• 1   Caliban. — Prospero you’re a great illusionist: / you know all about lies. / And you lied to me s (...)

Caliban. — Prospero, tu es un grand illusioniste :
le mensonge, ça te connait.
Et tu m’as tellement menti,
menti sur le monde, menti sur moi-même,
que tu as fini par m’imposer
une image de moi-même :
Un sous-développé, comme tu dis,
un sous-capable,
voilà comment tu m’as obligé à me voir,
et cette image, je la hais ! Et elle est fausse !
Mais maintenant, je te connais, vieux cancer,
et je me connais aussi ! (88)¹

• 2  From Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Paris, Présence Africaine, 1956.

1The late Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) shall be forever associated with the philosophy of negritude that he espoused with such impact on the francophone black world from the 1930s on. Negritude re-appropriated the word nègre with its insulting connotations. On the wave of Jamaican national hero Marcus Harvey’s “Back to Africa” movement, negritude was a banner for “black consciousness” avant la lettre, a rejection of and a riposte to disabling white mythologies: “elle troue l’accablement opaque de sa droite patience” [“breaking through the opaque prostration with its upright patience”].2 It straddled both a political project and a poetic renewal, confronting the violence of colonialism with cataclysmic passion: “the striking of the mental wave against the rock of the world.” Negritude sought to “decolonize the mind” and Césaire’s poetry is a cry to revolt, intransigent in its fidelity to the “invulnerable idea” of justice—and shot through with pain at the tragedy of its non-realisation.

• 3  A tempest (Une tempête) played from 21 September to 14 October, 1998. It was described by Professo (...)

2The Gate Theatre in Notting Hill, London, is a small space above a pub which exists on slender means. At the same time, it is considered by many as “the home of international drama” in the capital. I became the Gate’s literary manager in 1998. The then artistic team conceived of the Gate as an arena of spiritual liberation and an enriching crucible of cultures: a gateway to a richer knowledge of the human. I believed that these themes lay at the heart of Césaire’s great anti-colonialist adaptation of The Tempest which he entitled Une tempête (the lower case t is no accident; here Shakespeare’s island play is cut down to size; this tempest is one colonial storm among many). As the vanguard production for our Home for the Exiles season in 1998, I advocated staging this play to mark the 150^th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the French colonies and the 50^th anniversary of the arrival of the first wave of post-war immigrants from the West Indies to Britain on board the S.S. Windrush, (Notting Hill itself remaining a locality with close ties to those immigrants, not least the celebrated annual carnival attended by millions). We would commemorate those momentous events in what was to be a critically acclaimed British première and I provided a new translation of the play for this purpose.3

• 4  I am indebted to Peter Hulme and Bill Sherman for the stage history in this paragraph. Their co-ed (...)
• 5  See Robert Eric Livingston, “Decolonizing the Theatre: Césaire, Serreau and the Drama of Negritude (...)
• 6  See Alvina Ruprecht, “Staging Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête: Anti-Colonial Theatre in the Counter-Cul (...)

3Une tempête was already well known within the francophone world.4 First produced at an international festival in Hammamet, Tunisia, in the summer of 1969, before playing in Paris in January 1970, it was directed by Jean-Marie Serreau, with whom Césaire had worked so closely on most of his theatrical writing. Serreau’s death in 1973 brought Césaire’s career as a playwright to a close.5 That first production is of special interest: a Caribbean rewriting of The Tempest, produced in Tunisia, close to Sycorax’s origins and to Claribel’s destiny (though neither, interestingly, feature much); which reads the play in part through the US black politics of the Civil Rights period (associating Caliban with Malcolm X and Ariel with Martin Luther King), and which adopted the manners and dress of an American Western. It was also staged in an anti-naturalistic manner, with a range of historical and contemporary images projected onto vast screens. Another notable production was that by Elie Pennont in Martinique in 1992, where the actor playing the African god Eshu became the unifying image, remaining on stage throughout the performance (in Césaire’s script he appears in one scene only), watching silently from a distance: “the incarnation of the fragmented psyche that must be acknowledged before any healing can take place.”6

• 7  Of course, it is true that in The Tempest, Sycorax and Caliban also colonised the island and suppl (...)

