrets he guards. Where Roberts had seen a bar
breaking, Blayney sees “blotted ink” (as the Vaughans summarize his claim,
137). What we see is not a neutral “matter” awaiting “proper resolution.”
There is no way of knowing what the particular piece of metal responsible
 62 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

for the f/s quandary may or may not have done. But, as Stephen Orgel has
remarked to me, the fact remains that to anyone’s eyes two copies of F1 in the
Folger appear to read “wife,” a material fact that may well have extended be-
yond those two copies. Bar or blot? Miranda married or marred? Is Blayney’s
argument compelling because now, to have Miranda there as “wife,” she
would be smirched, blackened, Sycoraxed?

INEVER SAW A WOMAN / BUT ONLY SYCORAX,

MY DAM , AND SHE
The bibliographical dilemmas in The Tempest around “he”/“she” and “wife”/
“wise” suggest how complex a mapping of sex and gender will necessarily be
in the volatile contexts of the play’s writing and rewritings. These dilemmas
reveal that the charge of “masculinism” variously and justifiably deployed
(against Fernández Retamar or Fanon or Lamming—or Shakespeare) is
not one charge. The grids of intelligibility of the homosocial multiply as it
fractures along the lines of an excoriated homosexuality (tantamount to a
racialization when tied to Caliban and to the figuration of male maternity
attached both to him and to Sycorax) and a facilitating homoerotics. In this
light, the paralleling offered by Lamming’s Penelope as she extends her self-
understanding to include “the Negro, the Jew, the homosexual, the worker”53
can only be a preliminary gesture in mapping such complexities, since it
supposes discrete categories rather than complex relationships between and
among them. The bibliographical dilemmas intimate, rather, that the mean-
ing of any differential or diacritical term will be subject to its relationship
to other terms. “Correcting” the “he”/ “she” “error” to “she” does not remove
all the ways in which Sycorax is positioned in the play to fail to represent
a normative instance of femininity: a monstrous mother, engaged in illicit
sex, not coupled with a known father. Nor does it make it possible to imagine
that Caliban, however “masculine” his rape attempt is, can be comprehended
along the lines of what is permissible to Ferdinand, that he ever could be
invited into the relationship affirmed at the betrothal. Restoring Miranda to
the text as “wife” will potentially assure her the normative position denied to
Sycorax, but it will not quite do what various forms of feminism might wish:
grant her personhood or autonomy, usher her into an egalitarian, unsubor-
dinated position. Hailing Miranda’s inclusion as “wife” therefore speaks to
the form of feminism that would have a woman in the text, no matter what
the cost might be—a demand for “representation” that is sounded frequently
in criticisms of The Tempest that deplore feminine absence in the text, as if
presence were itself a guarantee of recognition.54
It is such an absence that Rob Nixon underscores in the conclusion to his
essay “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest” when he ex-
plains why “the plot ran out” after the 1970s ushered in “independence” and
attendant neocolonialism:
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 63

The play’s declining pertinence to contemporary Africa and the Caribbean has
been exacerbated by the difficulty of wresting from it any role for female defi-
ance or leadership in a period when protest is coming increasingly from that
quarter. Given that Caliban is without a female counterpart in his oppres-
sion and rebellion, and given the largely autobiographical cast of African and
Caribbean appropriations of the play, it follows that all the writers who quar-
ried from The Tempest an expression of their lot should have been men.55

Nixon’s argument seems to preclude what nonetheless has happened: en-

gagement with the play by feminists, who see more possibilities than he can
imagine.56 In the pages that follow, such possibilities will be mapped. These
are prompted by the figure of the sodomite and witch in The Tempest and
lead to the “monstrous” possibilities of nonnormative sexualities to be found
in the work of a number of Caribbean writers and theorists (and in various
forms of Caribbean social/sexual arrangements).
Let us begin with a striking intervention—one that complicates the terms
of feminism—exemplified by a stunning 1990 essay by Sylvia Wynter that at-
tempts, as the title of her essay puts it, to move “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings:
Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman.’”57 Wynter’s essay
appeared as the afterword to an important inaugural gathering of work by
Caribbean feminists, and her intervention means to serve as a caution to an
enterprise that she reframes. Rather than assuming that feminism is given
or available to or desirable for Caribbean women, Wynter moves toward an
identification with “Caliban’s ‘woman,’” eschewing the terrains of various
kinds of absence—Caliban’s father or mother, most pointedly—in favor of
a figure she wishes to disentangle from “Luce Irigaray’s purely Western as-
sumption of a universal category, ‘woman’” (355). Wynter’s argument hinges
on the claim that the absence of a “mate” for Caliban in The Tempest is of
a different order than the absence of his mother or father. She conjures
“Caliban’s ‘woman’” into existence (indeed, writes as her), thereby actively re-
writing the play. The scare quotes around her designation signal a distinction
between “Caliban’s ‘woman’” and Miranda as a representative of “woman,” a
dehomogenization of terms that could be compared to the textual cruxes we
have examined in The Tempest. Wynter’s is a feminist reading that nonethe-
less resists those feminist readings of the play that would forge identifica-
tions with Miranda. For however much Miranda is Prospero’s tool, she is also
Caliban’s accuser and reviler. As Wynter puts it, the displacement of gender
as the ultimate ground of explanation is shown in the play through “the re-
lations of enforced dominance and subordination between Miranda, though
‘female,’ and Caliban, though ‘male’” (358). Miranda, that is, is doubly placed,
and her gender signifies doubly: in relationship to her father and future hus-
band, on the one hand, and to Caliban, on the other.
The position that Wynter takes has disturbed other feminists. Indeed, the
 64 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

“beyond” of her title is a gesture she has made in relationship to other dis-
courses, with equally abrasive effects. In “Beyond the Categories of the Master
Conception: The Counterdoctrine of the Jamesian Poiesis,” for example, she
challenges the usual readings of C. L. R. James by insisting that Marxist
paradigms of class and economic determinism will not explain the full com-
plexity of his project.58 In “On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minority’ Literary
Criticism and Beyond,” an essay for an issue of Cultural Critique devoted to
the question of “minority discourse,” Wynter’s “beyond” is tantamount to a
refusal of a term (“minority”) that, like “feminism,” nonetheless enables her
movement “beyond.”59 That this “beyond” communicates with positions we
have been mapping is suggested by her “Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant
and the New Discourse of the Antilles”: “This new terrain and perspective
was to define the Antillean educated elite, opening them/us onto the possi-
bility of a new intellectual front, outside the orthodox ‘fronts’ of Marxism, lib-
eral nationalism, and feminism.”60 This new space and location is as much an
outside as it is a “demonic ground,” an unrecognized foundation instantiated
by a figure like “Caliban’s ‘woman.’”61
Wynter comes to the positions she takes through a career that parallels
that of many Caribbean intellectuals of her generation. A year younger than
Lamming, she, like him, left the Caribbean for Europe. For her, as for him,
the 1930s worker uprisings were decisive events. As she puts it in an extra-
ordinary interview conducted by David Scott, “that movement determined
everything I was going to be or have been” (hence, her break with Marxism
nonetheless conserves it as well, although not in some entirely doctrinaire
form).62 Her 1962 novel The Hills of Hebron traces various post–World War I
social movements that were precursors to the uprisings of the 1930s. Her
time in Europe was, as it was for Lamming, a period of discovery of “what
it was to be this new thing: a Jamaican, a West Indian” (“Interview,” 130).
Like Lamming, she quickly came to see the ways in which social uprising
was co-opted by the emergent black bourgeoisie and nationalist groups. Like
Lamming’s Trumper, she came to understand the contours of “race” better by
comparing the U.S. system of stark black/white opposition to the more com-
plex equilibrations of color and class in the Caribbean. Wynter refers often to
Lamming and to other notable figures of her generation, such as Fanon and
Edouard Glissant; conversely, she was recognized immediately by her con-
temporaries as a major intellectual force in her own right.63
Although Wynter has been a playwright and a novelist (as well as a dancer
and an actress), she has also (unlike Lamming) briefly worked in the govern-
ment in her native Jamaica. Her central career has been in academia: At
the University of London, she specialized in Spanish Golden Age literature;
subsequently she took up a teaching post in that field at the University of the
West Indies in Jamaica. In the 1970s, she came to the United States, holding
positions first at the University of California, San Diego, and then at Stanford,
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 65

from which she retired after teaching there for some twenty years. The move
to the United States enabled her to branch out from her “field” (in which she
has published a number of essays) and into the broader terrain mapped in
the numerous essays she has published since the 1980s as she has pursued a
project whose aim is nothing less than “to rethink the origins of the modern
world, and with it, the origins of different categories of people.”64 For her, the
novelty she seeks to articulate is, as it is for Lamming or C. L. R. James or
Fernández Retamar—or, indeed, for Glissant, as she quotes and glosses his
project—based in colonialism: “[B]ecause Antillean societies ‘did not pre-exist
the colonial act, but were literally the creation of that act,’ one cannot ‘speak
of structures disturbed by colonialism, of traditions that have been uprooted’”
(“Beyond the Word,” 643). This refusal of pristine precolonial traditions, how-
ever, is not a refusal of Africa or of “race,” since the springboard for a beyond
follows from the new beginning of the colonial venture, which, Wynter never
forgets, was also the beginning of a new era of denigration institutionalized
in slavery and the plantation system. Extending Glissant, Wynter takes
Shakespeare’s Caliban “as a symbol of the first ‘native’ or nihilated (néan-
tisé) peoples.” She seizes upon Trumper’s “new word” in In the Castle of My
Skin and upon his articulation of a position beyond and outside the position
of “man” as her platform for a thinking beyond the categorical and on to the
new ground of the “radical alterity” announced in the refusal of the rights
of man.65 Her search, by means of “Caliban’s ‘Woman,’” is for “a new ‘model’
projected from a new ‘native’ standpoint” (BMM, 364), launched, that is, from
a site of negation that is literally unimaginable in The Tempest, “Caliban’s
physiognomically complementary mate” (BMM, 360). Phrased that way, it
might appear that Wynter is merely demanding representation of the black
woman, that the plot she seeks opposes mixture and would further racial
division and heteronormativity. But in fact, her “model” exceeds all those nor-
mative assumptions. Indeed, in “‘A Different Kind of Creature,’” Wynter chal-
lenges créolité and proponents of mestizaje as insufficiently radical, by which
she seems to mean that such programs, unrooted from the nonnormative po-
sition of negation, aim at a false homogeneity akin to the “neoliberal human-
ist piety of multiculturalism” that she deplores and that does not mark out
for her a path to a position “beyond.”66
To understand Wynter’s radical thought and the place of her reading of
The Tempest in it, it is crucial to see that she reads the play as an index to a
global transformation that begins for her in the Renaissance.67 In “Beyond
Miranda’s Meanings,” she is intent on one piece of a complex system that
she has sketched in numerous essays, mapping how racial difference came to
be installed as a categorical difference that overrode, rewrote, and re-placed
gender difference: “Caliban, as an incarnation of a new category of the human,
that of the subordinated ‘irrational’ and ‘savage’ native is now constituted as
the lack of the ‘rational’ Prospero, and the now capable-of-rationality Miranda,
 66 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

by the Otherness of his/its physiognomic ‘monster’ difference” (BMM, 358).

This is why Miranda’s gender is no guarantee of difference in terms of ra-
cial positioning.68 As Wynter understands it, the medieval binary of spirit/
flesh was easily assimilable to the binarism of gender, just as it was also
allied to divisions between the clergy and laity. For her, the “discovery” of
Columbus is very literally a global event of vast displacements in which the
“non-homogeneity of the human,” first mapped in distinctions between spirit
and flesh or man and woman (“1492,” 36), underwent a crucial secularizing
permutation. She insists that when Columbus broke with a vision of the
limits of the habitable world and Copernicus similarly declared that the
world was made for the sake of humans (rather than for God), a new terrain
of the human arose, one that divided persons not so much by gender as by
rational capacity: “[W]ith the shift to the secular, the primary code of differ-
ence now became that between ‘men’ and ‘natives,’ with the traditional ‘male’
and ‘female’ distinctions now coming to play a secondary—if none the less
powerful—reinforcing role” (BMM, 358). She in turn links this development
to the kinds of self-realization—detached from assurances of noble blood that
had supported earlier distinctions—that empowered the emergent bourgeois
class. A series of nonrational “native” Others arise as the placeholders of an
alterity that guarantees the differentials that secure the norm. As Wynter
sees it, the process is completed in the fully racialized schema that follows
upon Darwin and social Darwinism, in which the “wretched of the earth” are
produced as the final filiation of all that is not “Man,” a “dys-selected” group
that barely can be thought of as human.
Against this stark developmental pattern of what is ultimately a systems
theory approach to human history indebted to the early theorizations of
Gregory Bateson and to the more recent work of Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela, Wynter looks to “a new contestatory image of the human”
(“1492,” 50) as a way of completing the unfulfilled promise of humanism (the
promise lay in breaking into an expanded sense of the secular; its failure lay
in the proliferation of categories of irrational savagery ultimately capped by
the utterly irredeemable “nigger”). David Scott, in his interview with Wynter,
positions her between humanism and the antihumanism of Michel Foucault
(whose archaeology of “Man” in his The Order of Things is crucial for Wynter).
Scott reads Wynter’s project as one seeking to “re-enchant” humanism. Yet
Wynter places so much pressure on the figure of “Man” that secures human-
ism and liberalism that her desire to rethink the “human” must ultimately
lie outside the orbit of “humanism” even if it is somehow its fulfillment (this
rhythm, as we have noticed, also shapes her relationship to feminism and to
Marxism). “‘Nigger,’” she insists, is the “ultimate conceptual other to ‘Man’”
(“Columbus,” 153). Although Wynter wishes to overcome all forms of alterity,
and to reach, from her “demonic position,” a space beyond difference that can
be called “human,” such a position would necessarily break with the very bi-
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 67

naristic mode that, she insists, has been the underlying principle behind all
invidious distinctions that have secured the human (as “Man”) against non-
human Others. Even more pressing, binarism is the very principle by which
categories are formed. Wynter seeks nothing less than a move beyond the
categorical: “A science of human systems which takes the laws of figuration
of human systems as its objects of inquiry must, therefore, adopt a synthetic
rather than a categorized approach to its subject” (“Ceremony,” 44). In this
difficult project, the figure of “Caliban’s ‘woman’” stands for and in the “on-
tological absence” (BMM, 360) in which this future possibility resides. Where
she “is,” no “Man” has been before.
If, through the figure of Miranda, Wynter addresses feminist criticism
that too easily universalizes a notion of “woman” and inevitably whitens
and Europeanizes its subject, she is equally insistent that “patriarchy” (as a
universalizing concept) misses the political dimension of the play: Prospero
is not simply a father; he is also a monarch, and his actions need to be read
in the context of European state consolidation and colonial expansion. Thus,
she takes Irigaray to task, presumably for Irigaray’s focus on classical and
psychoanalytic texts whose dehistoricized categories of gender are blind to
the historical transformation that Wynter seeks to outline. “If, before the
sixteenth century, what Irigaray terms as ‘patriarchal discourse’ had erected
itself on the ‘silenced ground’ of women, from then on, the new primarily
silenced ground . . . would be that of the majority population-groups of the
globe” (BMM, 363). Replacing the “ground” of “woman” with “the majority
population” indicates one reason why Wynter is not happy with the designa-
tion “minority.” Further noteworthy in this formulation is the way “Caliban’s
‘woman’” serves as an alternative to the structure of desire in The Tempest,
where every male character’s desire—whether he be a prince, a plebe, or a
native—is, as she puts it, “soldered” (BMM, 361) onto Miranda. Wynter there-
by suggests that the desire for “Caliban’s ‘woman’” would not be assimilable
to the desire for Miranda articulated in the play—including by Caliban when
he incites Stephano and Trinculo by comparing the incomparable to what he
can compare her to, his mother:

I never saw a woman

But only Sycorax, my dam, and she;
But she as far surpasseth Sycorax
As great’st doth least.
(3.2.98–101)

This alternative desire is based in the history of slavery as it unfolds in

Shakespeare’s era, when it was considered more expeditious to reproduce
“natives” through replacements of live Africans for dead ones than to foster
conditions of life in the New World that would enable sexual reproduction.
 68 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

From this, Wynter implicitly fetches the strong sense that “reproduction” is
not only or always a matter of sexual reproduction. As a figure for alternatives
to the heterosexual plots of The Tempest, “Caliban’s ‘woman’” figures new
populations, new alliances, and new ways of thinking, possibilities “beyond
the ‘master discourse’ . . . and its sub/versions. Beyond Miranda’s meanings”
(BMM, 366). The orthographic play of the slash in “sub/versions” expresses
Wynter’s sense of the complicities of (white) feminism with male and colonial
dominance, while the “beyond” here beckons beyond binaristic overturning,
beyond the reoccupation of the same terrain by those formerly excluded (a
process, Wynter argues, that always produces new exclusions), toward some-
thing genuinely new, the “wholly new thing” glanced at in Penelope’s diary
ruminations, the “different kind of creature” that Trumper announces.
In refusing the identity politics that attach themselves to race or gender
or sexuality, Wynter does not mean to deny their pertinence to the struggle
she imagines and articulates. Rather, she wants to drive all such local “-isms”
to a recognition of the new population of which “Caliban’s ‘woman’” forms a
vanguard, a population that certainly would include those oppressed by race,
class, gender, or “sexual preference” (BMM, 359). Stunningly, these constitute
the “majority population groups.” In the history that Wynter traces, racial
exclusion serves as the primary site for the worldwide social suffering that
she sees as the result of the discourses she traces—the “‘industrial waste’ . . .
of the Black and Latino lives of the United States’ inner cities, as well as of
American Indian lives on the reservation . . . and their global counterparts,
the jobless/welfareless denizens of the shantytowns/favela archipelagoes of
the Third and Fourth Worlds” (“Columbus,” 147)—and as central to the intel-
lectual project of Othering that she seeks to dismantle. Its privilege lies in
the fact that “race” explains the contours of modernity best, as the endpoint
of the transformations that Wynter traces.
In her theorizations, Wynter draws from and extends the work of figures
like Fanon, Césaire, and Lamming (and Elsa Goveia, an important social
theorist and historian of the West Indies who is rarely mentioned in the
same breath with these founding figures).69 Her reach toward synthesis is
remarkable, embracing a bewildering set of theorists of every kind and of
many disciplines (Foucault and Jacques Derrida, but also social scientists,
biologists, systems theorists, and historians) and formulated in sentences of
remarkable length and in vocabularies that shift from clause to clause as
they enact the desire to go beyond the regime of “Man.” Understandably, one
can find her lacking in specificity about forms of difference, can feel disabled
as she refuses to ally herself with specific groups, and can worry that her
attempt at a new regime of the human may fall prey to a suspect universal-
ism.70 Nonetheless, the impulse “beyond” in Wynter is recognizably one that
points to the social movements of the 1960s, where recognitions of oppression
were imbricated with each other.71 The call from the colonized and the ra-
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 69

cially oppressed extended to women and to gays; Wynter’s work reinvigorates

that desire for connections.
In terms of my own project, certainly a far more limited one than
Wynter’s, the crucial connection lies in her linking of the modern racial
binarism to notions of biological difference and of the natural, which leads
her explicitly to call into question again and again “allegedly ‘natural’ erotic
preference” (BMM, 365).72 Through “Caliban’s ‘woman’” Wynter posits “an
alternative sexual-erotic model of desire” (360). Wynter is not writing as or
from the position of gay politics any more than she is positioning herself as a
feminist; from her “demonic” standpoint, one in line with the argument being
advanced in these pages, Wynter affirms the ontologically untenable ground
of a “‘monster’ difference” (358) that exceeds even Caliban’s (he is, after all,
represented). “Caliban’s ‘woman’” is so unthought as not even to be imagined
as the irrational opposite of a monstrous mother or demonic father; she is
an unimaginable outside, an unimaginable site of desires, an unimaginable
object of desire.
What Wynter seeks to describe through this figure is not an individual
but a population, a social production that is itself productive. Thinking her
way toward and as “Caliban’s ‘woman,’” Wynter also displays the thinking
of a Caliban that would override gendered identification. She aims for a
radical alterity, a utopic no place that is at least conceptually possible, a
thinkable site to rethink the era of “Man,” impelling “both the Antillean and
the human subject beyond our present ‘order of discourse’ and episteme into
‘realms’ beyond ‘conventional reason’ . . . a shift from ontogeny to sociogeny,
from l’Etre to l’étant, and the new frontiers of being and knowing that such a
shift opens . . . the gift of that Other America” (“Beyond the Word,” 645–46).
Wynter writes “towards the epochal threshold of a new post-modern and
post-Western mode of cognitive inquiry; one which goes beyond the limits of
our present ‘human sciences,’ to constitute itself as a new science of human
‘forms of life’” (BMM, 356).
In this overarching project “beyond,” one can be overwhelmed by Wynter’s
systems of multiplying binarisms and can mistake them for a series of paral-
lels. It is thus crucial to register that as these continually replace each other,
they also displace each other. Miranda’s “woman” can function alongside
Prospero’s “man” since both consolidate as “Man” against the position of
“native.” But “native” too, as the Other of “Man,” does not have a place for
“Caliban’s ‘woman,’” who is not merely outside the gender category but
is even displaced when she is unmarked and included /subordinated and
made invisible in the racializing category. (Wynter does not pause over the
disappearance and disavowal of the black woman and her desire in Lamming
and Fanon, but she nonetheless marks out the possibility of seeing that exclu-
sion.) Gender fractures into new differences that are not themselves sym-
metrical with previous binarisms; the call from the position of “Caliban’s
 70 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

‘woman,’” however much it is prompted by Lamming’s Trumper, is nonethe-

less one of radical alterity, a beyond even beyond the “Rights of Man” that
Lamming posits from a race/class position that is also, as we have seen, lim-
ited by his masculinism.
Wynter’s reading of C. L. R. James is probably the best place to see her
mobilizing the differentials, for she maps how “a system of color value ex-
isted side by side with capital value, education value, merit value, and labour
value” and insists that “to single out any of these factors was to negate the
complex laws of the functioning of the social order” (“Beyond the Categories,”
69). The result was “multiple permutations” that give rise to “multiple iden-
tities” that go under the singular/plural name “of being a Negro—of being
Caliban” (68):

Given the pluri-consciousness of the Jamesian identity—a Negro yet British,

a colonial native yet culturally a part of the public school code, attached to the
cause of the proletariat yet a member of the middle class, a Marxist yet a Puritan,
an intellectual who plays cricket, of African descent yet Western, a Trotskyist
and Pan-Africanist, a Marxist yet a supporter of black studies, a West Indian
majority black yet an American minority black—it was evident that the Negro
question . . . could not be solved by an either/or. (69)

From these multiples emerge, for Wynter, the possibility of a praxis that
seizes upon them and that grasps the totality arising from “the experimental
categories of the coerced, the non-norm” (83).

THIS ISLAND ’S MINE

“Caliban’s ‘woman’”—or, as Wynter often refers to “her,” his “mate”—offers
a figure of nonnormativity: Beyond gender as a Western formation, this
“woman” cannot find a place under the definition of “woman”; located beyond
the normativities of gender that place Miranda as the endpoint of male de-
sire, this “woman” might be the object of desires not to be aligned with the
sanctioned forms of heterosexuality that support exchanges of property and
power; as “mate,” this “woman” even might be “male” and the object of homo-
sexual desire outside the orbit of homosocial relations.
Wynter does not privilege the sexual terms that her analysis prompts.
Although her figure of “Caliban’s ‘woman’” is not explicitly prompted by the
sodomite and witch in Shakespeare’s play, it nonetheless seems to me congru-
ent with those cross-gendered, racialized “monsters.” I turn now to the work
of another Caribbean writer whose deployments of The Tempest come closer
to the figures offered by the play. Michelle Cliff, like Wynter, is a Jamaican
(although some fifteen years younger than Wynter) and has been located
for many years in the United States. Her writing will be a leading example
throughout the remaining pages of this part of Tempest in the Caribbean
because it best realizes the productive energies to be found in the excoriated
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 71

sodomite and his mother.73 Like Wynter (or Toni Morrison or Paule Marshall
or Gloria Naylor, for that matter), Cliff is not an author considered in the
usual surveys.74 Nonetheless, she too can be understood to widen the terms
of identification that have been supposed possible in relation to The Tempest.
Beside Wynter’s evocation of “Caliban’s ‘woman’” could be put the figure
Cliff identifies in the title of her 1991 essay, “Caliban’s Daughter: The Tempest
and the Teapot.”75 As “Caliban’s daughter,” Cliff takes her place within the
majority population group that Wynter imagines. Cliff ’s genealogical project
involves several forbidden mixtures. Cliff labels the portion of her life that
culminated in her achieving an M.Phil. at the Warburg Institute (for a thesis
in Renaissance history and culture) as “Ariel,” the fulfillment of the destiny
written on her light skin as the “child who was chosen . . . to represent the
colonizer’s values” (“Caliban’s Daughter,” 40). Repudiating the eloquence that
required her to negotiate “six Western languages—five living, one dead” (38)
and renaming that accomplishment “speechlessness,” Cliff moves to reclaim
an identity she was taught to reject (to recall the title of her first published
volume of prose and poetry, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise
[1980]). The name for this racial/sexual subject position is “Caliban.”76
Drawing upon and citing Fernández Retamar’s “Caliban,” Cliff takes from
it a dialectic that, as we have seen, Fernández Retamar does not always
sustain, summoning the multiple and incommensurate parts that form her
identity as an “Afro-Caribbean,” which includes, as she elaborates, “Indian
(Arawak and Carib), African, European,” “both Caliban and Ariel” (“Caliban’s
Daughter,” 40). Thus, in this formulation, Cliff ’s genealogical project is simi-
lar to Lamming’s double paternity: Caliban’s daughter is also Ariel’s. Indeed,
going further, this daughter, crossing gender identification, and multiplying
herself, is “both Caliban and Ariel. And underneath it all, the granddaughter
of Sycorax, precolonial female, landscape, I(s)land: I land” (40).
The island that is hers she claims in Caliban’s gesture, claiming it is
his/ hers thanks to Sycorax. The genealogy that Cliff traces is ultimately a
maternal line; although no male counterpart for Sycorax is named, her iden-
tification is through Caliban (and Ariel), although here no mother is provided
for this daughter. This is, therefore, a genealogy that only looks heterosexual.
Eliding heterosexual couplings, it nonetheless glances at the violence these
elisions register. For, as Cliff makes clear, Clare Savage, the autobiographical
heroine of her first two novels, Abeng (1984) and No Telephone to Heaven
(1987), names the crossroads of the complex terrain of identity mapped in
this genealogy. “Clare” signifies the light-skinned privilege that affiliates her
with the colonizer; “Savage,” her heritage in a “wildness” she has been asked
to “bleach” out. That bleaching is in fact the sign on her skin of the sex forced
on black female ancestors by white male rapists. Cliff proposes an analogy
between “the past which has been bleached from her mind” and “the rapes
of her grandmothers [that] bleached her skin” (“Caliban’s Daughter,” 45). So
 72 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

behind the figure of Clare Savage lies the miscegenation that The Tempest
misrepresents as something Caliban would have done (Lamming’s “Lie”), the
fundamental misrecognition of sexual violence that, as we have noted, can
get elided in too easy celebrations of the mestizo. The broken genealogy Cliff
offers breaks with these violent beginnings of the colonial subject to imagine
and remember other affiliations, blackening what has been bleached.
These identifications cross gender, and not only in this daughter of Caliban
who nonetheless is Caliban. For the grandmother who serves as the site of
primordial identification—“the forest, . . . Sycorax, the precolonial female”
(“Caliban’s Daughter,” 39)—is an “old woman . . . liberated from the femi-
nine role” (even though she is a grandmother) who “may claim masculinity
as hers” (47). Hence, in a parallel move, reviewing her childhood reading,
Cliff asks provocatively, “What does it mean when the Jamaican tomboy
says, ‘I am Heathcliff?’ Or finds herself drawn to Bertha when she is told
to identify with Jane?” (43–44), scenes of reading and “wrong” identification
reiterated in Abeng when the twelve-year-old Clare argues with her father
that Ivanhoe should have chosen the dark, Jewish Rebecca rather than the
fair, Christian Rowena, or when she wonders, reading Great Expectations,
whether she should identify with Miss Havisham or with Magwitch, that is,
whether she should see herself in terms of gender or racialization. Caliban,
Sycorax, Bertha, Heathcliff, King Kong: All are sites in “Caliban’s Daughter”
for the monstrous identity that Cliff reclaims crossing gender and species to
claim her dark self. As she notes, the child chosen to represent colonial values
was meant to affirm the difference between “male and female” (40), a colonial
propriety violated as Cliff seeks the mixed origins that account for her “own
peculiar self” (40), an individuality composed of “everything I am and have
been, sometimes civilized, sometimes ruinate” (40), an individual indivisible
from the multiple. The I that lands is a plural singularity: I(s) land.
The primordial black woman (“Sycorax”) with whom Cliff makes her most
profound identification and who (like Shakespeare’s character) cannot be
confined within gendered definitions could be contextualized by recalling
Lamming’s nomination of G’s mother who fathered him, in In the Castle of
My Skin. It has been the task of many women writing after Lamming to rep-
resent more fully what he merely gestures toward, the experience of women
in privation nonetheless carving out new spaces of possibility. These father-
ing mothers are not just figures of speech. It is commonplace, for example, to
note the matrifocality of Caribbean households, a partial reflection of the fact
that some 70 percent of children born in the region are not the offspring of
legally constituted marriages.77 Lower-class women are often involved in non-
marital sexual relationships with men. Middle-class married men often father
children on the side, and, indeed, fathering children (not necessarily sup-
porting them) is a prerequisite for normative masculinity across classes. The
“bastard” condition that Lamming hails through Caliban is, legally speaking,
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 73

that of most Caribbeans. Thus, many grow up in households headed by such

“fathering mothers.” Equally to Cliff ’s point, mothering in these situations
is not confined to the biological mother; extensive networks of women raise
children. This begins to account for the elision of the “actual” mother in the
genealogy of Caliban’s daughter.
Rhonda Cobham, in “Revisioning our Kumblas,” studies three foundation-
al texts by Caribbean women—Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey (1970),
Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980) and Paule
Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983)—for the ways they represent
social rather than biological mothering. The social norm of the nonnuclear
family is furthered by these extended networks of women. And although
some of these women may be or may have been mothers, the mothering that
these novels depict also is a fathering, “eroding boundaries between gendered
attributes” (“Revisioning,” 307), much as Cliff ’s claims to identity embrace
both Caliban and Sycorax. To account for this, Cobham points to the figure
that is so important for Cliff ’s theorization as well as for her representa-
tional strategies in the novels about Clare Savage: the old woman “past child-
bearing age when, according to many West African traditions, the gender dis-
tinction between men and women no longer matters” (“Revisioning,” 309). The
survival of African social organization is one explanation for this figure, but
Cobham also follows Angela Davis on the experiences of African women en-
slaved in the New World. Precisely through their nonpersonhood—the refus-
al to them of normative femininity, both in their domestic roles (often raped
into motherhood) and in their roles as laborers alongside the men—these
women elided the boundaries between male and female. The importance of
such discursive claims to African tradition and the history of enslavement is
that they deny the Western assumptions that would associate such nonpatri-
archal forms of domesticity with cultural failure.78
This erosion of gendered boundaries, as Cobham emphasizes, entails the
elision between heterosexual and lesbian activity and makes moot the ques-
tion of sexual identity. Such elisions can be socially precarious: Economic
survival often is at stake, and stigma can be launched against “aberrant”
sexual activity and refusals of gendered behaviors tied to compulsory hetero-
sexuality. As Cliff puts her version of this point—“to be masculine in this
context, in the context of the Caribbean, is not to be ‘mannish’ but to have
access to self-definition” (“Caliban’s Daughter,” 48)—she answers the notion
of gender propriety that can be voiced, especially by those claiming middle-
class neocolonial positions, by separating “masculine” and “mannish.” If mas-
culinity is definitionally a form of self-possession whereas femininity, in its
most normative mode, is a form of dependence, it is in the relations between
women that refuse such dependence that a selfhood can be formed, one that
risks the label “mannish.” This self-identity in Cliff can be compared to the
self-identity of the women in the stories Makeda Silvera recounts in her
 74 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

essay on Jamaican “man royals” and “sodomites.” Silvera recalls above all her
great-grandmother, her grandmother, and her great-aunts as models for the
“strong,” self-defining woman she becomes. As she interviews her mother and
grandmother, they tell her of the many women they knew growing up who
had sex with other women but who also raised families, women who slept
with other women as well as with men.
Silvera’s experiences echo further: Patricia Powell, a novelist who has
published three novels in the past decade, each of which focuses on aspects
of same-sex behavior and identity in Jamaican settings (Powell’s place of
origin), has remarked in an interview on the role that her great-aunt played
in her upbringing.79 In Powell’s first novel, Me Dying Trial (1993), which was
originally her honors thesis at Wellesley College, the focus is on a woman
trying to be “strong,” attempting to find sexual fulfillment both in marriage
and outside it, trying to be a mother, but also seeking independence economi-
cally and intellectually; all these are in conflict. In the course of the novel,
in order to advance toward these goals, Gwennie abandons her children for
various periods of time. One of them, her daughter Peppy, the product of a
brief and passionate extramarital affair, is sent to live with her great-aunt
Ma Cora, who runs a rum shop. Although Ma Cora has been married and
has had children, in her shop she trades drinks and gossip with the male
clientele. Ma Cora has raised numerous children, an example of the social
mothering Cobham describes. Moreover, she has spent her entire life work-
ing. She raises Peppy in the rum shop; at the age of four, she is drinking and
cursing; by age five, she is behind the counter, selling. Housework is not her
domain. When Peppy approaches adolescence, Ma Cora attempts to restrain
the tomboy; as in Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey, such restraint puts boys off
limits, and although its aim is sexual propriety, it can nonetheless further
nonheterosexual choices.
Powell dedicates Me Dying Trial “For Aunt Nora,” making the autobio-
graphical connection between her great-aunt and Ma Cora all but explicit.
Among Ma Cora’s teachings to Peppy is instruction that the Bible is not the
last word on female sodomites; indeed, when she tells Peppy, of a villager,
that “Miss Clementine was sodomite” (96), she does so nonjudgmentally. By
the end of the novel, Peppy is still alienated from her mother, but she has
also found a female lover, something the novel presents in a muted way. Open
declarations of lesbian identity would certainly not lead to reconciliation
with her mother, whose attempts at self-realization and respectability in the
United States are articulated in part through homophobic outbursts. The
problematic path that Gwennie chooses toward self-respect (and a sexual
relationship with a man) is contrasted with Peppy’s choice.
For Silvera and Powell, the female homosociality highlighted in novels
like those of Brodber and Hodge (both focus on a young woman’s develop-
ment in a colonial society in extended family situations, with various models
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 75

for female behavior) points the way toward a “lesbian” identity that might
be said (following Cobham) to characterize women in the Caribbean more
generally, especially lower-class women for whom the institution of mar-
riage and the parameters of normative heterosexuality seem remote—are,
in fact, a class sexuality derivative of colonial society. Femininity is so tied
to these norms that for Cliff (whose novels locate Clare’s dilemma inside just
such a colonial marital framework), for a woman to be “masculine” means
the repudiation of colonial gender and translates into the ability “to claim
that part of the self associated with the nonfeminine, whatever that might
be” (“Caliban’s Daughter,” 48), a hesitation in definition that leads Cliff to
the ways Charlotte Brontë figures Bertha’s nonfemininity as transgressive
of gendered and human definition: “I find myself thinking of the notion of
the lesbian as monster, marauder; the man/woman in the closet” (“Caliban’s
Daughter,” 48).
Cliff rewrites Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic
and its normative femininity as she considers what female identification
with the figure of the black woman entails, what it means “to love another
woman—psychically and physically—in the Caribbean landscape” (“Caliban’s
Daughter,” 48). Of some interest here—and certainly a sign that Cliff ’s think-
ing moves well beyond the analogies offered in Penelope’s diary entry about
the Jew, the homosexual, the Negro, and the worker in Of Age and Innocence,
and furthers the project represented by Wynter’s intervention—is that Cliff
has no desire to call what she is describing lesbianism. That term for sexual
arrangements she marks as denoting a particular Western form of female-
female sexuality. This serves to dehomogenize notions of homosexuality, to
deny universality to such social formations—a belief that almost always
assumes that homosexuality Western-style is homosexuality tout court.80
Hence—by way of Brontë and Shakespeare, through various forms of iden-
tification that resist gendered boundaries and proprieties of identification—
Cliff moves toward a “native” sexuality that does not fit within the Western
terms “heterosexual” or “homosexual.” Forcefully, she repudiates the notion
that “one woman loving another woman” can only emblematize “Western
decadence,” that such relations only serve to show “the seduction of the trop-
ics by Europe” (48).
It is just such a charge that Silvera reports when she describes telling
her grandmother that she is a lesbian. It is “a white people ting,” her grand-
mother says, but as Silvera coaxes her to tell stories of the women she knew
years ago, she displays the fact that such a statement “was a strong denial
of many ordinary Black working-class women she knew” (“Man Royals,” 97),
women for whom lesbian experience was commonplace. Cliff ’s intervention
speaks clearly to the charge of “Western” imposition to be found in Fanon’s
Black Skin, White Masks, and it also seeks to reclaim what Fanon denies, that
explicit forms of same-sex sexuality exist in the Caribbean. As Alexander
 76 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

points out (“Erotic Autonomy,” 85–86), Caribbeans who claim that same-sex
sexuality is not native to the region are often repeating a colonial plot: In
answer to the charge that “they are all sodomites,” colonial regimes and their
neocolonial extensions seek a form of Western legitimacy based in the repudia-
tion of same-sex sexuality. The nostalgic glance in contemporary Caribbean
rhetoric to a time before Western imposition of sexual decadence is often
nothing more than a sign of continuing colonization, a narrative that Silvera
interrupts by insisting that her grandmother recall stories about women she
knew rather than biblical injunctions about world-destroying sodomites.
To find a name for this existence, Cliff jokingly proposes “Trinidadian”
(“Caliban’s Daughter,” 49) rather than “lesbian.” Although Trinidadian cul-
ture is far more open to alternative forms of expresson than is Jamaican,
Cliff does not have in mind the cross-dressing institutionalized in Carnival,
for example; rather, she points to the Trinidadian writer Dionne Brand
and cites approvingly Brand’s invocations, in her sequence of poems “Hard
against the Soul,” of the figure of the grandmother as a site of desire and
of identification.81 Although Cliff does not register this, native names do, in
fact, abound. Audre Lorde, pointing back to the island of Carriacou, from
which her mother emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, seizes upon
the term “zami” to rename herself: “Zami. A Carriacou name for women who
work together as friends and lovers.” 82 These women are those “who survived
the absence of their sea-faring men easily, because they came to love each
other, past the men’s returning” (Zami, 14). Silvera adds “zami” to her lexicon
of “man royal” and “sodomite” in her story “Baby”: “‘I know what I am,’ con-
tinued Baby, ‘I’m a lesbian. A zami. A sodomite. A black-skinned woman.’”83
This conjunction of race and sexuality parallels Cliff ’s move to decouple
“lesbian” from “Trinidadian.” It echoes Lorde’s discomfort when her white
lesbian friends in the 1950s claim “we’re all niggers” (Zami, 203), not because
Lorde seeks to hierarchize difference but because she knows that differences
of race and sexuality cannot simply be translated one into the other.84 Within
the lesbian culture of the period she describes, only white women were ca-
pable of playing “femme”; black women were supposed to be “butch.” Lorde
finds herself as sister/outsider to these arrangements of lesbian culture even
as she seeks to affirm her lesbianism and her race, and she finds herself op-
posing mandatory role playing as she affirms her desire “to be both man and
woman” (Zami, 7).
Indeed, Lorde seeks to extend “lesbian” identity even to her mother, from
whom she fetches her sense of strength and anger, if not her mother’s way of
expressing it, which was often to inflict upon her children the demands of op-
pressive racist powers she could not resist. This provides yet another frame
for understanding the absence of the mother from Cliff ’s genealogical project
(it is even more legible in Abeng). Brand too has written about the effects of
maternal self-hatred passed on to daughters in In Another Place, Not Here
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 77

