Aimé Césaire (1913–2008)

This was incredible. Exploring the contradiction and hypocrisy of Europe after the horrors of Nazism are revealed and arguing, successfully at that too, that Hitler wasn't the anomaly that he was–and is still, painted to be. Cesaire mostly uses French colonial history and the horrors done in Algeria, Madagascar, Vietnam as examples. No doubt it must have been a shock and a joke to the communities that had experienced and lived with the trauma European colonialism had wrought on them, when their colonizers were condemning Germany. The ironic tone of the writing, at parts strangely funny while showing contradiction, gave an even greater effect to the work the writing was supposed to do. Even though half the planet was still colonized when it was published (1950), and colonial exploitation has taken stealthier and more insidious forms since then, this book still remains both fortunately and unfortunately fresh and required reading.… (more)

A retelling of Shakespeare's play The Tempest, set on an island where the European colonial Prospero enforces slavery on a mulatto Ariel and a Black/indigenous Caliban. The text pushes beyond critiquing colonialism and into decolonisation. I read Richard Miller's 1985/1992 anglophone translation but wished I'd also had the original French for side by side comparison.

There are some interesting linguistic choices that aren't from Shakespeare, such as Prospero being "marooned" on the island, and the first scene very pointedly has people participating as players literally choosing their own characters: "You want Caliban? Well, that's revealing." "And there's no problem about the villains either: you, Antonio; you Alonso, perfect!" Caliban's first word is "Uhuru!" (Freedom!). Caliban rejects the slave name foisted on him by Prospero, and wants to be called "X" (like Malcolm, clearly). There's intertextual Baudelaire: "Des hommes dont le corps est mince et vigoureux,/ Et des femmes dont l'oeil par sa franchise étonne." And the play's intellectual coup de grâce is Prospero's choice of taunt at Caliban for not murdering him: "See, you're nothing but an animal... you don't know how to kill." Unlike Prospero and his fellow Europeans, Antonio and Sebastian, who have shown they know how to murder motivated by personal ambition.

In the end we find that Caliban has always been free in his own mind while Prospero continues to enslave himself to his desire for power over others.… (more)