4Césaire’s single point of attachment to Shakespeare’s play is to be found in Act III Scene 2 when Caliban declares: “I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island.”7 Subtitled “an adaptation for a black theatre”, Une tempête engages with the fundamental racial and class elements intrinsic to The Tempest, with the implicit intention of wresting the adapted play away from the negative and complacent agenda of an institutionally racist imperial theatre. Césaire’s powerful transformative project is underpinned by radical historical revisionism. Speaking about Shakespeare’s play, he said:

• 14  See Ibid., p. 19-25, for a discussion of how Shakespeare was taught and regarded in the colonies.
• 15  Rob Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest”, Critical Inquiry 13 (1987), p. 5 (...)

9Furthermore, from the perspective of writers in the Caribbean and Africa, what better target for appropriation than the Bard, the paragon of British cultural hegemony?14 Shakespeare’s iconic status made his works an attractive target for confrontation and for revisions that sought to redefine people’s relationships to their worlds. What is at stake is, according to Rob Nixon, “the very possibility of decolonising the area’s cultural history by replacing an imposed with an endemic line of thought and action”.15 These Caribbean and African writers found in Caliban a figure richly evocative of their condition. They adopted the play as a rallying and foundational text, rich for revision and re-appropriation, and they appreciated that The Tempest could bolster their self-definition during a time of major upheaval:

• 17  Paul Brown, “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonia (...)
• 18  Ibid., p. 48.
• 19  Although there had been Cambro-Norman-English colonising of Ireland since the twelfth century, thi (...)
• 20  Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, “‘Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish’: The Discursive Con-texts of (...)

10Yet it is important to recall, like Paul Brown, that “The Tempest is not simply a reflection of colonialist practices but an intervention in an ambivalent and even contradictory discourse”.17 Brown considers Shakespeare’s play a narrative “which seeks at once to harmonize disjunction, to transcend irreconcilable contradictions and to mystify the political conditions which demand colonialist discourse”, but he writes the play “ultimately fails to deliver that containment and instead may be seen to foreground precisely those problems which it works to efface or overcome”.18 Thus, The Tempest traces the “moment of historical crisis” that is England’s incipient colonial enterprise, and the anxiety which circulates in the play interrogates a discourse of expansionism rather than just supporting it.19 This interrogation of text and historical context is continued by Francis Barker and Peter Hulme who note the underlying anxiety in a play “imbricated within the discourse of colonialism”. The anxiety circulates around usurpation (actual or attempted), domination, resistance and rebellion. Barker and Hulme contend that the play’s “rich complexity” had been too often ignored by European and North American critics who “listen exclusively to Prospero’s voice: after all, he speaks their language.” (Given that the play has traditionally been interpreted as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage, the magician-duke has often been confused for the Bard’s representative, an egregious mistake given what we know about Shakespeare’s “negative capability”.) They astutely noted: “It has been left to those who have suffered colonial usurpation to discover and map the traces of that complexity by reading in full measure Caliban’s refractory place in both Prospero’s play and The Tempest.”20

• 21  Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, Trans. Joan Pinkham, New York, Monthly Review Press, 2000, (...)
• 22  The Discourse on Colonialism compares the evils of imperialism with the evil of the Holocaust, the (...)

11Simply and provocatively put, if Shakespeare, as projected in a simplistic and authoritative imperial reading, provides an official, colonial perspective, Césaire—with astonishing fidelity to the original—translates this and gives voice, specifically through Caliban, to the occluded colonized and oppressed. Une tempête epitomizes translation as interpretation, as (creative) revision. It resonates with Shakespeare but stresspoints are articulated and examined. It is an excoriating debunking of the “white man’s burden”, the French republic’s mission civilisatrice (Prospero’s despairing that upon Caliban’s nature “nurture will not stick”) and a relentless exposition of how colonization decivilizes the colonizer (“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”). The infamy of colonial exploitation is recognised and named. In his Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire initially defines colonization in negative terms, by first of all establishing what it is not: “neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law.”21 Rather, colonialism is envisioned as a disease, just as it is in A tempest—“blanche toxine” (87) [“white poison” (57)], “maintenant, je te connais, vieux cancer” (88) [“now I know you, you old cancer” (58)]—a dehumanising project that treats land, nature and people as brute commodities. It must be vomited out.22

• 24  The phrase “noble savage” first appeared in Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada (1672) although (...)