(230–31). It has often been the mother’s task to take up (often against self-
interest or the realities of social positioning) the work of social division that
sends “chosen” daughters—or sons—on a colonial path. This is a situation
we might recall in Lamming’s representation of G’s mother, promoting G’s
estrangement from the other villagers as his passport to success but also
thereby ushering him into the kind of complex identity-crossing situations
that Wynter analyzes in the work of C. L. R. James, situations that only mul-
tiply in the writing and experiences of black women in the Caribbean.85
If Cliff cannot provide a “native” name for her racial/sexual identity, it is
in part because such “native” names have been excoriated. In Coping with
Poverty, Hymie Rubenstein reports of the villagers he studied in St. Vincent
that “sexual activity in Leeward Village takes only one socially approved
form, with bulling [male homosexuality] and zammie [lesbianism] consid-
ered nasty” (257). Although he details the many nonmarital forms of sexual
contact, including strong homosocial groupings, as among these socially ap-
proved forms of heterosexuality, he takes the villagers’ dismissal of “nasty”
behavior as the last word on the subject—as if there were no “bullers” or
“zammies” in their midst, failing to consider the possibility of their coincident
existence with approved forms of same-sex bonding. “Madivine. Friendling.
Zami. How Carriacou women love each other is legend in Grenada, and so is
their strength and beauty” (Lorde, Zami, 14). Against Rubenstein, against the
village suppositions—which, as Silvera’s interviews make clear, can be dis-
mantled by an interrogator who wants such truths to be articulated—Lorde
suggests networks of women, crossing islands from Carriacou to Grenada
and beyond, to the Harlem where she grew up.
“Zami” is a creolization of French “ami,” indeed of the elision in the plural,
les amies, “the friends.” “Zami” names in the singular an inevitable pluraliza-
tion, relationships between women that cannot simply be called lesbian and
that cannot automatically preclude a sexual tie either.86 Its social meaning
can be situated through the only ethnographical work of which I am aware—
conducted by Gloria Wekker—that has investigated the sexualization of ties
between women in the Caribbean.87 Wekker studies “mati work” among poor
black urban women in Suriname. “Mati” means “friend,” “mate”—the term
Wynter applies to “Caliban’s ‘woman’”—and may have originated as a term
for male shipmates. “Mati are women who typically have children [as do both
Lorde and Silvera], who may be in a variety of relationships with men (e.g.,
marriage, concubinage, visiting relationships) and who also have sexual rela-
tionships with women” (“One Finger,” 336). The sociality she studies, Wekker
opines, may have African roots (“One Finger,” 332), or it may have been
developed with the beginning of the slave trade (“‘What’s Identity,’” 122).
It is attested in early-twentieth-century anthropological literature (“Mati-
ism,” 149) and, Wekker affirms, continues as a strong and unstigmatized
possibility in Suriname, where, she notes, following Lorde, the strength of
 78 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

female homosocial bonds could allow one to claim that all women might be
termed “lesbian” (“Mati-ism,” 153). Like Cliff, Wekker contrasts this to a form
of “lesbianism” among middle-class women, who affirm an identity and class
politics that derive from Western models. Unlike such women, Wekker claims,
mati do not understand themselves as exclusively “lesbian” in identity or in
orientation, and they regard the “self” as a more multiple, nonindividuating,
communal, and non-gender-exclusive phenomenon (“One Finger,” 331). Mati
thereby oppose not only Western-style “lesbianism” but also forms of norma-
tive femininity that presume female dependence upon men, “middle-class
values like legal marriage, monogamy, the heterosexual contract, one man fa-
thering all one’s children” (“‘What’s Identity,’” 123). Mati sociality resists the
heterosexualizing political economy that Alexander studies in the neocolonial
regimes of the Caribbean, remaining as a sign of a “counterhegemonic memory
of an insurgent sexuality” (“Erotic Autonomy,” 86) that legislators now, like
colonialists in the past (or like Shakespeare in The Tempest), seek to foreclose
and abominate.
Although Wekker limits her focus to one group of women in one locale,
it certainly seems possible to generalize from her example to that of other
poor black women in the Caribbean. Nonetheless, these forms of sociality
were not likely to have been readily available to an author of middle-class
origins like Cliff, who seeks to break the bounds of her colonial formation, or
to someone like Brand, whose affirmations by way of the old black woman
are countered by the ways economic deprivation serves to divide women
from each other. In Brand’s writing, marked by intense alienation from any
locale—from her native Trinidad as well as from Toronto, where she has
lived since her adolescence—political purpose in support of the poor, espe-
cially poor black women, cuts across and overrides the possibility of same-sex
ties. Overwhelmed by the despair of heterosexual imperatives and capitalist
economies, Brand often represents lesbianism as simply “not enough” and not
an answer. For her, femaleness is so marked by privation as to make it seem
impossible for there to be female socialities capable of any political effective-
ness. Brand’s politics are the bleak counterpart to an utter obliviousness, like
Fernández Retamar’s, to gender and sexuality as counterforces; they echo with
the 1950s of Lorde’s Zami, where “politics,” Lorde suggests, meant opposing
McCarthyism, and neither race nor sexuality had, in that sense, a politics.
The difficulty Brand faces speaks to the current replay of that earlier
era: neocolonial regimes in the Caribbean; neoconservative politics in the
United States and Canada; ongoing black nationalist exclusions of women
and gays (a point that Silvera, for one, makes eloquently); the failure of many
gay male, feminist, and lesbian feminist groups to encompass the question
and experience of race. Brand’s is not ultimately the stance that Cliff takes,
however much she may hail her as sister outsider. Brand’s writing positions
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 79

herself as victim, despite the kind of assurance she voices, for instance in a
recent interview: “I think for me the voice is unshakeable: it can say anything
it wants, with certainty,” where she points to the women of her youth as in-
spiration, “the kind of women who drink, socialize openly and are completely
frank about their sexuality,” as the interviewer puts it. “I grew up with
these women; my aunts were those women,”88 Brand replies, and it is to her
aunts “Phyllis and Joan—to their big hands, to their bigger laughter” that
In Another Place, Not Here is dedicated. Brand cautions that such strength
should not be confused with power, downplaying what she says her writing
can do. Cliff certainly does not shirk these difficulties, yet she continues to
find possibilities. In the essay “Object into Subject,” Cliff insists on revaluing
the agency of black women, and in Free Enterprise, she rewrites the history
of black resistance to include actual women who often have been ignored, to
draw them together across historical and geographical divides. Brand seems
to leave her subjects objects.89

. . . BY SYCORAX MY MOTHER
Cliff conjures her most powerful image in “Caliban’s Daughter,” of a “demonic
ground” of female masculinity and “lesbian” monstrosity, through the figure
of Nanny, the Maroon revolutionary reported to have routed the British in
Jamaican revolts. She “could catch a bullet between her buttocks and fire the
lead back at her attackers. She is the Jamaican Sycorax. The extent to which
you can believe in the powers of Nanny, that they are literal examples of her
Africanness and strength, represents the extent to which you have decolo-
nized your mind” (47). That Nanny’s anus epitomizes these powers should
not be overlooked, for this suggests that it is not biological reproduction that
serves to reproduce racial knowledge or self-knowledge. A connection formed
this way cannot be heterosexual either, as is evident in the genealogy Cliff
provides, at once historical and mythic, from Sycorax and Caliban, from a
Sycorax who is a Caliban to a Caliban who is a Sycorax.90 However much
Cliff reclaims a primordiality associated with an ur-mother and an ur-nature,
she does so in the spirit of a “deconstructivist, wild colonial girl” (42), as she
puts it, and the de-essentializing impulses in her essay forge the links that
allow movement across gender difference and recognition that conventional
gender is Western and colonializing. In this respect, Cliff ’s telling of Nanny’s
prowess could be contrasted to G’s story to the prostitute, late in Lamming’s
In the Castle of My Skin, about boys sharing a shit-smeared stick. G’s (and
Lamming’s) reticence about sex and meaning, about the stigmatized links be-
tween boys that might nonetheless house anticolonial and “native” energies,
is overcome by Cliff ’s Nanny, returning bullets shot from her buttocks.
But such a reclamation of identity is only hard-won and partial in Cliff,
as can be seen in Abeng, to which I now turn. Timothy Chin, in an essay on
 80 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

homosexual representation in Caribbean literature, points to the linkages

between Nanny and the character Mma Alli in Cliff ’s first novel. Mma Alli
“had never lain with a man,” only with women, yet her sisterhood embraced
“Black men” resisting colonial rule, thereby “inscribing a ‘proto-lesbian’
figure within the reconstructed mythology of an Afro-Caribbean past” that
Clare Savage must reclaim against the depredations of her upbringing as
a “colonized child.”91 As Chin points out, the relationship between Nanny,
the woman who “could catch a bullet between her buttocks” (Abeng, 14), and
Mma Alli, who made love to women (including Inez, the woman that a Savage
ancestor keeps as his forced mistress) as one way to “keep their bodies as
their own” (35), is not a biological one. Clare’s origins are not only a matter of
literal ancestors. Hence, late in the novel, the narrator says of Kitty, Clare’s
mother, that she “should have been the daughter of Inez and Mma Alli, and
Nanny too” (128). In one respect, Kitty is their descendant: She is a black
woman who attempts not to deny her racial identity. Nonetheless, she has
handed Clare over to her father as a child who, inheriting his green eyes and
light complexion, can pass as white. (As the novel makes clear, no one whose
history stretches back as far as the Savages could ever be white, and racial
differences in Jamaica, unlike in the United States, are a complex set of
taxonomies that juggle skin color, economic status, and other markers of so-
cial difference, like education.) Kitty has succumbed to colonial imperatives.
Indeed, her marriage was forced upon her, the result of an out-of-wedlock
pregnancy; Clare is the fruit of that union. “What choice did I have” (147), she
asks her mother, a question that is not just personal but ramifies to the class
and color regimes of Jamaica. At least within the family, Kitty has given up
the possibility of identifying with her black ancestors for the sake of further-
ing racist regimes. At twelve, as she is beginning to come to understand her
complex identity, Clare yearns “to suck her mother’s breasts” (54), as Mma
Alli does Inez’s. It is not only the broken mother-daughter relationship she
seeks to restore; it is also a relationship between black women imagined as
stretching back to Africa and the Maroon revolts headed by Nanny.
Kitty is estranged from her daughter, but she is also the product of es-
trangement from her mother, Miss Mattie, the potent grandmother of the
novel. Miss Mattie, daughter of a white woman who ran off with a black
servant, has a history of enforced labor, one in which attempts at economic
survival often precluded maternal concerns. “All her life Mattie Freeman had
fended for herself. Even in marriage” (142). In the countryside of St. Elizabeth,
she is regarded as a rich woman, owning a few acres of land and presiding
over a sharply divided social world of women who can enter her parlor and
participate in her prayer services and the poorer women who gather outside.
The designation “black woman” splits along the lines of class and property.
Clare spends summers with Miss Mattie, confined to the household, avoiding
these meetings in the parlor as she yearns to break out of the rigid confines
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 81

of gendered inactivity. (Miss Mattie allows her only a few tasks, none that
would sully her middle-class aspirations.) “Strength” goes hand in hand
with the enforcement of privileges. Yet Miss Mattie does have power—she is
a kind of “sorceress” (14), even if her powers are mundane—and Nanny too
was a “sorceress” (14). Miss Mattie has strength, but at a cost: the divisions
between her and the poor women of her community, between her and the
granddaughter being cultivated for a life beyond country confines, between
her and her daughter Kitty, herself divided. Kitty yearns for connections with
Blacks, had once dreamed of setting up a school in St. Elizabeth that would
have dispensed with the colonial curriculum, a dream cut short after her
marriage. She reaches out to black strangers but pushes aside the daughter
who will advance whiteness, as Kitty herself had, by marrying Boy Savage,
and reproducing him in Clare.
Handed over to Boy, Clare functions as an honorary son (8). Her light skin
is tantamount to a sex change. In Miss Mattie’s eyes, this explodes as an ac-
cusation when Clare steals a gun from her house in a misguided attempt to
seize male prerogatives. Clare is, Miss Mattie mutters, “[a] girl who seemed
to think she was a boy. Or white” (134). The novel poses as a genuine dilemma
the crossing between the masculinism of white privilege and the “mascu-
line” attempt to refuse the white privilege of a dependent femininity. These
gendered regimes are those of a middle class, or of a would-be middle class.
(It is Clare’s skin and her education, not actual economic status, that mark
her as middle-class.) These aspirations are most manifest in the novel in the
vicious racism of white “ladies” or of those positioned thanks to their skin
color or education in this “white” position (Clare’s teachers, and the woman
she is sent finally to live with). This model is held up to Clare by Kitty and
Miss Mattie. She endlessly hears reiterated the sentence, “‘Is jus’ no fe gal
pickney, dat’s all.’ She had heard this before—spoken in different ways” (57),
repeated injunctions policing her femininity. Refusals of this racialized,
classed, gender position prompt Clare’s search for the kind of strength associ-
ated with Nanny or Mma Alli and still dimly to be found in her grandmother.
Yet it is by no means simple to imagine how a girl with fair skin and green
eyes, a star pupil in the prestigious colonial school she attends, can find her
way to positions that are marked as black, lower-class, and nonfeminine.
The novel holds out Nanny or Mma Alli as its prized exemplars, but it is
adamant in insisting that such possibilities remain unknown and occluded
for the colonial Clare. She nonetheless moves along the pathway to such a
self-discovery, through her contentious reading, through her identifications
with Anne Frank (and through her to questions about blackness and female-
ness displaced and crossed in the experiences of the Holocaust), and above all
through her relations with Zoe, a poor black girl, given to her as a playmate
by Miss Mattie.
Zoe is the daughter of Miss Ruthie, a marketwoman whom Miss Mattie
 82 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

allows to squat on her land. Clare dreams of a relationship that will over-
come differences, binding the two girls together. She inducts Zoe into her
fantasy life and attempts to realize it as she enlists Zoe in her plan to steal
her grandmother’s gun and shoot a wild pig. Zoe makes Clare see all the
divisions (of color and class) that divide them. Clare wants to be someone—
someone individual, free of constrictions—but her very desires are bound to
the privilege attached to her social status. She may think she is confined
at her grandmother’s house, but she is on holiday, away from her parent’s
home in Kingston, away from school. These positions, this movement, sug-
gests her future: emigration to the United Kingdom or the United States.
Zoe is genuinely confined; her life course will repeat her mother’s. To Zoe,
Clare is “Kingston smaddy. White smaddy” (118), somebody attached to place
and privilege. Clare’s idyll of country friendship is a game played with con-
sequences for Zoe, who cannot leave the land she does not own, and who is
likely to suffer for Clare’s gun-toting, masculinist transgressions.
Cliff, however, invalidates neither Clare’s desire to break with racist re-
gimes of femininity, to undo the differences between a poor black girl and a
middle-class girl who, thanks to her skin and her schooling, can pass as white,
nor the form that desire takes, as the two girls lie naked beside each other on
a rock, in a masturbatory scene in which Clare yearns to touch Zoe’s breasts,
and in so doing, to reach through her body to her mother’s as well:

The two girls closed their eyes against the rise of the sun to noon overhead
and touched hands. Brown and gold beside each other. Damp and warm. Hair
curled from the heat and the wet. The warmth of the sunlight on their bodies—
salty-damp.
Pussy and rass—these were the two words they knew for the space-within-
flesh covered now by strands and curls of hair. Under these patches were the
ways into their own bodies. Their fingers could slide through the hair and deep
into the pink and purple flesh and touch the corridor through which their ba-
bies would emerge and into which men would put their thing. Right now it could
belong to them. (Abeng, 120)

Such a moment certainly is “lesbian”; it recalls the scene in the novel

between Mma Alli and Inez. Nonetheless, “lesbian” only begins to name the
complications here. Does Clare desire Zoe, or does she desire her dark skin?
Both are forbidden desires. Either might mark a woman as not a woman
in violating the regimes of gendered propriety. In Miss Mattie’s mother (a
white woman who runs off with a black man) and in the sister of the woman
to whom Clare is consigned (a woman who has gone “mad” after giving birth to
a child she had with a black man—mad not through her “error” but thanks
to the punishments of deprivation and stigma she was made to suffer), the
novel offers examples of nonnormative heterosexual behavior, a desire for
darkness that may parallel Clare’s “lesbian” desire. As in Wynter’s work,
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 83

a desire for what is thought impossible—the desire for or as “Caliban’s

‘woman’”—may obviate distinctions between heterosexual and homosexual.
It may suggest other forms of sociality, the kind, indeed, to be found in Clare’s
name, although she does not know it. Whereas to Boy, her name recalls Clare
College, where one of his ancestors went, for Kitty it is the name of a black
girl, Clary, who had safeguarded her and seen her through a life-threatening
illness. Abandoned by Miss Mattie to the hands of this girl, Kitty secretly
names Clare for this nonbiological “mother” and “sister” who had saved her
life. Reaching out for Zoe, Clare is also reaching for herself.
Clare is a child divided by race, by gender; divided by her parents, by
her school, by city and countryside. The novel ends with her menstruating,
arriving into womanhood. Everything is left open as to whether she will
find a way to negotiate the halves and to forge bonds that will enable her
to claim an identity that will be black and female, yet not that of a lady or
of someone bounded by the restrictions of middle-class proprieties. These
proprieties have marked her off for the kind of educational career that Cliff
herself had, for instance, or for marriage to a light-skinned man. The claim-
ing of her body seems to hinge upon the possibility of assembling—out of
every form of desire that she has been led to believe is wrong and counter to
her privilege—an identity worth reclaiming. This is by no means assured or
easy. As the narrator notes, Nanny Town exists, but it remains “difficult to
reach” (14). It is available in numerous practices: in knowledges of the soil
and its produce that poor women have, that even Kitty knows from Miss
Mattie; in the garments that women weave, unknowingly resuming African
arts. And it is occluded in numerous obfuscations, impossibilities of naming
like the kinds that cross in Clare’s name, with its open secret of affiliative
lines between women. Clare’s name is itself criss-crossed. Clare Savage is
white and “native,” yet her whiteness is the Savage claim, Boy’s ancestry that
stretches back to the plantation owner who burned his property—that is, his
slaves—rather than free them. Her mother, bound to these colonial arrange-
ments, was once a Freeman.
At the end of the novel, Clare is punished for stealing a gun and firing it,
accidentally killing Miss Mattie’s bull. Her father thinks that her wildness
shows her still untamed blackness, and he sends her to live with a white
woman whose racism is nakedly held out to Clare as the model for her to
adopt. Her mother, however, sees Clare’s misbehavior as a sign that she
has acted on the privilege she accrues from her father’s claims to whiteness.
Neither parent, no one in the novel, comments on the fact that Clare fired the
gun when a male intruder came upon her and Zoe lying naked upon the rocks.
Two naked girls; they had done what girls were not supposed to do, something
Clare’s male cousins did, displaying themselves naked. Clare had desired
Zoe. Her desires are the deepest level of the unspoken in a novel where the
unspeakable history of slavery, of race and class and gender differences, is
 84 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

speakable, if only in euphemisms. Clare’s transgressive desire, crossing iden-

tification and desire (the wish both to be and to love the black woman), on all
these counts, has no name and apparently has no forms of lived embodiment.
But on the other hand, it has a history stretching back to Nanny and is still to
be found in the bonds between women that are native to her person and her
island.
Abeng is written in fragmented narrative sequences. A strong narrator
knows and sees much that is occluded and unspoken but also leaves much
unsaid and unsayable. The narratives that I have assembled here are pre-
sented piecemeal throughout the novel.92 Judith Raiskin notes that through
Clare, Cliff represents the search of a (potential) Caliban-Sycorax poised
between the recognition that the “challenges to the hierarchical systems of
race and sex”—which, as Raiskin argues, are central to Cliff ’s project—are
“no match for the force of these systems once set in motion,” and the promise
that Lauren Berlant, for one, has identified in a moving meditation on Cliff ’s
work: “[I]t closes off nothing but the already exhausted futures we call the
present tense.”93 Clare’s situation does not promise resolution—its mapping
of the crossings of categories of race, color, class, gender, and sexuality is a set
of disalignments—except in the kind of multiple/singular category-defying
composite that is announced by way of the rereading of The Tempest offered
in the persona of “Caliban’s Daughter.”

. . . MY DAM ’S GOD SETEBOS

In Cliff, identity is non-self-identical. Gender is interrupted by race. (The con-
trolled and heterosexualized female body is properly gendered, ladylike; it is
therefore “white,” whereas the out-of-control female body, like that of Clare’s
classmate Doreen Paxton, who suffers an epileptic seizure and is thrown out
of school for such misbehavior, reveals itself as “black” despite efforts at its
schooling/whitening.) Race, in terms of the female body, is inextricable from
gender; gender is divided along the axes of sexuality. (Cross-racial desire,
whether the desired one is male or female, is stigmatized if the object is
“black” and approved if “white.”) Negotiating these often unspoken but none-
theless powerful regimes, reassembling a valued identity out of abjection and
across and through the various dislocations that mark and place Clare, is the
difficult project of the novel and of Cliff ’s work more broadly.
In part by way of contrast, Cliff ’s project could be compared to Edward
Kamau Brathwaite’s, which is as alert as hers is to the fragmentations and
dislocations of the Caribbean subject. “Caliban,” a poem in Brathwaite’s
Islands (1969) is mentioned by Fernández Retamar in “Caliban” as “dedicated,
significantly, to Cuba” (Fernández Retamar, “Caliban,” 13). Nixon endorses
this reading of Brathwaite’s “Caliban” and argues that its allusions to The
Tempest serve as repudiations of Shakespeare.94 The Vaughans, in their chap-
ter “Colonial Metaphors” in Shakespeare’s Caliban, claim that Brathwaite’s
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 85

poem can be compared to the reclamation of Caliban by Fernández Retamar

and Césaire as another example of texts that “avidly adopted Mannoni’s imag-
ery” (155); they offer a bland summary of the poem in their chapter “Modern
Poetic Invocations,” in which they affirm that in its middle section, Caliban
“experiments like his Shakespearean original with the language Prospero
taught him,” another sign for them that colonial texts are bounded by the
colonizer’s culture, inevitably included within “Shakespeare’s unmatched
universality” (171). Yet, as Nixon notes, the “earth music of the carnival and
the intercession of black gods” (574) locate other possibilities in the poem, as
Gordon Rohlehr’s reading in Pathfinder confirms by way of the numerous ref-
erences and allusions to African deities and their attributes and to the limbo
dance as it reenacts and refuses the condition of the confinement of slaves on
ships across the Middle Passage. For Brathwaite, as for Cliff, resuscitation of
African and New World resources is vital.95
Neither Nixon nor the Vaughans mention another Brathwaite poem, also
titled “Caliban,” that appeared first in Black + Blues in a 1976 Casa de las
Américas imprint, presumably because the “caliban” of that poem is caught
in inanition; he is “blind,” “tortured,” “twisted & bent,” a “victim” in a “wilder-
ness.”96 Whereas the Caliban of Islands is possibly a ragtag performer of the
kind that Paule Marshall presents in her “Brazil,” as “o grande Caliban,” a
worn-out nightclub performer, the “caliban” of Black + Blues is even more
hopeless, a product of Prospero’s (un)making. Whereas Nixon might have
included the poem to show how the plot ran out in the postemancipation pe-
riod, Brathwaite in fact continued to deploy The Tempest through the 1990s.
He “has never professed to love the tortured fellow,” Cynthia James notes,
as she maps the various uses to which Caliban has been put in Brathwaite’s
oeuvre.97 On the one side, he stands for the Maroon revolutionary and rebel, a
prophet and terrorizer who can be the poet’s persona, but he is also a traitor,
a mulatto, an opportunist, a mindless dancer, and a terrorized victim. This
double Caliban can be seen in the use that Brathwaite has made of the figure
in historical essays tracing plantation personality types. Caliban, in “Caliban,
Ariel, and Unprospero in the Conflict of Creolization” (1977), is a “would-be
rebel or house slave,” a typology repeated in Barabajan Poems (1994), where
Caliban is first called a rebel and then immediately recharacterized, “or more
accurately wd-be rebel.”98 Brathwaite’s project bears comparison with Cliff ’s
insofar as he looks back to the Maroons (as she does through Nanny), to diffi-
cult recoveries of identity, and to possibilities that lie buried in histories that
need to be unearthed. Moreover, the double Caliban that Brathwaite offers
is potentially attuned to the fact that “Caliban” cannot simply name native
energies; his name and part are also Prospero/Shakespeare’s doing, and the
denigrations buried in the name also inform the lived experience of Blacks
in the Caribbean. Brathwaite’s Caliban, like Cliff ’s Clare, needs to discover
possibilities undreamed of in the monster/clown of The Tempest. However,
 86 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

for Brathwaite, unlike Cliff, such discoveries and recoveries involve a repu-
diation of the doubleness that is, arguably, the condition of the subject made
in colonialism; racial recoveries in his work reinscribe sexed and gendered
normativities.
This goal is realized in poems that are remarkable as assemblages of frag-
ments, broken words and lines meant to unleash unheard-of energies, as in
the 1969 “Caliban,” where Caliban’s declaration of self-nomination and in-
dependence from Prospero in The Tempest is rewritten:

Ban
Ban
Cal-
iban
like to play
pan
at the Car-
nival;
dip-
ping down
and the black
gods call-
ing, back
he falls
through the water’s
cries
down
down
down
where the music
hides
him
down
down
down
where the si-
lence lies.
(“Caliban,” The Arrivants, 193)

Elsewhere, Brathwaite trades in “calibanisms,” words written in what he

calls nation language, creolizations that express New World sensibilities and
native possibilities of creation.99 Brathwaite testifies in his autobiographical
“Timehri” to his belated inspiration when, as an adult, he read In the Castle
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 87

of My Skin, a work by his almost exact Barbadian contemporary (Brathwaite

was born in 1930, three years after Lamming), underscoring the prescience
of Lamming’s depiction of a lived misery that lacked terms for its enuncia-
tion. Like Wynter, Brathwaite points to Trumper’s discovery as one that he
made his own and that has guided his vast output over a long career.100 The
embeddedness of his poetry in African mythology and New World reworkings
has been unfolded by his critics, especially in the patient and exacting work
of Gordon Rohlehr; at the same time, its dazzling rhythms, as his poems at-
tempt to go beyond the meanings that Rohlehr unfolds, produce sounds that
exceed ordinary sense in the extraordinary resources of improvisatory crea-
tion and re-creation (Brathwaite’s texts often exist in numerous forms and
rewritings), as has been examined by Nathaniel Mackey, among others.101
Biographically, Brathwaite’s life follows a familiar curve: from Barbados to
England—where he studied at Cambridge—and a return to the Caribbean, to
Jamaica, where he taught history at the University of the West Indies (UWI),
Mona, for many years until he moved to New York University. He returned by
way of Africa; Brathwaite spent eight crucial years in the newly independent
Ghana. For the discussion at hand, one way of framing this movement of exile
and return can be seen in the transformation of a poem that appeared first as
“X/Self ’s Xth Letter from the Thirteen Provinces” in X/Self (1987) and was
later recast and significantly renamed as “Letter SycoraX” in Middle Passages
(1993), where it was reset in “Sycorax video style,” a computer-generated set
of typefaces that Brathwaite has adopted for much of his publication since
the 1990s.102 Even if Brathwaite has aimed at writing calibanisms, he has
been just as intent at reclaiming a maternal inheritance that he (like Cliff )
associates with Africa. As early as “Hex” in Mother Poem (1977), he alludes
to “black Sycorax my mother” (47). Elaine Savory has hailed this aspect of
Brathwaite’s work, claiming that he has been “moving from male-oriented
to female-oriented images of decolonization,” a remark that points us, once
again, to the absence of gendered consideration in the works of Nixon and the
Vaughans.103 Through Sycorax, Brathwaite names his African and spiritual
origins, his mother tongue; through the video style that he names after her
(and after his old computer, also named “Sycorax”), he attempts to put words
on the page that visualize sounds in their immediacy. Sycorax is the muse
in the machine that wires the poet to originary energies. “It is this spirit in
the form of Sycorax, the anti-colonial matrix of creativity, who inspires the
machine, the Western computer, to produce Brathwaite’s video style, which
so markedly brings orality into the written word,” Savory summarizes.104
Brathwaite puts it this way, in conversation with Nathaniel Mackey:

Sycorax being the submerge African and woman and lwa of the pla(y), Caliban
mother and person who deals with the herbs and the magical sous-reality of the
world over which Prospero rules. And therefore I celebrate her in this way—thru
 88 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

the computer—by saying that she’s the spirit/person who creates an(d)/or acts
out of the video-style that I workin with She’s the lwa who, in fact, allows me the
space and longitude—groundation and inspiration—the little inspiration—that
I’m at the moment permitted105

“X /Self ’s Xth Letter” becomes a letter written by Caliban to his mother,

about the discovery of the computer as a way to curse Prospero “wid im own /
curser” (X/Self, 85). This Caliban is not Shakespeare’s

learnin prospero linguage &

ting
not fe dem/not fe dem
de way caliban
done
(84–85);

the machine is turned back upon its inventor; techne is mined for energies
that cannot be controlled by the colonial project; X writes “fe we / fe a-we” (85).
This “we” also appears elsewhere in Brathwaite as “mwe,” a singular plurali-
ty. It aims at negritude as Brathwaite defines it: “[T]here is a black Caliban
Maroon world with its own aesthetics (sycorax)” (X/Self, 130), Caliban and
Sycorax joined, indeed, Caliban retrieved from colonial inanition by Sycorax,
joined as “mwe,” me and we, man and woman.
If these cross-gendered, singular-plural configurations remind us of Cliff,
there are nonetheless worrying limitations in Brathwaite’s project, for ex-
ample, in “Caliban, Ariel, and Unprospero,” where Sycorax is translated as
“the obeahman or native preacher” (43), a masculinization that reads entire-
ly contrary to Cliff ’s moves across gender since it enhances only one gender,
the male. Rohlehr, in “‘Black Sycorax, My Mother,’” offers a close reading of
Mother Poem and the function of Sycorax in it, worth pausing over in this re-
spect.106 Sycorax serves, Rohlehr catalogues, as “Mother Tongue,” “archetypal
Mother” (279), “archetypal presence and Muse,” and “Mother Earth” (281).
This symbolic maternity is crucial—for her son. Her future possibilities lie in
him; he needs her to find his essence, what Brathwaite calls his “nam.” That
spiritual seed is “man” spelled backward:

ma ma ma: she is tell muh

ma ma man: she is tell muh

ma ma man: she is tell muh

say man: she is tell muh

say man: she is tell muh
(“Nametracks,” Mother Poem, 57)
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 89

Edward Brathwaite was renamed Kamau in Africa by his spiritual mother,

Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o’s grandmother; Kamau, as he spells the name in Barabajan
Poems (239–40), when read forward letter by letter, hails him as male, spirit,
chief, sun, and universal spirit; read backward, it names him as female, mouth,
womb, secrecy, anima. Rohlehr finds the “âme” in “nam,” and in this he seems
to follow Brathwaite, who absorbs the feminine principle into himself.
Responding to an essay by Bev Brown that had accused Brathwaite of
such erasures/incorporations of “woman” into a masculinist plot, Rohlehr
insists on the fullness of representation of women in Brathwaite.107 It is true
that black women are amply and sympathetically represented in Mother
Poem and elsewhere as impoverished, beaten down by labor, or forced into
unwanted pregnancies, unhappy marriages, and prostitution.108 They are,
however, always represented in relationship to men (or sometimes to female
slaveowners, whose race and position align them with male domination),
not in relationship to each other. Their men are in danger of emasculation—
by slaveowners, by capitalists, and by their wives, who also have the possi-
bility of redeeming/remasculinizing them. Mothers have sons, it seems, not
daughters; their futures and pasts are entirely bounded by relationships
with men. In Brathwaite, patriarchal oppression is answered by what Sue
Thomas summarizes as a “‘pro-family’ patriarchal sexual political ideology,” a
plot that Cliff for one has understood as a continuation of colonialism in the
domestic sphere, which Alexander has linked, as we have observed, to the
regimes of the neocolonial state.109 Brathwaite’s repudiations of the West and
of colonialism stop short of a rethinking of the sex/gender system. Women are
tied—and should be, he implies—to the institution of marriage, to the biology
of procreation as female destiny.
Rohlehr reads the strong women of Mother Poem as “fathering.” Brathwaite,
however, has referred to Lamming’s sentence as “this awful axe/ione that it’s
the mothers who father us” (ConVERSations, 52), and he wishes to heal the
split through a reconstituted nuclear family of the kind named in his second
trilogy: mother, sun, and an X who may make good on the blighted sunship of
the father, filling his place as the (w)holy son (X is Caliban’s self-nomination
in Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête). Rhonda Cobham has read the terror of the
awful axiom in a parenthesis in Brathwaite’s telling of his renomination
as Kamau.110 The African women spit on him, as they “nam” him, and, in
small type, in parentheses, Brathwaite solicits empathy for his situation: “(I
was very much alarmed to say the least at first)” (Barabajan Poems, 236).
Dependence upon and liberation through Sycorax (the mother, the machine)
are anxiogenic. Brathwaite has countered it, especially through his latest
computer, named Stark, generator of the Sycorax video style and a figure
Brathwaite has recently added to his Tempest personality types. Stark, the
new computer, is also Caliban’s sister; she is, moreover, a set of black women
writers whom Brathwaite hails as fellow practitioners: Paule Marshall, Alice
 90 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

Walker, Erna Brodber, Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, Jamaica Kincaid, Caro-
livia Herron, and Cynthia James, most notably. Here is how Brathwaite de-
scribes her in Barabajan Poems:

Stark/Sister Stark, Caliban’s sister, is my own imaginative invention. . . . she

did not walk clearly away from me until the October evening 1991 at NYU
when I spoke of Paule Marshall’s then new book, Daughters and recognized
Stark in what Marshall was doing—the first time that the Plantation has a
black woman w/ firm feet, sensitive/aggressive breasts and a space & plan if not
always a room of her own. (316)

Although it is certainly salutary to find Brathwaite including women in

The Tempest plot and its anticolonial rewriting, the nature of the sexualiza-
tion of the scene of the encounter, as the figure in his head greets him with
her “sensitive/aggressive breasts,” gives pause. As Cobham points out in
“K /Ka/Kama/Kamau,” Brathwaite embraces women writers in order for
them to confirm his vision; they serve as his narcissistic mirrors, she charges.
This can be seen most starkly in ConVERSations, where Brathwaite cites
from the work of Maria Headley, one of his students, who praises him for
the circulation of Sycorax in his texts “as a sort of hidden mother”: “In
Brathwaite’s poem/letter from Sycorax. the very form of the letter is telling—
she is not able to speak in person. but must articulate some further view-
point. must become dissociated from personal contact. The invisible mother
is one who can inform from afar and through silence” (191).111 Headley refers
to Brathwaite’s “Dream Sycorax Letter,” a poem in which Sycorax writes on
behalf of her dead/dread son (Caliban Brathwaite) to the publishers who
have been unsympathetic to his video style—a lack of sympathy that seems
exaggerated even if Brathwaite registers the fact that for him now, as was
the case for Lamming in the 1950s, he lacks a sustaining cultural milieu at
home.112 The Sycorax who writes the poem insists that she has “no désir, or
wish to become any more visible” (126), no desire to speak in propria persona.
She speaks as the text/font; as the immediacy of his dead voice, as his living
principle. Sycorax has become text, but her text is his:

“dreamstorie” “nansesem” “nam-histories &

herstories” “manscapes” “panyard”
solar
“jazz/ legba” “tranesong/shango”
“the sycorax video-style” as i say
name after mwe!
(“Dream Sycorax Letter,” 131)

So far as I know, Brathwaite has referred only once to Michelle Cliff. In his
typologies of New World Tempest figures in Barabajan Poems, she appears
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 91

under the rubric “Caliban” but with those “wrought or fraught with DICHOTO-
MOUS sometimes SCHIZOPHRENIC CONFLICTS” (316). A question mark beside her

name shields her a bit from the charge of schizophrenia that Simon Gikandi
has leveled at Clare in Abeng, a pathologizing to which Myriam Chancy has
recently replied.113 Although Chancy does not quite say it, Gikandi’s judg-
ment must be linked to his inability to reckon with Clare’s relationship to Zoe
and its incipient sexualization. Gikandi’s charge parallels Rohlehr’s dismissal
of feminist readings in “Brathwaite with a Dash of Brown” as the imposition
of an improper outside on native male-centered creation. Rohlehr repudi-
ates feminism as Western, as brown not black. His position could be aligned
with Wynter’s critique, but it is here deployed in the service of Brathwaite’s
black male powers. Brathwaite’s labeling of Cliff alludes primarily to her
crossed racial positioning. However, as is well documented, race, gender, and
sexuality are often tied together in black nationalist rhetoric that aims at a
determinately male and heterosexual racial revitalization. Brathwaite seems
to have moved beyond his double and divided (schizophrenic?) Caliban to one
that has regained integrity through Sycorax, a claiming of femaleness that
consolidates his gender, race, and sexuality. (This can be appealing to some
of Brathwaite’s female admirers, who find their racial and gendered confir-
mation backed by heterosexual positioning.)114 Nonetheless, there are mas-
sive exclusions in these consolidations of black heterosexual subjects. Cliff ’s
difficult project of attempting to make coherences across differences seems
answered and refused by Brathwaite’s project even as it shares many simi-
lar components. This need not be the case. As Cobham notes of Brathwaite’s
turning Sycorax and Stark into computers, “there is nothing inherently
invidious about this utopian image of woman as supportive cyborg” (“K/Ka/
Kama /Kamau,” 307); it could locate “woman” elsewhere. Yet it seems that in
Brathwaite, the cyborg is brought back into male orbit, Sycorax once again
subordinated, as she is in Caliban’s account, to her god Setebos.

ALL THE CHARMS / OF SYCORAX

Cliff does not refer to Brathwaite in “Caliban’s Daughter,” but she does make
significant gestures to Aimé Césaire, which prompts a consideration now of
his rewriting of The Tempest as Une Tempête. Césaire’s deployment of Caliban
has, like Brathwaite’s work, been subject to feminist critique as masculinist,
with considerable cogency: Césaire accords Sycorax no speaking part in Une
Tempête, something he clearly could have done, since his version of the play
does add characters to the original cast.115 Nonetheless, it seems fair to as-
sume that Cliff ’s gestures toward Césaire cannot aim at the consolidation of
a patriarchal/heterosexual masculinism, and they will lead us further to de-
homogenize and complicate the scope of feminist interventions. Moreover, her
valuation of Césaire must be put beside a critique offered by Tom Hayes in an
essay on the humanist subject as embodied in Prospero across the history of his
 92 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

reinscriptions. However incisive Une Tempête may be at critiquing Prospero,

Hayes avers, Césaire writes with the aim of reinvigorating a native masculin-
ism, as best evidenced by the introduction of “Eshu, a black-devil god,” the one
character whose addition to Shakespeare’s cast list Césaire announces.116 Eshu
appears in the masque scene (at just the moment in the play when Sycorax
could have appeared) to “whip you with his dick” (48),117 scandalizing the god-
desses, reinforcing the subordination of women, and thus introducing a black
male in the position that Hayes calls the humanist subject, a figure intent on
securing a racialized and heterosexual masculinity. Hayes faults Césaire for
forgoing the homosexual possibility that can be found in cannibal/Caliban.
I turn to Césaire now, moreover, because he represents an even earlier
generation of Caribbean writers than Brathwaite (he was born in Martinique
in 1913); his has been a founding voice in Caribbean consciousness through-
out the second half of the twentieth century. His Notebook of a Return to the
Native Land, which first appeared in 1939, and his Discourse on Colonialism
(the earliest version dates from 1950) are cited again and again. Fanon—who
was taught by Césaire in Martinique (as was Glissant)—fetches his initial
epigraph in Black Skin, White Masks from the Discourse, and he cites Césaire
frequently throughout his text as he wrestles with questions of black authen-
ticity. Lamming uses lines from the Notebook as the epigraph to his chapter
on The Tempest in The Pleasures of Exile; Wynter invokes Césaire repeatedly,
for example, ending the essay that fetches its title from Trumper’s “different
kind of creature” by citing Césaire’s project as exemplary in its aim “to rese-
manticize meaning/ being from the perspective of alterity” (“‘A Different Kind
of Creature,’” 168). Une Tempête is, moreover, a rewriting of Shakespeare’s
play as a play, formally closest to the original of the anticolonial reinscriptions
of The Tempest, and it is thus an apt site to consider the deeply imbricated
relationships between texts that seem denied in a project like Brathwaite’s.
Although in Nixon’s account (“Caribbean and African Appropriations,” 572)
the play is summed up in the revolutionary gesture signaled by Caliban’s
first word in the play—Uhuru, the Swahili word for “freedom” that was a
black revolutionary byword in the 1960s—liberté is in fact Caliban’s last word
in the play. I want to pursue that pathway from this opening:

CALIBAN : Uhuru!
PROSPERO : What did you say?
CALIBAN : I said, Uhuru!
PROSPERO : Mumbling your native language again!
( A Tempest, 11)

Prospero’s denigrating the African word as “native”—he says barbare in the

original (24)—points, of course, to the project that engaged Césaire in France in
the 1930s, the negritude movement (Césaire probably coined the word négri-
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 93

tude) that importantly insisted on the African origins of Caribbeans against

colonial denigration, self-hatred, and alienation of the kind analyzed in Black
Skin, White Masks. As Césaire indicates in a lecture he delivered at about the
same time he was writing Une Tempête,

[I]t must not be forgotten that the word négritude was, at first, a riposte. The
word “nègre” had been thrown at us as an insult, and we picked it up and
turned it into a positive concept. . . . We thought that it was an injustice to say
that Africa had done nothing, that Africa did not count in the evolution of the
world. . . . Our faith in Africa did not result in a sort of philosophy of the ghetto,
and this cult of, this respect for, the African past did not lead us to a museum
philosophy.118

Nonetheless, this “originary” move of African reclamation (for Caliban, in

the play; for Césaire, whose trajectory is, in part, represented through the
character) is an initial gesture as the play moves from Uhuru toward a re-
semanticized liberté. Une Tempête is Césaire’s last major publication (his
Oeuvres complètes appeared in 1976), and it has a strong retrospective cast. It
rewrites The Tempest in abbreviated form; before the first act is over, Prospero
has given up revenge on the Europeans to ally himself with them against
Caliban’s impending revolt.
Caliban proceeds in the play through a series of self-identifying moves;
soon after uttering “Uhuru,” he demands that Prospero call him “X”: “Call me
X. That would be best. Like a man without a name. Or, to be more precise, a
man whose name has been stolen. You talk about history . . . well, that’s his-
tory, and everyone knows it! Every time you summon me it reminds me of a
basic fact, the fact that you’ve stolen everything from me, even my identity!
Uhuru!” (15). In this context, the use of “Uhuru” involves a resemanticization
of the kind that Wynter applauds, a recourse to Africa as a strategic histori-
cal and discursive act. It produces not a name for Caliban but a place for him
to reject his name and the charges of brutality and cannibalism lodged in it.
Yet X marks necessarily a place of crossing, the condition of the subject made
in colonialism, functioning even as a sign of minimal literacy within the
Western scriptive order. Moreover, X also is a name, as Césaire makes clear
in a scene that he provides for Caliban and Ariel (act 2, scene 1), who enact a
confrontation between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. In this scene,
Caliban affirms, in English, “Freedom now” (21), espousing revolutionary
violence against Ariel’s more quiescent and conciliatory path that aims at
sounding Prospero’s conscience. Ariel, pointedly, is a mulatto, and the play
seems unequivocally to be on the side of 1960s black nationalism.
However, once sides are drawn—Prospero (one with the European aris-
tocrats) against Caliban (allied to Stephano and Trinculo)—the play comes
to an impasse. Caliban realizes that he has made common cause with fools,
a move that may parallel one by Césaire, who in the Discourse had made
 94 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

interchangeable racial liberation and worker revolution but who by 1956

had resigned from the French Communist Party. Given the opportunity to
kill Prospero, Caliban demurs, just as Césaire, from his position as mayor
of Fort-de-France (to which he was first elected in 1945; Césaire only retired
from elected office in 1993), led the way not to independence for Martinique
but to its becoming a French overseas département in 1946, a stance he came
to regret.119 The play ends with Caliban and Prospero locked in dialectical
struggle, Prospero on the wane, the island overrun with untamed, “un-
clean” (68) nature, and Caliban offstage chanting “FREEDOM HI -DAY, FREEDOM
HI - DAY ” (68).120 This is, in fact, the same line he sang when he joined forces

with Stephano and Trinculo (44), an indication that Césaire also seeks to
resemanticize the proletariat cause that had foundered by masking its colo-
nialism under republican slogans: Stephano nonetheless would be king of the
island; Caliban would be his.
Nixon’s estimation of the play as a revolutionary manifesto echoes pre-
vailing views of the play as simply a reversal and refusal of the colonialist
plot of The Tempest, a reading rightly called into question by Joan Dayan.
Dayan argues for a much closer relationship between the two texts; for her,
both exhibit the resources of ambiguity and irresolution.121 “Oscillation” in
Shakespeare’s Caliban is his destiny, she claims (128), sounding much like
the Vaughans in this, the dialectic of the play’s close the opportunity for
Hegelian “reciprocal recognition” (131) that echoes the “labor of reciprocity”
(130) that constitutes Césaire’s artistic practice. For Dayan, the play is locked
into its original just as the neocolonial state is tied to the West, a pernicious
system, she insists, but also the way (the only way, she implies) for Césaire to
participate in “the western cultural tradition” (141), the only game in town.
Cozy couples: Césaire and Shakespeare, Caliban and Prospero. They show
the “fertile collision and mutual abiding of these reciprocal worlds” (140).
Between Nixon’s view of nativist revolutionary energies mobilized in
repudiation and revolt and Dayan’s of a mutuality that is, in effect, capitula-
tion, there seems to be no choice politically; yet it seems clear that the play
straddles these dichotomies. Hardly “fertile” at the end—except insofar as
the island is on the verge between ruin and some possible opening that could
rewrite the French revolutionary ethos of freedom—the impetus for this re-
covery still lies in the initial cry of “Uhuru,” which has been displaced but not
abandoned. Césaire is recognizing the difficult terrain of the postemancipa-
tory situation; his Caliban finally is more Ariel-like than would have been
imagined initially. Une Tempête is a play for a black theater, a psychodrama
in which the actors don masks. It is in the black skin, white masks of the on-
going colonial situation that the play situates its struggle. Césaire rewrites
The Tempest past the point where the plot ran out.
Dayan’s happy story of reciprocity, with its un-self-reflexive casting of
this as male-male coupling, endorses a version of what a feminist critic like
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 95