12With a piercing satirical economy, Césaire alludes to Gonzalo’s utopian rhapsody in The Tempest, with its indebtedness to Thomas More, Montaigne and the classical theory of the Golden Age, but what is most striking is how Césaire picks up on Montaigne’s ethical denunciation of western inhumanity and brutality in “Of Cannibals”. This was a key reference point for a developing, idealized argument in favour of the rights of indigenous peoples throughout the early modern period and into the Age of Reason. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the “good savage” was held up as a reproach to European civilisation in the throes of the wars of religion, and stood as a direct counter to the Hobbesian view of human depravity in a state of nature. By the eighteenth century, this argument was fuelled by both sentimentalism and primitivism, and was advanced by both English and French writers and explorers. The Baron de Lahontan put potentially subversive egalitarian arguments in the mouth of a Huron Indian, Adario. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, identified as the philosopher of the French Revolution, was deliberately maligned by his political opponents for advancing a theory about the “noble savage” but this was untrue. What is clear, however, is how such a theory preserved a superior paternalism and ultimately a lack of egalitarian empathy between the colonisers and the colonised in which the latter were cast as dependent children—here “a pool of eternal youth”. Prospero calls Caliban “boy” (a repugnant name for colonial servants) at the very end of A tempest. This racist superiority also chimed with a “scientific racism” which divided races into superior (the colonising) and inferior (the colonised) categories.24

• 25  In Une tempête, Prospero tells Miranda how his prophetic art had “discovered” the precise location (...)

13The other key theme to pick up in this re-casting of Act II Scene 2, is the duplicity within Gonzalo’s sugared and idealistic words. He freely admits that he favours colonisation, but his eulogy of the “noble savages”, whom he wishes to preserve as they are, as if in aspic, is undermined by his simultaneous desire to plunder the island for its natural resources, “guano” in this case, which, “sous une sage direction” (39) [“wisely administered” (29)], will make the island “plus riche que l’Égypte avec son Nil” (39) [“richer than Egypt with its Nile” (29)]. Césaire identifies a base rapaciousness underlying both the colonial and the neo-colonial project in which, say, the generally environmentally disastrous plunder of natural resources would be carried out by the colonisers—or multi-national companies, in many ways their modern equivalents—with virtually none of the profits benefiting the local population, whilst literally dismantling the topography, and cultural topography, beneath their feet.25 As Caliban says to Prospero: “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 !” (25-6) [“You think the earth itself is dead… It’s so much more convenient! Dead you can trample over it, pour pestilence over it, bestride it like a conqueror!” (20)] Césaire adds another element to the neo-imperialist project: tourism. Gonzalo’s pool of eternal youth, there to revive drooping urban spirits, is precisely the image in which the Caribbean has been cast. Once again, the inhabitants, here of the islands, are cast in belittling and servile roles, in order to service the fantasies of their western paymasters. Such fantasies home in on sub-pastoral, primitivist clichés concerning a proximity to nature (even if the islanders’ natural environment is destroyed), spontaneity, creativity and straightforward sexuality and eroticism.

• 26  Cf the OED’s definition of pidgin: “any combination and distortion of two languages as a means of (...)

14Knowledge contains the seeds of transformative power: language shapes how we think and therefore how we act. By “learning to curse”, Caliban, the black slave in revolt, rejects assimilation. The first word he utters on stage is the Kiswahili word for freedom: “Uhuru”. Whereas for Shakespeare, Caliban is “a salvage and a deformed slave”, Césaire’s charismatic protagonist crucially uses a foreign language—foreign from the perspective of the colonizer, that is—in order to assert his own identity and autonomy.26 He refuses to be interpellated as the linguistic subject of the colonial master narrative; he refuses to be broken and conditioned, a mere component in the means of production.