Jyotsna Singh, in “Caliban versus Miranda,” deplores in Césaire. By hav-

ing his Caliban repudiate any desire for Miranda, she charges, Césaire, like
Shakespeare before him, imagines women only as objects of homosocial ex-
change; the revolution is thus “an all-male” enterprise (205). Worse: “[I]n the
absence of a native woman as his sexual reproductive mate” (206), “Césaire’s
call for a revolution lacks credibility as he prevents Prospero’s former slave
from peopling the isle with Calibans” (207). Singh cites Wynter, but she takes
the installation of a proper racial mate as leading to properly racialized pro-
creation. The woman Singh desires would be in precisely the position that
Brathwaite mandates: coupled, procreative. This, for her, is the “revolution-
ary” role for women that Césaire denies representation.
Césaire does represent Singh’s heterosexual imperative, however, through
his Miranda, who is reduced to a mere outline of Shakespeare’s character but
with a few telling changes. Baffled by Prospero’s revelation that she is a prin-
cess, she affirms a relationship with nature, describing herself as “wild,”122 if
an aristocrat only “queen of the wildflowers, of the streams and paths, running
barefoot through thorns and flowers, spared by one, caressed by the other” (6).
Her attachment to nature is apparently maintained when she first encounters
Ferdinand: “I hope you’ll like it here with us. The island is pretty. I’ll show you
the beaches and the forests, I’ll tell you the names of fruits and flowers, I’ll
introduce you to a whole world of insects, of lizards of every hue, of birds . . .
Oh, you cannot imagine! The birds! . . . ” (18). These lines, transposed from
Caliban’s offer to Stephano and Trinculo in Shakespeare (2.2.154–58), could
suggest an identification between Miranda and Caliban. However, Miranda’s
ties to nature or to Caliban have been broken by her knowledge of her royal
status, and no naivete can be found in her initial exchange with Ferdinand,
which precedes her offer of a tour of the island. She recognizes him instantly as
a flatterer and as royalty, and the revelation in the chess scene, that she is as
much of a power politician as he is, comes as no surprise. In Césaire’s stripped-
down version of the character, Miranda passes from a state of innocence to
one of experience almost instantaneously in assuming her role as Ferdinand’s
mate. It is possible in this to find a shorthand allusion to Lamming’s treatment
of the play in The Pleasures of Exile, in which he notes the shared innocence
of Caliban and Miranda, both pawns to Prospero, but goes on to remark the
crucial difference, from Prospero’s point of view, that Miranda can be included
in his designs, whereas Caliban must remain outside. From a certain feminist
perspective, one could read Césaire’s (mis)treatment of Miranda as parallel
to Shakespeare’s masculinism; could find it even further heightened in the
context of some black nationalist calls to unleash violence—including rape—
against white women.123 From another feminist perspective, it is possible
to say that Césaire’s brutal treatment of Miranda may have potential for a
critique alert to the difference that race makes in gendered/sexual formations.
In that respect, rather than taking (heterosexual) offense at Caliban’s
 96 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

declaration that he “couldn’t care less” (13) about Miranda, one could imag-
ine Césaire doing what Wynter insists, showing that Miranda is not an
inevitable object of male desire. Césaire’s Caliban happily hands Miranda
over to Ferdinand. True, this makes Miranda a pawn not only for her father
but also for Caliban; yet it also suggests that Césaire cannot imagine that
once Miranda has been conscripted into her father’s designs—from the mo-
ment she knows her social status—she could be drawn back into the orbit of
nature that she has repudiated. Césaire’s Caliban equivocates his desire for
Miranda, answering Prospero’s charge: “Rape! Rape!” he exclaims, “Listen,
you old goat, you’re the one that put those dirty thoughts in my head” (13).
The translator here chooses one possible meaning in Caliban’s line: “[T]u me
prêtes tes idées libidinouses” (27), which can just as easily mean “you ascribe
to me your libidinous ideas.” This response answers Lamming’s “Lie,” adduces
Fanon’s rereading of the colonial psychology that Mannoni attributes to such
incestuous fantasies. If rape were attempted, it would not reveal Caliban’s
indigenous/racial character or his essential maleness.
If Caliban’s handing of Miranda over to Ferdinand makes explicit that her
coming-to-consciousness involves her implication within the colonialist ad-
venture and thereby her de-naturing, this highlights Caliban’s attachment to
nature in the play. Nature is gendered female in Une Tempête, an equation of
woman and nature that certainly can be suspect, as it is in Brathwaite, and
as Singh charges (196) when she wishes for something more than a symbolic
Mother Earth in the play. Yet her complaint is prompted by the very lines
that Cliff quotes in “Caliban’s Daughter” (46), as Caliban defends Sycorax
against Prospero’s denigrations:

[S]he was my mother, and I won’t deny her! Anyhow, you only think she’s dead
because you think the earth itself is dead . . . It’s so much simpler that way!
Dead, you can walk on it, pollute it, you can tread upon it with the steps of
a conqueror. I respect the earth, because I know that it’s alive, and I know
Sycorax is alive. (12)124

Cliff can value his words as not merely symbolic because she insists on
the difficulty of recovering this primordial attachment even as something
to be known and valued, let alone as the basis for a reordered future that
might break with the depredations of colonialism. Caliban’s insistence on an
unbroken tie with Sycorax, and his recognition elsewhere in the play that
Prospero’s arsenal of weapons involves the misuse of a nature that might be
marshaled against him, are not merely symbolic uses of nature—or of the
feminine—but indications of a difficult impasse in the recovery toward which
Cliff aims. For Cliff, Caliban’s invocation of his mother is most significant
for its relocation of his being on this natural/maternal terrain. Feminine
identification cannot assure him normative masculinity. Césaire’s Caliban’s
gesture, as Cliff prompts us to read it, is not incorporative and erasing; it is,
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 97

rather, gender transforming (and potentially, therefore, nonheterosexualizing

as well). The Caliban with whom Cliff identifies as Caliban’s daughter is in
fact Césaire’s Caliban.
Before a Sycorax can be represented as a real possibility, there must be the
kind of voicing and desiring and identification that Caliban articulates. Cliff
takes Caliban’s lines as her own, as she does too when she cites a passage in
Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land in “Caliban’s Daughter”
(39), a passage describing a schoolboy, a “sleepy little nigger” whose teacher
cannot pry a word from him, “for his voice gets lost in the swamp of hunger”
(37).125 Cliff overrides Césaire’s masculine identification with a “sleepy little
nigger” by way of racial identification, perhaps too along the route of “his
voice,” “sa voix,” a plot that is gendered grammatically in French (“voix” is a
feminine noun), not biologically naturalized.
The identifications that Cliff makes—with Caliban, with Césaire—cross
and complicate gender but remain in the service of an affirmation of the
primordial (and silenced) black woman whose realization would be a new
subject position necessarily differentiated from the normative (and colonial-
ist) heterosexuality instanced by Césaire’s Miranda and Ferdinand. Singh’s
deployment of Wynter is tilted in the direction of the feminism against which
Wynter cautions, one that forgets race and mandates heterosexuality as the
way for a woman to be a woman. Césaire’s interrogation of “nature” denatu-
ralizes as colonial the imperative of heterosexual coupling. The recovery of
nature is the recovery (from the colonial perspective) of the unnatural.
As Singh notes, Césaire’s play ends with Caliban and Prospero locked in
a Hegelian dialectic. She terms it a “curious, almost natural bond” (“Caliban
versus Miranda,” 205), the muted (but unmistakable) implication being that
this male couple embodies a masculinist misogyny tantamount to homo-
sexuality. Tom Hayes offers a similar critique, except for him such mascu-
linist bonding cannot be a sign of a sexual link since he believes that male
homosexuality per se must be politically progressive. As M. Jacqui Alexander
has demonstrated, however, there is now a flourishing white gay male travel
industry in the Caribbean indistinguishable from the mainstream industry
that has been such a support for a nationalist/heterosexualization project
that guarantees the immiseration of women.126 Cliff ’s point that native homo-
sexuality ought not be seen as a form of colonialist imposition and degrada-
tion does not deny that there has been colonialist/ homosexual imposition
(in prostitution, in imposing Western-style sexualities as normative truths
about sexuality); her point is just that such plots do not exhaust the possi-
bilities of explaining or regulating “native” sexuality. Césaire sees this too
when, following the scene of the student in Notebook, the “exacerbated stench
of corruption” is laid at the door of “the monstrous sodomies of the host and
the sacrificing priest, . . . the prostitutions, the lubricities, the treasons, the
lies” (37). The question in such a formulation must be whether Césaire has
 98 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

foreclosed the possibility of nonheterosexual forms of “native” sexuality as

inevitably the result of the tainted scene of sodomizing the native, a question
raised too by similarly lurid descriptions of European decadence in Césaire’s
Discourse, or by the fact that male mutilation in the Notebook is named ex-
plicitly as castration (61).
Nonetheless, in the face of desires to disidentify with the “nigger” made by
colonialism, the gesture in the Notebook is to say “I accept,” to affirm oneself
as Caliban/cannibal, to embrace and reclaim through the term “negritude” a
territory of shame and abjection:

I accept . . . negritude . . . measured by the compass of suffering

and the Negro every day more base, more cowardly, more sterile, less profound,
more spilled out of himself, more separated from himself, more wily with
himself, less immediate to himself,
I accept, I accept it all. (77)127

Although the speaker of the Notebook is undoubtedly male, he aims to

unleash monsters, buried energies of the land that can be symbolized by its
“fat tits” or “orgasmic” waters (39) or figured, as in the opening lines, as the
face of a woman telling lies or occupied in her lyric cadence, a flow that may
be the same as that of a peasant woman urinating or, elsewhere in the poem,
of his mother pedaling for life at her Singer sewing machine (41). Certainly
this is a poem in which the speaker reiterates his “virile prayer” (69, 73) and
wishes for germination, for the awakening of voice and activity. Yet the plot
of the poem is not so gender exclusive as to preclude the kinds of identifica-
tions Cliff makes. Indeed, as the poem moves to imagine futurity, it crosses
gender and complicates what at first seems like a heterosexualized coupling:

[L]et the ovaries of the water come where the future stirs its testicles
let the wolves come who feed in the untamed openings of the body at the hour
when my moon and your sun meet at the ecliptic inn. (67)128

The union of the speaker and his people in this poem may be imagined as
a sexual embrace, but these lines exceed literal heterosexual figuration for
this. Although “fraternity” is one insistent name for this “male thirst and the
desire stubborn” (45), this male-male embrace includes a feminized earth
and the “feminization” at times of a male speaker characterized by “untamed
[sauvages] openings.”
This body is far more determinate in its racialization than it is in its gen-
der, and its race begins, as it does for Cliff, in the grandmother’s bed (Notebook,
43). So if we return to the moment in A Tempest that has been taken to mark
the limits of Césaire for feminist or queer reading, the insistent phallicism of
the Yoruba god Eshu whom Césaire introduces into the play, we might first
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 99

note that the trickster/metamorphic figure could be based in the abject equa-
tion of black man and phallus that Fanon details in Black Skin, White Masks.
There are many risks here, not least—as Lee Edelman’s “Part for the (W)hole”
persuasively argues129—that the very attempt to secure heterosexual mascu-
linity may involve a display of the penis tantamount to an announcement of
castration (and, within this logic, homosexuality). The entanglement of race
and sexuality here, as in Fanon, crosses the line between homophobic mascu-
linism and homosexual display. Eshu’s main effect is to scandalize the god-
desses. His song takes shots at queens and brides, sending the queen naked
into the streets and the bride into the bed of another man. Whether this
misogyny marks him as hetero- or homosexual is not so easy to tell. Eshu
proclaims an erotics aimed at the anerotics of the original wedding masque,
a disruptive force that makes Prospero wonder whether he is losing his grip.
The god reveals the male-male tie in which it is always the racial Other who
is the exemplar of sexual potency. “Power! Power!” Prospero intones, “what is
power, if I cannot calm my own fears?” (49).
In these impasses of indeterminate, projected sexualities, having and
being the phallus—which is to say, being male or female as much as being
hetero- or homosexual—is thrown into question precisely because of the ra-
cialized difference Eshu embodies. But Eshu also offers another set of terms
to understand his sexuality in the lines he speaks when he appears:

How about something to drink? . . . Your liquour’s not bad. However, I must say
I prefer dogs! (Looking at Iris) I see that shocks the little lady, but to each his
own. Some prefer chickens, others prefer goats. I’m not too fond of chickens, my-
self. But if you’re talking about a black dog . . . think of poor Eshu! (47)

Eshu’s slide along the registers of appetite allows for an embrace of besti-
ality. Eshu, overwhelmingly male, Myriam Chancy reminds us (by way of
Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s deployment of the god in The Signifying Monkey as
the embodiment of multiple meaning), was “originally believed to be a bi-
sexual God, both feminine and masculine.”130 His declaration of alternative
appetites/sexualities finds its parallel when Ariel resists Prospero’s claim to
have “delivered” him from his tree prison by expressing a desire to have re-
mained there: “After all, I might have turned into a real tree in the end” (10).
As the editors of Césaire’s poetry remark, this tree-desire is often expressed
in his poetry; it suggests a rootedness in a nature whose capacity for meta-
morphosis and transformation remains the hoped-for source of energy to re-
sist the deformations of colonial domination.131 When Prospero frees Ariel, he
promises “a very unsettling agenda,” to be the voice in the wind and the earth
making “the most forgetful slaves” yearn for freedom (60).
In this context of strange desires, one can register the force of the “sod-
omies” invoked in the Notebook and place them beside a scene that Césaire
adds to his Tempest (by way of Ernest Renan’s rewriting of The Tempest, which
 100 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

Césaire also is recasting), a friar’s accusation that Prospero professes “hereti-

cal perversion” (7).132 Here, as in the Notebook, the perversity would seem to
be an ascription by the very institution (the church) that Césaire explicitly
names in the Discourse as the site of the ideological production of a justifica-
tion for colonial greed and rapacity. The friar’s condemnation of Prospero in
the play is not taken to be naming a fact about him; rather, the accusation is
exposing the church’s mendacity. This leaves open a space for perversion, as
when the speaker of the Notebook affirms his obscene apostasy (51–53). The
so-called friar who appears in Une Tempête (his title in scare quotes in the
original French) is a travesty of the scandalous fraternity that Césaire affirms,
an identification with abjected people and place that the church might call
“sodomy” but that is recoded as nature. Hence, the scene between Ariel and
Caliban that Césaire added to Shakespeare (on the model of Renan, in fact)
ends with Ariel and Caliban exchanging the name of “brother” despite their
fundamental differences (23). Here, as in the final scene between Caliban and
Prospero, fraternity is a male-male relationship. Yet, as X suggested earlier, it
is still a place of crossing, potentially available beyond gender determination.
If Une Tempête offers no brief for full-scale revolution, it is because such
an overturning merely reverses the dialectic. This explains the long exchange
between Caliban and Prospero at the end of Une Tempête. As Césaire has
claimed elsewhere, in remarks that guide later comments in describing the
play by way of Hegel, the play reveals that “the slave is always more impor-
tant than his master—for it is the slave who makes history.”133 In the closing
dialogue, Caliban and Prospero throw back at each other the sentence, “I
hate you.” Nonetheless they end locked in a relationship: “And now, Caliban,
it’s you and me!” (67). The play closes with them as the sole inhabitants of
the island, and just before Caliban shouts his cry of “Freedom,” Prospero,
withered and diminished, recognizes again that “it’s just us two now . . . you-
me . . . me-you” (68).134
This odd coupling takes place in a scene that Cliff names through the
Jamaican word “ruination”: “the reclamation of land, the disruption of cul-
tivation, civilization, by the uncontrolled, uncontrollable forest” (“Caliban’s
Daughter,” 40). Prospero looks about him to find the landscape overrun with
opossums, animals he had imagined erecting themselves on their tails (A
Tempest, 67). Seeing only “dirty nature” (68), he sees the Sycorax he had
claimed was dead. Caliban calls Prospero “the Anti-Nature” (52) as he as-
sembles his rebel forces—nature spirits—flinging the charge of perversion, of
the unnatural, back where it belongs. In the final stagnation and stalemate
with which the play ends, like the inanition of the Notebook, the island awaits
the charge of a new life seized in the old word “freedom,” a resemanticization
of the old categories of abuse and old divisions. The new demonic monstrous
ground for change is Caliban—and Sycorax.
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 101

In Césaire, the “unnatural” in Caliban lies precisely in his affirmations of

nature, for this is nature without civilization (civilization being, of course,
the misnomer for conquest and exploitation), nature opposed to the patriar-
chal, aristocratic, white male imperial design. Caliban’s “nature” is the tie to
his mother that cannot be broken; this is how he has access to himself. No
wonder, then, that Cliff cites Caliban’s defense of Sycorax, for these lines rep-
resent the play’s counterplot that lodges a hope for futurity. Not cited by Cliff,
but central to this project of risked identifications, are the lines that Caliban
speaks immediately after his invocation, in which he reports that Sycorax
haunts his dreams, even appearing to him when he “was lying by the stream
on my belly lapping at the muddy water” (13). His/her reflection warns him
of the approach of “the Beast” in which he might see in the waters the figure
that Prospero would have him see as his identity, and with which he would
destroy Caliban.

you lied to me so much,

about the world, about myself,
that you ended up by imposing on me
an image of myself:
underdeveloped, in your words, undercompetent
that’s how you made me see myself !
And I hate that image . . . and it’s false!
(64)

When the monster speaks French, the lines of difference can no longer be
maintained. “There is no reason why André Breton should say of Césaire,
‘Here is a black man who handles the French language as no white man
today can’” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 39).

DO YOU LOVE ME, MASTER ?

If Cliff ’s estimation of Césaire (or Wynter’s, for that matter) can be seen from
the vantage point of a certain feminism to constitute a violation of gendered
solidarity, it is nonetheless a move toward racial alterity that invites, from a
standpoint that still could be called feminist, a rethinking of sexuality and
gendered proprieties. These debates within feminism could be resituated fur-
ther through the complex terrains in “the long crisis of modern sexual defi-
nition” succinctly mapped by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the
Closet. Sedgwick notes how sexual definition has been fractured by minori-
tizing impulses (which assume homosexuality as the identity of a discrete
subgroup) and universalizing impulses (which assume a spectrum of sexual
identities). These definitions intersect with formulations about gender: sexual
identity as a matter of consolidating gender (where male homosexuality would
 102 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

be continuous with masculinism, for example) or sexual identity as a matter

of cross-gender identification (where male homosexuality would testify to a
“woman” within or be revealed in “effeminate” behavior).135 These alignments
can crisscross in surprising ways in the indicatively European and U.S. con-
texts for male identity that Sedgwick explores. They gain further complexity
when to sex and gender one adds a consideration of their embodiment in ra-
cialized subject positions.
In Abeng, as Clare ponders the scene in which she fired a gun at the male
intruder who interrupted her intimacy with Zoe, she wonders whether fear
or shame had motivated her, and she thinks about her uncle (and godfather)
Robert, labeled “funny” by her family: “Robert had caused some disturbance
when he brought a dark man home from Montego Bay and introduced him to
his mother as ‘my dearest friend’” (125). Robert’s parents recoil at the indis-
cretion of his statement but also at the friend, a U.S. Black, who, they assume,
“led him into all this foolishness” (125). Clare asks her parents’ maid Dorothy
to explain what makes Robert “funny” and is told he is a “battyman—him
want fe lay down wit’ only other men” (125). “Explanations” for Robert’s homo-
sexuality (his being a battyman, a buttman) multiply: that he is crazy, un-
controlled, or the product of inbreeding or cross-breeding or of oversolicitous
maternal care. Clare responds aversively to Robert even as his case seems
to parallel her own, something she cannot quite see although he has come to
mind as she thinks about her desire for Zoe, whose “fault” she understands to
be congruent with what she has been taught is wrong about “loving someone
darker than herself ” (127), an “error” that has been presented to her in terms
of heterosexual choice and gendered propriety.
The “explanations” about Robert are, as usual in the novel, evasions and
complications around the twinned unspeakabilities of sexuality and race. Rob-
ert’s desire for a darker black man—and an American to boot—divides race by
color and nation. In that context, the American can function as a Westerner
subverting native desire from its straight path. But Robert’s desire, insofar
as it is innate, also follows along the tracks of an account of race that Clare
has been taught: that to be black is to be deficient, to be made to suffer, to be
tied to the indignities of a body whose dangerous eruptions must be tamed or
borne. Robert’s “condition” is allied to bad blood or bad upbringing, much as
Clare has been removed from a maternal line of race identification into the
nonetheless maternal line of middle-class femininity. Yet Clare also wonders
whether the term “battyman” can be applied to her, whether Robert’s failed
masculinity is equivalent to her unfeminine desires. Indeed, there also is
presented to her the possibility that her desire for darkness represents not so
much a deficit of femininity as its excess.
These tangles complicate Timothy Chin’s claim in “‘Bullers’ and ‘Battymen’”
that Cliff sees Clare’s incipient lesbianism as parallel to Robert’s homo-
sexuality. It is notable, for instance, that in “battyman” Abeng has a “native”
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 103

word for male-male sex, whereas it lacks one for female-female relations,
which suggests, at the least, a certain visibility and legibility for Robert’s
desire that cannot produce gender equivalence. Abeng thus asks whether
male homosexuality and lesbianism can be equated, even as it suggests their
congruence. How and when does Robert’s “funny” nature become visible as
disturbance? Does the label “battyman” simply mean homosexual, or does it
mean a desire that is multiply transgressive: for another man, for an Ameri-
can, for someone darker? The last thing Clare is told about Robert is that “the
disease was the fault of Robert’s mother,” that Robert was “spoiled” by ma-
ternal love (126). Is the incipient charge of gendered failure (on his mother’s
part, on his) the same as the charge brought against Clare, of wanting to be
a boy, a charge leveled at her identification with her light-skinned father,
rather than with her mother, which may yet be a feminine identification with
the line of Nanny?
Robert is not the only “battyman” in Abeng; the term is also applied to
Clinton, a man who has returned from the United States and moved back
in with his mother, showing no interest in women. Taunted by neighbors as
a battyman, Clinton is left to drown, his body unburied. His mother, once
thought of as a powerful obeah-woman, is reseen as Mad Hannah, as she
worries that her son’s spirit will never be at rest. “Where they used to poke
fun at Clinton, they now poked fun at his mother” (63). Through its disdain
for Hannah, the community disavows its ties to African belief systems of
obeah, Sycoraxian magic, and knowledge of nature; it refuses to see that its
rejection of Clinton is allied to this racial refusal. Clare is drawn to Hannah;
her questioning of normative regimes could land her in the “mad” position of
Hannah because she recoils at the limits of a prescribed femininity or in the
position of Clinton, who drowns in the mockeries of community refusal. Uncle
Robert also drowns.
Cliff ’s representation through Clare of the possibility of drawing male-
male desire into the orbit of female-female desire—along with her linking of
both of them to the Calibanic project of reclaiming Sycorax and through her
both Africa and the Caribbean landscape as sites of new possibilities—is sig-
nificant not only in its own terms but also insofar as it points to the fact that
nonphobic representations of male homosexuality in Caribbean literature are
almost exclusively to be found in the work of women writers and theorists.
Patricia Powell’s Pagoda, for instance, has as its central character Lowe, a
Chinese immigrant to Jamaica in the late nineteenth century, a woman who
cross-dresses as a man both to escape forced marriage in China and to en-
able her immigration. Lowe is protected by the white man who raped her and
provided her with a wife so that Lowe can continue her disguise and bring
up their child in a seemingly ordinary family. The villagers suspect the two
“men” of a “nasty” cross-racial/sexual relationship, of being “devil workers”
(15). They do not suspect what the novel gradually reveals, that Lowe and her
 104 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

wife are lesbian partners (Lowe, in fact, is not her wife’s only female lover).
The novel suggests that female-female relationships are commonplace (in
the rum shop women complain about their husbands and children and talk
about “the women they loved on the side” [57]). The lability of female desire
provides a route for Powell to represent the complexities of relationships that
may appear to be heterosexual or homosexual but that are, at root, female-
female. The difficult project that the novel imagines for its hero(ine) is the
revelation to her daughter that her father was her mother, that the woman
she took to be her mother, and who indeed mothered her, was not. This plot
resonates with Me Dying Trial in its extensions of female community and in
the centrality of a fraught mother-daughter relationship (here, the mother
rather than the daughter is “lesbian”). It draws these into cross-gendered
plots that begin to implicate male same-sex coupling, a feature even more in
evidence in Me Dying Trial, where the proto-lesbian Peppy has a particularly
close relationship with her proto-gay brother Rudi. It is in fact his coming out
that drives a wedge in the family, leading to maternal repudiation. And the
most painful point of this is that earlier in the novel, as Gwennie, the mother,
attempts independence, she is guided by her friendship with a man who is in-
volved with another man; this man becomes a model for Rudi. Powell’s point
in these novels is to suggest a range of enabling extrafamilial relationships
that need to be valued rather than excoriated.
To the extent that male homosexuality is understood in Caribbean cul-
tures on a cross-gender model, it is not surprising that it is rarely represented
in work by male writers or that when it is, it is denigrated. The battyman
represented by Guyanese writer Roy A. K. Heath in The Murderer (1978) is a
sinister character: a police informant who lives with his alcoholic prostitute
mother who wonders “where he pick up the germ from”; the novel suggests
that it was from her.136 Recall Jeremy from Lamming’s Water with Berries, also
politically suspect, and the parallel Miranda figure Randa, who betrayed her
marital vows. Consider Brathwaite’s only reference to male homosexuality of
which I am aware: In Barabajan Poems, he laments the destruction of a street
in Barbados by developers who have no respect for the past and who seek to
make the island a tourist paradise. In highly ambiguous remarks, Brathwaite
recalls Bajan lore about Sandylane, that it had been a pickup site for wealthy
Europeans to entice “poor/needy/ambitious? young Bajan males into homo-
sexual service” (309). It is difficult exactly to locate Brathwaite’s nostalgia for
a street in which, he claims, Bajans were made “aliens” by a sexual experience
that he clearly understands as parallel to recent exploitative developments—
difficult, moreover, since he applies the terms “bullers” and “battymen” to
these Bajans, that is, uses indigenous terms for men who are supposedly
made alien by having sex with men. A slight pause of identification does occur
in his telling—“we were the ALIENS,” he affirms—but on the whole the story of
Sandylane battymen is told as some kind of joke. (“Battyman,” “buller,” and
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 105

“auntie man,” the most common terms used in the Caribbean, are slangy, pe-
jorative, and derisive in usage.)137 Does Brathwaite defend against the truth
that Hilton Als blithely announces in The Women, as he describes his mother’s
lack of surprise that a friend of hers is an “auntie man”: “[A]untie men were
not mysterious beings to her; in Barbados, most ostensibly straight men had
sex with them, which was good, since that left women alone for a while.”138 Als
himself identifies as an auntie man, an identity formed through his identifica-
tion with his mother as a “Negress.”
In her work on mati workers in Suriname, Wekker mentions in passing
that the term can refer not only to women’s relations but to those between
men as well (“One Finger,” 331), a parallel that may be attributed to the
separation of male and female homosocial cultures. Mati may have derived
from a term for shipmate (“Mati-ism,” 149), a derivation parallel to a male-
male lexicon among Indo-Caribbeans, or so Sean Lokaisingh-Meighoo argues
in an essay on the lability of the language for male-male camaraderie that
arises from the term jahaji bhai, “ship brother.”139 This term can be applied
by either gender to each other but also extends, he argues, to male homo-
social relations that also are sexual. The map of sexuality provided by these
examples is complex: It may involve the separation of gender as a social
fact or a commonality marked by a shared term; it may describe same-sex
sexuality as a matter of cross-gender identification or as the consolidation of
same-sex social relationships.
These provide sites of possibility written across diasporic existence, as
Stuart Hall, for one, has argued.140 The multiplicities of these social/sexual
arrangements for new kinds of persons are the antidote to the lethal bina-
risms that pit groups against each other, clinging to older paradigms of exclu-
sive identity. But precisely for that reason, as groups attempt to consolidate
power, same-sex relations are the sites of severe stigma, scarcely represented
at all in Caribbean literature beyond the examples I have been gathering on
these pages. When Cliff jokingly calls up “Trinidadian” as a possible name
for lesbian relations, she does so because the term “Jamaican” seems un-
available. In 1992, when a gay march took place in Jamaica, it was met with
violence; in 1997, when the state proposed distributing condoms in prisons
to decrease the rate of HIV infection, the move was regarded as tantamount
to promoting homosexuality, a position the government then insisted it cer-
tainly did not seek to take.141 One need not go to the Caribbean, of course, to
witness state-sponsored homophobia. Responses to the possibility of making
same-sex relationships visible echo those to be found in the United Kingdom
or the United States. Nor is the legendary homophobia of Jamaica unique;
Alexander’s work on failed attempts in the early 1990s to liberalize sexual
laws offers overwhelming evidence of the assumptions of ignorance on the
part of state managers in the Bahamas and Trinidad, their display of the
privileges of unknowing that Sedgwick so tellingly explores in Epistemology
 106 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

of the Closet. Nonetheless, the point here is that both the homophobia dis-
played and the attempts to organize sexual life in terms of the homosexual/
heterosexual distinction constitute refusals of Caribbean sociality and sexual
organization. AIDS, of course, may quickly dissolve any such distinction,
though not the difference of how the disease is lived in the Caribbean. In My
Brother, Jamaica Kincaid’s powerful account of the 1996 death of her brother
Devon, his only chance to stay alive comes from her bringing him AZT. The
drug is not otherwise available in Antigua; AIDS is an imminent death sen-
tence. In Powell’s A Small Gathering of Bones, a novel about AIDS in Jamaica
in the late 1970s, HIV infection, as Aparajita Sagar argues in an essay on
the novel, is not simply to be understood as a sexual infection; it is a disease
spread by the particularly virulent response that homosexuality evokes.142
That virulence, as both Kincaid and Powell suggest, is the product of the
colonial experience that has promoted the disunity and disintegration of
Caribbean life that so many commentators, from Césaire, Fanon, and Goveia
on, have detailed. “Antiguans are not particularly homophobic,” Kincaid writes
in My Brother; their homophobia parallels the fact that “they are quick to
disparage anyone or anything that is different from whom or what they
think of as normal.”143 This matches their lack of sympathy for those in pain
or in trouble, and the reason for this, Kincaid explains, as so many before her
have done, lies in the history of “subjugation, leaving in its wake humiliation
and inferiority; to see someone in straits worse than your own is to feel at
first pity for them and soon better than them” (186).
The valuing of homosexual existence against such deeply ingrained co-
lonialist legacies of feeling and behavior is a central point in Spirits in the
Dark (1993) by H. Nigel Thomas (born in St. Vincent, now located at Laval
University, Quebec). Thomas’s novel is virtually the sole Caribbean novel
written from a gay male perspective.144 It is, in many respects, a familiar
story about a young man passing through the colonial education system,
recognizing its limits and its aim to divide islanders as a way to further and
reinforce neocolonial regimes. In the novel, the world of Isabella is black, but
anti-African, and although texts by Fanon, Lamming, and Malcolm X are
available, Thomas portrays little organized political resistance. His hero,
Jerome Quashee, differs from many protagonists of Caribbean novels, however,
insofar as the divisions and alienation that lead to his mental breakdown are
compounded by his homoerotic desires. From the vantage of an unspeakable
difference, he sees the intolerance of difference in his milieu, linking its racial
divisions (black against white, black against Carib) and sexual antagonisms
(men against women) to homophobia. The novel proposes a utopic solution
through an Afro-religious group whose democratic/socialist sociality recalls
Césaire’s descriptions in his Discourse of precolonial Africa or Lamming’s fan-
tasies about the original Tribe Boys. In this community, Jerome can hope to
find acceptance for his same-sex desires. Nonetheless, the best that Jerome’s
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 107

spiritual counselor can propose is that he share this knowledge about himself
sparingly, that he suffer his trials and tribulations, for most members of the
community are not yet ready to receive it: “Is true that people is always grow-
ing, some faster, some slower. But most o’ the brethren ain’t grown enough fo’
understand why you is how yo’ is and fo’ accept yo’ as yo’ is” (212–13).
Timothy Chin devotes several fine pages to Spirits in the Dark: “[A]t the
same time that it exposes the complicity of the community, Thomas’s text,
like Cliff ’s, demonstrates an acute sensitivity to the ambiguous and some-
times contradictory spaces that inevitably exist in any culture” (“‘Bullers’
and ‘Battymen,’” 139). It is, he continues, “within the context of concrete
affiliative social relations that the potential for negotiating these contradic-
tions can exist” (140). Spirits in the Dark represents Jerome and a few other
men with homosexual desires as a distinct minority; none of the brethren
presumably feel such desires or have homosexual sex. The sites of possibility
that Chin describes are valuable ones, and they are notable for their cross-
gendered potential: a marketwoman, for example, who is, in fact, a man and
yet is fully accepted by the other marketwomen. Moreover, Jerome’s initia-
tion into the brotherhood involves a symbolic death and rebirth in which he
descends into a cave, a womb, to be reborn from Mother Earth and to derive
from her and from his mother the strength to endure: “There followed an-
other silence, during which he struggled with his memory. He told himself
he wouldn’t get out of the cave whole without it. Suddenly it was as if his
body chose to relax and he heard within himself an echo of his mother’s voice.
‘Some things yo’ can’t hurry, no. Yo’ just have fo’ let them finish in their own
time. Meekly wait and murmur not.’ . . . I will endure” (193).
What Jerome achieves at this moment parallels Césaire’s Caliban’s invoca-
tions of his mother. The difficulty of this reclamation—so central to Cliff—is
also key to the novels of Patricia Powell, as we have seen in Me Dying Trial.
Fraught relations with mothers are the focus in her Small Gathering of Bones
as well. The character in the novel who is dying of AIDS is literally killed by
his mother, Miss Kaysen, who throws him down the stairs; when she found
out about his illness, she repudiated him: “I am not your mother” (Small
Gathering of Bones, 21). At the novel’s close, the novel’s protagonist, Dale
Singleton, also faces Miss Kaysen, and perhaps a similar demise (he also
is HIV positive, although he has not yet recognized that). Dale is strongly
identified with his mother; his relationship with Nevin, his former lover, with
whom he continues to live, in fact parallels his mother’s relationship with
his father. Both men are unfaithful. Dale had attempted to tell his mother
about his sexuality, but she had refused to hear him; now she is dead. Early
in the novel, we see Dale at his desk. Over it are “faded etchings of: ‘Jesus
Saves’, ‘Batty-man’, and ‘One Love Jamaica’” (14). All betray him in the
course of the novel. He leaves his church (in which he had learned the lesson
that he should silently suffer his difference), and although there is a network
 108 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

of gay men and of locales in which to socialize, Dale plunges into unprotected
anonymous sex. Jamaica is the villain in the novel, and the country is embod-
ied in the figure of the rejecting mother.
Beside the murderous Miss Kaysen, there is Mrs. Morgan, Nevin’s mother.
She has maimed her husband (fathers are basically absent in the novel). She
holds her son close. They work together, live in houses that back each other.
Mrs. Morgan knows about her son’s sexuality and uses her knowledge to
blackmail Dale when he will not help her break up the affair her daughter
is having with a Rastafarian. Mrs. Morgan resembles no one more than the
mother in Kincaid’s My Brother. There, too, the sons live in a house right
behind the mother’s. One brother no longer speaks to his mother; the other
broke her neck “by throwing her onto the ground in the process of trying to
stop her from throwing stones at him because she disapproved of him bring-
ing a girlfriend, or any woman with whom he had a sexual relationship, into
the structure where he—they all—lived” (My Brother, 188).
Kincaid’s mother wishes her children dead, the telos of the kinds of divi-
sions that characterize Antigua in Kincaid’s scathing A Small Place. In My
Brother, Kincaid writes about the brother who did die, not of the two who
have survived in these violent repudiations that parallel Kincaid’s own
ferocious writing, filled with loving hatred of her mother. When Devon fell
ill, Kincaid assumed heterosexual sex was responsible. “If he had had homo-
sexual sex, he would not have advertised it” (40). Abandoned by everyone
when he is hospitalized, except his mother—who relishes his suffering (when
he recovers enough to leave the hospital, he shares a bed with her)—she
apparently does not know what Kincaid discovers only after her brother’s
death, when she meets a woman at a reading who introduces herself as a
lesbian who kept her home open as a place for gay men to meet. Devon had
been among them. This life of Devon’s remains opaque for Kincaid. Looking
at his corpse, she reports, “[W]e did not and cannot know what he looked like
as the seducer of men” (181). His sexual life apparently left no traces. Yet it
was lived under his mother’s eye.

[H]e had died without ever understanding or knowing, or being able to let the
world in which he lived know, who he really was—not a single sense of identity
but all the complexities of who he was—he could not express fully: his fear of
being laughed at, his fear of meeting with the scorn of the people he knew best
were overwhelming and he could not live with it openly. His homosexuality is
one thing, and my being a writer is another altogether, but this truth is not lost
on me: I could not have become a writer while living among the people I knew
best, I could not have become myself while living among the people I knew best—
and I only knew them best because I was from them, of them, and so often felt I
was them—and they were—are—the people who ought to have loved me best in
the whole world. (My Brother, 162)
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 109

The painful silence in Kincaid’s account, like the stigma and silence around
same-sex relations in most Caribbean novels, keeps suggesting what Als
claims to be true, that the highly occluded representation of same-sex be-
havior exists side by side with the ordinariness of its occurrence in mother-
dominated societies, where the mother is herself positioned by self-division.
Stuart Hall is fond of saying that he left the Caribbean because he needed
to get away from his mother. He has also pointed to the utter hopelessness
of Fanon’s claim that the Oedipus complex is unknown in the Antilles, a re-
gion Hall characterizes by “deeply troubled and assertively heterosexual and
often homophobic black masculinities.”145 As Als puts it: “‘[M]aleness’ is not a
viable construct in colored life. Colored life is matriarchal” (The Women, 40),
and he virulently faults black power movements for their mesmerizing rela-
tionship to what he regards as the utterly spurious figure of the black male
and his empowerment. The identity he claims—as Negress—is, he implies,
closer to the truth about black men. The pleasure he takes in seducing black
men lies in his making them see their vulnerability. The Women thus draws
us back into the orbit of cross-gendered identification and, within the typolo-
gies we have been exploring, back to the relationship of Caliban to Sycorax
that Cliff reclaims.
The “women” in The Women are Als and his mother, as well as Dorothy
Dean and Owen Dodson, the figures to whom he devotes eulogistic chapters.
These “women” are, themselves, divided in various ways, and not merely by
gender (only two of them are female). Dean was a fag hag, living in a world
surrounded by privileged gay white men: “I am a white faggot trapped in a
black woman’s body” (73), s/ he says of herself. Dodson is the opposite, a male
Negress: “He competed with women sexually for what he desired: a man—
which he did not consider himself to be” (135). When Als has sex with Dodson,
he becomes a man; Dodson “was my first woman” (132). These identifications
across race and gender are not sites of comfort in The Women. For necessarily
they are also sites of disidentification with whom one is or is supposed to
be. These are black men and women who desire whiteness in various ways,
culturally and physically. It is part of Als’s point to expose that unspeakable
cultural desire as rooted in various forms of black consciousness, both in the
Harlem Renaissance, which, Als claims, denatured Dodson’s genius in its
search for a middle-class respectability, and also in the black power move-
ment, about which Als is particularly cruel, exposing the poetry of Nikki
Giovanni, for example, for its vaunting of black male heterosexual privilege
and power and tearing into Malcolm X’s autobiography for its failure to rep-
resent his mother. Als goes so far as to claim that Malcolm’s desire for male
power was his desire to be the white man who had raped his grandmother.
Als dismisses the “dreary marginal issues of race, or class, or gender” (19) for
the complexity of the identification he claims (from his mother) as Negress:
“It is difficult to be Negress-identified, since the Negress rarely identifies
 110 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

with herself ” (44). Negress-identification is necessarily disidentification. It

is to locate oneself and one’s desire as “a disgrace to the race” (73), as a “Bad
Nigger” (83). Als thus refuses identity for the sake of the kinds of wrong iden-
tifications that Cliff entertains.

When Cliff resumes the story of Clare Savage in No Telephone to Heaven, she
tells it from the vantage point of Clare’s final decision to return to Jamaica,
to claim it, rather than England (where she has been studying art history)
as her mother country. She returns, moreover, to join with Jamaican revo-
lutionaries united under “the name of Nanny” (No Telephone to Heaven, 5);
to them she gives her maternal grandmother’s ruinate land (Miss Mattie is
long dead) as a base for their operations. Clare dies at the end of the novel,
burned into the ruinate forest by government forces that decimate the rebel
band. This return joins together Clare’s desires: for mother, grandmother,
Jamaica, Africa, the past, the land, another voice—a desire that one might
call “lesbian” (even though Clare has no sexual relationship with a woman
in the novel) in the extended sense by which the term might describe the
networks of an alternative sociality that might revolutionize society and in
the sense, too, that Als claims himself as a Negress or that Thomas’s Jerome
finds himself through his mother’s voice.
That desire positions Clare as Césaire’s Caliban, as the novel makes
explicit in a moment recognizable from “Caliban’s Daughter,” when Clare,
lonely in her London flat, reads Jane Eyre and repudiates the identity her fa-
ther would wish for her: “No, she could not be Jane. Small and pale. English.”
Rather, Clare sees, Bertha is “closer to the mark. Captive. Ragout. Mixture.
Confused. Jamaican. Caliban. Carib. Cannibal. Cimarron. All Bertha. All
Clare” (116).146 Mixed, confused, colonial, Clare entertains an identity si-
multaneously an entirety (“All Bertha. All Clare”) and yet made up of the
incommensurate terms paratactically listed, but not easily parallel, crossing
gender for the sake of racial nomination.
These mixtures of different and nonidentical forms of nonwhiteness are
only further complicated by the fact that these names also have oppressive
meanings associated with them. The burdens associated with this can be
seen, for instance, in a stunning moment when Clare voices resistance to
her father and affirms herself through her mother. Kitty and Boy had emi-
grated to the United States, where, faced with the kind of blatant racism that
Lamming’s Trumper reports, Kitty experienced intense dislocation. Working
in a laundry, she writes subversive messages decrying American racism
on the flyers included with the clothes laundered by a fictional company
spokesperson, “Mrs. White.” Ultimately, Kitty comes out as Mrs. Black and
announces she has killed Mrs. White. Soon after, she leaves Boy and returns
to Jamaica, where she dies. In her orphaned state, and after the massacre of
girls her own age in a church in Birmingham, Clare lashes out at her father’s
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 111

pursuit of whiteness and refusal to make common cause with American

Blacks. “My mother was a nigger,” she says. “And so am I” (104). Through
the virulent term of racial denigration, Clare allies Caribbean and African
American identity, against her father’s and her culture’s mode of thinking.
Clare at this moment fulfills Trumper’s discovery.147
Clare nonetheless leaves the United States for England. Her return to
Jamaica is facilitated by the letters she receives from her friend Harry/
Harriet, calling her home. Clare and Harry/Harriet are bonded in the novel
from their first appearance together, when she gags after having had sex
with one of the boys at a party and Harry/Harriet opines that “cock-juice
don’t mix with champagne, sweetheart” (88), something he undoubtedly knows
firsthand as an openly effeminate battyman. The return to claim a despised
identity is prepared for in an acidly comic scene in a Kingston bar (Clare
home on a visit) in which Clare and her friend rename themselves for some
Western tourists through terms of denigration that include the charge of
African cannibalism. Clare’s list is not as startling as the words that she
and Harry/Harriet fling up, but their juxtapositions are just as telling. “I am
Prince Badnigga, and this is my consort Princess Cunnilinga,” Harry/Harriet
tells the tourist, adding that his eye shadow is an ancient mark used by his
African tribesmen to distinguish them from the enemies they ate (125).
Harry/Harriet sounds more than a bit like Hilton Als here. S/ he is the
central political figure of the novel. Her cross-gender status (ultimately re-
solved in the decision to “be” Harriet) parallels Clare’s as she finally embraces
herself as a black woman. As Judith Raiskin notes about this symmetrical
moment, race and gender choices are moved “beyond the biological determina-
tions of these positions” (Snow on the Cane Fields, 191). It is also crucial that
this mirroring preserves differences between Clare’s racial assumption and
Harriet’s gender.

“Girlfriend, tell me something. Do you find me strange?”

Clare looked into her friend’s eyes. Mascara and eye shadow washed away
by the salt water, the eyes stood out, deep brown. Her own eyes naked, green as
the cane behind them. She thought, Of course I find you strange; how could I
not? You are a new person to me. At the same time I feel drawn to you. At home
with you.
“No, I don’t find you strange. No stranger . . . no stranger than I find myself.
For we are neither one thing nor the other.” (131)

Harry/Harriet has a past similar to Clare’s, or to Caliban’s. His mother

was a dark-skinned maid forced to submit to her light-skinned employer;
he has been brought up in the master’s house, tolerated as a cross-dressing
battyman, repudiated the moment he chooses to take his homosexual iden-
tity seriously. If Clare yearns for a relationship with a woman, she has it, in
a sense, with Harry/Harriet, not least because he identifies so completely as
 112 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

a woman, and precisely through the stunning moment from his past that he
tells Clare about, when he was raped by a white policeman: “Ten years old
and guilty that a big man in a khaki uniform, braided and bemedaled, in
the garrison of Her Majesty, did to me what he did. What else to expect but
guilt . . . or shame . . . whiteman, Black bwai” (128).
Harry/Harriet acknowledges how seductive it would be to treat this rape
as a symbol of colonialism: “Darling, I know how hard it is to listen to all of
this; it is hard to tell. I have been tempted in my life to think symbol—that
what he did to me is but a symbol for what they did to all of us, always bear-
ing in mind that some of us, many of us, also do it to each other” (129). Yet he
insists upon its literality, only extending its meaning to embrace his mother’s
experience: “I only suffered what my mother suffered—no more, no less” (129).
That is, he grants it symbolic value precisely in terms of his mother’s actual
experience. He refuses, moreover, to read the rape as an explanation of his
homosexuality: “And no, girlfriend, before you ask, if you intended to ask, or
assume, that did not make me the way I am. No, darling, I was born this way,
that I know. Not just sun, but sun and moon” (128). Cliff ’s point here is to af-
firm Harry’s homosexuality rather than to treat it as simply a sign of colonial
decadence, the forced imposition of a Western form of sexuality unknown in
the Caribbean. Césaire’s Caliban is thus also a model for Harry/Harriet’s
“lesbianism” in his attachment to and identification with his mother, playing
out a sexual potential for Caliban that Belinda Edmondson notes in Making
Men: the “masculine” revolutionary force also symbolizes colonized, femi-
nized territory (60–61).
When Harry/Harriet chooses to be Harriet rather than to play the part,
when she chooses to be a revolutionary, she does so in the face of the hatred
he would incur if her fellow revolutionaries knew there was a penis under
her dress. Harry/Harriet is the novel’s privileged political spokesman be-
cause of the sexual position s/ he inhabits. Those politics are therefore sexual
politics, a gender politics that can be called black lesbian feminist, and whose
challenge to those identity labels comes from the fact that Harry/Harriet—a
biological male—is its embodiment.
As the “new person” made possible by the colonial past, Harry/Harriet’s
debt to the script of The Tempest is as unstraightforward as her relationship
to the terms of identity politics; insofar as the play—and its history of revi-
sionary rewritings—lies behind Cliff ’s writing, the positions occupied by her
characters arise not only from the unspoken, repressed, and unrepresented
but also from the unspeakable and monstrous in the play. Caliban/Bertha is
one way Cliff names the position as Clare moves to reclaim an identity she
has been taught to despise.
The Tempest’s male Sycorax, Césaire’s female-identified Caliban, the blue-
eyed hag and her sodomite son stand behind Clare and Harry/Harriet, as well
as behind the third central character of the novel, the impoverished black
 CALIBAN’S “WOMAN” / 113

Christopher, who is intent upon giving proper burial to his grandmother.

Christopher kills his light-skinned employers, desecrating their genitals. He
also brutally murders the dark maid who sides with them, slashing her body
beyond recognition. He hears his grandmother’s voice as he performs these
acts. As Edmondson comments, linking Christopher to Clare, “that these
other, black, maternal bodies have been dead but not buried reminds us of the
invisibility of black women in the narration of West Indian revolutionary dis-
course, as embodied by Caliban’s mother, the absent Sycorax, who represents
Caliban’s past heritage of might and agency” (Making Men, 130). Christopher
is the novel’s most violent representation of the forces unleashed by unre-
solved mourning for the dead grandmother, the unreclaimable, unburied, and
unburiable past. Christopher plunges into madness (like another Caliban
figure in the novel, Clare’s sometime lover Bobby, incurably wounded by the
Agent Orange he administered in Vietnam). He too is consumed in the confla-
gration that ends the novel. The revolutionaries have targeted a U.S. movie
company filming a travesty romance version of the Maroon history of Nanny
and Cudjoe. Christopher—inarticulate, crazed—has been conscripted to play
the part of an African god. “Howl! Howl! . . . Try to wake the dead. Remember,
you’re not human” (No Telephone to Heaven, 207), the film director tells him
as he utters the cry with which he unwittingly triggers the government fire
that brings down the revolutionaries.
The revolutionaries’ violence had been directed at the false representa-
tions of the filmmakers. As in the passage in which Harry/Harriet describes
his rape, the symbolic and the real are inextricably tied together, and No
Telephone to Heaven stages its possibility more in its chances of rewriting
than in the actuality of social transformation. Although there is good war-
rant to privilege Clare in an analysis of the novel, Harry/Harriet, Clare, and
Christopher are tied together: in versions of revolutionary struggle and
in attachment to the (grand)mother and the land, ruinate and stagnant
(Christopher lives in a garbage heap), dead and yet—like Sycorax in Césaire’s
Tempête—alive. Moreover, in their varied relationships to class and color po-
sitions, to gender and to sexuality, they form a kind of composite figure, one
not to be reduced to some singularity but to be seen instead as a matrix of
transformations, always strange and yet close. The ways Cliff ’s characters
occupy various positions on the grids of intelligibility can only be negotiated
through the recognition that no singular figure emerges from the template
they provide. In this, the characters are—at once—utterly singular in their
actions and histories even as they come to make up a kind of symbolic picture
of the colonial and neocolonial dilemma. As the character who continually
struggles toward and fails to consolidate an identity that gives its due to all
its conflicting elements, Clare is most representative both of the personal di-
lemma that Cliff traces and of the larger cultural field in which she operates.
 114 / CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”

And it is in watching Clare grope to bring together what can never finally be
brought together that the novel offers its sobering vision of possible futures.
These are limited by all the forces that continue colonialism under new
forms of economic domination, forces not simply outside but inside as well,
as Harry/Harriet insists in his reading of the rape as something done not
only by whites to blacks but also by empowered blacks to those who live
in poverty (the revolutionary band is betrayed by one of its own members)
and by forces that not only operate at the economic level but are lived in the
stigma attached to everything that is thought not to be normal. One sign of
how contingent and difficult such attempts at wholeness and recovery must
be is the fact that the closest the novel comes to representing the “lesbian-
ism” that would consolidate Clare’s identity is, as Cliff remarks in an inter-
view, the figure of Harry/Harriet.148 The representation of homosexuality as
a liminal gender position only partly explains this cross-identification. For
Harry/Harriet’s identification as a woman has everything to do with his iden-
tification with his mother, with her underclass condition, with the fact of her
rape, and with all the ways these facts also are symbolic of the colonial moth-
erland. “Woman” is therefore incapable of being read only as a term of gender
since it is so inflected with these further meanings and histories. The limit
represented by Clare’s failure to achieve lesbian identity is overcome through
this extended sense of what “lesbian” would mean in the Caribbean context.
In this extended sense of the term, Clare’s decisions to return to her grand-
mother’s ruinate farm, to hand the land over to the revolutionaries, and to
fight with them can be called lesbian choices. They are summed up in the fig-
ure celebrated in the briefest chapter of the novel, section 7, “Magnanimous
Warrior!” a two-page invocation to the figure so named. The section ends by
asking, “Can you remember how to love her?” (164), and sentence after sen-
tence addresses her as “Magnanimous Warrior,” as “Mother” and “Warrior”
in alternating sentences. M/ W: Cliff has in mind the Fon deity Mawu-Lisa,
female and male creation god(dess). But “warrior” also names a convention-
ally male role, and in a word that alliterates with “woman,” while “m” and
“w” cross genders. This primordial female figure—call her Nanny, call her
Sycorax—is also Harry/Harriet. “One old woman, one who kenned Harriet’s
history, called her Mawu-Lisa, moon and sun, female-male deity of some of
their ancestors” (171). “I was born this way,” Harry/Harriet had affirmed,
we recall: “Not just sun, but sun and moon” (128). This primordial ground
of femininity is at the same time a ground of male femininity. As Timothy
Chin tellingly remarks, “sites of ambiguity and contradiction—which often
reflect how ‘differences’ are actually lived and negotiated—are, paradoxically
perhaps, the ones that can potentially enable new forms of social and cultural
relations.”149
MIRANDA’S M EANINGS
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 MIRANDA’S M EANINGS

HUMANE CARE
“Remember, you’re not human”: The film director’s words to Christopher in
No Telephone to Heaven point us, once again, to the demonic ground of dif-
ference upon which Cliff operates, the terrain claimed by Wynter through
the category of “nigger”/“native” as the “ultimate Conceptual Other” to the
human as the “technological master of nature and ostensibly supracultural,
autonomous ‘Man’ of the Western bourgeoisie,” the character embodied in
Césaire’s Prospero. Can any valuable sense of the human remain after the
depredations of colonialism and neocolonialism?1
In Abeng, in a stunning moment recalled but uncomprehended by Clare,
an old, obviously poor, black woman approaches two of her darker-skinned
classmates, asking the time. The other girls rebuff her, but Clare gives her
the time “and the threepence busfare she begged,” lashing out at her class-
mates, “How could you be so inhuman?”2 The narrator takes up an analysis
of the scene, explaining, first, why the woman had approached the other girls,
assuming sympathy and identification, and then, why they had refused her:
“[T]hey hoped to pass or were being trained to pass beyond the suffering and
the expectation of their oneness with this state of being and to make a sepa-
ration for themselves” (78), a separation—beyond their color—they believe to
be theirs, thanks to their schooling. Clare’s supposedly humane act of charity
also is based on separation and is not offered as a sign of human identifica-
tion, certainly not of racial identification. Her charity, as much as denigration,
is a colonialist act of the sort that Shakespeare’s Prospero claims for himself
when he says he showed “humane care” for a Caliban that he names in the
very same line as essential filth—“filth as thou art” (1.2.346)—Caliban to
whom he had earlier accorded a “human shape” (1.2.284) in lines whose am-
biguity we have already had occasion to remark.
117
 1 1 8 / M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S

The narrator’s analysis moves Clare’s inhuman/human lashing out at her

classmates along the colonial route carved out in the belief that “the suffer-
er was not expected to be human” (78). Therefore, suffering unleashed upon
those made to suffer needs no justification; no justification was needed to
feed the “sufferers” to the colonizer’s dogs, as was done regularly, most spec-
tacularly when a group of so-called Panamanian sodomites met this end at
Balboa’s hands. “All monsters. All inhuman” (Abeng, 78). The European imag-
ination had populated the New World with forms of animal mixture, can-
nibals, monstrous “Men / Whose heads stood in their breasts” (The Tempest,
3.3.46–47), as Gonzalo, the humanist, recalls his Mandeville and the images
of “natives” that fill Renaissance travel books like Sir Walter Ralegh’s on
Guiana. The true heart of darkness, Cliff ’s narrator maintains, is a core con-
necting the extermination of natives, the enslavement of Africans, the Jewish
Holocaust. “Inhuman” is the foundation of Clare’s classmates’ unforgivable
but understandable act, as they distance themselves from themselves and
identify with the forces of “civilization”/extermination. But it is also the root
of Clare’s kindness to the old woman.
The regimes of “man” and of the “human” seem inadequate to remedy
the situation created by the divisions in this scene, to suspend the prolifera-
tion of invidious differences that Wynter’s work unveils, or to ameliorate the
post-Enlightenment situation underscored in the conversation G has with
Trumper in In the Castle of My Skin, wherein Trumper, we recall, notes
the U.S. habit of racial denigration that says “nigger” rather than “nigger
man,” as in Barbados. In the latter term, the word “man” preserves the illu-
sion of a commonality in the human. “One single word make a tremendous
difference. . . . I’m a nigger or a Negro an’ all o’ us put together is niggers or
Negroes. There ain’t no ‘man’ an’ there ain’t no ‘people.’”3 Hence the “Rights
of Man” is an empty slogan. “If the rights o’ Man an’ the rights o’ the Negro
wus the same said thing, ’twould be different, but there ain’t ’cause we’re a
different kind o’ creature” (297). Has the “different” future arrived, one in
which “man” and “Negro” are identical, which Trumper glimpses and fore-
closes, one in which “different” is the human same? Or is such an overcoming
of difference inevitably a triumph for the Eurosame? Could “human” name the
new kind of person whose existence Wynter summons in “Caliban’s ‘Woman’”
and that Cliff configures in Harry/Harriet? Is not the supposed universalism
of “human” and “Man” inevitably the mark of privilege denied variously to
those said to be too close to nature to be thought of as cultured and human, to
those called unnatural and thereby outside human nature, to those relegated
to live in shit, as Césaire insisted, as Cliff remembers, citing this passage as
an epigraph to a chapter of No Telephone to Heaven:

And this land screamed for centuries that we are bestial brutes; that the human
pulse stops at the gates of the slave compound; that we are walking compost
 M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S / 1 1 9

hideously promising tender cane and silky cotton and they would brand us with
red-hot irons and we would sleep in our excrement and they would sell us on
the town square and an ell of English cloth and salted meat from Ireland cost
less than we did, and this land was calm, tranquil, repeating that the spirit of
the Lord was in its acts.4

In Une Tempête, Gonzalo and his confreres have come to the island to expro-
priate guano; it is the colonizer who trades in excrement.
Prospero’s declaration of his “humane care” is followed by lines in which
Miranda reviles Caliban, a speech eleven lines long, the only words she ad-
dresses to him in the course of Shakespeare’s Tempest. Prospero’s justifica-
tion of his enslavement of Caliban for his alleged attempted rape, Caliban’s
assertion,

Would’t had been done!

Thou didst prevent me—I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans
(1.2.348–50),

prompts Miranda to speak:

Abhorred slave,
Which any print of goodness wilt not take,
Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known. But thy vile race—
Though thou didst learn—had that in’t which good natures
Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou
Deservedly confined into this rock,
Who hadst deserved more than a prison.
(1.2.350–61)

These lines embody “Miranda’s Meanings” for Wynter, and provide the basis
for her analysis of the seismic displacement that allowed “Woman” to join the
regimes of “Man,” as “a co-participant, if to a lesser derived extent.” They also
serve as a kind of textual crux in The Tempest: “From Dryden to Kittredge,”
Orgel notes in his Oxford edition of the play, “this speech was almost al-
ways reassigned to Prospero.” In the introduction to their Arden edition, the
Vaughans credit this, along with the “wife”/“wise” dilemma, as the only real
textual cruxes in the play, deciding that the lines rightly belong to Miranda.
 1 2 0 / M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S

Her anger, they opine, “is timely and appropriate,” befitting “her character,
which is more forceful and sexually aware than early editors seemed to pre-
fer.”5 Wynter’s argument that the ascendency of “race” “now enables the par-
tial liberation of Miranda’s hitherto stifled speech” (BMM, 361) would seem
to obviate this textual problem. No need, therefore, to worry the question
whether the speech is “properly” Miranda’s and “may be taken,” in Orgel’s
phrasing of the problem in his gloss to lines 350–61, as indicative of “an
important aspect of her nature.” It would reveal, rather, in Gayatri Spivak’s
phrasing, “the mesmerizing focus of the ‘subject-constitution’ of the female
individualist,” an individual who nonetheless speaks for the group that calls
itself “human.”6
What does need to be asked, following the impetus of Wynter’s critique,
and still on the basis of textual prompting, is whether Miranda’s use of the
word “race” in these lines (a usage that seems to refer not simply to some-
thing located within Caliban’s character but to an identity that might link
him to others) can legitimately be brought into the scope of the racial plot
that Wynter reads out from the lines.7 Miranda’s usage is close enough to a
modern notion of “race” that it seems important to ask whether such a usage
is indeed possible in an early modern text. I have all along been supposing
this possibility. To support it, I will turn to the meanings of “race” to be found
in Shakespeare and then broaden the inquiry along paths laid down by Wynter
(and by Lamming), to explore the regimes of the human. In Miranda’s lines
there is a tension between, on the one hand, a belief that those characteris-
tics that would secure humanity and the essential freedoms attendant upon
it may be acquired by any subject through a system of deliberate and struc-
tured pedagogy and, on the other, a belief that some beings may be nomi-
nally human but nonetheless incapable of this achievement of full humanity.8
These tensions, mobilized in the service of securing categorical demarcations,
are the ways in which “race” in Miranda’s lines anticipates the racialized dis-
courses of Enlightenment philosophy and political discourse that ramify into
the ideological support of liberalism and colonialism.

. . . THY VILE RACE

Shakespeare’s plays make use of the word “race” some dozen times, where it
most often designates a notion of birth and lineage that confers a specific so-
cial rank.9 We find “the Nevils noble race,” for example, in 2 Henry VI (3.2.215)
and a “happy race of kings” in Richard III (5.3.152), and Marina’s pupils in
Pericles are of “noble race” (5 Chorus 9). Such usages could be said to form
the antithesis to Caliban’s “vile race,” thereby nudging Miranda’s phrasing in
the direction of lineage. Indeed, in Timon of Athens, Timon divides the world,
which he refers to as “the whole race of mankind,” into “high and low” (4.1.40).
In these usages, race is naturalized as a rank conferred by birth. Such natu-
ralization of social status is echoed in the other frequent usage of “race”: to
 M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S / 1 2 1

designate a stock of animals or the cultivation of plants. “Race” attaches itself

to animal breeds (horses, both in an analogy that Lorenzo draws for Jessica
in Merchant of Venice [5.1.72] and in a comment marking how preternaturally
Duncan’s horses, “the minions of their race,” devoured each other at his death
[Macbeth, 2.4.15]), and The Winter’s Tale famously represents grafting as the
joining of the “bark of baser kind, by bud of nobler race” (4.4.95).
It is in passages where such mixtures are regarded as threateningly
destabilizing that Miranda’s usage of “race” finds its closest parallels. When
Antony disdains the blandishments of Cleopatra that have stood in the way
of “the getting of lawful race” with Octavia, that “gem of women” (Antony
and Cleopatra, 3.13.107), his meaning seems close to Miranda’s insofar as
illegitimate sexual union (in his case, adultery rather than rape) is seen as
productive of an adulterated kind. Shakespearean usages of “race” frequently
worry the question of mixture (whether of plants or of people), and they pose
the possibility of adulteration, even within a noble strain (Duncan’s horses
are the best example of this). Many of these usages suggest that untoward
union (of Lorenzo the Christian and Jessica the Jew; of Antony the Roman
and Cleopatra the Egyptian) may be the matrix of “race.” Even the allusion
to the “race” of the Nevils arises in a context of crossbreeding and political
contention.10
Orgel glosses Miranda’s usage with a line from Measure for Measure,
Angelo’s declaration, “Now I give my sensual race the rein” (2.4.160). This
might seem rather obliquely related to the usage of “race” in The Tempest,
but it is pertinent insofar as Angelo’s unleashing of the horses of his passion
might relate to the charge against Caliban if only because the indication of his
“race” lies in his attempt at rape.11 That Angelo has hitherto controlled the
reins he now drops points, however, to his marked difference from Caliban,
whose “race” has something uncontrollable in it—an otherwise unnamable
“that in’t”—that leads him to rape. When Miranda’s lines point to something
“in” Caliban’s “vile race” that makes him unassimilable to European stan-
dards of moral behavior, they indicate that his sexual desire signifies an
unnatural attempt at “unlawful” mixture showing he has failed to recognize
the unbreachable difference between “kinds.” That failure, it might be said,
suggests that Caliban is virtually outside the pale of the human—a category
constituted precisely by the ability to recognize high and low status distinc-
tions, as Timon’s previously cited lines imply. In these ways, Caliban appears
more animal than human. Miranda’s lines recoil at sexual violence. They
voice disgust at a repellent mixture and, even more, at someone incapable
of understanding fundamental social distinctions. “Race” in Miranda’s lines
pushes in the direction of modern racism as it ontologizes the divide between
human and savage. Caliban’s wish for a progeny of “Calibans” is in line with
this as well, for it posits the reproduction of a separable kind.
In Racist Culture, David Theo Goldberg cites Miranda’s lines to illuminate
 1 2 2 / M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S

early modern usages of “race” that equivocate between its “natural and social”
meanings, that is, between its usage as a category of animal or plant and its
application to groups of people. As Goldberg puts it, “the conflation of natural
with the social kinds . . . were already well rooted nearly two hundred years
prior to the Enlightenment!”12 Although it is not his point to suggest that
the early modern term is identical to its post-Enlightenment incarnations,
he argues persuasively that early modern attachments of “race” to lineage
cannot simply be assumed to have nothing in common with later usages.
What makes Goldberg’s Enlightenment connection even more plausible is
the fact that Miranda’s lines invoke the high/ low distinction within a moral
framework akin to typical Enlightenment usages. If Caliban’s “race” is “vile,”
that term both indicates a status distinction and makes a moral judgment,
a slippage even more evident in Miranda’s self-nomination and inclusion in
the group she characterizes as “good natures.” Something of the trajectory
of such status terms can be noted in the historical transformation of “noble,”
which endures in modern English to suggest moral qualities rather than aris-
tocratic blood. Given the radically reduced cast of characters in The Tempest,
Miranda’s lines equivocate this moral positioning even further. Whether the
“race” exemplified by Caliban is simply a sign of his personal moral failure or
whether it is a shared characteristic cannot be determined. At the time that
Miranda utters these lines, the only others she has seen on the island are her
father and Caliban; hence any statement she makes about “good” or “vile” na-
tures can be only literally singular but is potentially generalizable precisely
in the direction of those Enlightenment discourses on “race” that assumed
the innate moral superiority of Europeans.
Goldberg argues that modern ideas of “race” find their earliest articula-
tion in the sixteenth century in the context of colonialism, a point of undeni-
able pertinence to The Tempest and especially to Caliban, whose name was
made possible by the ascription of cannibalism to Native Americans. It is
because of such ascriptions that I have been guided throughout this study
by the work of modern writers from the Caribbean like Lamming, who re-
fuses to treat Shakespeare with respectful philosophical distance, knowing
all too well the work that so historically remote a text as The Tempest has
been made to do. Nonetheless, the discourse mobilized by Miranda does not
so much depend upon New World associations as indicate how the mobiliza-
tion of incipiently modern racial distinctions to describe Native Americans
or black Africans depended upon the discourses of difference within—and
beyond—the human in Miranda’s lines. Assuming that when Europeans saw
“others” they immediately saw them as racially Other too easily naturalizes
racial difference. I would suggest, rather, that the language Miranda uses,
of unbreachable social distinction, and the prevarication between social and
natural mixing are necessary preconditions for the application of racial dif-
 M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S / 1 2 3

ference to foreigners, and I would further suggest that “race” in such in-
stances is not grounded in physiognomy.13
In making this point, I follow the argument that Foucault offered in a se-
ries of lectures delivered under the title “Il faut défendre la société” (“Society
Must Be Defended”) at the Collège de France in 1976.14 Against the ruse of
a political theory that posits sovereignty as a transcendental model located
above the social fray, a contract in which members of a society delegate pow-
ers to a ruling apparatus, Foucault sees the sovereign as, rather, an instance
of accumulated power, the outcome of struggle within a divided social ter-
rain. In Foucault’s model, the social is a state of war that is insurmountable,
a war, moreover, that conceptualizes itself as racialized struggle, “la guerre
des races” (51). In a stunning example, Foucault adduces the mobilization
by revolutionary forces in mid-seventeenth-century England of the Norman
yoke in order to claim for themselves a true Englishness, pointing thereby to
the foreign origin of the sovereign and claiming native status for themselves
(61). In this example, the king was seen not merely as a foreigner but also
as an enslaver. A revolutionary insurgent history making claims for those
normally excluded was voiced in the racialized terms of lineage and origin.
At more or less the same time, Foucault argues, similar arguments were
launched in France, but this time by aristocratic opponents to the king. In
that instance, a rearguard politics battened on racialized difference. From
these early modern instances, Foucault proposes that the ongoing history of
state formation entails a continuous battle in which social differences are
fought as racial differences. “Race” is less invented in colonialism than de-
ployed to others, at least at a certain moment in the history of the West.
The supreme modern instance of race for Foucault is Nazism (a conjunc-
tion reiterated in Paul Gilroy’s Against Race),15 and he details how notions of
race mobilized in the seventeenth century against the sovereign came to be
attached to the modern state as the supreme instance of the “good natures”
devoted to the extirpation of “vile races,” enemies within. Along the way, he
suggests ways this trajectory intersects with the formation of other kinds of
modern differences and other modern categories, notably those of class and
sexuality. Foucault’s lectures at the Collège were coincident with the publica-
tion of the introductory volume of his History of Sexuality. Its final section, on
the politicization of biology as the culminating point in a history of sexuality
coincident with the apparatuses that seek to further “life” by deciding whose
lives are worth preserving, is also the terminus for “race.” Wynter picks up
on these arguments in “The Ceremony Must Be Found,” claiming that the
creation of the “natural community” is a potentially lethal formation of ontolo-
gized racist difference.16 Foucault’s argument suggests, in short, that the early
modern invention of “race” is extraordinarily consequential, ramifying indeed
beyond the domain signified by the term “race” in modernity. Miranda’s lines
can be read along these pathways of “race.” In their description of a failed
 1 2 4 / M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S

pedagogic project, they begin the work of justifying the unequal distribution
of cultural capital. They do so in a register drawn from the world of print.

. . . ANY PRINT OF GOODNESS

Miranda ends her speech to Caliban by reiterating her father’s claim, that
Caliban deserves slavery—confinement—or worse for his attempted rape.
Her conclusion follows and rewrites Prospero’s narration in which his “hu-
mane care” (1.2.346) has been answered by Caliban’s filthy, abhorrent act.
As Miranda tells it, her attempts at care took the form of a pedagogy that
failed to work its effects. This, too, reinscribes Prospero’s script. He has been
her schoolmaster, and now she repeats the lessons learned for Caliban’s sup-
posed benefit, but to little avail: The “print of goodness wilt not take” (1.2.351).
Miranda casts Caliban’s language lesson—her giving him language and thus
the means to make his meanings known—as a particular form of language
giving. She writes pedagogy as inscription, as if he were the slate to be in-
scribed, printed. “Goodness,” what she would write on him, is also, as “good na-
tures” indicates, what she claims for herself. The attempt to form Caliban as
proper pedagogic object is also one that aims to make him a form of Miranda,
as she herself, taught by her father, was informed by him. Pedagogy here is
thereby a means for reproduction, cultural reproduction that nonetheless, in
its very metaphorics of printing, suggests sexual reproduction as well.17 The
metaphorics of printing and the pedagogic project of literacy seem to as-
sume that Caliban, like Miranda before him, is capable of a fully unproblem-
atic grafting of the kind represented in The Winter’s Tale. This time, however,
there is no saving revelation of royal blood. The humanitarian project reaches
its racial limit.
In its imagining of education as inscription, Miranda’s metaphor is not
unusual. In The Schoolmaster (1570), Roger Ascham stresses the importance
of beginning education early, as the time most apt for “men . . . to receive
goodness.” “For the pure clean wit of a sweet young babe is,” he continues,
“like the newest wax, most able to receive the best and fairest printing and,
like a new bright silver dish never occupied, to receive and keep clean any
good thing put into it.”18 Ascham’s images tally with Miranda’s, and he also
employs metaphors of grafting in drawing his “similitude” of the schoolhouse.
Whereas it might seem that Ascham’s image of the purity of the uncorrupted
mind, capable of receiving goodness, fails to imagine the situation that
Miranda describes—in which Caliban, “capable of all ill,” has some unnamed
“it” within that points to his limited capacity for inscription—it must be re-
marked that Ascham’s project does not even imagine a Caliban as a possible
pupil. Ascham’s innocent and pure mind is not some tabula rasa assumed
as the condition of any pedagogic subject; rather, the goodness that Ascham
would inscribe is directed at a good subject—a gentleman, in short.
 M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S / 1 2 5

Even if the pedagogic project in The Tempest seems to extend humanistic

education to a subject clearly not a gentleman, it does so under the conditions
that Richard Halpern has described in The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation.
Although education did promote social mobility, enlisting thereby new kinds
of people into higher echelons of society, it also had what Halpern describes
as a “demonstrative” purpose, through which educational failure was taken
to indicate those incapable of education. Rather than recognizing that the
sorting mechanism of education distributes the prestige of learning unevenly,
the mechanism itself was thought to reveal the limits in those it solicited.19
Halpern refers to this as a discourse of “capacities,” and Miranda describes
Caliban as “capable of all ill,” and therefore only in a very limited way able to
receive what she offered.
This difference can be contextualized by recourse to “race,” and it is im-
plicit in the social distinction that underlies a book like Ascham’s. If one turns
to a pedagogic text that is aimed not solely at a gentle audience but also at
a wider one, the project of naturalizing “capacity” is further evident. Richard
Mulcaster’s First Part of the Elementary, for example, insists upon the impor-
tance of education as a humanistic—indeed, a humanizing—project. It aims
to move its subjects from an existence that Mulcaster calls “mere being” to
one that he names “well being.”20 This movement—as the distinction between
“mere” and “well” suggests—is not simply hierarchical but implicitly social.
Pedagogy aims to print goodness, to produce “well being,” on subjects that are
not innately good.
Whereas Ascham would seize the gentle youth before he has had the
chance to be misprinted, Mulcaster imagines the originary situation of the
pedagogic subject as an existence in a state of nature that is, at best, neutral.
“Mere being” is a situation of “first humanitie” (Elementary, 31), in which life
is merely sustained, while “well being” is equivalent to what he calls “best
humanitie.” Mulcaster thereby divides human being into two states, and
only the latter is completely human. To live in the state of “mere being” is,
he says, to be “but half a beast,” whereas “well being” makes man “likest him,
of whom he hath his being, and most sociable” (31). The similitudes here—in
which “well being” makes the subject at once godlike and sociable—mark
the social thereby as a stratum of the elite constituted by the pedagogic ap-
paratus. Were education not to work, those solicited but not remarked by
the apparatus would remain in their quasi-bestial condition. “Well being”
involves the exercise of reason, for it is reason that indicates “our difference
in comparison with beasts” (34), but, it would appear, it also indicates our dif-
ference from ourselves before we attain to “well being.” Guided by reason, we
are trained and thereby taught a series of restraints so that we are no longer
devoted merely to perpetuating our existence, no longer driven by appetite
and desire. Full humanity marks the difference between “he that liveth,
fedeth, multiplieth” and he who exercises judgment, taking, in Mulcaster’s
 1 2 6 / M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S

example, “food with moderation, encrease with continence” (34). The division
within the human—the division that institutes the properly human—is one
that retroactively marks those who fail to be reformed as less than or other
than fully human.
“The beginning of everie thing,” Mulcaster writes, translating Plato, “is of
most moment, chefelie to him, that is young and tender, bycause the stamp
is then best fashioned, and entreth deapest wherewith ye mean to mark him,
and the sequele will be such, as the foretrain shall lead, whether soever you
march, bycause naturallie the like still draweth on the like” (23). This march
of mechanical reproduction, of like upon like—the printing of goodness—is
an interrupted trajectory, and one that can always fail. For Mulcaster’s “se-
quele,” the sequence from “mere being” to “well being,” is not simply a natural
telos. The graft may not take on those capable only of ill.
Caliban is one of those, for the particular failure that he represents is
ascribed to a defect rooted in him; “good natures” cannot be received by
those that have that unnamable something within that so debilitates them.
Miranda’s lines subscribe to Mulcaster’s thesis, that Caliban is all but reduced
to “mere being,” that what is innate in him—and, by extension, in all those
who are not rehabilitated and made fully human by the pedagogic project—is
a matter lodged in his “race.”
Miranda’s humanist pedagogy underwrites the program of colonialist edu-
cation. It also anticipates Enlightenment distinctions between those who have
and those who lack reason. As in those later texts, the question of human being
is fully equivocated. In her Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak takes up
Kant’s Third Critique in order to show that his philosophical project, so often
taken to be in the service of a universalism, is founded on a radical exclusion.
Answering those like Frances Ferguson, who embrace Kant as proposing
through the analytic of the sublime “the absolute equality of all persons in re-
lation to the transcendental schemata,”21 Spivak insists that the egalitarian-
ism of the Kantian project is not universally available. Rather, a divide within
the human is opened that runs along the fault lines of what she calls “the axi-
omatics of imperialism” (27). Spivak zeros in on “the raw man of the Analytic
of the Sublime—stuck in the Abgrund-affect without subreptitiously shuffling
over to Grund” (26).
The “raw man” here is Spivak’s literal translation of a figure who appears
in James Creed Meredith’s translation of The Critique of Judgement as “the
untutored man.”22 A pedagogy is at stake, and in this instance, as in the case
of Caliban, it involves a movement from “mere being” to “well being,” to recall
Mulcaster’s categories. “Without the development of moral ideas, that which,
thanks to preparatory culture, we call sublime, merely strikes the untutored
man as terrifying” (Critique of Judgement, 115). For anyone, Kant claims, the
experience of the sublime is at first discomfiting; one passes from the state of
being overwhelmed through a necessary self-reflexiveness that constitutes
 M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S / 1 2 7

a rising above the immediacy of perception and sensation to the secondary

state of transcendental consciousness. It takes training, it appears, to do this,
even to recognize the sublime. It takes a cultural inculcation, and some are
incapable of it. As Spivak suggests, some remain caught in the abyss, in the
entirely negative experience of the sublime, and lack the capacity for the turn
that transforms the abyss into a foundational moment. Spivak, translating
exactly, calls this subreption, for the moment is one of discontinuity and the
ground of the ground is without ground. Or, rather, in order for the transcen-
dentalizing moment to occur, its ground must be cast off to an elsewhere, to
someone incapable of this transformation, someone caught in the primordial
abyss, a being without morality, however human; a being not yet and never
quite capable of being fully human.
Spivak picks a difficult but indeed foundational moment in Kant’s schema
to notice that an exclusion is being performed. Wary of overly anthropologiz-
ing or incorrectly materializing the trope of the “raw man,” and thereby of
committing the very sort of faux pas that Kant disallows, Spivak teases from
this figuration the unnamed excluded Other as the “native,” collating this
passage with one in The Critique of Teleological Judgement in which Kant
wonders aloud whether humans need to exist at all—a question for him
made obvious by recourse to the example of “New Hollanders or Fuegians.”23
In choosing to search in a text whose transcendentalizing gives so little im-
mediate evidence of the exclusions that its supposedly universal system oper-
ates, Spivak eschews the notorious passage in Kant’s early, precritical (as it
is called) Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, in which
Kant momentarily entertains a proposition voiced by a black man only to
dismiss it summarily: “[T]his fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear
proof that what he said was stupid.”24
Race is not a topic much considered by Kantians, most of whom would
probably demur from Robert Bernasconi’s claim that the modern “concept of
race bears Kant’s signature.”25 The remark just cited is taken as typical of
Enlightenment racism by African American scholars like Henry Louis Gates
Jr. or Ronald A. T. Judy, as well as by David Theo Goldberg, whereas most
Kantians would be likely to dismiss it as an early crude remark not worthy
of the mature Kant and not to be read as in any way connected to his later
thought.26 Spivak’s difficult reading thus makes possible a connection most
Kantians would eschew. As Judy has argued, even if the thinking of the later
Kant seemingly rules out his earlier statement, Kant nonetheless has a
“Negro problem,” as he puts it, one most manifest precisely in the complicity
between Kantian transcendentalizing and an order of exclusionary inscrip-
tion.27 Most forcefully, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze has reminded Kantians
that Kant’s lifelong teaching on geography and anthropology deploys invidi-
ous racial distinctions that cannot be sheltered from—but are, rather, fully
consistent with—his final three critiques. The sentence in the Observations
 1 2 8 / M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S

may be early and precritical, but the texts on geography and anthropology
are lifelong projects.28
As Eze demonstrates, the Kantian “project of overcoming ‘raw’ nature”
(“Color of Reason,” 212), as announced, for example, at the opening of An-
thropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, is barred to those who remain
in the state of nature: non-Europeans incapable of the self-reflexiveness
necessary to make that desired self-transformation and self-perfecting that
Kant thinks is the work of becoming human. Kant notes, “it does not depend
on what Nature makes of man, but what man makes of himself.” 29 The non-
European, especially a black man, remains for Kant someone unable ratio-
nally “to ‘elevate’ (or educate) oneself into humanity” (Eze, “Color of Reason,”
215). “For Kant,” Eze concludes on the basis of his reading in texts on geogra-
phy and anthropology for the most part available only to those who read Kant
in German, “European humanity is the humanity par excellence” (“Color of
Reason,” 221). The supposed universalizing process of humanization by which
“man” rises out of nature is only realized by whites. “Physiological knowledge
of man aims at the investigation of what Nature makes of man, whereas
pragmatic knowledge of man aims at what man makes, can, or should make
of himself as a freely acting being” (Kant, Anthropology, 3). But some men are
incapable of that move, and that incapacity is marked physiologically—as
the outrageous sentence in the Observations affirms of those who are “quite
black.” In the light of Eze’s arguments, Spivak’s “suspect” anthropologizing
is hardly that; it suggests, rather, the need to bring together parts of Kant’s
corpus usually kept apart. As Paul Gilroy comments, “however beautiful they
appear to their benefactors, Kant’s democratic hopes and dreams simply
could not encompass black humanity” (Against Race, 60).
In his 1775 essay “On the Different Races of Man,” as well as in the notes
drawn from his lectures on geography, Kant promotes the superiority of
European—indeed, of Germanic—peoples. Although he thinks all people are
human, he also insists that natural differences are racial differences, and
innately so. Much as Miranda points to an unnamable “it” within Caliban’s
“race” that renders him incapable, Kant points to the “appropriate develop-
ments” of racially/geographically different peoples as suggesting innate dif-
ferences that cannot be explained by any visible circumstances or geography:
“Even there, where nothing answering the purpose is manifest, the mere
capacity to reproduce its particular assumed trait is proof enough that a par-
ticular germ or natural disposition was to be found in the organic creation.
For external things can be causes of an occasion, but not evocative causes.”30
Geography and climate, in other words, do not explain differences in
peoples. Rather, some “germ or natural disposition” is to be assumed, even
if Kant cannot exactly provide an account of what this reproductive prin-
ciple might be. This structure of thinking is identical to the one that Kant
describes in the analytic of the sublime, positing a break from the physical
 M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S / 1 2 9

to the transcendent. On the verge of the suspect biologism that will clinch
racial difference, Kant also harkens back to the reproductive schema that
underlies Miranda’s lines, one that can be found as early as the theory of race
propounded by George Best in 1553.31 Best too does not think that climate
explains the difference between whites and blacks. Impressed by the example
of “an Ethiopian as blacke as a cole brought into England, who taking a faire
English woman to wife, begat a sonne in all respects as blacke as the father
was” (180), Best proposes a myth of origins in the familiar biblical account
of the sons of Noah, one of whom was cursed with slavery and black skin.32
In Best’s account, Cham is punished not for spying his father naked but for
failing to abstain from sex on the ark. From this sexual immoderation sprang
an “infection in the blood” (182) passed down to future generations. “Blacknes
preceedeth . . . of some natural infection” (180) is Best’s guiding presupposi-
tion. Just as Miranda can do no more than point to something unnamable—
innate—in Caliban’s nature, instanced in his attempted rape, that dooms him
to failure, so too Kant locates something within, a reproductive insistence,
tainted (as in Best), that supplies the irremediable difference of race.
This connection—of something innate, something tied to sexuality—is
only furthered when we restore the context for Kant’s statement in Observa-
tions on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime:

Father Labat reports that a negro carpenter, whom he reproached for haughty
treatment toward his wives, answered: “You whites are indeed fools, for first you
make great concessions to your wives, and afterward you complain that they
drive you mad.” And it might be that there was something in this which perhaps
deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to
foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid. (113)

Although neither Eze nor Judy pauses over this, Kant actually momentarily
entertains the black man’s thought, and he does so because of the opinion
the man expresses about relations between men and women, husbands and
wives. In fact, Kant only pretends to quote Labat here; he has supplied the
black carpenter’s speech. In Labat, the discussion is about why black men
have their wives and children serve their meals rather than sitting with
them, as the white governor in Guadeloupe does. The carpenter replies that
“the governor is not wiser in that respect; although he well believed that
whites had their reasons, blacks also had theirs; and that if one wished to
consider how proud and disobedient to their husbands white wives were, one
would affirm that the Negroes, who keep theirs in a state of respect and sub-
mission, are wiser and more practical than whites in this regard.”33
Kant’s willingness to entertain a black man’s opinion about managing
wives highlights the point for which Isabel Hull is a valuable guide, that
Kant’s thinking about gender is fraught, congruent with (although not fully
parallel to) his thinking about race, I would argue.34 As Hull shows, Kant
 1 3 0 / M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S

equivocates between a universalizing view of humanity and a definition of

the human as citizen. The exclusionary force of citizenship bars “children,
the mentally impaired, the poor or economically dependent, and women” (301;
Hull’s list might well include nonwhites). When Kant writes Mensch he really
means Mann (305). Although there may be nothing theoretically within
Kant’s thought that would necessitate these distinctions, women and blacks
are thought and positioned similarly in Kant’s work: Men and women consti-
tute “two sorts of human being” (Observations, 77), and women—like blacks
(for the generalization about men and women is tacitly about whites)—are
closer to nature.
It is striking that in Kant’s Observations, the beautiful and the sublime
are gendered, the former female, the latter male, and that there, as in his
Anthropology, Kant believes that women should not be educated in mascu-
line, abstract subjects, that they are made by nature to be reproductive ma-
chines. Part of what they do is to reproduce the species, but they also repro-
duce culture by limiting male sexual drive, which, as Hull argues, is also the
drive toward freedom, which is a male prerogative. Women solve for men the
problem of sexuality, and for Kant it is a problem, since it represents for him
a sheer and mere appetitiveness capable, as he puts it in the Anthropology, of
enslaving a man (capable, in The Tempest, therefore, of warranting Caliban’s
enslavement). He writes, “Passion . . . no man wishes for himself. Who wants
to have himself put in chains when he can be free?” (Anthropology, 157). The
problem is that the solution to being enslaved by passion is enslavement to
a woman: “The woman becomes free by marriage; whereas the man loses his
freedom thereby” (223). A woman is free when she fulfills her task, entrap-
ping a man. Kant worries the question of sexual domination, the question
of who rules in marriage. He nominally hands over the domestic sphere to
women as properly theirs, but he also makes clear that their power there is
balanced by their disempowerment in the public and civic spheres. Domestic
“power” is therefore a ruse, since women are denied the full humanity of the
citizen. “The woman should reign and the man should rule” (224); “he loves
domestic peace and gladly submits to her rule, so that he does not find him-
self hindered in his own affairs” (217). No wonder Kant almost finds the black
man worth listening to as he criticizes European marital arrangements that
threaten domestic confinement. Just as Observations moves from a general-
ized discussion of the beautiful and the sublime to their embodiment in gen-
dered difference and then in national difference, so too Anthropology from a
Pragmatic Point of View moves from its considerations of “human” faculties
of thought and desire to their embodiment in gendered and national/racialized
differentiations.
Kant worries that the sexual relationship may constitute a form of slavery,
and he solves this problem by imagining marriage to be the only possible egali-
tarian arrangement. Kant’s view, most clearly seen in his Lectures on Ethics,
 M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S / 1 3 1

is that sexual desire is problematic precisely because it is natural; it is noth-

ing but appetite.35 It seeks another person not as a person but as sexual object.
For Kant, this is irremediable, and the solution is the monogamous couple,
each of whom gives over the totality of being to the other. They are equally
subject and object in this exchange and thereby avoid becoming merely ob-
jects for each other. Marriage is the social institution that solves the problem
of overcoming human nature, the sexual drive as mere appetitiveness.
Hull reads this as expressive of the fact that Kant’s desiring subject is
male, and she finds this version of “mutual objectification” to be a model that
“portrays two solipsistic egoists using each other; it is the model of cold prop-
erty exchange; it is a model of masturbation” (308). Her point, simply, is that
there is no woman there. The model accommodates what is for her a quin-
tessentially male point of view, disallowing, for instance, the possibility that
women might fulfill themselves in some other way than by becoming wives,
might have some cultural task or natural drive other than luring men to
them. Other feminist critics—for example, Robin Schott—have made a simi-
lar case, stressing that the objectifying view connects Kant forcibly to capital-
ist modes of exchange and especially to that form of objectification that can
be called reification.36 This “ideal” egalitarian model is a reduction of persons
to things, a reduction that is market driven.
Moreover, as Eric Clarke argues, Kant’s idealizing paradigm of marriage
assumes not only that the universal subject is a property-owning white male
but also that he cannot be a man who desires other men (similarly, Kant
cannot countenance the possibility of a woman desiring another woman).37
Humanity and citizenship are once again conflated. Kant says that homo-
sexual desire is not natural; it is one of the crimes against nature. (Kant
uncritically invokes the phrase that had prevailed from medieval canon law
through early modernity.) In that respect, the paradigm of self-making should
not exclude those who desire same-sex partners, since animals, Kant claims,
do not exhibit same-sex desire. Unnatural desire is human. But for Kant,
this only makes it more abhorrent: “These vices make us ashamed that we
are human beings, and therefore capable of them” (Lectures on Ethics, 171).
“All crimina carnis contra naturam degrade human nature to a level below
that of animal nature and make man unworthy of his humanity. He no longer
deserves to be a person” (170).
Racial, gendered, and sexual nonpersonage—all are tied to a reproductive
imperative: Race taints reproduction; women exist to reproduce; homosexuals
fail to reproduce. The norm of reproduction secures white male privilege. The
universalizing project of Kantian enlightened, self-conscious self-making can
produce a vision of nondifferentiated equal subjects only after entire groups
of nonpersons have been excluded.
Caliban assumes that had his rape attempt succeeded, he would have pro-
duced Calibans. Miranda assumes that had her pedagogy succeeded, she would
 1 3 2 / M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S

have reproduced herself as her father had reproduced himself in her. Mixture
is, either way, impossible; good cannot be grafted onto ill. The abyss cannot
be breached or filled, for it is already full of difference. Faced with a Caliban,
there is no possibility of moving from the abyss to the foundation. He is funda-
mentally incapable of the movement that is foundationally human. Miranda’s
last words, supporting the logic of Caliban’s enslavement as fit punishment
for his rape attempt, come as an afterthought, for his attempt has proved that
he never was capable of anything but evil, that his being was unreclaimable.
The deed points to his nature, to his all-but-utter alterity.