• 27  Steve Almquist, “Not Quite the Gabbling of ‘A Thing Most Brutish’: Caliban’s Kiswahili in Aimé Cés (...)
• 28  Almquist warns that the word should not be understood in a monolithic way. Much of the western med (...)

15Steve Almquist writes that, “At the centre of Césaire’s revision of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a single deeply resonant word—Uhuru. […] Uhuru is essential to Césaire’s revisionary project because it gives Caliban a voice, specifically an African voice, and it contributes to Césaire’s overall project in creating a diasporic textual counter to Shakespeare.”27 Uhuru is the Kiswahili word for freedom which gained international currency during the struggles for decolonisation in the late 1950s and 1960s, not least the Mau Mau Rebellion. Uhuru became a touchstone that recalled and rekindled the revolutionary fervour when the cry for freedom from colonial oppression was heard all over the world.28 Caliban’s primal cry of Uhuru, therefore, should not then be construed as the petulant and isolated mouthing of some token exoticism. It is nothing other than a call to militant solidarity among the dispossessed, and specifically the dispossessed among the African diaspora. (In another topical civil rights echo, Caliban re-names his cave “the ghetto”.) Almquist adds that:

• 30  Almquist, op. cit. See p. 597.

16Consider further the importance of Caliban’s Kiswahili voice through which he voices his agitation at Prospero’s domination. As Steve Almquist acutely appreciates, Césaire’s empowered Caliban does not gabble like “a thing most brutish”, unaware of his “own meaning” until taught the colonial language.30 On the contrary, even before his black slave’s first entrance, Prospero betrays his unease that Caliban “s’émancipe un peu trop” (24) [“is becoming a little too liberated” (18)].

• 31  “Freckled” refers to Caliban’s skin colour. Césaire’s use of the notoriously racist abuse word “mo (...)

18In further disabling strategies, Prospero refuses to accept the validity or sense of Caliban’s own culture and fashions Caliban as a sub-human beast in a manner which entirely honours such references as “freckled whelp” and “mooncalf” in The Tempest, the “savage and deformed slave” “upon whose nature nurture will not stick.”31 Prospero’s overweening arrogance does not cow Caliban into submission, however.

• 32  Césaire, op. cit., p. 42.

19Césaire’s protagonist registers his acute understanding of how his “education” has achieved little more than to reduce him to subservience in the guise of an automaton-drudge (remember Césaire’s formula: “colonisation = thingification”32). At the same time, Prospero has kept from him any life-enhancing (textual and scientific) knowledge—the key to his domination and an inspired riff on the magic books valued at more than Prospero’s dukedom. Caliban ruefully reflects on how he has been an expendable and unvalued means to an end, hoodwinked by an initially friendly-seeming Prospero:

• 34  Lucy Rix, op. cit., p. 237-238, discusses the drive towards self “whitening” as one of the most in (...)

27Such words now seem grimly prophetic of suicide bombings and campaigns of terror but they also identify the despair and desparation of the perpetrators and the terrible cost of stripping the wretched of the earth of their dignity, robbing them of their birthright and making them fear for their very existence, especially (and most usually) in a colonial situation. It is within this incredibly high-stakes situation, that the racial difference between the two slaves must be understood and considered. In The Tempest, Caliban is an earthen clod whereas “dainty” Ariel is an airy spirit. Césaire seizes upon this difference but racializes it, too. Historically, Martinique had more mulattoes than whites and, as ever, in colonial societies where the white ruling class sought to inculcate its values and sought to impress upon its subjects that its culture and skin colour were the ideals, the paleness of one’s skin and the proximity of one’s position to the white rulers became an important factor in determining one’s position in the social hierarchy. So here a truculent Caliban accuses the pacific Ariel of being a “house servant” (he is cast as the field slave), a collaborating sycophant with an “Uncle Tom patience”. Césaire does not shy away from projecting the racialized differences and tensions residing within colonial (and post-colonial) societies, not least his own. Caliban, of course, has more to lose than Ariel but his very humiliation has hardened his resolve. Alex Haley recalled in Roots the old racist jingle: “If you’re white, you’re all right; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re black, stand back.”34

• 36  Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, Eds., De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, London, R (...)

29Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson argue that, “Imperial textuality appropriates, distorts, erases, but it also contains.36 The imperial project contains cultures/subjects in order to control them, but no former colony is as simply circumscribed as colonial discourse would have it: each post-colonial political, historical, linguistic, and cultural situation inevitably becomes much more convoluted than is figured by the coloniser. In truth, it is Prospero who is enfeebled by his monoglot sclerosis. His rigid cultural position does not brook translation. He cannot discourse—his is a dialogue of the deaf—he can only dictate. Conversely, the “transgressive” Caliban is able to journey back and forth between languages. Empowered, he understands Prospero, not vice-versa.

• 37  Indeed, in an exciting addition to the original plot, the scientific Prospero sneers in recollecti (...)

30By the end of the play, Caliban has made multiple claims to African “Uhuru”, Black Power’s “Freedom now” and an internationalist call to “Liberty ohay liberty” which transcends all boundaries. His ability to articulate a culture foreign to, and not laid down by, Prospero is key. Prospero uses language to close down consciousness. Concerning Caliban, his language constantly negates, denies and demonises: “brute savage”, “beast”, “sorcerer”, etc, whilst Caliban’s linguistic identity, his African utterances, are dismissed as “Encore une remontée de ton langage barbare” (24) [“yet another return to your savage tongue” (19)]. Whereas Caliban asserts and affirms potential and otherness, Prospero refuses dialogue: “Je ne t’ai pas appelé pour discuter !” (27) [“I did not summon you here to argue” (21)]. He is portrayed as a sadistic power wielder who had dreamt of establishing a colonial empire even before leaving Italy and who is bereft of his original’s christianised goodwill: “Si tu rouspètes, la trique” (27) [“If you grumble you shall be thrashed” (21)].37 Césaire focuses on Prospero’s magic—a physical control over others—in this strictly limited sense. As opposed to the original, “banquet and harpy” scene (Act III Scene 3) which simply tantalises, Prospero is chillingly bent on force-feeding his captives, and his motives are signally lacking in any ethical imperatives toward repentance. While Prospero may claim “Je suis la Puissance” (44) [“I am Power” (32)], his material might resides in technological know-how and the machinery of repression. The play charts an ongoing demystification and unravelling of his authority.

• 39  According to Michel Giraud, “Dialectics of Descent and Phenotypes in Racial Classification in Mart (...)

31In an inspired response to Shakespeare’s mage’s magic, Césaire’s Caliban identifies Prospero’s illusions with spreading a deceitful false consciousness about the state of the world, imposing on Caliban a disabling belief in his own underdevelopment and incompetence.39 The speech is a culmination of Caliban’s efforts, established from his first entry, to rise up above oppression and resurrect an authentic black culture and history. Gilbert and Tompkins write,

• 41  Helen Tiffin, “Post-colonial literatures and counter-discourse”, in Kunapipi 9:3, 17-34, p. 17. Ti (...)

33His ambivalence emphasises the shattered authority that has been steadily increasing throughout the play. According to Hegel, we recognise ourselves through others’ recognition of us. Caliban does not grant this consensual recognition. A fissure rends the colonial veil. Whereas, in The Tempest, Prospero leaves the island to return to Naples, conveniently bestowing forgiveness on all and sundry and with an imminent marriage between Miranda and Ferdinand symbolising a re-soldered alliance between estranged ruling houses—even if there is no contrition from Antonio—here he remains. Just as Césaire’s Ariel sings, “Rien n’est, tout devient” (30) [“Nothing is, all becomes” (23)], so post-colonial theatre configures “process, not arrival.”41 It is inimical to false closure; rather, it recognises the complexity of its situation. Prospero, the old colonialist, is left listless and aged, alone on the island, raging against the encroachment of nature, roaring out for Caliban but unable to untangle the complexity of his relationship with him beyond: “Toi-Moi ! Moi-Toi !” (92) [“You-Me! Me-You!” (61)] But the mutuality of this dialectic no longer holds. Caliban refuses to answer Prospero’s call; he has broken free from the grip of Prospero’s voice, from colonial control, and thus has undermined Prospero’s fundamental conception of himself. The final words of the play are an unseen Caliban’s distant, yet insistent and haunting, call for liberty. Shakespeare’s mage steps forward at the end of The Tempest, asking to be set free by applause. Here, there is no such recognition. Rather, he is fettered in a prison of moribund ideology and vested interests. Prospero’s failure to leave the island also indicates Césaire’s recognition that whether decolonised or not, the grasp of colonialism (and, crucially, neo-colonialism) will not be relinquished so easily.