A THING MOST BRUTISH

In her retrodetermination of Caliban as “savage,” “a thing most brutish,”
Miranda ascribes to his nature—his “race”—something that had first been the
matter of a single act, his attempted rape. The failure of education to stick, to
change what is deeply within him and totally determinative of his behavior,
reinscribes the pedagogic project as an anthropology. Miranda had offered
a language lesson, and Caliban’s lack of language, his originary “gabble” is
remarked. The attention to language is overdetermined, and not just a ques-
tion of the distribution of cultural capital by the pedagogic apparatus. For, as
Anthony Pagden remarks in The Fall of Natural Man, a book that traces the
fortunes of the Aristotelian notion of the natural slave, the slave-by-nature,
in sixteenth-century Spanish debates about the nature of Native American
populations, a primary aspect of the concept follows from the assumption
that Native Americans have no language. Miranda’s lines mark Caliban as
the Aristotelian slave-by-nature. As Pagden points out, “barbarian” means
“babbler”; for the Greeks, someone who did not speak Greek, who thus lacked
the language of civilization, was marked thereby as barely human.38 In some
sixteenth-century thought, it was doubted whether the inhabitants of the
New World were human. Miranda’s “gabble” seems to translate barbarian
“babble” insofar as both terms are thought of as imitative of the nonsensical
sequence of sounds made by those without true language.
Miranda assumes that Caliban’s native sounds did not convey meaning,
that they were mere noise. Here, as in the texts Pagden examines, the defini-
tion of having a language and of lacking one depends upon the notion that
some forms of language are transparently rational, that they convey inner
intention in outer utterance. To lack language is to lack other qualities, es-
pecially the deliberative ability to form political associations. Thus, when
Aristotle opens his Politics by pondering the history of political formations
and offers an analysis of those who are forever barred from such forms, he
points to the barbarians, who are incapable, as he puts it, of realizing the
end of political formation, which starts as “a means of securing life itself ”
and culminates by securing the “good life.”39 Aristotle’s terms are echoed by
Mulcaster and, in turn, by Miranda’s invocation of unbridgeable racial dif-
 M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S / 1 3 3

ference. Man may be definitionally a political animal, but those who do not
live in the polis are at best subhuman. Lacking reason, they can scarcely be
differentiated from animals; lacking morality, they are incapable of state for-
mation. It is such people who, Aristotle claims, are born slaves—“some things
are so divided right from birth, some to rule, some to be ruled” (32)—and this
division in kinds of people is also a division that makes those born to be en-
slaved more like beasts than like people. Their bestiality is indicated by the
fact that they merely live, without self-control, irrationally driven by their
appetites.40 The division between kinds of people thereby replicates a divi-
sion within all people, between mind and body. Slaves are little more than
their bodies, and as such, they are the property of others whose self-control
over their own appetites endows them with the right to possess those who are
nothing more than bodies.
Caliban’s attempted rape thus offers evidence that he is Aristotle’s natu-
ral slave. The bare admission to humanity suggested by the parenthetical
observation that Caliban did learn something, although not what it took for
him to master himself, indicates only that he learned enough to be mastered
by others. This is precisely the point that Aristotle makes. “The ‘slave by na-
ture,’” he writes, “is he that can and therefore does belong to another, and he
that participates in the reasoning faculty so far as to understand but not so
as to possess it” (34). As Pagden phrases this, the natural slave—the Native
American—is “an imperfect human being” (Fall of Natural Man, 24). Pagden
claims that the debates about natural slavery stumbled over the problem
that in giving even this bit of reason to the native, the path was open to
a reformation project. The possibility of “perfecting” the imperfect native
through education means, for Pagden, that the outsider was now brought
in, recognized as a kind of human (105). If so, this Enlightenment project
was strongly belied by the institutionalization of slavery in the course of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was belied, moreover, by the ways
the humanistic project of producing those incapable of learning developed
as an exclusionary process. Wynter, contemplating those 1550 debates in
Valladolid between Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de Las Casas, con-
cludes that the natural slave is a racializing device used to produce the “non-
homogeneity of the human species.”41 Miranda says it exactly: The aim is to
produce someone who has learned only so much; someone who has learned, in
other words, to recognize the unbreachable gap between teacher and student,
civilized being and savage being; someone who has learned to embrace the
condition of natural slave.
Césaire, who transfers the language lesson to Prospero in Une Tempête,
allows his Caliban to refuse the point: “You didn’t teach me a thing! Except to
jabber in your own language so that I could understand your orders: chop the
wood, wash the dishes, fish for food, plant vegetables, all because you’re too
lazy to do it for yourself.” “Jabber” is baragouiner in the original: Caliban’s
 1 3 4 / M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S

word refuses the colonist’s supposition about a native lack of speech through
the creolization of New World language, illustrating Glissant’s point that “no
people has been spared the cross-cultural process.” “The idea of creolization,”
he continues, “demonstrates that henceforth it is no longer valid to glorify
‘unique’ origins that the race safeguards and prolongs.”42
“Abhorred slave,” Miranda addresses Caliban. What is most abhorrent
is not the act of attempted rape but the inability to move out of the barely
human condition. Aristotle worries the question of whether slavery is in-
herently wrong, and he concludes that in relation to those who are all but
inhuman, it is right. The affect produced by Miranda is directed at Caliban
as a being incapable of passing over into full humanity. In formulations that
emerge later in the seventeenth century, the term “slave” invokes the figure
of the person who cannot recognize the conditions of freedom and liberty,
those, for instance, tied in slavery to the despot-king.43 Miranda’s abhorrence
is thus a political gesture, one that will be theorized by Locke, for example,
when he justifies slavery in the second Treatise for those defeated in a just
war.44 Just wars appear to arise and to be justified when property and liberty
are violated, plunging people into a state of being that Locke cannot imagine
even to be within the state of nature. “He who makes an attempt to enslave
me, thereby puts himself into a state of war with me” (125; ch. 3, paragraph
17). The just outcome of such an attempt on “my” liberty is the deprivation
of the liberty of the other; those who emerge from the just war provoked by
an attempted infringement on “my” liberty remain, according to Locke, for-
ever barred from civil society, forever in the state of war that marked their
condition when they assaulted “me.” Since, in his formulations, no man can
surrender his liberty, for to do so would be to fail to inhabit the minimal con-
ditions of humanity, the person justifiably enslaved cannot be a person, can-
not have been a person in plunging “me” into the state of war. The slave—the
person who does not recognize my liberty—is abhorrent, deserving to be put
to death. Because he is not a person, he cannot be harmed by slavery. If the
slave finds social death intolerable, he can always rebel and be killed, Locke
suggests: “For, whenever he finds the hardship of his slavery outweigh the
value of his life, it is in his power, by resisting the will of his master, to draw
on himself the death he desires” (128; ch. 4, paragraph 23). Miranda, too,
avers that Caliban deserves something worse than enslavement.
“Caliban may become Man; but he is entirely outside the orbit of Human.”45
This is how Lamming phrases his understanding of Miranda’s lines in The
Pleasures of Exile, “the cantankerous assertion, spoken by Miranda, but obvi-
ously the thought and vocabulary of her father” (109). “Caliban can learn so
much and no more,” Lamming comments; the limits to the possibility of his
becoming human are marked by the language lesson that Miranda provides.
“Language itself, by Caliban’s whole relation to it, will not allow his expan-
 M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S / 1 3 5

sion beyond a certain point” (110); this is the belief upon which colonialism
(and colonialist education) depends.
Lamming is paraphrasing Miranda’s speech, reading it not by way of
Aristotle or Kant, which he could have done. “The race of Negroes,” Kant
avers, “can be educated but only as servants (slaves), that is, if they allow
themselves to be trained.”46 Lamming reads the lines through the lens pro-
vided by Hegel. “Caliban is not a child of anything except Nature,” Lamming
states (Pleasures, 110), and his remark resonates with a passage from the
introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of History that Lamming cites elsewhere
in his book: “What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical,
Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature and which
had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s history”
(Pleasures, 32, citing Hegel).47 “To be a child of Nature,” Lamming comments,
continuing his analysis of the representation of Caliban, “is to be situated in
Nature, to be identified with Nature, to be eternally without the seed of a dia-
lectic which makes possible some emergence from Nature” (111). Lamming is
not accepting Hegel—or Shakespeare—as offering the truth about Caliban.
A child may be in a state of nature, he suggests, “but a slave is not a child. Nor
is a slave in a state of Nature” (Pleasures, 15). Lamming is, however, point-
ing to a claim made about Caliban—about the Caliban made through this
claim—that aligns Hegel’s claim about the African with Kant’s figure of
the raw, untutored man, incapable of the self-reflection that constitutes the
human. In Hegelian terms, Caliban remains within a state of “mere nature,”
which is resolutely not the basis for any futurity.
Hegel refuses the Lockean state of nature, refuses Locke’s notion that
the state develops from a primordial human condition in which property
relations are already present and recognized as being in need of a formaliza-
tion that will guarantee them and that will allow for the state of liberty for
all members of the community. For Hegel, nature is mere being, a rawness
of predation. It is the state of war that Locke placed outside the state of na-
ture. History for Hegel is not something that simply continues life; rather,
but even more extremely than in Mulcaster’s schema of “mere being” and
“well being,” there is a fundamental break between the rawness of nature
and the true beginning of history. For Hegel, it is only through reason, and
with it the formation of the state, that the conditions for historical possibility
and freedom arise. In Hegel’s schema, the only geographical areas that par-
ticipate in this movement are the temperate zones. The frozen North has no
history, and Hegel does not even discuss it as an area. The South, for Hegel,
is Africa, and after a few pages describing how the African can never achieve
the minimal rationality and self-reflection necessary to constitute the state,
to constitute the human, and thus to be on the path of the Universal Spirit,
which is the path of history, he leaves Africa behind, “not to mention it again”
in The Philosophy of History (99). Lamming collates these rankling remarks
 1 3 6 / M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S

on racial exclusion with the representation of Caliban, and writes back—to

Shakespeare, to Hegel—not merely to indicate his understanding of the
scheme from which he has been summarily dismissed but, even more, to sug-
gest that the gift of language, meant as a tool of enslavement, has instead
allowed Caliban a being that was thought to be impossible, the impossible
being that also necessarily constitutes him as a different kind of creature.48
Lamming’s Hegelian reading of Miranda’s speech realizes that the ele-
ments there are the materials from which a more fully recognizable racial-
ized schema emerges in modernity. But it is just as important to note that in
preserving the notion of the Aristotelian “natural slave” lacking in the self-
control that indicates self-reflexiveness and rationality, in locating in Africa
the states of tyranny, cannibalism, and sexual promiscuity that Aristotle had
found in “barbarians,” Hegel is himself indebted to the very sources that also
lie behind Miranda’s words.49 And although he denies Locke’s state of nature,
he also thinks that slavery is proper to the African, who is impressionable
only in that mode to the forces of the West and of history. “Educable,” for Hegel,
means that they can be colonized, not that there is any cultural or spiritual
force in the African.50 Hegel is not alone here; Kant too imagines that the
only way to educate the “Negro” is by lashing him with a bamboo cane; even a
whip, he avers, will not penetrate the skin sufficiently.51 “Beating is the only
language you really understand,” Césaire’s Prospero tells Caliban (A Tempest,
14). Such scenes of instruction realize a possibility in the metaphorics that
dominate Miranda’s speech, with its image of imprinting, for branding also is
imprinting; to be literate can mean to have been so marked. The slave as text
marks precisely the historico-anthropological divide that Hegel manipulates:
the difference between those without and those with language. Language, in
this mode, as it is implicitly in Miranda’s metaphorics of inscription, is writ-
ing. The writing out of the racialized Other is the very plot of writing.
Miranda speaks these lines because the attempted rape would have pro-
duced damaged goods. She would never have been available for Prospero’s
marriage plot were she not a virgin. As Prospero’s property, she speaks to
the slave that is his and hers. In Miranda’s lines, the fetish speaks, and what
remains unvoiced is the alternative ostensibly outside the text, the absent fig-
ure that Wynter names “Caliban’s ‘woman,’” for example, but whose existence,
whose figurations as the outside, we have traced in moments of textual trouble
in Shakespeare’s Tempest: the swirling negativities that surround the sod-
omite and the witch. A sentence of Wynter’s cited earlier deserves reinscrip-
tion here: “Caliban, as an incarnation of a new category of the human, that of
the subordinated ‘irrational’ and ‘savage’ native is now constituted as the lack
of the ‘rational’ Prospero, and the now capable-of-rationality Miranda, by the
Otherness of his/its physiognomic ‘monster’ difference, a difference which now
takes the coding role of sexual-anatomical difference” (BMM, 358).
Whereas Caliban is structurally racialized through the various positions
 M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S / 1 3 7

offered by Miranda’s lines—as pedagogic, anthropological, philosophical, and

historical (non)subject—Wynter’s dense formulation suggests that his em-
bodiment cannot be that of “man.” Caliban’s racial positioning places him as
a site that exceeds and displaces the masculinity he might otherwise share
with Ferdinand and that exceeds it precisely in the failure of the rationality
he is assumed to lack. That position is marked by the unnamable in Miranda’s
lines. What is the “it” in Caliban that motivates him and that seems to con-
stitute the core of his impossibility? What makes him more “a thing” than a
man? The lines constitute this nonhuman being in the abhorrent figure of the
slave. Elsewhere, and insistently, as Wynter telegraphs, Caliban is marked as
monstrous. His monstrosity, insofar as it is to be explained—and constitut-
ed—is derived from his origin. “Hag-seed” (1.2.364), Shakespeare’s Prospero
calls Caliban in the lines immediately following Miranda’s. “Got by the devil”
(1.2.319), Prospero says just before. Demonic paternity, horrific maternity; the
“foul witch” (1.2.258) Sycorax was as deserving of death as her son, but “for
one thing she did / They would not take her life” (1.2.266–67). The unnamable
in these moments hovers around “things” and “its.” It looks askance at sexual
possibilities that are far from the norm or that are unspeakably coincident
with it: cross-racial sex, sex with Prospero, as Lamming imagined. Mixture
as the matrix of race. Might this explain why the one specific thing we know
about Sycorax is that she had blue eyes?52
The rape of Caliban raises the possibility of an unremovable taint; it pro-
vokes the kinds of questions that obsess Prospero about the series of events
that constitute the parallel to the rape. Just as Caliban wished to take some-
thing not rightfully given him, so too did Antonio. “Tell me / If this might be
a brother,” Prospero asks (1.2.117–18); “unnatural though thou art” is how
Prospero finally barely accepts Antonio (5.1.79). This worry about origin
is one found in Enlightenment taxonomies of categorical difference, as if
the answer to the nature of the racialized Other only could be answered
there (rather than in what has been made by the discourses of Othering to
which we have been attending). The particularly charged sexual landscape
of Caliban’s origin and of his attempted rape suggest, however, a further
resonance within the history of “race.” For as Foucault suggests, the divided
terrains of the social fasten in modernity on the figure of the enemy within
that must be purged in order for society to be defended. “What is racism?”
Foucault asks, answering,

It is primarily a way of introducing a break [une coupure] into the domain of life
that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must
die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races,
the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races
are described as good and that others in contrast, are described as inferior: all
this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls.53
 1 3 8 / M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S

The recognizable racial Other that emerges in this configuration cannot but
recall the various breaks constituted by the discourses that shape Miranda’s
lines. This division, Foucault argues, also describes the racialization of the
classed Other. And, crucially for Foucault, this is also the map that locates
the modern sexualized subject. In the nexus between the elimination of races
in the service of apparatuses bent on reproducing the socially normative and
the elimination of those whose sexuality stands as a refusal of the norm, or
as the monstrous means of a reproduction outside the norm, the modern
sexualized and racialized subject emerges: Caliban . . . or, as Wynter would
insist, “Caliban’s ‘woman.’” Her name is legion. Call her, for example, Harry/
Harriet. The racialization of this “woman” indicates that “Caliban’s ‘woman’”
necessarily displaces the woman who speaks Miranda’s lines, and the norma-
tive desires she represents and articulates.

ONE THING OR OTHER

Caliban’s language lesson is not a unique event in the play. Throughout,
Prospero assumes the part of severe pedagogue: with Ariel, with Miranda,
with the court party, and with Ferdinand, whom he casts in the role of Cali-
ban. These pedagogies imagine the possibility of transformation denied to
Caliban: freedom (perhaps) for Ariel, marriage for Miranda and Ferdinand,
the reordering and relegitimation of sociopolitical relations between Naples
and Milan (in this, even Antonio and Sebastian are included, however grudg-
ingly). Caliban remains at most mere appetitive life, more a thing than a
person: Taught “one thing or other,” he is for that “a thing most brutish,”
a “thing,” finally, “of darkness,” acknowledged as Prospero’s own (5.1.275–76).
In these ways, Caliban can be linked to that condition of “bare life” that
Giorgio Agamben has identified in Homo Sacer, his elaboration of the Fou-
cauldian concept of biopower (those who have a right to live, those who ought
to die) that underwrites the theory of race offered in Foucault’s 1976 lectures
and in the theory of sexuality developed in the final chapter of the introduc-
tory volume of his History of Sexuality.54 As that which establishes a principle
of exclusion from the political that is nonetheless an included exclusion, bare
life for Agamben can be located as early in the history of modernity as those
places in Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics that mark mere being off from true
existence, distinguishing life from the good life. The divide is political but
also ontological. It is indicated by the passage from speech into language that
Miranda’s pedagogy engages precisely by metaphorizing one as the other. Such
metaphoricity suggests transformation into the human. Agamben makes this
point from a passage in the Politics in which the human is defined by language
(as opposed to voice, which humans share with animals): “Politics therefore
appears as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar
as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being
 M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S / 1 3 9

and the logos is realized. In the ‘politicization’ of bare life—the metaphysical

task par excellence—the humanity of living man is decided” (Homo Sacer, 8).
In The Tempest, Caliban’s status as bare life and his/its included/excluded
status are indicated by a kind of reverse pedagogy: It is Caliban who knows
the sounds of the island, the places where food can be gathered. The log-
bearer is requisite for life, even if his life has no value—or the same value
whether dead or alive, as Trinculo opines: “Were I in England now, as once
I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday-fool there but would give
a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man—any strange beast
there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar,
they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” (2.2.27–31; these are, we recall,
the only lines from The Tempest cited in Lamming’s Water with Berries). At
first seemingly exchanging his knowledge of “fresh springs, brine pits, bar-
ren place and fertile” (The Tempest, 1.2.338) in order to be taught “how / To
name the bigger light and how the less” (1.2.334–35), Miranda’s teaching
would seem to have added to Prospero’s pedagogy only Caliban’s ability to
countenance Stephano’s claim to have arrived from the moon: “I was the man
i’ th’ moon when time was.” “I have seen thee in her,” Caliban replies, “and
I do adore thee. My mistress showed me thee, and thy dog and thy bush”
(2.2.132–35). Thus, while the education Stephano proffers—“kiss the book,”
he repeats, as he offers the “language” in his bottle—might appear to parody
the “humane” attempts of father and daughter, it merely transfers (in an
ideological ruse that Paul Brown identified) the business of colonial educa-
tion to a site (the lower-class clown) where the desire to “recover,” “tame,” and
sell Caliban can be enunciated.55
Miranda’s offer to Caliban to make his purposes known, which fleetingly
suggests an aim to grant him the consciousness of a “good,” human nature,
must seem dubious in this context: first, because it assumes that as bare life,
without language, Caliban has no access to his purposes; second, because it
supposes that the only route to them must be by way of this pedagogy. Al-
though there are moments, precisely around their having language, when
Caliban and Miranda, as supposed natives of the island, are structurally
parallel—Stephano’s “where the devil should he learn our language” (2.2.64)
elaborates Ferdinand’s exclamations, “My language! Heavens!” (1.2.429)—
these flickering identifications are undermined by the claim that Caliban’s
purposes are irremediably bestial. As Lamming, who builds on these simi-
larities to their ultimate difference, notes, Miranda may become “Man,” but
Caliban always “is ‘Man’ and ‘other than Man’” (Pleasures, 15).
“Whoever says rape, says Negro”:56 Fanon’s startling sentence in Black Skin,
White Masks underwrites an argument like Ania Loomba’s, that whether or
not Caliban “is” black, “Caliban’s political colour is clearly black” (Gender,
Race, 143). Non(human) being, the Negro is an “object in the midst of other
objects” (in Fanon’s analysis [109]), assuming “the role of thing, excluded,
 1 4 0 / M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S

devoid of language,” as Lamming puts the condition named Caliban (Plea-

sures, 166). For Fanon, this “thing” is also, at the same time, the biological
(the penis). Rewriting the Lacanian mirror stage to account for racialized
difference, which provides a decisive break across any universalizing psycho-
analysis, Fanon shows how the black man is posited as the Other for the
white man, in whom there is no possibility for recognition: “[F]or the white
man The Other is perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely as
the not-self—that is, the unidentifiable, the unassimilable” (161 n. 25). The
unassimilable could be linked genealogically to that Kantian thinking of the
sexual as a merely natural appetitiveness whose inhuman aim is the Other
as object. But what this also means, as Fanon argues, is that the Hegelian rela-
tionship of recognition, and with it, any ontology, are unavailable to the black
man. The master, he comments—and by this he means not only the slave
master but the white man after slavery has been abrogated (and continued
by other means)—“differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For
Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the
slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work” (220 n. 8).
“My turn to state an equation: colonization = ‘thingification.’” The sentence
is Césaire’s, from the Discourse on Colonialism cited frequently by Fanon.57
Although Césaire seeks mainly to ally the cause of the racially oppressed
with that of the proletariat, his text is filled with images of sadism, brutality,
rapes, and heads cut off, which intensely sexualize the scenario of Western
degradation that he paints under the false surmise that “civilizing” is iden-
tical to colonizing: “I look around and wherever there are colonizers and
colonized face to face, I see force, brutality, cruelty, sadism, conflict, and, in
a parody of education, the hasty manufacture of a few thousand subordinate
functionaries, ‘boys,’ artisans, office clerks, and interpreters necessary for the
smooth operation of business” (21).
This complex of sexuality, race, and nonpersonhood could be brought
into the orbit of biopolitical analysis, perhaps with this caveat: Whereas for
Agamben and for Foucault, the “end” of biopower (the fullest manifestation of
what Agamben designates as the “‘Nomos’ of the Modern” [Homo Sacer, 166])
is Nazism, Césaire (who, like Fanon and Cliff, thinks the questions of race
alongside the ovens) would remind us that Nazism, insofar as it is called “the
crime against man . . . is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime
against the white man” (Discourse on Colonialism, 14). A logic within the
West, and exercised as politics in the West, is the matrix for “race.” The lethal
energies of biopower were first manifest not in the camps but in the centuries-
long systematic destruction of black lives across the Middle Passage, and be-
yond. These produced a camp mentality, or so Paul Gilroy argues in Against
Race, long before the Nazi regime, and that mentality is not yet overcome.
“The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter—that is, he will
come closer to being a real human being—in direct ratio to his mastery of the
 M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S / 1 4 1

French language” (Black Skin, White Masks, 18)—closer, but never there, as
with Caliban (even the Caliban that humanistic critics hail for his humanity).
Fanon may end Black Skin, White Masks hoping for a future of shared hu-
manity, but the conditions for such a future cannot come from the West, not
even from the Enlightenment traditions that seem to hold out the promise of
equality. For that equality is offered on unacceptable terms. Fanon can even
look askance at slave revolts (presumably, above all others, the Haitian ex-
ample, in which the revolutionary principles of liberty, equality, and fraterni-
ty were demanded): “[T]he Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom, for he
has not fought for it. From time to time he has fought for Liberty and Justice,
but these were always white liberty and white justice; that is, values secreted
by his masters” (Black Skin, White Masks, 221). Freedom on other terms, in
other bodies, would involve a reordering of “life” beyond the Enlightenment
project.

. . . MY ENDING IS DESPAIR
Inspired by the closing pages of Black Skin, White Masks, as well as by
Fanon’s call at the end of The Wretched of the Earth for a “new man,” Paul
Gilroy proposes, in Against Race, a new humanism to replace race thinking.
In Gilroy’s view, race has taken two equally unacceptable paths, both of which
he connects to Nazism: on the one hand, an atavistic drive toward purity
exemplified by the Nation of Islam; on the other, the selling of buffed black
bodies in the global marketplace. He decries “the homophobia, misogyny,
anti-semitism, and fundamentalist nationalisms currently being affirmed in
black political cultures” (198); he mourns “the disappearance of the pursuit
of Freedom as an element in black vernacular culture” (184), an element lost
in the race for profit. Gilroy’s argument has some prompting in Fanon, to
be sure, yet Fanon’s texts are not so easily mobilized for a humanistic argu-
ment. For one thing, although Fanon seeks to end the alienation of the white-
masked black man and is wary about accepting a version of negritude that
would solidify black identity in the beat of the drum, the new regime of “man”
that he affirms is marked by the very misogyny and homophobia that worry
Gilroy. Moreover, Fanon can imagine this new emergence only as genuinely
new, a future that necessarily—violently—disrupts the past. “The explosion
will not happen today. It is too soon . . . or too late” (Black Skin, White Masks,
7). “Explosion” is the first word of the book. It names an agenda.
Gilroy acknowledges the intellectual aspect of this agenda when he dis-
tances the humanism he advocates from an Enlightenment heritage:

[T]he alternative version of humanism that is cautiously being proposed here

simply cannot be reached via any retreat into the lofty habits and unamended
assumptions of liberal thinking, particularly about juridical rights and sovereign
entitlements. This is because these very resources have been tainted by a history
 1 4 2 / M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S

in which they were not able to withstand the biopolitical power of race-thinking
that compromised their boldest and best ambitions. Their resulting failures, si-
lences, lapses, and evasions must become central. They can be reinterpreted as
symptoms of struggle over the boundaries of humanity. (Against Race, 30)

Gilroy seeks, in fact, to widen “the boundaries of humanity” to a level of “banal

human sameness” (29) that he locates as genetic—bare life—and that he at-
tempts to tie to diasporic black cultures by means of an etymological link:
The “spore” in “diaspora,” he claims, offers a version of supposedly asexual
reproduction. “Could that alternative, gender-free linkage complicate the no-
tion that diaspora is inscribed as a masculinist trope and cannot be liberated
from the quagmire of androcentrism?” he asks (126).
Gilroy’s book is an ill-named project. It is against race-thinking and racism,
but claims (dangerously, I believe) to be against race, even as it attempts to
marshal the resources of a black diasporic tradition—exemplified for Gilroy
in music like that produced by Bob Marley, with its call for freedom that was
heard around the globe—as the only resource for the future. Although Gilroy
gestures several times to a dehomogenization of black culture that would
recognize the divisions caused by class, gender, and sexuality, he barely
mentions any form of cultural production except that produced by men. His
degendered project is in danger of reinstating the masculinism he deplores.
What he clings to, valuably, is the possibility of cultural production that can-
not be reduced to the workings of capital: “The cultural life of recorded sound
was not reducible to the simple economic relations in which it was enmeshed.
Indeed, a whole tradition grew up around the idea that this music had a
value beyond money” (273).
Like David Scott in Refashioning Futures, Gilroy looks to such cultural
production because he knows, with Fanon, that the solution to the problems
caused by colonialism, world wars, and race-thinking cannot be found in
the states that have arisen as supposedly independent decolonized regimes.
Fanon’s predictions about the forms that the newly independent states would
take have been more than confirmed. Neocolonial economic dependence marks
the Caribbean and other formerly colonized regions of the globe, and those
states deemed successful are the ones most enmeshed in international capi-
tal, which ensures all the stratifications of colonial society. Those stratifica-
tions are embodied in forms of democracy that belie the aspirations Gilroy
names as the best in liberal thought, which he too hopefully continues to be-
lieve might be rescued from its entanglements with slavery and colonialism.
“Have you ever wondered to yourself,” Jamaica Kincaid asks,

why it is that all people like me seem to have learned from you is how to im-
prison and murder each other, how to govern badly, and how to take the wealth
of our country and place it in Swiss bank accounts? Have you ever wondered
why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our so-
 M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S / 1 4 3

cieties and how to be tyrants? . . . you leave, and from afar you watch as we do
to ourselves the very things you used to do to us. And you might feel that there
was more to you than that, you might feel that you had understood the meaning
of the Age of Enlightenment (though, as far as I can see, it had done you very
little good).58

The history of failed revolutions—in Grenada, Guyana—the capitulation of

the Manley regime in Jamaica, the sad spectacle of tyranny in Haiti that
followed almost immediately upon the revolution that C. L. R. James had
celebrated in The Black Jacobins and from which Fanon distances himself:
These, too, are cause for despair. Cuba remains perhaps a hopeful question
mark.
Possibility, Scott and Gilroy argue, must come from “popular” culture
produced by those who continue to suffer the effects of “independence,” from
those who register their disenfranchisement and continue to imagine alter-
natives to it. In Refashioning Futures, Scott proposes, against “a decline of
the middle-class nationalist-modern, a reduction in the purchase of the ethos
that sustained it, an enfeebling of the ethical-political languages through
which its vision was articulated, and a contracting of the very social space it
occupies in the public sphere”—a litany that echoes against Cliff ’s novels and
the forces against which Clare Savage struggles—a possibility for a future
that Scott describes as “Fanon avec Foucault.” It lies in “an increasing moral,
social, and economic autonomy of the popular classes, an expansion of their
ability to insert themselves into the global economy in ways (whether legal or
illegal) that circumvent or bypass the middle class–controlled state and the
capitalist-controlled economy.”59 Looking to dance-hall culture, to Rasta, to
the figure of the “ruud bwai” as practices of freedom that might lead to “un-
settling the settled settlements of this very postcolonial sovereignty itself ”
(Refashioning Futures, 205) and toward ongoing acts of refashioning that
would refuse normativities, he conjures this future:

On the one hand, I want to imagine a diverse field composed of multiple public
realms, constituencies, or ensembles that constitute in effect different ways of
being-in-common, different ways of being citizens or women or black or what-
ever, and in which, therefore, different but mutually recognized modalities of
collective identity are voiced and practiced. And on the other hand, I want to
imagine an ethos, or perhaps even a habitus, of critical responsiveness to the
tendency of such identities to harden into patterns of exclusion that seek to
repel or abnormalize emergent or subaltern difference. (217)

For such a future to emerge from the sites Scott envisages, their own limits
would need to be overcome: masculinism and homophobia above all, which
some commentators, celebrating the popular, do not take seriously as social
facts. Carolyn Cooper, for example, positively delights in the way in which
 1 4 4 / M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S

“homosexuality is gloriously vilified” in Jamaican dance halls, supposedly for

the benefit of women.60 Gilroy sees the costs to women in such celebrations of
their sexuality: that ultimately it is male sexuality and male irresponsibility
for unwanted children, abandoned women, that is promoted, often insidiously
in the name of patriarchal privilege.
Cultural production may indeed be a site for imagining new beginnings,
continual self-making, diasporic flows and their “unanticipated destinations”
(Gilroy, Against Race, 251). It is nonetheless the case that much that
is produced in the region is not available elsewhere, that the conditions
that prompt Kincaid in My Brother to link Antiguan homophobia to her
need to escape her homeland in order to realize herself as a writer remain
prominent. It is for these reasons that, for the most part, it has been dia-
sporic writing that has engaged us in the pages of this book. The image by the
Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier that serves as its frontispiece certainly
indicates that there are those who operate in the region who are asking the
kinds of searching questions that need to be asked about “independent” re-
gimes that foster homophobia and racism and mislead citizens into believ-
ing that an exercise of propriety coupled to demeaning work is the proper
reward for capitulation to capitalist domination. Nonetheless, it has seemed
to many that articulating futures for the Caribbean worth imagining was
possible only after they had left the region. Even Fanon, we must recall,
did his work in Algeria. Such departures explain why Caribbean literature
so often returns again and again to experiences of self-alienation. Much in
the educational system remains unchanged; cultural production by writers
of Caribbean origin is read anew, it seems, with every generation. Diasporic
flows need to move in more than one direction if futurity is not to be rooted
to place. The work of writers like Wynter and Cliff and Als, as they suggest,
moreover, the labilities of gender and sexuality that belie the dominant views
of masculinist and heterosexist cultures, needs to be heard. Work produced in
the Caribbean likewise needs to travel. Such work also suggests the resources
for possibility that continue to reside in “race,” for the danger in Gilroy’s
“banal” project is the erasure of difference, which is also its goal. Bare life
cannot be merely reclaimed. What counts as life is always a contestatory
issue. Agamben wrote Homo Sacer motivated in part by the devastations
that have been the result of the breakup of the USSR, wars fought in eastern
Europe (and in Africa as well) in the name of ethnicities, wars conducted as
nation-states that were imposed as a result of the world wars of the twenti-
eth century crumble. How shall we think the dislocated future, the energies
of diaspora as they might be drawn to these divisive sites or might seek new
global conditions bringing together the wretched of the earth in opposition to
old impositions? This is the difficult question to be faced; Fanon’s espousal of
violence is entangled with it.
 M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S / 1 4 5

How shall we think these questions—Fanon’s “explosion”—now? At the

opening of Pleasures of Exile, Lamming proposes, against the sadistic justice
of Prospero, the conciliatory “ceremony of the Souls” (9) practiced in Haiti, a
Vodun rite in which the dead and the living can be reconciled. It is a ceremony
that Lamming also conjures setting his Fola on the path of a revolutionary
consciousness, the season of adventure that would make moot the question
of paternity in the irresolution of a double father, black and white. It is also
the ceremony that Teeton has in mind in Water with Berries as he moves
to his assignation with Myra on Hampstead Heath, the face of homosexual
Jeremy bearing down upon him. Perhaps in this ceremony, in the resources of
diasporic culture, the multiple denigrations of race and gender and sexuality
can be faced, and something new can come from the negations.

PROSPERO : What were you hoping for?

CALIBAN : To get back my island and regain my freedom.
PROSPERO : And what would you do all alone here on this island, haunted by the
devil, tempest tossed?
CALIBAN : First of all, I’d get rid of you! I’d spit you out, all your works and
pomps! Your “white” magic!
PROSPERO : That’s a fairly negative program . . .
CALIBAN : You don’t understand it . . . I say I’m going to spit you out, and that’s
very positive . . .
(Césaire, A Tempest, 63)

Rule Brittania / Brittania rules the waves

Britons never, never, never shall be slaves . . .
And we sang and thought the song applied to us. Which it did, by negation.
(Cliff, “Caliban’s Daughter,” 36)

In Pleasures of Exile, the ceremony mutates into a law court, where it turns
out that the crucial witness is someone descended both from Caliban and
from Prospero: “[H]e sees himself as Caliban while he argues that he is not
the Caliban whom Prospero had in mind. This witness claims a double privi-
lege. He thinks he is, in some way, a descendent of Prospero. He knows he
is a direct descendent of Caliban” (11). This privileged witness is in the dia-
sporic condition that Gilroy affirms against race, but he is better named, as
Lamming suggests, as a subject necessarily divided and doubled. Lamming
marks this doubleness as the inevitability that follows from colonialism, the
moment in the history of the globe that begins to tie it together on its way to
modernity. This double marking must be a preliminary gesture to be compli-
cated by questions of class, gender, and sexuality. For the labilities of incom-
mensurable differences provide the only pathways for connections to others,
for possibilities of transformative recognitions that need not be tied to the
 1 4 6 / M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S

violence of difference. As Lamming says, this crucial witness cannot be inno-

cent; indeed, “there are no degrees of innocence” (Pleasures, 11):

Involvement in crime, whether as witness, or an accomplice, makes innocence

impossible. To be innocent is to be eternally dead. And this trial embraces only
the living. Some may be corpses, but their evidence is the evidence of a corpse
who has returned to make the unforgivable apology: “Gentlemen I did not real-
ize! Although I was there, although I took part, I did not realize! I was not aware!”
The confession of unawareness is a confession of guilt. This corpse, dead as he
may be, cannot be allowed to go free; for unawareness is the basic characteristic
of the slave. Awareness is a minimum condition for attaining freedom. (12)

These are profoundly difficult sentences, but they speak to the condition after
colonialism, after the impositions of new world orders, their explosive repudia-
tions. They speak to the violence of “Enduring Freedom” or the identification
of an axis of evil that needs to be eradicated. Revolutionary consciousness, as
Lamming proposes, throws off the shackles of slavery that bound colonizer
and colonized. It leads to the recognition that we cannot return to the hopes of
the Enlightenment insofar as they are entangled with the misery of invidious
difference fought in the wars of the twentieth century and beyond, all rooted
in colonialist racism, wars that fastened on bare life that could be sacrificed.
“Life” never is innocent.

More than a decade ago, as I was finishing writing Sodometries, an ad for

a T-shirt caught my eye: It promised its wearers that “we” would not be
“Saddamized,” couching “Desert Storm” in a racist and homophobic image
meant to capture the U.S. masculinist, militaristic imaginary. In a “Shouts
& Murmurs” piece in The New Yorker on November 5, 2001, “Doing the CNN
Crawl,” a spoof on the absurdities that pass in the ticker on the bottom of
the TV screen, Daniel Menaker fantasizes this item: “Shakespeare scholar
Harold Bloom signs seven-figure book deal for comparative study of Caliban
and Taliban.”61 What’s the joke? That Bloom, who has iconic media status,
gets his name attached to just the sort of project he deplores, since his Shake-
speare speaks for a humanity that would be beyond such political connec-
tions? That Menaker shares this view with Bloom, since he is deriding the
work of literary critics who seek to make political interventions by means of
the cultural objects they study? These are only two examples of a new con-
servatism in the academy and the media, worrisome insofar as they reflect
and contribute to the current political climate. No doubt, the conjunction of
Caliban and Taliban is absurd, an effect of the signifier that fails to signify
meaningfully, and not least because that radical Islamic movement cannot
be imagined to have found a platform of refusal in Shakespeare. But it is not
absurd—or so Tempest in the Caribbean has argued—to return to the past and
to some of the most venerated texts in the Western tradition to see that in-
 M I R A N D A’ S M E A N I N G S / 1 4 7

vidious differences are part of the legacy of this canon. It was for that reason
that Fanon, in his chapter on national culture in The Wretched of the Earth,
advocated a complete break with a deplorable past, the explosion advocated
in Black Skin, White Masks. Against the despair that pits us against them in
unstoppable violence (and that Cozier depicts as an elementary-school lesson
in the image that serves as the frontispiece to this book), it has been my aim
to suggest instead that old sites of denigration can serve as resources for new
social imaginings, new social actors, new ways of thinking. A desirable future
may be possible if we can recognize and respect alterities and can refrain
from imposing false unanimity, even in the name of shared humanity, let
alone under the auspices of the so-called free world that Fernández Retamar
derides in “Caliban.”
This page intentionally left blank
NOTES
PREFACE
1. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
2. On the multiple meanings of “the Caribbean” as a locale, see Norman Girvan,
“Reinterpreting the Caribbean,” in New Caribbean Thought, ed. Brian Meeks and
Folke Lindahl (Kingston, Jamaica: University Press of the West Indies, 2001), 3–23; see
also in that volume, Gordon Rohlehr, “A Scuffling of Islands: The Dream and Reality
of Caribbean Unity in Poetry and Song,” 265–305, charting artistic responses to the
short-lived West Indian Federation of the late 1950s and various subsequent attempts
at regional unification (often in the sphere of culture).
3. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Im-
perialism,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1985, 1986), 264, for her demurral from identification with
Caliban, and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 117–18, for a restatement of the point. For a reading of these reinscrip-
tions that seems enchanted with their being “local versions of the old grand story” that
can be deployed toward overcoming colonial depredation, see Edward W. Said, Culture
and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 213.
4. Rob Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest,” Critical
Inquiry 13 (Spring 1987): 557–78.
5. See J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist
Critique of Political Economy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Gibson-Graham seek to do for
“capitalism” what feminist inquiry has done for “woman” or queer inquiry for the cate-
gories of sexual identity: to dismantle a regulatory fiction by showing that capitalism,
like all identities, is a temporary fixing, and not one that commands all other forms
of economic and social relationships. The aim of the book is to allow for the reality of
other forms of economy against the vision of economic determinism that they locate in
the arguments of David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell,
1989), among others.
6. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, “Introduction,” The Politics of Culture in the Shad-
ow of Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 1, 6.
7. This view of the Enlightenment legacy is by now commonly accepted, as Wendy
Brown notes in Politics out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001):
“An understanding of liberal universalism as not simply continuing a history of exclud-
ed others but as having a specific normative content—heterosexual and patriarchal
families, capital, and ‘property in whiteness’—erodes the credibility of its classic story
of progressively widening its scope of freedom and equality, extending the goods of en-
franchisement and abstract personhood to more and more of the world’s populations”
(9). In Free Enterprise (New York: Dutton, 1993), Cliff offers a densely interwoven ac-
count, part fictional, part factual, of the role of women in various New World locales in
opposing and ending slavery.

149
 1 5 0 / N O T E S T O “A D I F F E R E N T K I N D O F C R E A T U R E ”

A DIFFERENT KIND OF CREATURE

1. Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cul-
tural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Rob Nixon, “Caribbean
and African Appropriations of The Tempest,” Critical Inquiry 13 (Spring 1987): 557–78;
both of these include a comprehensive bibliography, updated in Peter Hulme and Wil-
liam H. Sherman, eds., “The Tempest” and Its Travels (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).
A recent addition to the field is Chantal Zabus, Tempests after Shakespeare (New York:
Palgrave, 2002).
2. For some examples, see May Joseph, “The Scream of Sycorax,” in Nomadic Iden-
tities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Coco Fusco, “El Diario de
Miranda/Miranda’s Diary,” in English Is Broken Here (New York: New Press, 1995). In
their rewritings of The Tempest, both Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor imagine black
Mirandas. Morrison’s Jadine in Tar Baby (New York: Penguin, 1981) is the Europe-
anized protégé of the Prospero figure, Valerian; she has lost touch with her “ancient
[African] properties” (305). Naylor’s has not; her Mama Day (New York: Vintage, 1988),
properly named Miranda, has African /feminine powers that Shakespeare associates
with Prospero and excoriates in Sycorax.
3. See Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean,
1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), ch. 3. In an unpublished essay, “The Geography
of Disenchantment in The Tempest,” Kevin Pask continues Hulme’s project by arguing
for the significance of Atlantic elements in the predominantly Mediterranean environ-
ment of the play, a nexus of emergent colonialism in a mercantile context that notably
includes the traffic in the bodies of women, both Miranda and Claribel.
4. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, “Introduction” to their edition
of The Tempest (Arden Shakespeare, third series; Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Thomas
Nelson, 1999).
5. See Richard Halpern, “‘The picture of Nobody’: White Cannibalism in The Tem-
pest,” in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon
O’Dair, and Harold Weber (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 262–92.
6. All citations of The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987), unless otherwise noted.
7. George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1991 reprint of 1953 text), 297; hereafter Castle.
8. C. L. R. James, “The Making of the Caribbean People,” in Spheres of Existence
(Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, n.d.), 176; the piece is a transcript of a 1966 lecture.
9. David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 204.
10. Roberto Fernández Retamar, Calibán (Lleida: University of Lleida, 1995), 24;
Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1989), 4.
11. For a stunning schematic mapping of the multiple differences of the colonial
condition, see Edouard Glissant, Discours Antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 30–31 n. 2; Ca-
ribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1989), 17–19 n. 2.
12. For an important and detailed discussion of the various histories rapidly summa-
rized here, see Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (London: Verso, 1997).
 N O T E S T O “A D I F F E R E N T K I N D O F C R E A T U R E ” / 1 5 1

13. Arguing for the homogeneity of the United States, Fernández Retamar writes,
“The white population of the United States (diverse, but of common European origin)
exterminated the aboriginal population and thrust the black population aside” (“Cali-
ban,” 4), an extraordinary claim on many counts. It ignores the long process of making
white of immigrant populations; the survival of Native Americans and a growing Na-
tive American movement, exemplified by Vine DeLoria; and the Civil Rights move-
ment. It also ignores the role played by the figure Fernández Retamar advocates in
his essay, José Martí, in radical Afro-Cuban populations in the United States; on that
point, see Winston James, “From a Class for Itself to a Race on Its Own: The Strange
Case of Afro-Cuban Radicalism and Afro-Cubans in Florida, 1870–1940,” ch. 8 in Hold-
ing Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century
America (London: Verso, 1998).
14. Nixon’s account of uses of The Tempest, unlike Halpern’s, never considers how
even the masculinist tradition he unfolds engages questions of gender and sexuality.
For him, it appears, such issues are women’s work and are available only in texts by
women. As we shall see in “Caliban’s ‘Woman,’” there are possibilities for women’s
engagement with The Tempest to which Nixon (like Fernández Retamar) fails to at-
tend. Fernández Retamar has acknowledged his masculinism in “Postdata de Enero
de 1993,” in Calibán, 83, and by including in the list of names that opens the section
“Nuestro Símbolo” in “Calibán” (in Calibán) several more names of women (39). My
thanks to Sara Castro-Klaren for advice about the 1993 postscript, and for confirming
its rather perfunctory attention to gender.
15. Ricardo L. Ortiz, “Revolution’s Other Histories: The Sexual, Cultural, and Criti-
cal Legacies of Roberto Fernández Retamar’s ‘Caliban,’” Social Text 58 (Spring 1999):
33–58. Deploring the homophobic masculinism of “Caliban,” Ortiz substitutes a homo-
philic masculinism.
16. Severo Sarduy, a Cuban associated with the journal Lunes de Revolucion, left
Cuba for Paris in 1960 and remained there until his AIDS-related death in 1993. There
he became associated with Tel Quel and served as the publisher of a number of Cuban
writers who could not be published in Cuba, including Lezama Lima. Roland Barthes
often cites Sarduy, who wrote several works of fiction as well as theoretical and criti-
cal essays. Mariposa, “butterfly,” is a possible term from the “bestiary” of slang for
homosexuals/transvestites; the homophone maricón clinches the association. I am
grateful to Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes for advice about this lexicon, confirmed by
Emilio Bejel in Gay Cuban Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), where
he notes, opening his discussion of the Cuban documentary film about a group of trans-
vestites, Mariposas en el andamio (Butterflies on the Scaffold, dir. Luis Felipe Bernaza
and Margaret Gilpin [1996]), “in Cuban culture, as well as in other Hispanic cultures,
the word mariposa (butterfly) is sometimes used with a homosexual connotation” (196).
Sarduy often theorized the transvestite; see, e.g., “Writing/Transvestism,” in Written
on a Body, trans. Carol Maier (New York: Lumen, 1989), 33–37, or From Cuba with a
Song, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1994), in which the trans-
vestite figures the mixed nature of Cuban culture.
17. Ortiz is indebted, as he notes, to the comprehensive essay by Brad Epps, “Proper
Conduct: Reinaldo Arenas, Fidel Castro, and the Politics of Homosexuality,” Journal of
the History of Sexuality, 6, no. 2 (1995): 231–83. It, along with Ortiz’s “Revolution’s Other
 1 5 2 / N O T E S T O “A D I F F E R E N T K I N D O F C R E A T U R E ”

Histories,” provides an ample bibliography on the topic of homosexuality in revolution-

ary Cuba; a subsequent and valuable addition to this literature is José Quiroga, Trop-
ics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York: New York University
Press, 2000), esp. 118–31.
18. This history, I note in passing, has been all but lost on the present generation of
conservative voices, who speak for U.S. gays only by advocating our right to marry and
serve openly in the military.
In “Caliban Revisited,” his 1986 piece contextualizing the original essay, Fernández
Retamar does locate his writing within the context of a seemingly triumphant left that
joined “oppressed ‘races’ and communities, of women, of marginal peoples,” immedi-
ately distancing himself from the “absurdity” of “hippies and flower power” (Caliban
and Other Essays, 47–48).
19. All citations from José Enrique Rodó, Ariel, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (Aus-
tin: University of Texas Press, 1988). Rodó was a Uruguayan writer; Ariel was—and
remains—an important cultural manifesto, as Carlos Fuentes attests in his prologue
in this edition, which also provides ample bibliographic references.
20. In his riposte to Fernández Retamar, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, in “The Meta-
morphoses of Caliban,” diacritics 7 (September 1977): 78–83, makes the counterclaim
that Fernández Retamar is influenced by French writers (he means Frantz Fanon and
Aimé Césaire; his remark is technically true but erases them as Caribbean writers)
and that his (and Che Guevara’s) alliances with Blacks are therefore suspect acts of
blackface as well. It is unfortunate to find Rodríguez Monegal essentially deploying
the same kind of rhetoric against Fernández Retamar as Fernández Retamar uses
against him.
21. On this well-recognized point, see, e.g., Oscar Montero, “Modernismo and Ho-
mophobia: Darío and Rodó,” in Sex and Sexuality in Latin America, ed. Daniel Balder-
ston and Donna J. Guy (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 101–17.
22. For an acute analysis, see Sylvia Molloy, “Too Wilde for Comfort: Desire and
Ideology in Fin-de-Siècle Spanish America,” Social Text 10, nos. 2–3 (1992): 187–201,
which analyzes Martí and Rubén Darío on Oscar Wilde in the context of modernismo
defenses against and entanglements with homosexual desire.
23. See Sylvia Molloy, “His America, Our America: José Martí Reads Whitman,” in
Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies, ed. Betsy Erkkila and
Jay Grossman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 83–91; in the same volume,
Jorge Salessi and José Quiroga, in “Errata sobre la erotica, or, the Elision of Whitman’s
Body,” 123–33, extend the study of “homoerotically repressed scenes of instruction that
may be at the root of the Whitman question in Latin America” (124)—in Martí, among
others—to Spanish translations of Whitman.
24. Citations from José Martí, “Our America,” in The America of José Martí: Select-
ed Writings, trans. Juan de Onis (New York: Noonday, 1953), 138–51, quotation at 150.
Elsewhere, from the same volume, I cite “Emerson” (216–38), “Whitman” (239–58), and
“Simón Bolívar” (152–62).
25. This heady prose seems like a more accurate translation of Martí than the chas-
tened one Peden gives for Rodó, though Fuentes, in a prologue to Peden’s translation,
praises it precisely for removing the rhetorical swells, which, he confesses with embar-
rassment, inflamed him as a young reader (Ariel, 14). Ortiz notes these remarks by
 N O T E S T O “A D I F F E R E N T K I N D O F C R E A T U R E ” / 1 5 3

Fuentes as a sign of the persistence of late-nineteenth-century attitudes (“Revolution’s

Other Histories,” 55–56 n. 12).
26. For one study of this phenomenon, see Jorge Salessi, “The Argentine Dissemina-
tion of Homosexuality, 1890–1914,” in Entiendes: Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings,
ed. Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1995), 49–91, a study of theoretical texts but also of policing/anthropologizing texts
that “uncover” a native homosexual culture in the cities of Latin America even as they
insist on a foreign causality.
27. For a very different view from Fernández Retamar’s on the relationships be-
tween race and nature in Martí and Rodó, see Joseba Gabilondo, “Afterword” to The
Cosmic Race/La raza cosmica, by José Vasconcelos, trans. Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore,
MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 102–3.
28. For an attempt to bring Martí’s erotics into the orbit of homosexual desire,
see Benigno Sanchez-Eppler, “Call My Son Ismael: Exiled Paternity and Father/Son
Eroticism in Reinaldo Arenas and José Martí,” differences 6, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 69–97.
Molloy, “His America, Our America,” compares Martí’s Ismael with Rodó’s Ariel, their
shared family romance of fathers and sons without mothers (84).
29. Severo Sarduy, Written on a Body, 64. Epps, “Proper Conduct,” notes that Sar-
duy’s writing on the body as a site of transvestism and imitation could be brought to
bear on the resolute masculinism advocated by the revolution as a necessary front that
might still be only that (244), a point congruent to the one I have been making about
the homoerotic/homophobic strategies in these various Latin American texts around
The Tempest.
30. The interview with George Kent first appeared in Black World 22, no. 5 (March
1973): 4–14, 88–97. The interview along with numerous other published and unpub-
lished materials are gathered in George Lamming, Conversations: Essays, Addresses,
and Interviews, 1953–1990, ed. Richard Drayton and Andaiye (London: Karia Press,
1992), 104 for the reference in the Kent interview.
31. The interview originally appeared in Ian Munro and Reinhard Sander, eds.,
Kas-Kas: Interview with Three Caribbean Writers in Texas (occasional publication of
the African and Afro-American Research Institute; Austin: University of Texas, 1972;
Lamming was a writer in residence in Texas in 1970); republished in Lamming, Con-
versations, cited phrase, 73.
32. For the significance of the “riots” of 1937, see George Lamming, “Caribbean
Labor, Culture, and Identity,” Bucknell Review (Caribbean Cultural Identities, ed. Glyne
Griffith) 44, no. 2 (2001): 17–32, esp. 22, a printing of an address delivered in 1994 at
the University of the West Indies. Their significance is also explored in David Scott,
“The Sovereignty of the Imagination: An Interview with George Lamming,” Small Axe
12 (September 2002): 72–200; see esp. 75–87. For the role of the “riots” in Lamming, In
the Castle of My Skin and in cultural-historical context, see Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o, Home-
coming (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1972), 110–26, and Supriya Nair, Caliban’s Curse:
George Lamming and the Revisioning of History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1996), ch. 3. For a superb account of congruent events, see Ken Post, Arise Ye
Starvelings: The Jamaican Labour Rebellion of 1938 and Its Aftermath (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1978).
33. “Western Education and the Caribbean Individual,” one of two pieces gathered
 1 5 4 / N O T E S T O “A D I F F E R E N T K I N D O F C R E A T U R E ”

in George Lamming, Coming Coming Home: Conversations II (Philipsburg, St. Martin:

House of Nehesi Publications, 2000), 25.
34. See George Lamming, “Coming, Coming, Coming Home,” in Coming Coming
Home, 38–39. The problems with this view are detailed by Andaiye in the foreword to
Lamming, Conversations, 12–14.
35. George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1992 reprint of 1960 text); hereafter Pleasures.
36. Mannoni was analyzed by Jacques Lacan; see Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques
Lacan and Co., trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990),
234, for a brief account of his analysis, which began in 1947.
37. Lamming, Pleasures of Exile (London: Allison and Busby, 1984), 7; the introduc-
tion to the 1984 reprint is omitted from the 1992 Michigan reprint.
38. The charge of dependency is also made by Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Resistance and
Caribbean Literature (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980).
39. Vera Kutzinski, “The Cult of Caliban: Collaboration and Revisionism in Contem-
porary Caribbean Narrative,” in A History of Literature in the Caribbean, ed. A. James
Arnold, vol. 3 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997), 285–302, citation 288. In her Sugar’s
Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1993), Kutzinski has insisted on the heterosexual violence that under-
writes tropes of mestizaje.
40. Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans.
Pamela Powesland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 76–77.
41. All citations from Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam
Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
42. Fanon’s statement is, of course, an overstatement, since he does devote a
chapter to the black woman’s desire for the white man. Presumably, as a black man
he knows nothing of the black woman. The gendered limits of Fanon’s thought have
been examined: by Anne McClintock, for example, in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender,
and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), 360–68; and more
capaciously by Rey Chow, “The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscege-
nation, and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon,” in Frantz Fanon: Critical
Perspectives, ed. Anthony C. Allessandrini (London: Routledge, 1999), 34–56, and by
Lola Young, “Missing Persons: Fantasising Black Women in Black Skin, White Masks,”
in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read
(Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1996), 86–101, both of whom argue for variously threaten-
ing forms of black female agency. More pertinent to the analysis at hand have been
attempts to articulate Fanon’s views of gender with his views of sexuality, and par-
ticularly of male homosexuality; Diana Fuss, for example, in “Interior Colonies: Frantz
Fanon and the Politics of Identification,” an essay that appeared initially in diacritics
24, nos. 2–3 (1994): 20–42, and was reprinted as the final chapter in Fuss, Identifica-
tion Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), finds not only more lability in Fanon’s view of
female gender than does McClintock but also connections between his misogyny and
his homophobia, including the potentially enabling possibility that a dehomogenized
definition of homosexuality might emerge from Fanon’s admittedly phobic account.
Misogyny and homophobia are also linked in Ann Pellegrini’s reading of Fanon in her
Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New York: Routledge,
 N O T E S T O “A D I F F E R E N T K I N D O F C R E A T U R E ” / 1 5 5

1997); privileging the “blind spot of gender” (93) in her analysis of Fanon, Pellegrini
also argues that Fanon’s enablement of a vision of the heterosexuality of the black
male (and the deflection of homosexuality) occurs through his cross-raced plots, in
which the black man possesses the white man’s white woman.
43. Henry Louis Gates Jr., in “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Spring 1991):
457–70, a review of the criticism on Fanon to the time of his writing, fastens on Fanon’s
figure of the New Man without pausing over why it must be so gendered, or what gen-
der politics and what forms of sexuality Fanon is advocating—or defending against.
His summary is nonetheless fairly accurate in terms of the absence of a concern with
gender in many of the critics he reviews, including Homi K. Bhabha, Edward Said, and
Abdul Jan Mohamed.
44. A stunning discussion of the homophobic logic of Fanon’s collapse of white rac-
ism into homosexuality can be found in Lee Edelman’s “The Part for the (W)hole,” ch. 3
of Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge,
1994). And Kobena Mercer has written equally tellingly on the effects and historical
contexts of Fanon’s argument for the theorization of gay black sexuality; see “Decoloni-
sation and Disappointment: Reading Fanon’s Sexual Politics,” in The Fact of Blackness,
ed. Read, 114–31, and “Busy in the Ruins of a Wretched Phantasia,” in Frantz Fanon,
ed. Allessandrini, 195–218.
45. See Peter Hulme, “Reading from Elsewhere: George Lamming and the Paradox
of Exile,” in “The Tempest” and Its Travels, ed. Hulme and Sherman, 220–35. The signifi-
cant exception to this generalization would be Ania Loomba, “Seizing the Book,” ch. 6
of Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).
Loomba briefly revisits this material in Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 5–6, 161–68, and she notes as well that “Lamming and
others were far ahead of the Shakespearian scholarship of their day” (164). Pointing
to the north-African origins of Sycorax and Caliban, Loomba cautions against a New
World model of colonialism that ignores other sites and types of European colonial en-
counters that contributed to early modern concepts of race.
46. Peter Hulme, “Rewriting the Caribbean Past: Cultural History in the Colonial
Context,” in Interpretation and Cultural History, ed. Joan H. Pittock and Andrew Wear
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 183.
47. Claribel’s north-African marriage is akin to Miranda’s alliance with Ferdinand
insofar as both are patriarchally arranged aristocratic marriages. Nonetheless, the un-
spoken but unmistakable racial antipathy reported about the “loathness” (2.1.128) of
a “fair soul” (2.1.127) to be married to an African rather than to a European links the
King of Tunis to Caliban. Both share a north-African origin. On this topic, see Marjorie
Raley, “Claribel’s Husband,” in Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance, ed. Joyce
Green MacDonald (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 95–119.
48. George Lamming, Season of Adventure (London: Allison and Busby, 1979), 49.
49. Among the feminist critics would be Nair as well as Belinda Edmondson, whose
“Novel of Revolution and the Unrepresentable Black Woman,” ch. 5 of Making Men:
Gender, Literary Authority, and Women’s Writing in Caribbean Narrative (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1999), follows a trajectory similar to the one I have been
tracing.
50. George Lamming, Of Age and Innocence (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), 206.
 1 5 6 / N O T E S T O “A D I F F E R E N T K I N D O F C R E A T U R E ”

Ngũgı̃, Homecoming, 140–42, treats this and related passages in his discussion of the
alienating effects of colonialism.
51. For a brief consideration of the occasion and the connections between Lam-
ming’s thought and Fanon’s, see David Macey, Frantz Fanon (New York: Picador, 2000),
165–67.
52. George Lamming, “The Negro Writer and His World,” Présence Africaine 18/19
(1956): 321; also in Conversations, 37–38.
53. Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Itha-
ca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), focuses on conditions of language in his discus-
sion of Lamming’s Castle.
54. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1988), ch. 6, “Secret Subjects, Open Secrets,” 192–220.
55. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Har-
mondsworth, England: Penguin, 1967), 251; hereafter Wretched.
56. Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Caliban Speaks Five Hundred Years Later,” in
Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock,
Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 171.
57. Kent interview, 92; cited from Lamming, Conversations, 100. This citation is the
starting point for Peter Hulme’s analysis of Lamming’s final novels and the psychology
of (neo)colonialism in “The Profit of Language: George Lamming and the Postcolonial
Novel,” in Recasting the World, ed. Jonathan White (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1993), 120–36.
58. See Kent interview, 91 (cited from Lamming, Conversations, 99–100), as well as
the 1979 interview in Daryl Cumber Dance, New World Adams (Leeds, England: Peepal
Tree Books, 1992), 138.
59. Hulme, “Profit of Language,” 120. Lamming’s agenda—translating his novels
into political allegory—is followed by Sandra Pouchet Paquet, The Novels of George
Lamming (London: Heinemann, 1982), and by Ambroise Kom, George Lamming et le
destin des Caraibes (Ville de Salle, Quebec: Didier, 1986).
60. George Lamming, Water with Berries (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,
1971), 12.
61. It is not clear what action the Secret Gathering took; about all we know is that it
left behind the corpse of a woman—a white woman—who got her sexual pleasure from
kinky sex with one of the revolutionaries and who died having sex. Characteristic of
the novel, Lamming moves from this story (45) to have Fola walk into the novel as the
sole female member of the revolutionary group (47), attempting to balance the abjec-
tion of and violence against women with this sign of gender solidarity.
62. Lamming interprets Jeremy this way in the Kent interview: “He really detests
Jeremy. He detests the function which Jeremy performs. Jeremy is a bureaucrat. . . .
There is a part of him which feels that even to be sitting talking to Jeremy is to be
involving himself in a pollution which he had put behind” (92; cited from Lamming,
Conversations, 101).
63. That “Third World” novels should be read as national allegories is the argument
of Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,”
Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88; the argument is criticized by Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory:
Classes, Nations, Literature (London: Verso, 1992), ch. 3. Hulme notes this controversy
 N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ” / 1 5 7

in “Profit of Language,” but he nonetheless reads Lamming’s Water with Berries as

national allegory. On heterosexual romance as a way to code nation building, see Doris
Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); for a telling critique of the
heterosexism of such novels and an opening toward other possibilities, see Rhonda
Cobham, “Misgendering the Nation: African Nationalist Fictions and Nuruddin
Farah’s Maps,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris
Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Routledge, 1992), 42–59, esp. 47, on stigmati-
zation of homosexuality as foreign infection.
64. The fog of the novel is often an alcoholic haze, which may be reflected in its title;
it binds the male characters together in the local pub that Roger burns down late in
the novel, his act of rebellion after repudiating his wife and their mixed-race child.
65. At the end of Lamming’s Natives of My Person (Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press, 1992), a novel in which men and women are entirely separate, the men on
their (neo)colonial voyage never arrive at San Cristobal, and the women remain there
forever as a future that the men need to discover, a future that might “solve” male-
female relations or might dissolve them. As “a future they must learn” (345), men need
to renounce masculinity. Although some, including Hulme and Paquet in her foreword
to the University of Michigan edition of Pleasures, find this conclusion hearteningly
feminist in its impulse, it needs to be said that even here, women function for the sake
of men.

CALIBAN’S “WOMAN”
1. Significantly, Othello is the play with a half-dozen uses of “monstrous.” The
words are attached to Iago’s plot and to the monster in Othello’s mind, Desdemona’s
infidelity, naming thereby the charged site of female sexuality, Othello’s racially black-
ened sexuality, and the terrain shared in his coupling with Iago. It is worth noting that
Othello is the Shakespeare play that has garnered the most critical attention to ques-
tions of race and their entanglements with sexuality. In that regard, Karen Newman’s
“‘And wash the Ethiop white’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,” ch. 5 in Fash-
ioning Femininity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), is exemplary. Other
important considerations include Patricia Parker, “Fantasies of ‘Race’ and ‘Gender’: Af-
rica, Othello, and Bringing to Light,” and Jyotsna Singh, “Otello’s Identity, Postcolonial
Theory, and Contemporary African Rewritings of Othello,” both in Women, “Race,” and
Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New
York: Routledge, 1994).
2. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory, ed.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3–25. In a
largely pyschoanalytic vein, Cohen further explores the excess of monstrosity in Of Gi-
ants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999). Cohen’s stress on the hybridity of an attractive/repulsive body is to be contrast-
ed, I think, with the dynamics of excoriation in The Tempest and with the revaluation
in modern texts that seize upon devalued difference as a site of alterity.
3. Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cul-
tural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 10.
 1 5 8 / N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ”

4. Ibid., 10. This bibliographic information will, of course, be found in most modern
texts of the play, including Stephen Orgel’s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
5. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797
(London: Methuen, 1986), 114.
6. George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1992 reprint of 1960 text), 15; hereafter Pleasures.
7. Matthew W. Black and Matthias A. Shaaber, Shakespeare’s Seventeenth-Century
Editors, 1632–1685 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1937), 95.
8. The Tempest, Arden edition, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1954); I cite
the lemma to 1.2.282. The original Arden edition, ed. Morton Luce (London: Methuen,
1901), fails to record the he/she emendation.
9. The pronoun change to “she” was first made by John Dryden and Sir William
Davenant in their rewriting of Shakespeare in The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island
(1670), as Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan record in their 1999 Arden
edition (Arden Shakespeare, third series; Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Thomas Nelson,
1999).
10. See Stephen Orgel, “Introduction” to his edition of The Tempest, 18–19, as well
as his essay “Prospero’s Wife,” originally published in Representations 8 (Fall 1984):
1–13, and reprinted in Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen
Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 54.
11. In this, Prospero would seem to mirror James I, whose misogyny was accompa-
nied by proclamations of his female creative powers as “nourish-father” to the nation,
a formulation that makes him at once a nursing mother (“nurse” derives from Middle
English “nourrish”) and a father; see the discussion of James I’s Basilikon Doron in
Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore, MD: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1983), 141–43.
12. For a pertinent critique, within the context of historical /critical accounts of
witchcraft in the Renaissance, of a dehistoricizing reduction of questions of femininity
to questions of the mother in psychoanalytically inflected feminist criticism, see New-
man, Fashioning Femininity, ch. 4.
13. It is just such a fantasy of male genius that governs Peter Greenaway’s film Pros-
pero’s Books (1991), during which John Gielgud (as Prospero) recites everyone’s lines.
14. For an argument congruent with this one, see Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter
Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance
Europe,” in Body Guards, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1991), which concludes that fixing gender on genitals is an eighteenth-century
development and that, in the Renaissance, gender could be located elsewhere. Their
final examples include other bodily parts, such as the mouth (which will be important
for the argument that follows below), or clothing as sites of gender identification. The
latter point is developed in their Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). It is worth remarking here that the
character in the play who demonstrates this kind of lability—and subordination—is
Ariel, a boy actor who plays female roles every time Prospero assigns him a part: sea
nymph, harpy, goddess.
15. In other words, the interchangeability of gender, as it is conceptualized in New
Historicist work that depends upon Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (Cambridge, MA:
 N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ” / 1 5 9

Harvard University Press, 1990)—for example, Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean

Negotiations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), ch. 3,
or Stephen Orgel, “Nobody’s Perfect, or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for
Women?” SAQ 88 (1989): 7–29, which is incorporated into Orgel, Impersonations: The
Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996)— does not work in both directions. Moreover, the one-sex model is just
that, a model that pertains to anatomical drawing and not to the social meanings of
gender that strongly mark male/female difference.
16. The Tempest, ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1921).
17. The sentence can be found in the “first letter” ascribed to Hernán Cortés (ad-
dressed “to Queen Doña Juana and to the Emperor, Charles V, Her Son”) and expresses
a sentiment that is ubiquitous in colonialist literature of the period, as I argue in Sod-
ometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1992), part 3, examining Latin American and Anglo texts that deploy the figure of the
sodomite as the embodied antithesis of colonial order (in Hispanic texts, the figure of
the sodomite is attached to the “native” most often, whereas Anglo texts tend to locate
sodomy among the laboring class). The illustration I use in Sodometries, which shows
Balboa feeding “sodomitical” Panamanian natives to his dogs, Hulme uses in his dis-
cussion of Caliban (Colonial Encounters, 113), referring to Prospero’s unleashing of his
dogs against him in act 4, scene 1. Hulme does not mention what the scene illustrates,
nor does he comment on the pertinence of sodomy to cannibal Caliban.
18. See M. Jacqui Alexander, “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An
Anatomy of Feminist and State Practice in the Bahamas Tourist Industry,” in Femi-
nist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and
Chandra Talpade Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997), 63–100 and n. 12, for the point
that the colonial scene underlies the present Bahamian regime, in which “natives” are
inducted into the belief that “‘native’ heterosexuals had more in common with imperial
heterosexuals than with ‘native’ homosexuals” (370); and Alexander, “Redrafting Mo-
rality: The Postcolonial State and the Sexual Offences Bill of Trinidad and Tobago,” in
Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann
Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 133–52, for
arguments about the ideological naturalization of heterosexuality. For an overview of
the arguments presented in these two essays, see Alexander, “Not Just (Any) Body Can
Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality, and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago
and the Bahamas,” Feminist Review 48 (1994): 5–23.
19. For a survey of the recent historical literature, see Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous
Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 1994), ch. 5, esp. 171–80, 194–210. Whereas Dolan emphasizes
the status of the witch as an “insider,” Judith Bennett and Amy Froide, in “A Singular
Past,” in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, ed. Judith Bennett and Amy
Froide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), note that “the most like-
ly targets for an accusation of witchcraft were women who lived without men” (14).
20. Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan
England,” History Workshop Journal 29 (1990): 1–19, reprinted in revised form in Jonathan
Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).
 1 6 0 / N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ”

21. Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press,
1982), 40, 72 cited. On the latter page, Bray also notes as significant that Drago’s ar-
rest coincided with an efflorescence of witch trials.
22. See Valerie Traub, “The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris,” GLQ 2 (1995): 81–113.
23. George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1991 reprint of 1953 text), 104, 26.
24. As Gesa Mackenthun puts it in “A Monstrous Race for Possession: Discourses
of Monstrosity in The Tempest and Early British America,” in Writing and Race, ed.
Tim Youngs (London: Longman, 1997), 52–79, “By having ‘littered’ a ‘puppy-headed’
monster, Sycorax is not only marked as a witch but also bears the traces of a monstrous
female” (64).
25. The north-African locale for the unspeakable deed may connect Sycorax to a
city infamous as a site of white slavery (see Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and English-
men in the Age of Discovery [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999] for this
significance of Algiers, and Paul Baepler, White Slaves, African Masters [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999] for an anthology of texts from the seventeenth
to the nineteenth centuries), a site moreover regularly declared a hotbed of male
same-sex activity, as Matar notes (as does Bray as well, Homosexuality, 75). This plot
figures in Cervantes’s Don Quixote (part 1, chs. 39–41) and in several of his plays, as
is demonstrated in Adrienne L. Martín, “Images of Deviance in Cervantes’s Algeria,”
Cervantes 15, no. 2 (1995): 5–13. Martín also points to the stigmatization of north-
Africans in Diego de Haedo, Topographiae historia general de Argel (1612), a text that
declares that sodomy was openly practiced in Algiers, a claim taken at face value by
Daniel Eisenberg, “Juan Ruiz’s Heterosexual ‘Good Love,’” in Queer Iberia, ed. Josiah
Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutchinson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999),
253. Eisenberg also suspects that the true author of the Topographiae was Cervantes.
Gregory Hutchinson has argued in “The Sodomitic Moor: Queerness in the Narrative
of Reconquista,” in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 99–122, that the early modern
period is the moment when the sodomitical Moor assumes stereotypical force. And
north-Africans were frequently accused of sodomy by the Inquisition, as E. William
Monter notes (Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands
to Sicily [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 292). It is further worth
mentioning that in William Strachey’s account of a shipwreck off Bermuda, a source
for The Tempest, he compares the New World hurricane to storms “upon the coast of
Barbary and Algeere” (cited in Appendix 1 in the Vaughans’ Arden edition, 290). This
north-African locale is the charged site of Claribel’s marriage as well as the near foun-
dering of Aeneas’s imperial ambitions.
26. This interpretation assumes that the lines do simply mean that she was preg-
nant. According to James C. Oldham, “On Pleading the Belly: A History of the Jury of
Matrons,” Criminal Justice History 6 (1985): 1–64, his study of the records “does not
permit a conclusion that a successful pregnancy plea was ‘tantamount to a pardon’”
(19), as John Beattie has argued in an unpublished essay to which Oldham alludes.
Oldham shows that a delay in execution was usual, and that often the death penalty
was replaced by imprisonment or by deportation; his evidence is drawn mainly from
late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cases.
 N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ” / 1 6 1

27. On this point, see Jacques Chiffoleau, “Dire l’indicible: Rémarques sur la catégo-
rie du nefandum du XIIe au XVe siècles,” Annales 45 (1990): 289–384.
28. Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (Boston: Fag Rag Books,
1978).
29. Evans depends here on Henry Charles Lea, Materials toward a History of Witch-
craft, ed. A. C. Howland, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939),
2:485: “[V]os viri cum succubis and [sic] vos mulieres cum incubis fornicati estis, Sod-
omiam veram et nefandissium crimen misere cum illis tactu frigidissimo exercuistis.”
30. Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation (London: Routledge, 1991), 143.
31. E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands dur-
ing the Reformation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 136, 198. A similar
view of the relationship between sodomy and witchcraft accusations is offered by Guido
Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 140, which regards the two crimes as paral-
lel instances of the policing of “the normal and the abnormal”; in a note (196 n. 135),
he further speculates on the relationship and distribution of these accusations.
32. Cited in Monter, Frontiers, 280. Monter details executions for sodomy and for
witchcraft in separate chapters of this study but does not draw connections between
them.
33. Paul Brown, “‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’: The Tempest and
the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and
Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Brown’s understanding of
sexuality is limited to heterosexuality; he also too easily collapses the positions of the
native woman (Pocahontas) with Miranda, and although he draws parallels between
the gender situation and class antagonism (master/masterless relations, which Dolan
argues in Dangerous Familiars, 60–71, ignores “insider” servant status), he does not
read sexuality in these parallels.
G. R. Quaife, Godly Zeal and Furious Rage: The Witch in Early Modern Europe
(London: Croom Helm, 1987), 99; Quaife continues by referring to one claim that the
devil has a three-pronged penis, thus “permitting him to engage in coitus, sodomy and
fellatio simultaneously.” In his reviews of previous scholarship, he notes those who
have thought of witchcraft prosecutions as policing nonheterosexual relations, whether
among women or among men. For further documentation of witchcraft involving anal
sex with the devil, see Jeffrey Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 1960), 391. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and
Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 235, has a passing consid-
eration of the witchcraft/sodomy/ heresy nexus. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil
(London: Routledge, 1994), also associates the sexual activities of the witches’ Sabbath
with sodomy (25) but does not pursue the connection further.
34. Retha M. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 194.
35. Michael Drayton, “The Moone-Calfe,” in The Works of Michael Drayton, ed.
J. William Hebel, 5 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1932), vol. 3, lines 178, 190.
36. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Montague
Summers (New York: Dover, 1971 reprint of 1928 text), 30.
37. As Franco Mormando notes in The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and
 1 6 2 / N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ”

the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999), Bernardino is capable of calling both sodomy and witchcraft the worst of sins
(122–23), but separately: He is vehemently opposed to both as forms of heresy, but he
does not otherwise connect the two except as “the worst.”
38. Thomas Weld, cited by Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (New
York: Vintage, 1989), 17–18. As Karlsen comments and goes on to cite Weld further to
this point, the monstrous births were seen as the analogues to the monstrous beliefs
of Hutchison and her followers. Such accusations against witches are a particular in-
stance of the phenomenon that Marie-Hélène Huet studies in Monstrous Imagination
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), in which the monstrous imagination
of the mother is said to be responsible for deformed offspring. This phenomenon is also
discussed in Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982); she also notes that sodomy and bestiali-
ty were among the supposed causes of deformed offspring (65). A wide-ranging study
of monstrosity in early modernity is offered in Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park,
Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 1998), ch. 5.
39. Makeda Silvera, “Man Royals and Sodomites: Some Thoughts on the Invisibility
of Afro-Caribbean Lesbians,” in Reclaiming Sodom, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 95–105, citations from 96–97.
40. Not that any previous editor has ever noted these implications. David Sundel-
son, in “So Rare a Wonder’d Father: Prospero’s Tempest,” in Representing Shakespeare,
ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1980), does, although the lines are adduced in the context of Prospero’s
“impotence” in Milan (35). Sundelson does note that once on the island, Prospero as-
sumes paternal and maternal powers.
41. Sundelson, “So Rare a Wonder’d Father,” 41. As Sundelson continues to explicate
this scene, he reads the greedy mouth as making a female demand and the scene of
venting as a parody of childbirth and an expression of female loathing. Although the
latter point is not to be denied, I do not think one can simply collapse this scene onto a
female body. Nor do I think the relationship between Caliban and Trinculo necessarily
needs to be read as a repudiation of relationships with women, as Barbara Bowen
seems to suggest in “Writing Caliban: Anticolonial Appropriations of The Tempest,”
Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 5, no. 2 (1993): 80–99, when
she writes that “the coupling of Trinculo and Caliban, head to tail under the gaberdine,
followed immediately by Stephano’s song about abandoning ‘Kate’ in favor of the ‘boys’
at sea (II.ii.55), clearly suggests an erotic bond” (92).
42. See Jeanne Addison Roberts, “‘Wife’ or ‘Wise’: The Tempest l. 1786,” Studies in
Bibliography 31 (1978): 203–8. David Bevington prints “wife” in his edition, The Com-
plete Works of Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman, 1980); his textual
apparatus records “wise” as the F1 reading; he offers no explanation for his emendation.
43. Mark Thornton Burnett, “‘Strange and woonderfull syghts’: The Tempest and
the Discourses of Monstrosity,” Shakespeare Survey 50 (1997): 187–99, 195 cited.
44. Frye, in his Penguin edition, notes at 4.1.123 that “some copies of F read ‘wife’”
(Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1959).
45. The Tempest, a new variorum editon, ed. Howard Horace Furness (Philadelphia:
J. B. Lippincott, 1892).
 N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ” / 1 6 3

46. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
47. Andrew Marvell, “The Garden,” lines 63–64, in The Poems and Letters of Andrew
Marvell, ed. H. H. Margoliouth, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), 1:49.
48. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, Wil-
liam Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 616.
49. See Valerie Wayne, “The Sexual Politics of Textual Transmission,” in Textual
Formations and Reformations, ed. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1998), 179–210; Wayne discusses the “wife”/ “wise” crux
on 184–87.
50. One could compare here the note in Luce’s 1901 Arden edition, which, as am-
bivalent as Kermode’s, prints “wise” and yet seems in the note to prefer “wife.” One of
the arguments in the note is that “the rhyme of Paradise with wise is a blemish, and it
could hardly have been intentional.”
51. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, “Introduction” to their edition
of The Tempest, 137–38.
52. Peter W. M. Blayney, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” The Norton Facsimile
of the First Folio of Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1996), xxi, cited in part by Vaughan
and Vaughan, “Introduction,” 137. I am grateful to Barbara Mowat for sharing with me
her thoughts and further information on this bibliographical dilemma.
53. George Lamming, Of Age and Innocence (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), 151;
hereafter Age and Innocence.
54. For an essay grounded in such principles, see, e.g., Abena Busia, “Silencing
Sycorax: On African Colonial Discourse and the Unvoiced Female,” Cultural Critique
14 (Winter 1989–90): 81–104, an essay indebted in passing to Orgel, “Prospero’s Wife”;
or May Joseph, “The Scream of Sycorax,” Nomadic Identities (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999). For a reading of Miranda alert to her difficulties for femi-
nist identification (and which also insists that Caliban’s alleged rape attempt makes
him a difficult model for the colonial subject), see Laura E. Donaldson, “The Miranda
Complex,” in Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire-Building (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), which could usefully be juxtaposed to
Elaine Showalter, “Miranda’s Story,” in Sister’s Choices (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) (on
page 40 of which, Showalter seems to think that Lamming is a conservative Anglo-
Canadian writer).
55. Rob Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest,” Critical
Inquiry 13 (Spring 1987): 557–78; quotations at 576, 577.
56. Ironically, the last critic cited by Nixon is Sylvia Wynter (her afterword to
Lemuel Johnson’s Highlife for Caliban [Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1995 reprint
of 1973 text]), but this does not prompt Nixon to name her in the text of his essay or to
include her in his survey. And although Nixon may be accurate in his roll call of African
and Caribbean writers (which, unlike even Fernández Retamar’s, includes no women),
it is worth noting that Morrison’s Tar Baby, written by an African American but set in
the Caribbean, and self-consciously so, predates Nixon’s essay. And it is also worth not-
ing that Paule Marshall, born in the United States to West Indian immigrants, and an
author who frequently writes about the West Indies, had, as early as 1961, rewritten
The Tempest in “Brazil,” the concluding story in her collection, Soul Clap Hands and
 1 6 4 / N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ”

Sing (reissued Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1988). There, “Caliban” and
“Miranda” are nightclub performers. Like the other male-female couples in the stories
in this volume, they are examples of people who have lost touch with “native” authen-
ticity, which Marshall plays out in various forms of unsatisfactory sexual relations
across differences of age and race (in “Brazil,” such mismatching is found even in size;
Caliban is called “O Grande” but is a midget, and his masculine aggression is undercut).
Marshall clearly refuses the kinds of mixing celebrated in Fernández Retamar. In one of
the stories, “British Guiana,” the man who has lost contact with his genuine origins is
also suspected of homosexuality. This plot (of the kind to be found in Black Skin, White
Masks) is also to be found in Marshall’s The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (New York:
Vintage, 1984 reprint of 1969 text), which centers on a relationship between a “native”
and a European woman, as has been noted and deplored by Timothy S. Chin, “‘Bullers’
and ‘Battymen’: Contesting Homophobia in Black Popular Culture and Contemporary
Caribbean Literature,” Callaloo 20, no. 1 (1997): 127–41, and by Rhonda Cobham, “Revi-
sioning Our Kumblas: Transforming Feminist and Nationalist Agendas in Three Carib-
bean Women’s Texts,” in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and
Literature, ed. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt (Jackson: University Press of Missis-
sippi, 2000). Cobham finds more productive thinking and representing of female-female
relations in Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1983). These
limits are only overcome in Marshall’s Fisher King (New York: Simon and Schuster,
2000), whose central figures are a single woman and the boy she has raised. “There’re all
kinds of family and blood’s got nothing to do with it” (210), Hattie thinks when the boy,
Sonny, is claimed by his uncle, and she is validated in her thought: Her claims to the boy
reside in her past intimacy with both his grandmother and his grandfather.
57. Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’
of Caliban’s ‘Woman’”; the essay appears as the afterword in Out of the Kumbla: Carib-
bean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton,
NJ: Africa World Press, 1990); hereafter BMM. Natasha Barnes worries the question
of Wynter’s opposition to feminism in “Reluctant Matriarch: Sylvia Wynter and the
Problematics of Caribbean Feminism,” Small Axe 5 (March 1999): 34–47, arguing
that “Wynter’s conclusions lead to a repudiation of feminism as a site of emancipatory
imagining” (41). I am grateful to Professor Barnes for some stimulating discussion of
this complicated issue, and I discuss below my understanding of Wynter’s conflicted
relationship to feminism. It is certainly possible to survey Wynter’s thought and barely
mention gender as a concern, as can be seen in Paget Henry’s discussion /evaluation of
Wynter in “Sylvia Wynter: Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Thought,” in Caliban’s
Reason (New York: Routledge, 2000), 117–43.
58. Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception: The Counter-
doctrine of the Jamesian Poiesis,” in C. L. R. James’s Caribbean, ed. Paget Henry
and Paul Buhle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 63–91. Paget Henry’s
evaluation of Wynter’s work in Caliban’s Reason—essentially to fault her, in tradition-
al Marxist fashion, for her refusal to heed the economic as the ultimate determinant of
the social—must be motivated in part by the critique of Marxism that Wynter makes
in this essay.
59. Sylvia Wynter, “On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minority’ Literary Criticism and
Beyond,” Cultural Critique (Fall 1987): 207–44.
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60. Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the
Antilles,” World Literature Today 63, no. 4 (1989): 637–47, 640 cited.
61. In “On Disenchanting Discourse,” Wynter glosses “demonic” by way of an essay
in biological theory as “logical representations of reality which exclude a space-time
oriented observer” (207 n. 3).
62. David Scott, “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia
Wynter,” Small Axe 8 (September 2000): 119–207, 125 cited; my gratitude to Natasha
Barnes for providing me with a typescript of this interview before its publication. The
interview is invaluable, both for information about the shape of Wynter’s life and ca-
reer and for the exposition of the crucial ideas that she has been developing that Scott’s
questions provoke; I will refer to it as “Interview” in further citations in my text. For
a 1980 interview with Wynter, see Daryl Cumber Dance, New World Adams (Leeds,
England: Peepal Tree Books, 1992), 276–82.
63. Lamming refers to Wynter alongside C. L. R. James in a 1966 essay (“Carib-
bean Literature: The Black Rock of Africa,” in Conversations: Essays, Addresses, and
Interviews, 1953–1990, ed. Richard Drayton and Andaiye [London: Karia Press, 1992],
124); Edward Kamau Brathwaite devotes several pages to her in his “The Love Axe (1):
Developing a Caribbean Aesthetic, 1962–1974,” in Reading Black: Essays in the Criti-
cism of African, Caribbean, and Black American Literature, ed. Huston Baker (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Africana Studies and Research Center Monograph Series,
no. 4 [1976]), 20–36, see esp. 25–28. I will not be writing here about Wynter’s work be-
fore 1970, extraordinary as it is.
64. “Interview,” 174. The interview is the best place to start assembling a bibliogra-
phy of Wynter’s writing; it can be extended through Brathwaite, “Love Axe (1).”
65. Wynter, “Beyond the Word,” 644; Sylvia Wynter, “‘A Different Kind of Creature’:
Caribbean Literature, the Cyclops Factor, and the Second Poetics of the Propter Nos,”
Annals of Scholarship 12, nos. 1–2 (1997): 153–72, 153 cited. See Edouard Glissant,
Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Vir-
ginia, 1989), 117–19, for Glissant’s mention of the Caliban tradition that encompasses
(for him) Fanon, Césaire, Lamming, and Fernández Retamar. In Poetics of Relation,
trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), Glissant associates
Caliban with the possibility of community founded in a sense of the fragility of life on
earth (54), an alternative form of humanity.
66. See Wynter, “‘A Different Kind of Creature,’” 156; the quotation is from Wynter,
“1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New
World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smith-
sonian Institution Press, 1995), 41. On these views, see also Wynter, “Do Not Call Us
Negroes”: How “Multicultural” Textbooks Perpetuate Racism (San Francisco: Aspire
Books, 1990).
67. This finds a parallel in W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Development of a People,” in Writ-
ings, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1982), 1:201–15,
in his concise and stunning sentence “The African Slave trade was the child of the
Renaissance” (207). My thanks to Nahum D. Chandler for drawing this text to my
attention. Unlike Eric Williams, in Capitalism and Slavery (London: Andre Deutsch,
1964 reprint of the 1944 text), which established the economic links between emergent
capitalism and the slave trade, Wynter’s focus is on ideological productions that have
 1 6 6 / N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ”

material effects, particularly on the entailments and ramifications of humanism. She

elaborates her model of social transformation in “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings” in such
essays as “‘A Different Kind of Creature,’” “1492,” and “Columbus, the Ocean Blue, and
Fables That Stir the Mind: To Reinvent the Study of Letters,” in Poetics of the Americas:
Race, Founding, and Textuality, ed. Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 141–63.
68. There is scarcely an essay of Wynter’s that does not advance this thesis, though
it is continually redeveloped and redeployed in relationship to the specific concerns
of each of her essays; in addition to those cited already, one could add “The Ceremony
Must Be Found: After Humanism,” boundary 2 12, no. 3, and 13, no. 1 (Spring/Fall
1984): 19–70. “Interview” is perhaps the best place to start; “Beyond Miranda’s Mean-
ings” is an extraordinarily compressed and compacted piece of writing. The summary
I provide in the text is far too schematic and hardly does justice to the complexities of
Wynter’s thought.
69. Wynter refers often to Goveia’s crucial essay “The Social Framework,” Savacou
2 (1970): 7–15, in which Goveia lays out patterns of social division in the West Indies as
well as the overriding uniting factor of racial division as the legacy of colonialism that
must be repudiated.
70. In “Reluctant Matriarch,” Barnes worries a congruent issue, that Wynter’s
early affiliation with nationalist movements may make her work legible through aims
that have ignored and delegitimated the concerns of women. “Caribbean feminism
is stigmatized as shrill, partisan, generating its rhetoric and modes of analysis from
suspicious foreign sources,” she notes (35; see 41–42 for development of the point). This
issue is also significant for the analysis that M. Jacqui Alexander offers in her essays
on sexual regulation.
71. Without overstating this, it is nonetheless a point affirmed, for example, by
Barbara Smith in a 1997 essay revisiting those (for her) formative years; see “Where’s
the Revolution?” in The Truth That Never Hurts (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press, 1998), e.g., 180, where she remarks that “unlike the early lesbian and gay
movement, which had both ideological and practical links to the left, Black activism,
and feminism, today’s ‘queer’ politicos seem to operate in a historical and ideological
vacuum.” For some examples of this imbrication, see the recently reissued 1972 volume
Out of the Closets, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: New York University
Press, 1992).
72. In BMM, see also 359 (where “sexual preference” is mentioned twice as a dis-
tinction that becomes racialized in modernity) and 360 (on “Caliban’s ‘woman’” as
representing an “alternative sexual-erotic model of desire”). The suspect category of
“‘natural’ erotic preference” (365) is further glossed in a note as well as in other essays
by Wynter, including “Columbus,” 148, and “1492,” 37.
73. Cliff was born in Jamaica in 1946; she spent her first years and her early ado-
lescence in Jamaica, and the period in between in the United States. She did graduate
work in London at the Warburg Institute and has worked in publication and in the U.S.
academy for the past twenty-five years. She is currently Allan K. Smith Professor of
English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. For further basic biography and
critical orientation, see the entry on Cliff by Cora Agatucci in Contemporary African
American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson
 N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ” / 1 6 7

(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 95–101. For more recent critical literature, see
Noraida Agosto, Michelle Cliff ’s Novels: Piecing the Tapestry of Memory and History
(New York: Peter Lang, 1999), and Antonia MacDonald-Smythe, Making Homes in the
West Indies: Constructions of Subjectivity in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica
Kincaid (New York: Garland, 2001), as well as the essays in Postcolonialism and Auto-
biography, ed. Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), and
the chapter on Cliff in Isabel Hoving, In Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean
Migrant Women’s Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
74. Cliff and Naylor receive consideration (and Marshall a brief mention) in Chan-
tal Zabus, Tempests after Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
75. Michelle Cliff, “Caliban’s Daughter: The Tempest and the Teapot,” Frontiers 12,
no. 2 (1991): 36–51; all citations are from this version. The essay exists in a number
of forms. A bit of it is borrowed from the autobiographical preface, “A Journey into
Speech,” in Cliff ’s The Land of Look Behind (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1985). An early
version is “Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character,” in Caribbean Women Writers, ed.
Selwyn R. Cudjoe (Wellesley/Amherst, MA: Calaloux / University of Massachusetts
Press, 1990), 263–68; its most recent recension, “Caliban’s Daughter, or Into the Inte-
rior,” American Visions/Visiones de las Americas (1994): 152–59.
76. The identity explicitly claimed in Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to
Despise (Watertown, MA: Persephone, 1980) is racial; however, the publication of
the book by a lesbian feminist press implies gendered and sexual identities as well.
Myriam J. A. Chancy, Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in
Exile (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), takes “Claiming an Identity” (in
Claiming an Identity, 43–51) as a key text in her reading of Cliff ’s entire oeuvre and
its racial/gendered /sexual project; see esp. 136–53 (which includes discussion of Abeng
[New York: Dutton, 1984]), 160–65, 196–200 (on No Telephone to Heaven [New York:
Dutton, 1987]), 171–84 (on Free Enterprise [New York: Penguin Books, 1993]). The
un/writing project that entails renaming her scholarly identity as “speechlessness” is
captured in Cliff, “Notes on Speechlessness,” Sinister Wisdom 5 (Winter 1978): 5–9.
77. As Goveia writes in “The Social Framework,” “[I]n the lower class, as is well
known, marriage is the exception rather than the rule and most children born in the
West Indies are illegitimate in the eyes of the law” (9). The 70 percent figure is noted
for the Bahamas in Alexander, “Erotic Autonomy,” 77, and in Hymie Rubenstein, Cop-
ing with Poverty: Adaptive Strategies in a Caribbean Village (Boulder, CO: Westview,
1987), 298. These figures, drawn from various locales (Rubenstein studies St. Vincent)
over a twenty-year period, suggest that they remain generalizable to the region.
78. In labeling these claims “discursive,” I follow David Scott, Refashioning Futures:
Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 124, and
his important argument that the black community constituted and produced around
“Africa” and “slavery” arises from the lived condition of racialization but also from the
ongoing rewriting of the past toward possible futures. Claiming “Africa” or “slavery” is
not so much to name singular origins as it is to mobilize “an always situated argument”
(124–25).
79. Faith Smith, “An Interview with Patricia Powell,” Callaloo 19, no. 2 (1996):
324–29. Powell was born in Jamaica in 1966 and emigrated to the United States in
1982. She has published Me Dying Trial (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993), A Small
 1 6 8 / N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ”

Gathering of Bones (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994), and The Pagoda (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1998).
80. Alexander, “Erotic Autonomy,” 69, also takes to task the notion that a Western
style of homosexuality (around questions of coming out and identity) is what is needed
in the Caribbean.
81. Dionne Brand was born in Trinidad in 1953 and emigrated to Canada in 1970.
Cliff cites “hard against the soul” from Brand’s sixth book of poems, No Language Is
Neutral (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990), the first in which lesbian desire is an
explicit theme. Brand writes in this volume, “Perhaps I / always had it in mind simply
to be an old woman, / darkening, somewhere with another old woman” (46), expressing
an attachment to the primordial woman that Cliff affirms as well. Brand continues
to publish poetry; Land to Light On (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1997) is a re-
cent volume. She has also recently published two novels. In Another Place, Not Here
(New York: Grove, 1996) tells the crossing stories of a Caribbean woman “rescued”
from forced marriage by the arrival of a Canadian activist, who comes and dies in a
revolutionary cause; Elizete, the islander, reverses the route of Verlia, the Canadian,
tracking her back to Toronto, to her former lover Abena, whom Verlia abandoned be-
cause she “couldn’t just live in a personal thing” (102). (In terms of the inquiry we have
been pursuing, it is perhaps most notable that Elizete has a sense of herself through a
debiologized female genealogy through a woman who sought to rename things by emp-
tying them of their colonized nominations.) At the Full and Change of the Moon (New
York: Grove, 1999) is a multigenerational novel tracking a genealogical narrative from
a slave woman to present scenes of black immiseration. Brand has also made films and
written nonfictional accounts of the experiences of black working women in Canada; on
the latter, see Chancy, Searching for Safe Spaces, 86–95.
82. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Freedom, CA: Crossing,
1982), 255.
83. Makeda Silvera, Her Head a Village (Vancouver: Gang Press, 1994), 68–69.
Chancy, Searching for Safe Spaces, 127–31, comments on Silvera’s representation of
the difficulty of including lesbian representation for her audience, a theme in the title
story of the volume that includes “Baby.” “Zammie” is also the term for female friend-
ship in Basin (1985), a play by Jacqueline Rudet, an English writer born to Dominican
parents who grew up in the Dominican Republic. Joseph, Nomadic Identities, cites
from the preface to Basin as it appears in Black Plays, ed. Yvonne Brewster (London:
Methuen, 1987), 114: “According to Rudet, ‘ “zammie” is not “lesbian” in patois. The
word refers more to the universality of friendship between Black women, no matter
what nationality, no matter what class, all Black women have very important things in
common. . . . Every Black woman is the “zammie” of every other Black woman,’ Rudet
continues, ‘It’s almost an obligatory thing’” (Joseph, Nomadic Identities, 121).
84. This is a point in a number of the essays gathered in Audre Lorde, Sister Out-
sider (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1984), and A Burst of Light (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand,
1988).
85. The most spectacular (counter)example is provided by the mother represented
across Jamaica Kincaid’s oeuvre, a woman whose ferocious love is aimed at annihilat-
ing her children (particularly her daughter) if they attempt independence.
86. As Rudet puts it in the preface to Basin: “Zammie was a word I’d forgotten
 N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ” / 1 6 9

about. It was a word my mother would use to describe a close friend, but it had conno-
tations of being more than a friend and, in a strange way, it was a rude word that only
grown-ups could use, as if ‘zammie’ meant lover” (114). Rudet recalls the word because
one of the characters in her play—a woman who sleeps with other women—invokes
the term to explain her solidarity with and to solicit it from another woman who sleeps
with men (see Basin, 132).
87. I will be citing from Gloria Wekker, “Mati-ism and Black Lesbianism: Two Ideal-
typical Expressions of Female Homosexuality in Black Communities of the Diaspora,”
Journal of Homosexuality 24, nos. 3–4 (1993): 145–58; “One Finger Does Not Drink
Okra Soup: Afro-Surinamese Women and Critical Agency,” in Alexander and Mohanty,
Feminist Genealogies, 330–52; “‘What’s Identity Got to Do with It?’: Rethinking Identi-
ty in Light of the Mati Work in Suriname,” in Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and
Transgender Practices across Cultures, ed. Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia E. Wieringa
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 119–35.
88. “Dionne Brand: No Language Is Neutral,” in Frontiers of Caribbean Literature,
ed. Frank Birbalsingh (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 136, 134 cited.
89. Michelle Cliff, “Object into Subject: Some Thoughts on the Work of Black Women
Artists,” in Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspec-
tives by Feminists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldua (San Francisco: aunt lute books, 1990),
271–90; Free Enterprise (New York: Dutton, 1993).
90. For a recent study of the historical and mythic Nanny, see Karla Gottlieb, The
Mother of Us All: The History of Queen Nanny (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000).
Relying on Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s assertions that the story of Nanny’s anal
powers was made up by the British, that it is obscene and derisive (75–76), Gottlieb
emphasizes the maternal powers of Nanny: a mother to the nation who herself was
reported to have been childless. It is perhaps symptomatic of the limits of the kind of
recovery practice that this work represents that Gottlieb mentions the existence of a
novel called Abeng (46) but declines to name its author. Richard Price demurs from
Brathwaite’s views in his preface to the third (1996) edition of Maroon Societies: Rebel
Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1996 edition of the 1976 text), xxii.
91. Chin, “‘Bullers’ and ‘Battymen,’” 137; citations from Cliff, Abeng, 35, 77. In his
otherwise acute reading of repressed histories in Abeng, Simon Gikandi, Writing in
Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1992), ch. 7, “Narration at the Postcolonial Moment: History and Representation in
Abeng,” barely mentions gender and ignores questions of sexuality that, arguably, are
central to historical recovery in the novel. Gikandi does point usefully to the fact that
the double-meaning abeng—the horn that called slaves to work and that rallied Ma-
roons to revolt—goes back to Africa, where it played no part in slavery and the planta-
tion system but, instead, had another meaning, a point that I would take to suggest
the strategic value of a “recovery” that is also a rewriting of Africa for the purposes of
future solidarity.
It is also likely that Cliff ’s title recalls the title of a newspaper launched in opposi-
tion to the “Independence-in-practically-name-only” (Abeng, 5) that came to Jamaica
in 1962, four years after the time frame of the novel. On this, see the essay by one of
the founders of Abeng, Rupert Lewis, “Learning to Blow the Abeng: A Critical Look at
 1 7 0 / N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ”

Anti-Establishment Movements of the 1960s and 1970s,” Small Axe 1 (February 1997):
5–17, and Obika Gray, Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960–1972 (Knox-
ville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), ch. 8, “The Apogee of Black Power Ideology:
The Abeng Newspaper Movement.”
92. For an examination of linguistic range and polysemy in Cliff, see Françoise
Lionnet, “Of Mangoes and Maroons: Language, History, and the Multicultural Subject
of Michelle Cliff ’s Abeng,” in De/Colonizing the Subject, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia
Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 321–45.
93. Judith L. Raiskin, “‘With the Logic of a Creole’: Michelle Cliff,” ch. 5 in Snow
on the Cane Fields: Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996), 192. Raiskin focuses on No Telephone to Heaven, but on
184–85, she offers a useful mapping of the complex crossings in “mixed race” categories
that she argues affect representation in Abeng. I cite page 149 from Lauren Berlant,
“’68, or Something,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 124–55; I cite from Berlant’s
discussion of Cliff ’s No Telephone to Heaven in relationship to Toni Morrison’s Song of
Solomon (138–53). See also Farah Jasmine Griffith, “Textual Healing: Claiming Black
Women’s Bodies, the Erotic, and Resistance in Contemporary Novels of Slavery,” Cal-
laloo 19, no. 2 (1996): 519–36, a study of the ways in which a validation of black female
sexuality works to answer the denigration of black women; see 531–36 for her consid-
eration of Cliff.
94. Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations,” 574. Islands is the third volume
of poems in a trilogy that includes Rights of Passage (1967) and Masks (1968), gathered
as The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), from
which I will be citing. The most thorough reading of the poems can be found in Gordon
Rohlehr, Pathfinder: Black Awakening in “The Arrivants” of Edward Kamau Brath-
waite (Tunapuna, Trinidad: Gordon Rohlehr, 1981, 1992).
95. Scott, in Refashioning Futures, 106–18, has respectfully dissented from the
Afrocentrism in Brathwaite, finding its nationalist, essentialist historicizing anthro-
pology unnecessary for the nonetheless necessary discursive/political deployment of
Africa for New World decolonizing projects. Brathwaite seems to wish to reject the
facts that the colonial subject is necessarily mixed, that African “survivals” are nec-
essarily transformations, and that claims to Africa cannot be rooted in some essential-
ized, prediscursively raced subject.
96. I cite from the reprint of Kamau Brathwaite, Black + Blues (New York: New
Directions, 1995), 18.
97. Cynthia James, “Caliban in Y2K?—Hypertext and New Pathways,” in For the
Geography of a Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau Brathwaite, ed. Timothy J.
Reiss (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001), 351–61, I cite 353. This volume contains
an extensive bibliography of Brathwaite’s writing (435–50) and of criticism of his work
(451–66).
98. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Caliban, Ariel, and Unprospero in the Conflict of
Creolization: A Study of the Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1831–32,” in Comparative Perspec-
tives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, Annals of the New York Academy
of Sciences 292 (June 27, 1977): 41–62, citation on 43. Kamau Brathwaite, Barabajan
Poems (New York: Savacou North, 1994), 316.
99. Brathwaite’s major statement about nation language is “History of the Voice”
 N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ” / 1 7 1

(1979–81), reprinted in Kamau Brathwaite, Roots (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 1993 reprint of a 1986 Casa de las Américas publication).
100. Edward Brathwaite, “Timehri,” in Is Massa Day Dead? ed. Orde Coombs
(Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1974). Brathwaite describes himself as “not con-
sciously aware of any other West Indian alternative (though in fact I had been living
that alternative). . . . Then, in 1953, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin ap-
peared and everything was transformed” (32). Trumper’s conversation with G is cited
on 34. “Timehri” names Native American marks akin to those that Brathwaite com-
mits himself to recording.
101. See Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagements: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality,
and Experimental Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 139–61,
271–74, and “Wringing the Word,” World Literature Today 68, no. 4, a special issue de-
voted to Brathwaite (Fall 1994): 733–40.
102. Kamau Brathwaite, “X/Self ’s Xth Letter from the Thirteen Provinces,” in X/Self
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). X/Self is the third volume in a trilogy that
includes Mother Poem (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) and Sun Poem (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1982). The three volumes were reprinted in revised
form as Kamau Brathwaite, Ancestors (New York: New Directions, 2001). Kamau
Brathwaite, “Letter SycoraX,” in Middle Passages (New York: New Directions, 1993).
Middle Passages reprints a number of earlier poems in Sycorax video style.
103. Elaine Savory, “Returning to Sycorax/Prospero’s Response: Kamau Brathwaite’s
Word Journey,” in The Art of Kamau Brathwaite, ed. Stewart Brown (Bridgend, Mid
Glamorgan, Wales: Seren, 1995), 221. In Savory’s allegory, “Prospero” stands for pub-
lishers who have resisted the new Sycorax video style, an implicitly masculinist refusal
of Brathwaite/Caliban’s “returning home, linguistically and therefore spiritually, to his
mother, Sycorax, the true possessor of the island” (211).
104. Elaine Savory, “Wordsongs and Wordwounds/Homecoming: Kamau Brathwaite’s
Barabajan Poems,” World Literature Today 88, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 750–57, 750 cited.
105. Kamau Brathwaite, ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey (Staten Island,
NY: We Press; Minneapolis, MN: Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, 1999), 189.
106. Gordon Rohlehr, “‘Black Sycorax, My Mother’: Brathwaite’s Reconstruction of
The Tempest,” in For the Geography of a Soul, ed. Reiss, 277–95.
107. Bev E. L. Brown, “Mansong and Matrix: A Radical Experiment,” in A Double
Colonization: Colonial and Post-Colonial Women’s Writing, ed. Kirsten Holst Petersen
and Anna Rutherford (Aarhus, Denmark: Dangaroo, 1986), 68–79. Brown’s experiment
entails reading Brathwaite against Jean Rhys and Zee Edgell, finding in them a “fe-
male homosociality” that is “a source of historicity, with the chief authority being the
Great Gran” (74), a move that could be compared to Cliff ’s “essentialist” and historicist
aims. Rohlehr answers in “Brathwaite with a Dash of Brown,” in his The Shape of That
Hurt (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago: Longman, 1992), 209–47.
108. For another positive evaluation of such representations, see Velma Pollard,
“Francina and the Turtle and All the Others: Women in EKB,” in For the Geography of
a Soul, ed. Reiss, 43–50.
109. Sue Thomas, “Sexual Politics in Edward Brathwaite’s Mother Poem and Sun
Poem,” Kunapipi 9, no. 1 (1987): 33–43, cited phrase, 34. Thomas emphasizes the poems’
pathos around the emasculated father figure. “Even though Brathwaite is sensitive to
 1 7 2 / N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ”

the sufferings of women, he accepts the patriarchal values of those traditions largely
uncritically,” she concludes (41), a point that could as readily be applied to Rohlehr
and to Mackey (who notes that women are placed in a mothering role in Brathwaite
without making any critical assessment of that limitation [“Wringing the Word,” 734]),
as well as to some of Brathwaite’s female critics (Savory and Pollard, for example) who
embrace the role of mother/daughter in relationship to his work. Zabus, Tempests after
Shakespeare, has it both ways, agreeing with the feminist critique (61) but also affirm-
ing Brathwaite’s feminine identification through the Sycorax video style (62–63).
110. Rhonda Cobham, “K /Ka /Kama/Kamau: Brathwaite’s Project of Self-Naming
in Barabajan Poems,” in For the Geography of a Soul, ed. Reiss, 297–315.
111. Brathwaite’s voicing of the silenced mother has been seen as a project congru-
ent with the work of M. Nourbese Philip, by Mackey, “Wringing the Word”; Joseph, No-
madic Identities; and Paul Naylor, Poetic Investigations (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1999), who follows a chapter on Brathwaite’s “tidalectic rhythms”
with one titled “M. Nourbese Philip: ‘Displacing’ Him.” Philip has written about her
belated discovery in 1991 (when she returned to her native Tobago after an absence
of twenty-four years spent in Canada) of Lamming’s treatment of The Tempest in The
Pleasures of Exile in her “Piece of Land Surrounded,” in A Genealogy of Resistance
(Toronto: Mercury, 1997). She cites Lamming on the absence of Sycorax and claims
locating Sycorax as her project: “To find the true source of authenticity, a more auctho-
nous lineage and line of descent, it is to Sycorax we must turn” (166), a turn that in-
volves acknowledging that “we are still dumb in the language of Sycorax” (167), which
remains to be discovered. A similar point about Lamming can be found in Ngũgı̃ wa
Thiong’o, “In the Name of the Mother: George Lamming and the Cultural Significance
of ‘Mother Country’ in the Decolonization Process,” Annals of Scholarship 12, nos. 1–2
(1997): 141–51, which argues for the need to break with the mother country to find
the real mother language, that of Sycorax. That “dumbness” in Philip could also be
compared to the silence that the Caliban of Brathwaite’s first poem of that title needs
to hear in the music inspired by African gods. Philip has published a volume of poems,
She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Charlottetown, PEI: Ragweed, 1989),
that attempts such recovery through exposure of the deformations of language under
slavery, and she has published a narrative of such attempts, Looking for Livingstone:
An Odyssey of Silence (Stratford, Ontario: Mercury, 1991). Philip’s project is evaluated
by Chancy, Searching for Safe Spaces, 99–116; Chancy concludes that one limitation
of the project is its refusal to acknowledge the sexualization of the mother-daughter,
female-female bonds that Philip poses as an antithesis to a masculinist colonial tradi-
tion (see 116, and Chancy’s reiteration on page 157, in which Joan Riley, Beryl Gilroy,
and Toni Morrison are similarly criticized for creating a homo/ heterosexual division
that impedes the thinking of race with sexuality). Hoving, In Praise of New Travelers,
disputes Chancy’s claim.
112. Kamau Brathwaite, “The Dream Sycorax Letter,” Black Renaissance/Renaissance
Noire 1, no. 1 (1996): 120–36. Brathwaite left Jamaica after a hurricane damaged the
archive of Caribbean writing that he had been gathering and UWI failed to support its
retrieval. Cobham stresses this cultural situation of neglect and also links it to a pain-
ful document, Kamau Brathwaite’s Zea Mexican Diary (Madison: University of Wiscon-
sin Press, 1993), composed around the death of Brathwaite’s wife, Doris Brathwaite.
 N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ” / 1 7 3

The computer Sycorax had, in fact, been hers; when she died, Brathwaite had to learn
to access it. Doris Brathwaite had been her husband’s prime audience; his tribute to
her was the completion of the bibliography of his work that she was composing—he
was, it seems clear, her work. The Sycorax video style and its desired immediacy would
seem related to his ongoing mourning for Doris Brathwaite.
113. Gikandi, Writing in Limbo, 249; Chancy, Searching for Safe Spaces, 152–53.
Chancy, who strongly advocates in her work the need to recognize lesbians as part
of a black female community, is herself hesitant in reading the relationship between
Clare and Zoe as sexual, perhaps because Clare does not have such a term in her own
vocabulary (see, e.g., 151).
114. At least one of these, Pamela Mordeccai—who is represented in For the Geog-
raphy of a Soul, ed. Reiss, by “Images for Creativity and the Art of Writing in The Arriv-
ants,” 21–42, and “Three Poems,” 269–76—coedited with Betty Wilson the volume Her
True-True Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing from the Caribbean (Portsmouth,
NH: Heinemann, 1989), which included Cliff but went out of its way in the introduction
to distance the creole Cliff from authentic black writers. On this unhappy incident, see
Lionnet, “Of Mangoes and Maroons,” 325–26.
115. All citations will be to Aimé Césaire, Une Tempête (Paris: Seuil, 1969), and A
Tempest, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Ubu, 1992). Feminist critique is best rep-
resented by Jyotsna G. Singh, “Caliban versus Miranda: Race and Gender Conflicts
in Postcolonial Rewritings of The Tempest,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern
Culture, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 191–209.
116. Tom Hayes, “Cannibalizing the Humanist Subject: A Genealogy of Prospero,”
in Genealogy and Literature, ed. Lee Quinby (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1995), 96–115. It must be pointed out that the limit of Hayes’s argument is
reached when Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) is praised for its decentering of the
humanist subject.
117. “[D]e son penis, il frappe,” 70.
118. Aimé Césaire, “Entretien et débat,” 1967 talk at the Maison Hélvetique, trans.
and cited in Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (Ur-
bana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 34–35. On precedents for Césaire’s
revaluation of nègre, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Particularly significant would be Lamine San-
ghor’s 1927 “Le mot ‘nègre,’” discussed in ch. 1, and the writing of Paulette Nardal,
particularly “L’Eveil de la conscience de race” (1932), discussed in ch. 3. Nardal’s essay
is available as “The Awakening of Race Consciousness,” in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 107–11.
119. In her essay on Glissant, Wynter explains this assimilative move through
the experience of the French West Indies of German occupation, which moved Antil-
lean consciousness toward an identification with the home country not to be found
in the British West Indies. This reading is, in fact, disputed by Glissant in Caribbean
Discourse; he continues to insist on independence and regards being a département of
France as threatening an absorptive annihilation of native culture by the metropole.
For a superb review of Césaire’s career and the argument of his Discourse on Colo-
nialism, see the introduction, “A Poetics of Anticolonialism,” by Robin D. G. Kelley to
 1 7 4 / N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ”

the recent reissue of Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 7–28; see 24 for Césaire’s changing views on
departmentalization.
120. “[S]ale,” 92; “LA LIBERTÉ, OHÉ, LA LIBERTÉ,” 92.
121. Joan Dayan, “Playing Caliban: Césaire’s Tempest,” Arizona Quarterly 48, no. 4
(Winter 1992): 125–45.
122. “[S]auvageonne,” 19.
123. On this, see Zabus, Tempests after Shakespeare, 75, where the rhetoric of El-
dridge Cleaver and Amirí Baraka is linked to Lamming’s Water with Berries.
124. “[C]’est ma mère et je ne la renierai pas! D’ailleurs, tu ne la crois morte que
parce que tu crois que la terre est chose morte. . . . C’est tellement plus commode!
Morte, alors on la piétine, on la souille, on la foule d’un pied vainqueur! Moi, je la re-
specte, car je sais qu’elle vit, et que vit Sycorax” (26).
125. “[C]ar sa voix s’oublie dans la marais de la faim,” Cahier d’un retour au pays
natal, 36. All citations from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and Cahier are
from the enface edition, Aimé Césaire, The Collected Poetry, trans. Clayton Eshleman
and Annette Smith (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983).
126. See M. Jacqui Alexander, “Imperial Desire/Sexual Utopias: White Gay Capital
and Transnational Tourism,” in Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Trans-
national Age, ed. Ella Shohat (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 281–305. Alexander medi-
tates on the painful conjunction of white gay male tourism to the tropics, pointing out
the ruses of the embrace of capital to include gays and lesbians who are caught up in
furthering the plots of heterosexual domination that her earlier essays have analyzed.
She confronts what a critic like Hayes shirks.
127. “[J]e accepte . . . négritude . . . mésurée au compas de la souffrance / et le nègre
chaque jour plus bas, plus lâche, plus stérile, moins profond, plus répandu au dehors,
plus séparé de soi-même, plus rusé avec soi-même, moins immédiat avec soi-même /
j’accepte, j’accepte tout cela” (76).
128. “[V]iennent les ovaires de l’eau où le futur agite ses petites têtes / viennent les
loups qui paturent dans les orifices sauvages du corps à l’heure où à l’auberge éclip-
tique se recontrent la lune et ton soleil” (66). I am indebted to Christian Nagler for this
reading.
129. Lee Edelman, “The Part for the (W)hole,” ch. 3 of Homographesis: Essays in Gay
Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994).
130. Chancy, Searching for Safe Spaces, 132. On the bigendering of Eshu in Henry
Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), see
29–30, a point made in passing in developing a reading of the god as a site of open-
ended interpretation.
131. These are among the characteristics of Eshu outlined by Robert Farris Thomp-
son, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Vintage, 1983), 18–33.
132. Ernest Renan’s play Caliban (1878) is a crucial intertext for Césaire, since its
rewriting of The Tempest is well along the lines for which Césaire attacks Renan in the
Discourse, for a so-called humanism that is antidemocratic and deeply racist. (Césaire
claims to see no difference between Renan and Hitler.) Among the ways in which
Renan’s Shakespeare affects Césaire’s are the presentation of Prospero’s learning as
a form of mastery of nature realized in such inventions as gunpowder and the rallying
 N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ” / 1 7 5

call of “fraternity” against him. Césaire reverses Renan’s take on each of these claims
but goes partway in agreeing with him about the church’s opposition to human devel-
opment, partway because for Renan, “human” means European, not what he explicitly
calls “inferior races,” which include Blacks. Renan’s play is available in English, trans.
Eleanor Grant Vickery (New York: The Shakespeare Press, 1896). The most sustained
discussion of the three versions of the play is Roger Toumson, Trois Calibans (Havana:
Casa de las Américas, 1981), a prolix study conducted largely under structuralist proto-
cols. Ruby Cohn, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1976), devotes a chapter to modern Tempests in which Renan and Césaire, among oth-
ers, are discussed; she concludes the chapter with “surprise” at the “polemical note” with
which the analysis ends, its humanistic affirmation of blackness (308).
133. S. Belhassen, “Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest,” in Radical Perspectives in the Arts,
ed. Lee Baxandall (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1972), 176. The citation comes
from an interview with Césaire.
134. “Toi et moi! Toi-Moi! Moi-Toi!” (92).
135. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1990), 1; on minoritizing/universalizing and its complex
relationships to gender mappings, see esp. 82–90.
136. Roy A. K. Heath, The Murderer (London: Allison and Busby, 1978), 92. The
murderer in the novel is not the “battyman” but, rather, someone alienated from family
life who kills his wife. Barbara Fletchman Smith, Mental Slavery: Psychoanalytic Stud-
ies of Caribbean People (London: Rebus, 2000), uses Heath’s novel as an example of the
condition of Caribbean psychic disturbance. She sees such disturbance as rooted in the
history of slavery and its disruptive effects on family life, which she thinks needs to be
restored along highly heteronormative lines.
137. The point is confirmed in Richard Allsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean Usage (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1996), in the entries on “battyman” as well as those on
“zami” and “mattee.”
138. Hilton Als, The Women (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996), 29. Als
was born in the United States in 1961 to Barbadian immigrants; he spent time in Bar-
bados during his childhood.
139. Sean Lokaisingh-Meighoo, “Jahaji Bhai: Notes on the Masculine Subject and
Homoerotic Subtext of Indo-Caribbean Identity,” Small Axe 7 (March 2000): 77–92. The
essay builds on the homosocial continuum that Sedgwick examines in Between Men.
140. See, e.g., Stuart Hall, “Negotiating Caribbean Identities,” New Left Review 209
(January/February 1995): 3–14.
141. On these histories, see Smith, “Interview with Patricia Powell,” 327; Lawson
Williams [pseud.], “Homophobia and Gay Rights Activism in Jamaica,” Small Axe 7
(March 2000): 106–11; Thomas Glave, “Towards a Nobility of the Imagination: Jamai-
ca’s Shame,” Small Axe 7 (March 2000): 122–26.
142. Aparajita Sagar, “AIDS and the Question of Memory: Patricia Powell’s A Small
Gathering of Bones,” Small Axe 7 (March 2000): 28–43. “Trauma and dying are what
infect and cross from one body to the next, not needing the medium of the human
immunodeficiency virus (HIV) but the hatred of the bigot in order to do so” (34).
143. Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997), 40.
144. H. Nigel Thomas, Spirits in the Dark (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993). In
 1 7 6 / N O T E S T O “C A L I B A N ’ S ‘ W O M A N ’ ”

“Baychester: A Memoir,” Massachusetts Review 35, nos. 3–4 (Autumn–Winter 1994):

448–62, Thomas Glave similarly asks, “where are the gay Jamaican voices?” (455) and
can summon up only Claude McKay, who never directly represents male homosexuality
in his poems or novels. On such coded representation, see Rhonda Cobham, “Jekyll and
Claude: The Erotics of Patronage in Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom,” in Queer Dias-
poras, ed. Cindy Patton and Benigno Sánchez-Eppler (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2000), 122–53. Likewise, A. James Arnold, “The Erotics of Colonialism in Con-
temporary French West Indian Literary Culture,” Annals of Scholarship 12, nos. 1–2
(1997): 173–86, deplores the hypermasculinism and antifeminism of créolité, finding
depictions of homosexuality only in some Hispanic texts from the region (mainly from
Puerto Rico); he closes by quickly endorsing Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart
for writing that is more open, “less dependent on sexual stereotypes” (182) than male
créolistes. He finds a hint of lesbianism in one of Condé’s novels (and also mentions
Cliff [as does Glave] as well as the Surinamese Astrid Roemer in this context).
145. Stuart Hall, “Minimal Selves,” in Black British Cultural Studies, ed. Huston
Baker Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996): “I really came here to get away from my mother. Isn’t that the universal
story of life?” (115); and “The After-Life of Frantz Fanon,” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz
Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1996), 30.
146. This moment also prompts Thomas Cartelli, “After The Tempest: Shakespeare,
Postcoloniality, and Michelle Cliff ’s New, New World Miranda,” Contemporary Litera-
ture 36, no. 1 (1995): 82–102, a study that valuably reads Cliff ’s novel as a reinscrip-
tion of The Tempest. Although Cartelli thinks Cliff surpasses such models as Lamming
and Césaire and frees herself from the hold of the play, his rewriting insists on read-
ing Clare as Miranda, a highly normativized move along gender, and he offers a very
schematic reading of the novel as an antipatriarchal brief (racial issues are muted,
cross-gendering is considered only by way of Harry/Harriet). Cartelli has also pursued
Tempest connections in “Prospero in Africa: The Tempest as Colonialist Text and Pre-
text,” in Shakespeare Reproduced, ed. Jean Howard and Marion O’Connor (London:
Methuen, 1987), 99–115, a study with a focus on Ngũgı̃. In slightly revised forms, these
essays constitute the chapters in Part 2, “Prospero’s Books,” of Cartelli’s Repositioning
Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge,
1999). Cliff ’s rewriting of The Tempest is also intermittently the theme of Belinda
Edmondson’s examination of her work in Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and
Women’s Writing in Caribbean Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999),
especially in the section entitled “Black Miranda: The White Creole Woman and the
Black Revolutionary Tradition,” 126–38.
147. Berlant, “’68, or Something,” writes stunningly about Clare’s galvanization to
racial consciousness during her stay in the United States when she contemplates the
murder of four black girls in a church in Birmingham in 1963. A token of the kind of
possibility that Berlant wishes to imagine: In the spring of 2000, it seemed possible for
the first time that the perpetrators of this crime might actually be brought to justice; in
the spring of 2002, one of them actually was sentenced to life imprisonment.
148. Meryl F. Schwartz, “An Interview with Michelle Cliff,” Contemporary Litera-
ture 34, no. 4 (1993): 595–619. “Harry/Harriet is the novel’s lesbian in a sense,” Cliff
says (601) in the context of extricating lesbianism from being regarded as a European
 N O T E S T O “M I R A N D A ’ S M E A N I N G S ” / 1 7 7

imposition. The figure of Harry/Harriet is also discussed in other interviews; see Opal
Palmer Adisa, “Journey into Speech—A Writer between Two Worlds: An Interview
with Michelle Cliff,” African American Review 28, no. 2 (1994): 273–81, where Cliff
stresses the completeness of the character as achieved both through struggle and rape,
the force of this representation to counter Jamaican homophobia (276); and Judith
Raiskin, “The Art of History: An Interview with Michelle Cliff,” Kenyon Review, n.s.,
15, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 52–71, esp. 64–70, where Cliff talks about the overlaps and
disjunctions of questions of race, gender, and sexuality.
Bobby, Clare’s lover after she leaves England, is also a Caliban figure as well as a
kind of “transitional” object for Clare’s assumption of a “lesbian” identity modeled on
Harry/Harriet; she attempts to heal his incurable wound, anticipating Harriet’s role
as nurse. Moreover, as a result of sex with the incurable Bobby, Clare is incapable of
bearing children. As Cliff insists in the interviews cited above, the form of nonnorma-
tive sexual identity she seeks to portray would not preclude loving relations with men.
For some acute comments on these queer possibilities, on the opening of alternatives
without legislating their forms, see Nada Elia, “‘A Man Who Wants to Be a Woman’:
Queerness as/and Healing in Michelle Cliff ’s No Telephone to Heaven,” Callaloo 23, no. 1
(2000): 352–65.
149. Chin, “‘Bullers’ and ‘Battymen,’” 139, drawing upon Stuart Hall in reaching
this conclusion. Chin has an admirably succinct description of Harry/Harriet: “Con-
stantly transgressing the boundaries that supposedly separate male from female, upper
from lower classes, insider from outsider, self from ‘other,’ ‘natural’ from ‘unnatural’
sexuality, Harry/Harriet inhabits an interstitial space—designated by the conjunction
‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’” (138). This formation could be contrasted with Paule
Marshall’s Daughters (New York: Athaneum, 1991), the novel Brathwaite praised for
its vision of women. Marshall has her own version of Nanny, called Congo Jane, and
her partner Will Cudjoe. But the point about this historical/mythical pair is their in-
separable coupling: “Jane and Will Cudjoe, she quickly adds, reminding herself of the
old saying about those two: You can’t call her name or his without calling or at least
thinking of the other, they were so close” (377).

MIRANDA’S MEANINGS
1. Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987), 207;
Sylvia Wynter, “Columbus, the Ocean Blue, and Fables That Stir the Mind: To Reinvent
the Study of Letters,” in Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding, and Textuality, ed.
Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1997), 153. Although the answer I offer here is “no,” within the context of hu-
manist and liberal understandings of the human, it might be that a resemanticiza-
tion of the concept is possible, as Wynter’s work suggests, or as is argued by Jean-Luc
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2000), who posits that being is a category of singular
plurality and mixture, that identity always involves identification, which makes all
subjects hyphenated; or by Judith Butler who, in recent unpublished work, depends
upon a shared fragility, mortality, and vulnerability that make the person a necessarily
relational category rather than one founded, as “human” usually is, on exclusions.
2. Michelle Cliff, Abeng (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984), 77.
 1 7 8 / N O T E S T O “M I R A N D A ’ S M E A N I N G S ”

3. George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 1991 reprint of 1953 text), 297.
4. “Et ce pays cria pendant des siècles que nous sommes des bêtes brutes; que les
pulsations de l’humanité s’arrêtent aux portes de la négrerie; que nous sommes un
fumier ambulant hideusement prometteur de cannes tendres et de coton soyeux et l’on
nous marquait au fer rouge et nous dormions dans nos excréments et l’on nous vendait
sur les places et l’aune de drap anglais et la viande salée d’Irlande coûtaient moins
cher que nous, et ce pays était calme, tranquille, disant que l’esprit de Dieu était dans
ses actes.” Citations from Notebook/Cahier from Aimé Césaire, The Collected Poetry,
trans. Clayton Eshelman and Annette Smith (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1983), 60/61.
5. Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’
of Caliban’s ‘Woman,’” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed.
Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990),
363; Stephen Orgel, “Introduction” to his edition of The Tempest (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1987), 120; Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, “Introduction”
to The Tempest, Arden Shakespeare, third series (Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Thomas
Nelson, 1999), 135.
6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 117.
7. This is a point explicitly denied in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s consideration of
the speech in his entry “Race” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentric-
chia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 279, and I
will proceed to explain why it is possible to take the term to refer to a group to which
Caliban belongs.
8. This is the “creaturely” condition that Julia Reinhard Lupton identifies in “Crea-
ture Caliban,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 1 (2000): 1–23. In Lupton’s theological
and universalizing account, Caliban is treated as a kind of prehuman anomaly, an
exception that points to the rule that all humans are creatures; in this analysis, the
kinds of particularity that attach to him and their generalization in terms of questions
of sexuality and race are ruled out. The universalism championed in Lupton’s essay is
resolutely beyond such differences and is therefore on the side of sexual norms as well
as against cross-race couplings.
9. All citations from The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Alfred Harbage (Bal-
timore, MD: Penguin, 1969). Margo Hendricks offers a similar tally in “‘Obscured by
dreams’: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare
Quarterly 47 (1996): 42, but she seems to think that the older genealogical meaning
that predominates in Shakespeare is disjunct from more modern uses of the term,
which she seems to think depend upon physiognomic difference and are incipient in
Shakespeare through images of mixing (in the genealogy of the Indian boy and in Bot-
tom’s transformation in the play). Another such tally appears in Ania Loomba, Shake-
speare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 22, to open a
more expansive discussion of the imbrication of “race” with questions of lineage, reli-
gion, nation, class, gender, and sexuality. Loomba argues acutely that premodern no-
tions of race, which lack strong ties to questions of skin color and which do not depend
on a biological support, are nonetheless capable of the lethal racist energies manifest
 N O T E S T O “M I R A N D A ’ S M E A N I N G S ” / 1 7 9

in colonialism; that moreover, twentieth-century racism, which no longer calls upon

nineteenth-century biological theories, bears more than a passing resemblance to early
modern prebiological concepts of race (see esp. 38–39).
10. In her 2001 Duke University dissertation, “Barbarous Play: Race on the Renais-
sance Stage,” Lara Bovilsky argues persuasively for such crossings as one matrix for
“race” in early modernity.
11. The line seems overdetermined by the metaphor of a sporting event, in which
case “race” would appear to mean something like “race track.” Moreover, Angelo’s pos-
sible control of his libido seems pointedly opposed to Caliban’s condition. I am grateful
to Kate Losse, both for her suggestion that the gloss seems to be offering more a con-
trastive than a parallel instance of the usage of “race” and for her helpful comments on
an earlier draft of these pages.
12. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 63. For Gold-
berg, the crucial transformation that “race” undergoes lies in the movement from
lineage and pedigree to the concept of a population characterized by “invariant, heredi-
table characteristics” (64). I take the reproduction of Calibans under the determinate
force of an indeterminate “it” to be moving the lines in The Tempest in this direction.
The continuing pertinence of such “class racism” is the subject of an essay by Eti-
enne Balibar in Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, trans. Chris
Turner (London: Verso, 1991), 204–16, esp. 207–8 for a history of race that is coincident
with the beginning of modern racialized slavery and the transformation of an aristo-
cratic genealogical formation as the basis of power relations into a nationalized and
racialized one.
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Achieving Our Humanity (New York: Routledge, 2001),
26, also affirms a connection between theories of lineage and modern racial formation.
13. As Kathleen Brown documents in “Native Americans and Early Modern Con-
cepts of Race,” in Empire and Others, ed. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), esp. 82–83, skin color is by no means
invariably registered in early modern designations of difference. A similar argument
is offered at greater length in Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
14. Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1997). Two
of these lectures, in which Foucault lays out a definition of power that does not depend
upon the sovereign apparatus, have long been available in English as “Two Lectures,”
in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980),
78–108. The short summary of the course that Foucault submitted at its conclusion was
translated as “Society Must Be Defended,” in Michel Foucault, Ethics, ed. Paul Rabinow
(New York: New Press, 1997), 59–65. In Race and the Education of Desire (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1995), Ann Laura Stoler has examined Foucault’s concept
of race in these lectures. The lectures are now available as Society Must Be Defended,
trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). Robin Blackburn, The Making of New
World Slavery (London: Verso, 1997), 13, has recourse to Foucault’s theory in delineat-
ing the novelty of New World racism. Eze, Achieving Our Humanity, also supports the
Foucauldian account: “The rise of Enlightenment race speech is an expansive transition
from the racialization of the West to the racialization of the world” (33).
 1 8 0 / N O T E S T O “M I R A N D A ’ S M E A N I N G S ”

15. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
16. Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” boundary 2
12, no. 3, and 13, no. 1 (Spring–Fall 1984): 19–70, at 43.
17. For the sexualization of printing metaphors, see, e.g., Wendy Wall, The Imprint
of Gender (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), and Margreta de Grazia, “Im-
prints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. Ter-
ence Hawkes, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1996), 63–94. For a congruent analysis of this
moment in The Tempest, see Joan Pong Linton, The Romance of the New World (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 155. In rather disquieting ways, in John
Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire (New York: Vintage, 1990), a novel that avowedly
offers itself as a rewriting of The Tempest (see, e.g., 132), Miranda’s lines are analyzed
as “the spurned woman speech” (139), and Caliban’s attempted rape seems to be vali-
dated, both for its refusal of pedagogic colonization and as an answer to Miranda’s de-
sire: “Beastly ingratitude. She offered the word, Caliban desired flesh. She descended
upon him like the New England schoolmarms with their McGuffey’s Readers, the col-
lege kids with books and ballots. Caliban, witch’s whelp that he was, had a better idea.
Her need, his seed joined. An island full of Calibans. He didn’t wish to be run through
her copy machine. Her print of goodness stamping out his shape, his gabble translated
out of existence. No thanks, ma’am” (140).
18. Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1967), 34.
19. Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1991), 94.
20. Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementary (Menston: Scolar, 1970), 30.
I have considered these passages before in Writing Matter: From the Hands of the En-
glish Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 32–33.
21. Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime (New York and London: Routledge,
1992), 30. Lower down on the same page, Ferguson remarks on the transcendentalism
of Kant’s sublime as “supremely egalitarian.” Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Rea-
son, devotes pages 1–37 to an analysis of Kant. I am indebted to Andrew Kitchen for
assistance in grasping Spivak’s argument.
22. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Ox-
ford: Clarendon, 1952), 115. The “raw man” remains forever “checked” by the onslaught
of the sublime (cf. 91). As Kant insists, the onrush of the sublime is initially a dis-
comfiting experience (106, 108), one that, when overcome, serves to indicate “the mere
capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of
sense” (98), thereby demonstrating through this capacity the particular ability of the
human to rise above nature (114). Kant connects this ability to innate moral sense
(116). Spivak, pointing to the excluded figure of the “raw man,” thereby points at a
form of the not-quite-yet (and never-to-be) human, mired in nature, incapable of the
reflexive turn that marks the disjunction between sensible onslaught and the begin-
ning of sublime thought.
23. Kant, The Critique of Teleological Judgement, part 2 of his Critique of Judge-
ment, 27. The choice of Fuegians in Kant resonates with The Tempest, suggesting how
long-standing this prejudice is. As John Gillies notes in Shakespeare and the Geography
 N O T E S T O “M I R A N D A ’ S M E A N I N G S ” / 1 8 1

of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), by serving Setebos, “the

god which Antonio Pigafetta describes as being worshipped by the Patagonian Indians
of the storm-beaten wilderness of Tierra del Fuego, Sycorax is identified with the most
remote, God-forsaken and degenerate of sixteenth-century American types” (142). As
Matthew Frye Jacobson indicates in Barbarian Virtues (New York: Hill and Wang,
2000), 144, the trope persists in Darwin’s Descent of Man, where the Indians of Tierra
del Fuego are invoked as the example of those whose development, although from a
common human origin, nonetheless places them across an “unbridgeable” divide.
24. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans.
John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 113.
25. Robert Bernasconi, “Introduction” to the volume he edited, Race (Oxford: Black-
well, 2001), 1. Bernasconi pursues the point in his contribution to the volume, “Who
Invented the Concept of Race?” 14–15, and in “Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Rac-
ism,” in Philosophers on Race, ed. Julie K. Ward and Tommy L. Lott (Oxford: Blackwell,
2002), 145–66.
26. Goldberg, Racist Culture, 32. As Goldberg generalizes from this example, “one
way for Enlightenment philosophers committed to moral notions of equality and au-
tonomy to avoid inconsistency on the question of racialized subordination was to deny
the rational capacity of blacks, to deny the very condition of their humanity” (32). Gold-
berg’s critique of Kant and Enlightenment racism, one aspect of his relentless critique
of liberalism, is worth comparing to the hard-hitting arguments of Charles W. Mills,
The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 70–72 on Kant, or
to Gilroy, Against Race, 58–65, which considers Kant (and Locke) and concludes “that
enlightenment pretensions toward universality were punctured from the moment of
their conception in the womb of the colonial space” (65). Leon Poliakov, in “Racism from
the Enlightenment to the Age of Imperialism,” in Racism and Colonialism, ed. Robert
Ross (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 55–64, comments on Kantians’ resistance to
his own arguments about Kant as the founder of modern notions of race (see 58–60).
For an earlier essay that insists on the centrality of race in Enlightenment thought, see
Richard Popkin, “The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism,” Studies in
Eighteenth-Century Culture 3 (1973): 245–62.
Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race?” has linked Kant’s category of race
to his concept of purposiveness, and Bernasconi includes Kant’s 1788 essay “On the
Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy” in Race, 37–56, to support his point. Phil-
lip R. Sloan, “Buffon, German Biology, and the Historical Interpretation of Biological
Species,” British Journal for the History of Science 12, no. 41 (1979): 109–53, argues
that “race” in Kant is linked to the development of categories in the Critique of Pure
Reason (see 128–29, 134–35). Sloan values Kant’s concept for the ways it reconciles
morphology and history, but he is utterly silent on the history of the use of the category
he commends as properly scientific. Similarly marred is John H. Zammito, The Genesis
of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 214–19, as
well as his Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002), which devotes only five (302–7) of its more than five hundred pages to the
concept of race, never discussing Kant’s views except to note the value of the distinc-
tion in the 1788 essay and elsewhere between description and interpretation.
27. Ronald A. T. Judy, (Dis)forming the American Canon (Minneapolis: University
 1 8 2 / N O T E S T O “M I R A N D A ’ S M E A N I N G S ”

of Minnesota Press, 1993), 146, the conclusion of an exacting reading of Kant’s “Negro
problem” that forms the central object of inquiry and critique in chapter 4 of Judy’s
book, “Critique of Genealogical Deduction.”
28. See Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, “Introduction” to the anthology he edited, Race
and the Enlightenment (London: Blackwell, 1997), 2–3, which includes the passage
from Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and excerpts
from Kant’s “On the Different Races of Man” and also offers translations from the lec-
tures on physical geography that compose two volumes in the standard German edition
of Kant’s works. Eze considers these questions more fully in “The Color of Reason: The
Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology,” Bucknell Review (Anthropology and the German
Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity, ed. Katherine M. Faull) 38, no. 2 (1995): 200–
241. This essay offers full bibliographical information on the critical tradition of reading
(for the most part ignoring) the question of “race” in Kant. Much of the essay is included
in Eze, Achieving Our Humanity, 77–111.
29. Citations from Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,
trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 203.
30. Kant, “On the Different Races of Man,” as excerpted in Eze, Race and the En-
lightenment, 43. In “Color of Reason,” Eze seizes upon Kant’s recourse to the notion of
the “germ,” or talent, that differentiates white Europeans from everyone else to argue
that this is a biological concept that makes Kant’s beliefs fully congruent with modern
racism. I think it is certainly a prerequisite for that, even if not quite yet a systematic
biologism. For further uses of the “seed” or “germ” as an originary predisposition divid-
ing races, see Kant, “On the Use of Teleological Principles,” in Bernasconi, Race, 44.
31. See George Best, “A True Discourse,” in Voyages, ed. Richard Hakluyt, 8 vols.
(London: Dent, 1907), vol. 2, from which all citations are drawn.
32. For a study that seeks to demonstrate that the genealogy of blackness in Gene-
sis is a Renaissance invention bolstered by the slave trade, and not univocally support-
ed by earlier readings of the Bible, see Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the
Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern
Periods,” William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 1 (January 1997): 103–42, an issue de-
voted to “Constructing Race: Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modern World.” For a
similar argument with wide-ranging examples, including Best’s “True Discourse,” see
Werner Sollors, Neither Black, nor White, yet Both (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1997), ch. 3, “The Curse of Ham, or From ‘Generation’ to ‘Race.’”
33. Jean Baptiste Labat, Voyages aux Iles Françaises de l’Amerique (Paris: Lefebvre,
1831): “[I]l me répondait que le gouverneur n’en etait pas plus sage; qu’il croyait bien
que les blancs avaient leur raisons, mais qu’ils avait aussi les leurs; et que si on voulait
considérer combien les femmes blanches sont orgueilleuses et désobéissantes à leurs
maris, on avouerait que les nègres qui les tiennent toujours dans le respect et la sou-
mission, sont plus sages et plus expérimentés que les blancs sur cet article” (174–75).
34. All citations from Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany,
1700–1815 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
35. All citations from Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (New
York: Century, 1930).
36. See Robin Schott, Cognition and Eros (Boston: Beacon, 1988).
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37. See Eric O. Clarke, Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 101–25.
38. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982, 1986), 16. For analysis of the pertinence of Aristotle’s natural slave to
Miranda’s lines, see Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, 150–53, and
Gillies, “The Figure of the New World in The Tempest,” in “The Tempest” and Its Travels,
ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London: Reaktion, 2000), 180–200, esp. 196.
Ian Smith, “When We Were Capital, or Lessons in Language: Finding Caliban’s Roots,”
Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 252–56, argues for a double derivation of barbarian /
Barbarian, the latter designating Sycorax’s north-African origin and not etymologi-
cally related to the Greek barbaros. For further speculation on this etymology, see Paul
Baepler, “Introduction,” White Slaves, African Masters (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999), 2.
39. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (New York: Penguin, 1962), 28. Julie K.
Ward, “Ethnos in the Politics: Aristotle and Race,” in Philosophers on Race, ed. Ward
and Lott, 14–37, attempts to argue that because Aristotle is unsystematic in his treat-
ment of “barbarians,” he does not deploy a racial category.
40. Some of the points developed here depend upon the deployment of the thematic
contrast of art and nature in Frank Kermode’s introduction to his Arden edition of The
Tempest (London: Methuen, 1954), and the similarly precritical essay by John E. Han-
kins, “Caliban the Bestial Man,” PMLA 62 (1947): 793–801, which points to the impor-
tance of Aristotle’s depiction of bestiality in the Ethics. I call this work “precritical” be-
cause its outlining of a thematic fails to ask questions about the historical pertinence
of such contrasts and implicitly values the values of those who label others as beasts or
natural slaves. For a critique of Kermode along these lines, see Malcolm Evans, Signi-
fying Nothing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 71–81.
41. Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of
the Americas, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smith-
sonian Institution Press, 1995), 34.
42. Aimé Césaire, Une Tempête (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 25, and A Tempest, trans. Richard
Miller (New York: Ubu, 1992), 11–12; Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, trans.
J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 140.
43. In Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
Quentin Skinner outlines one aspect of this early-seventeenth-century republicanism
with barely a pause over the fact that theorists decrying slavery for Englishmen had
no qualms about enslaving Africans. Warren Montag, in Bodies, Masses, Power: Spi-
noza and His Contemporaries (London: Verso, 1999), links this notion of slavery and
tyranny to Locke, arguing further (as I do later in the text) that “not only does he not
call into question the enslavement of Africans, . . . he provides the foundation of right
upon which a certain slavery can be established” (109). Montag alludes here to the ar-
guments on just war in the second Treatise, correlating it with Locke’s role in writing
the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina; he also notes the Royal African Company’s
invocation of the notion of the just war in defending slavery (110) and Locke’s justi-
fication of seizure of territory in the New World as “unowned” by Native Americans
(111). James Tully also develops this last point in An Approach to Political Philosophy:
Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 137–55, and Kathy
 1 8 4 / N O T E S T O “M I R A N D A ’ S M E A N I N G S ”

Squadrito disputes it in “Locke and the Dispossession of the American Indian,” in Phi-
losophers on Race, ed. Ward and Lott, 101–24. Peter Hulme, in “The Spontaneous Hand
of Nature: Savagery, Colonialism, and the Enlightenment,” in The Enlightenment and
Its Shadows, ed. Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova (London: Routledge, 1990), notes
that Locke offers a central division between those who merely collect food from nature’s
hand and those who labor; the former are the Native American inhabitants; the latter,
the Europeans, are justified in their colonial activity since such acts of cultivation prove
their rationality, their ability to own property, and therefore their humanness (30).
Similar arguments about Locke and Enlightenment thought that abhors slavery
but never comments on the actual institution are offered by Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel
and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26 (Summer 2000): 821–65, who seeks to argue that
Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is a response to the Haitian revolution. Buck-Morss is
hard-pressed to explain how such responsiveness fits with his notorious opinions of
Africa and endorsement of slavery in The Philosophy of History, to which I turn later
in the text.
44. All citations from John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. W. S. Carpenter
(London: J. M. Dent, 1924).
There is an extensive literature on the question of slavery in Locke. Since Locke is
often viewed as the most important theorist of modern liberal conceptions of liberty,
many commentators wish to regard Locke’s views on slavery as in no way contributing
either to that institution or to modern practices of democracy. For some representa-
tive examples, see the essays by Bernard R. Boxill, “Radical Implications of Locke’s
Moral Theory” (29–48), and William Uzgalis, “‘The Same Tyrannical Principle’: Locke’s
Legacy on Slavery” (49–77), in Subjugation and Bondage, ed. Tommy L. Lott (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), as well as Uzgalis, “‘An Inconsistency Not to Be
Excused’: On Locke and Racism,” in Philosophers on Race, ed. Ward and Lott, 81–100.
What makes such arguments difficult to believe is not merely the logic of Locke’s text—
which assumes that those who instigate a just war are themselves not even in a state
of nature and therefore have no rights; as Betty Wood puts it in The Origins of Ameri-
can Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), “Locke was able to justify the institution
of slavery by arguing that it lay outside the realm of the social contract” (63)—but also
Locke’s role in writing the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina, which declares that
“[e]very freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro
slaves, of what opinion or religion whatsoever” (cited in Blackburn, The Making of New
World Slavery, 275 n. 92). Moreover, modern democracy and slavery were not seen as
contradictory for the first century of the history of the United States, a point under-
lying the argument of Theodore W. Allen in The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols.
(London: Verso, 1994–97).
45. George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1992 reprint of 1960 text), 110.
46. Cited in Eze, Achieving Our Humanity, 99. In “Perpetual Peace,” Kant also de-
velops a view of the threatening lawlessness of the state of nature fully in line with
Locke on the justification of war against those who have no place in civil society; see
Achieving Our Humanity, 79. Moreover, as Bernasconi notes in “Kant as an Unfamiliar
Source,” 152, Kant affirmed that Blacks were slaves by nature.
47. Lamming is citing G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree
 N O T E S T O “M I R A N D A ’ S M E A N I N G S ” / 1 8 5

(Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), 99. Lamming supplies the italics in his cita-
tion. I am pleased to recall here my indebtedness to S. Asad Raza for a discussion some
years back of Lamming’s relationship to Hegel. For a stunning reading of Hegel, which
takes these remarks to mean that the European has not yet arrived at the under-
standing that the African possesses, precisely by not being tethered to an always un-
graspable futurity and linear progression, see James A. Snead, “Repetition as a Figure
of Black Culture,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr.
(New York: Methuen, 1984), 59–79, esp. 62–65. My thanks to Brent Hayes Edwards for
drawing this extraordinary essay to my attention.
48. Lamming’s point could be compared to the reading of the pedagogic scene of-
fered by Denise Albanese in New Science, New World (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1996), 76–77. She distinguishes Shakespeare’s Miranda’s education of Caliban
from Prospero’s more indexical—and hierarchical—act of showing him the sun and
moon and giving him names for them (1.2.335–36), arguing that Miranda’s education
gives Caliban access to his “purposes” (1.2.356). Therefore, according to Albanese, this
is not to keep Caliban entirely in his place, and she finds it significant that such an
education is Miranda’s doing, thus an inscription of her potential for rebellion against
her father. Thus, Albanese seeks to link female gender with racial difference. This po-
tential distinction between father and daughter was also forcefully suggested to me
by Paul Yachnin. Nonetheless, I remain convinced by Ania Loomba, who, in Gender,
Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), stresses
that “these lines underline Miranda’s implication in the colonialist project. She has
been taught to be revolted by Caliban (‘abhorred slave’); to believe in his natural in-
feriority (‘thy vile race’) and inherent incapacity to be bettered (‘which any print of
goodness wilt not take’); to feel sorry for the inferior native (‘I pitied thee’) and to try
and uplift him (‘took pains to make thee speak’); and to concur totally in his ‘deserv’d’
confinement. Miranda thus conforms to the dual requirements of femininity within the
master-culture: by taking on aspects of the white man’s burden the white woman only
confirmed her own subordination” (154–55).
49. Judith Shklar, “Self-Sufficient Man: Dominion and Bondage,” in Hegel’s Dialec-
tic of Desire and Recognition, ed. John O’Neill (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1996), situates Hegel’s master-slave dialectic within an Aristotelian framework.
Hegel reiterates the naturalness of slavery to Africa in part III of the 1830 Encyclo-
pedia, where he finds a strict correlation between the geographical situation of the
interior of Africa, surrounded by mountains, he claims, and “universal slavery without
resistance” (Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, ed. and trans. M. J. Petry, 3 vols.
[Boston: D. Reidel, 1978], 2:69).
50. See also Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, 2:53–55, 63–65. The first of
these passages is one that Buck-Morss seizes upon, since in it Hegel alludes specifi-
cally to the revolution in Haiti; however, he does so to indicate the derivativeness of the
slave revolt, as if it depended upon “Christian principles” (2:55), making it a realization
of European ideas. In part this is also Buck-Morss’s claim, as if the only way slavery
could be recognized as intolerable was by way of Enlightenment precepts. It is, in part,
such suppositions that Ronald Judy challenges when he seeks to show that someone
like Frederick Douglass did not need literacy or Western consciousness to know that
slavery was wrong.
 1 8 6 / N O T E S T O “M I R A N D A ’ S M E A N I N G S ”

51. For the Kantian texts, see Christian M. Neugebauer, “The Racism of Hegel and
Kant,” in Sage Philosophy, ed. H. Odera Oruka (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 264.
52. On this question, see Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance (London: Rout-
ledge, 1996); a discussion of the blue eyes as a crux appears in the introduction to the
book, subtitled “The Blue-Eyed Witch” (5–17). Marcus fastens on the description of
the “blue-eyed hag” (1.2.269) as an instance of a polysemy in The Tempest that can-
not be reduced to its usual reading, that is, that the blue around the eyelids connotes
pregnancy. As Marcus suggests, that reading gained ascendancy under the racializing
thought of nineteenth-century editors who could not countenance an African with blue
eyes. As Marcus also argues, however, blue eyes had yet to achieve in Shakespeare’s
era the modern association with blonde-haired white women. Marcus proposes her
reading as a way of keeping Shakespeare unedited, as if the riches of his text belie
later readings of Sycorax as racially other and sexually voracious. Obviously, much in
The Tempest leads to that portrait and to a way of limiting the meaning of blue eyes,
if not quite of fully determining them. It needs also to be added that “black” people in
the New World can have blue eyes; that north Africans, who under some racial regimes
are not thought to be black, also can be blue-eyed; that such people become “black” in a
U.S. context but not necessarily in an African one. Marcus treats the blue-eyed witch as
automatically a challenge to racial polarization, depending upon a black /white binary
that has limited purchase historically and geographically.
53. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 254–55; Il faut défendre: “En effet, qu’est-ce
que le racisme? C’est, d’abord, le moyen d’introduire, dans ce domaine de la vie que le
pouvoir a pris en charge, une coupure: la coupure entre ce qui doit vivre et ce qui doit
mourir. Dans le continuum biologique de l’espèce humaine, l’apparition des races, la
distinction des races, la hiérarchie des races, la qualification de certaines races comme
bonnes et d’autres, au contraire, comme inférieur, tout ceci va être une manière de
fragmenter ce champs du biologique que le pouvoir a prise en charge” (227).
54. All citations from Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
55. See Paul Brown, “‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’: The Tempest and
the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and
Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 48–71, esp. 64–66, which
concludes with a stunning analysis of how Caliban’s lines in 3.2 about the island music,
rather than indicating that Shakespeare granted Caliban humanity in exalted poetry,
show instead how fully Caliban is represented as having accommodated himself to co-
lonial inanition, where he can only dream of dreaming; hence, too, his final lines about
the wisdom of Prospero.
56. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New
York: Grove Press, 1967), 166.
57. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Month-
ly Review Press, 1972), 21, from which further citations are drawn.
58. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Penguin, 1988), 34, 36. Kincaid
ends her book also imagining a “human” solution to the problem: “[O]nce you cease to
be a master . . . you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too,
with the slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just
human beings” (81).
 N O T E S T O “M I R A N D A ’ S M E A N I N G S ” / 1 8 7

59. David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1999), 193.
60. Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of
Jamaican Popular Culture (London: Macmillan, 1993), 142; cf. 149–50, 156, 162, as
well as the discussion that opens Timothy S. Chin’s essay “‘Bullers’ and ‘Battymen’:
Contesting Homophobia in Black Popular Culture and Contemporary Caribbean Lit-
erature,” Callaloo 20, no. 1 (1997): 127–41, which is situated in controversies about
dance-hall lyrics advocating the murder of battymen. For a parallel, consider Velma
Pollard, Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari (Barbados: Canoe; Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 2000), a celebration of the linguistic virtuosity of Rasta
and its “universal” appeal against colonial suffering. Pollard notes the masculinism of
Rasta, pointing out that in its lexicon “man” means a Rastafarian, while “men” means
whites and homosexuals: “[T]he form ‘men,’ which in Dread Talk means ‘homosexual,’
must always be avoided in a movement that views homosexuality negatively within
a Jamaica that is distinctly homophobic” (103), she records, with complete neutrality.
But one must ask, it would seem to me, the limits of liberation that comes from such
a vision. And, of course, this language also speaks to the musical practitioners that
Gilroy and Scott value.
61. Page 55. My thanks to Caroline Levine for drawing this column to my attention.
Bloom registers his antipathy in his editor’s note and introduction to the collection he
edited, Caliban (New York: Chelsea House, 1992), xv, 1, 4.
This page intentionally left blank
I NDEX
Abeng (Cliff), 79–84, 117–18; female- Burnett, Mark Thornton, 55
female relations in, and class, 80–81, Butler, Judith, 177n. 1
82; male- male desire in, 102–3; and
race, 80, 83; Clare Savage in, 71, 83; Caliban: as (in)human, 41–42, 117,
and sexuality, 80, 82–84, 91, 103 132, 136–37 (see also human); and
Agamben, Giorgio, 138, 140, 144 language, 132–38; name, ix, 4, 6, 16,
AIDS, 105, 106, 107 122; race of, 4, 29, 120–24, 137 (see
Albanese, Denise, 185n. 48 also race); as would- be rapist, 20, 49,
Alexander, M. Jacqui, 48, 76, 78, 97, 105, 51, 55, 62, 96, 137
159n. 18, 174n. 126 “Caliban” (Fernández Retamar): Brath-
Algiers, 160n. 25 waite in, 84; and Cuban revolution, 6,
Als, Hilton, 105, 109–10 7; and gender, 7, 11, 151n. 14; Lam-
anticolonialism, 5, 37, 46 ming in, 12, 14; Martí in, 6, 10, 11;
Aristotle, 132, 133, 138 mestizaje in, 6, 16, 18; and race, 12;
Arnold, A. James, 176n. 144 Rodó in, 8, 9; Sarduy in, 8, 12; and
Ascham, Roger, 124 sexuality, 8, 11; Shakespeare in, 9
“Caliban’s Daughter” (Cliff), 70–79;
Barnes, Natasha, 164n. 57, 166n. 170 gender in, 73; in relation to Césaire,
battyman, 102, 103, 104, 105. See also 91, 96–97; in relation to Lamming,
Caribbean 71, 72, 79; in relation to Fernández
Bejel, Emilio, 151n. 16 Retamar, 71; sexuality in, 75, 76
Berlant, Lauren, 84 cannibalism, 4, 48
Bernasconi, Robert, 127, 181n. 26 Caribbean, ix, 4, 16, 142–44; feminism
Best, George, 129 in, 63; gender in, 77; sexuality in, 48,
Blackburn, Robin, 150n. 12 53, 72–73, 104, 105. See also batty-
black nationalism, 78, 93, 95, 109, 141 man; mati work; zami
Blayney, Peter, 61 Cartelli, Thomas, 176n. 146
Bloom, Harold, 146 Cervantes, 160n. 25
Bowen Barbara, 162n. 41 Césaire, Aimé, 92, 94; Cahier d’un
Brand, Dionne, 76, 77, 78, 79, 168n. 81 Retour au Pays Natal, 97, 98, 100,
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 87, 118; Discourse on Colonialism, 140;
172n. 112; and gendered representa- and negritude, 93, 98; in relation to
tions, 88–91; relation to Cliff, 85, 88, Cliff, 91, 96–97, 100–101, 118–19; in
90–91; relation to Lamming, 86–87; relation to Lamming, 95; in relation
and representations of sexuality, 89, to Wynter, 92, 93, 95. See also Une
104–5; uses of Caliban, 84, 85, 86, Tempête
88; uses of Sycorax, 87–88, 90 Chancy, Myriam, 91, 99, 172n. 111,
Bray, Alan, 48, 51–52 173n. 113
Brown, Bev E. L., 89, 171n. 107 Chin, Timothy, 79, 102, 107, 114,
Brown, Paul, 50, 139, 161n. 33, 186n. 55 177n. 149
Brown, Wendy, 149n. 7 Chow, Rey, 154n. 42
Buck- Morss, Susan, 184n. 43 Clarke, Eric, 131

189
 190 / INDEX

Cliff, Michelle, 70, 71, 166n. 73; Free Gillies, John, 180n. 23
Enterprise, x, 79, 149n. 7. See also Gilroy, Paul, ix, 123, 128, 140, 141–42,
Abeng; “Caliban’s Daughter”; No 144
Telephone to Heaven Glave, Thomas, 176n. 144
Cobham, Rhonda, 73, 89, 90, 91 Glissant, Edouard, 65, 134, 150n. 11,
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 41, 157n. 2 165n. 65, 173n. 119
colonialism, 5, 7, 19, 65, 76, 93, 106, 118, Goldberg, David Theo, 121, 122, 127,
122, 145. See also neocolonialism 181n. 26
Cooper, Carolyn, 144 Gottlieb, Karla, 169n. 90
Cozier, Christopher, 144, 147 Goveia, Elsa, 68, 167n. 77
Cuban revolution, 8, 13. See also
Fernández Retamar Hall, Stuart, 105, 109, 176n. 145
cultural sphere, x, 16, 142, 144; and Halpern, Richard, 4, 5, 6, 7, 20, 125
pedagogic reproduction, 124–27 Hayes, Tom, 91–92, 97
Headley, Maria, 90
Davis, Angela, 73 Heath, Roy A. K., 104
Dayan, Joan, 94 Hendricks, Margo, 178n. 9
Dover Wilson, John, 46–47, 54, 58 Henry, Paget, 164nn. 57, 58
Drayton, Michael, 52 Hegel, G. W. F., 100, 135–36, 140,
Du Bois, W. E. B., 165n. 67 185nn. 49, 50
Hull, Isabel, 129, 130, 131
Edelman, Lee, 99, 155n. 44 Hulme, Peter, 4, 21–22, 32, 42, 45,
Edmondson, Belinda, 112, 113, 155n. 49 184n. 43
Edwards, Brent Hayes, ix, 173n. 118 human, 5, 27, 41, 66, 117–18, 121, 125,
Eisenberg, Daniel, 160n. 25 130, 132, 147, 177n. 1
Epps, Brad, 153n. 29 Hutchison, Anne, 52
Eshu, 99
Evans, Arthur, 50 In the Castle of My Skin (Lamming):
Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, 127, 128, gender in, 72, 77; race in, 5, 28–29,
182nn. 28, 30 41, 48, 118; sexuality in, 29–31, 79
Irigaray, Luce, 63, 66
Fanon, Frantz, x, 13, 19–20, 24–25, 27,
30–31, 48, 75, 92, 99, 109, 139, 140, jahaji bhai, 105
141, 147 James, C. L. R., 5, 14, 70
Ferguson, Frances, 126 James, Cynthia, 85
Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 15, 31, Jones, Ann Rosalind, 158n. 14
147, 151n. 13. See also “Caliban” Jowett, John, 59–61
Foucault, Michel, 66, 123, 137, 138 Judy, Ronald A. T., 127
Fuentes, Carlos, 152n. 25
Furness, Howard Horace, 56 Kant, Immanuel: and gendered differ-
Fuss, Diana, 154n. 42 ence, 129, 130; race in, 127, 128, 135,
136; and racialized difference, 127,
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 99, 127, 129; sex/gender in, 130–31, 140; sub-
155n. 43 lime, concept of, 126–27, 180n. 22
Gibson- Graham, J. K., x, 149n. 5 Karlsen, Carol F., 162n. 38
Gikandi, Simon, 91, 169n. 91 Kermode, Frank, 56, 183n. 40
 INDEX / 191

Kincaid, Jamaica, 106, 108, 142–43, Monter, E. William, 50

144, 186n. 58 Morrison, Toni, 150n. 2, 163n. 56
Kutzinski, Vera, 18, 154n. 39 Mulcaster, Richard, 125

Labat, Jean Baptiste, 129 Nancy, Jean- Luc, 177n. 1

Lamming, George, 12–14, 27; The Naylor, Gloria, 150n. 2
Emigrants, sexuality in, 35; Natives nazism, 118, 123, 140, 141
of My Person, 157n. 65; Season of neocolonialism, 31, 48, 73, 78, 142
Adventure, sexuality in, 26, 156n. 61. Newman, Karen, 158n. 12
See also In the Castle of My Skin; Of Nixon, Rob, x, 3, 6, 7, 17, 20, 62–63, 84,
Age and Innocence; The Pleasures of 85, 92, 94
Exile; Water with Berries No Telephone to Heaven (Cliff), 110–14,
lesbianism, 75, 78, 82. See also mati 118; class in, 14; gender in, 111, 114;
work; zami race in, 110–11, 113; sexuality in,
Lloyd, David, x 111, 112, 114, 176n. 148; Tempest in,
Locke, John, 134, 183n. 43, 184n. 44
110, 112
Lokaisingh- Meighoo, Sean, 105
Loomba, Ania, 139, 155n. 45, 178n. 9,
Of Age and Innocence (Lamming): myth
185n. 48
of origins in, 25; and race, 27–28, 62;
Lorde, Audre, 76, 77
sexuality in, 26–27
Lowe, Lisa, x
Oldham, James C., 160n. 26
Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 178n. 8
Orgel, Stephen, 44, 54, 55, 57, 61, 119,
120, 121
Mackey, Nathaniel, 87
Ortiz, Ricardo, 8
Malleus Maleficarum, 52
Othello, 157n. 1
Mannoni, Octave, 14, 18–19, 20
Marcus, Leah, 186n. 52
Pagden, Anthony, 132, 133
Marshall, Paule, 85, 163–64n. 56,
Pask, Kevin, 150n. 3
177n. 149
Pellegrini, Ann, 154n. 42
Martí, José, 151n. 13; and Emerson, 11;
Philips, M. Norbese, 172n. 111
gender in, 10; mestizaje in, 6; race in,
10; and Rodó, 11; sexuality in, 10; Pleasures of Exile, The (Lamming), 145;
and Whitman, 10, 11; and Wilde, 10 Caliban in, 16, 18, 23, 42, 134, 135,
Martín, Adrienne, 160n. 25 139, 145; and Fanon, 19, 24; and
mati work, 77–78, 105. See also Fernández Retamar, 14, 15; Hegel in,
lesbianism 135; language in, 14, 16–17, 134, 136;
Mawu- Lisa, 114 and Mannoni, 17, 18, 21; sexual rela-
McClintock, Anne, 154n. 42 tions in, 18, 20–25, 45; The Tempest
Menaker, Daniel, 146 in, 18
Mercer, Kobena, 155n. 44 Pollard, Velma, 187n. 60
Mills, Charles W., 181n. 26 Powell, Patricia, 74, 103–4, 106, 107–8,
modernismo, 10, 11 167n. 79
Molloy, Sylvia, 10, 152n. 22 Prospero complex, 20
monstrosity, 5, 24, 41, 46, 49, 63, 69, 137
Montag, Warren, 183n. 43 Quaife, G. R., 51, 161n. 33
Montaigne, Michel, 4 Quiroga, José, 8
 192 / INDEX

race, 120; in Bible, 129; in Enlighten- monstrosity in, 41, 55; New Histori-
ment, 122, 126–31; in Foucault, 123, cist criticism of, 4, 21; sexuality in,
137; in Gilroy, 123, 128, 140, 141–42; 22–23, 47–48, 52–54, 55–56; textual
in Shakespeare, 120–21, 178n. 9; in cruxes in, 62, 119–20; textual history
Wynter, 123 of, 42–43, 47, 56–57, 59; wife/wise,
Raiskin, Judith, 84, 111 55–62; witchcraft in, 49, 54
Renan, Ernest, ix, 9, 100, 174n. 132 Tempête, Une (Césaire): feminist criti-
Richards, Jeffrey, 50 cism of, 91, 95, 94; gay criticism of,
Roberts, Jeanne Addison, 55 92, 97; gender in, 95, 100; language
Rodó, José Enrique, ix, 9, 10 in, 133–34, 136; names of Caliban in,
Rodríguez Monegal, Emir, 152n. 19 89, 93; as rewriting of Tempest, 92,
Rohlehr, Gordon, 85, 87, 88, 89, 91 93, 94, 100; sexuality in, 96, 98–100
Rowe, Nicholas, 42, 54, 56 Thomas, H. Nigel, 106–7
Rubenstein, Hymie, 77 Thomas, Sue, 89, 171n. 109
Rudet, Jacqueline, 168nn. 83, 86
Ruggiero, Guido, 161n. 31 Vaughan, Alden T.: and Virginia Mason,
3, 4, 6, 17, 41–42, 61, 84–85, 119–20
Sagar, Aparajita, 106 Vox in Rama, 50
Said, Edward, 149n. 3
Sarduy, Severo, 151n. 16 Warnicke, Retha, 51
Savory, Elaine, 87, 171n. 103 Water with Berries (Lamming): mon-
Scot, Reginald, 51 strosity in, 41; in relation to The
Scott, David, 5, 64, 66, 143, 167n. 78 Tempest, 31–37, 139; sexual plot of,
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 57, 101, 105 33–36, 47, 53, 104, 145
Silvera, Makeda, 53, 74, 75, 76 Wekker, Gloria, 77, 105
Singh, Jyotsna, 95, 97 White, Grant, 56
Skinner, Quentin, 183n. 43 Wideman, John Edgar, 180n. 17
slavery, 73, 133, 135; and Aristotle, witchcraft, 48, 50, 51
132–33, 136; and Locke, 134 Wynter, Sylvia, 64–65, 68, 117, 133, 136;
Sloan, Phillip R., 181n. 26 on class, 64; on gender, 63, 66, 69,
Smith, Barbara, 166n. 71 136; Hills of Hebron, 64; on human-
Smith, Barbara Fletchmann, 175n. 136 ism, 66–67, 69, 133; on C. L. R.
Snead, James A., 185n. 47 James, 70; on race, 64, 66, 68, 123;
sodomy, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 74, 159n. 17 relation to feminist criticism, 63, 66,
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ix, 120, 91; on secularization, 66; on sexu-
126, 127, 128, 149n. 3 ality, 67–68, 69, 70; on Tempest, 65,
Stallybrass, Peter, 158n. 14 119
Steevens, George, 54
Strachey, William, 160n. 25 Young, Lola, 154n. 42
Sundelson, David, 54, 162n. 41
Zabus, Chantal, 172n. 109
Tempest, The: colonialism of, 5; feminist zami, 76, 77, 168n. 83. See also lesbian-
readings of, 58, 60–61, 62; gender ism; mati work
in, 44–46; he/she, 42–47, 49, 62; Zammito, John H., 181n. 26
Jonathan Goldberg is Sir William Osler Professor of English
Literature at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author
of seven books in the field of Renaissance studies, including
Sodometries, Desiring Women Writing, and Shakespeare’s Hand
(Minnesota, 2002).