• 42  Almquist, op. cit., p. 591.
• 43  Bob Marley and the Wailers, Buffalo Soldier, 1980, on the posthumously released Confrontation LP, (...)
• 44  The Yoruba are a people of western Nigeria and neighbouring regions. A syncretistic religion of Sh (...)

34Steve Almquist writes: “Césaire’s representation of Caliban produces an Africanized figure that embodies the complexity of the diasporic African in the middle of the twentieth century.”42 It is my contention that the resurrection and resistance of Caliban is founded upon the African cultural resonances in the play: “Uhuru”, Shango, “Oo-en-day”, “Macaya”. It is to these that Caliban owes allegiance and not to imposed western ideologies. Like Malcolm, he calls himself “X”, identifies his dispossession, the fate of the enslaved African diaspora, and casts off the slough of abjection as he reclaims and refashions his cultural identity, “fighting for survival”, in Marley’s words, “in the heart of the Caribbean.”43 Caliban twice invokes Shango, the Yoruba god of thunder and lightning and the owner of the Bata drums. Césaire identifies Shango as a great god of heaven who is very violent but who is fundamentally benevolent, renewing the face of the earth. Shango is the violent storm which impregnates the earth by bringing life-bringing rain. Shakespeare’s western tempest is countered by an African one.44

• 45  See Gilbert and Tompkins, op. cit., p. 32-33, for a reading of this scene which epitomises “the sl (...)

35A crucial interpellation into Shakespeare’s play comes as Une tempête speeds towards its climax. Eshu, the African trickster devil-god “Dieu pour les amis, diable pour les ennemis” (68) [“God to my friends, Devil to my enemies” (45)], erupts into Prospero’s masque—anti-masque par excellence to all the stilted, ongoing decorum of the classical goddesses. His lewdness and sexual predatoriness—“de son pénis il frappe” (70) [“with his penis he smites” (46)] is an ironic exposure of white paranoia and demonization. Cocking a snook at Prospero, Eshu is not part of the colonialist’s script. He re-appropriates a vivid black identity by using negative stereotype, in a manner analogous to the political use of such terms as “dreadlock” or “queer”, and revelling in its otherness. Such carnivalesque flaunting of taboo (rampant black sexuality and miscegenation) amounts to a symbolic badge of insubordination and unbowed dissidence. The western pantheon is dispersed and routed by such “vulgarity.” Eshu stands for the supplanted spirit of Africa returning, superabundant and irrepressible.45

• 46  When reminded of being imprisoned in the cloven pine, Ariel dreams of having metamorphosed into a (...)

Césaire celebrates Caribbean and African ecology throughout.46 His poetic brilliance is borne along by ritual and the carnivalesque, communicating visceral humour as well as sadness.

• 47  See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in (...)

38Césaire did not generally write in creole but “marooned” himself from metropolitan French, refashioning a new voice in a manner congruent with Bill Ashcroft et al.’s notion of Britain’s erstwhile Empire “writing back.”47 The maroons were runaway slaves. By analogy, he sought to break the fetters of colonialist discourse. Césaire punned that he would pluck the “marrons du feu,” literally plucking the sweet-chestnuts from the fire but also symbolically rising up against imperialist strictures. Here the mystification and assumptions of the colonially projected Tempest are met head on and the colonial form is hybridised with the introduction of African and English languages and African and Caribbean ritual and rhythm. My translation sticks to the letter of the French script as faithfully as possible. Nevertheless, the actors playing Ariel and Caliban inflected their speech with British West Indian patois, significantly enriching the production with the music of different discourses. Historically, English has been more obviously permeable than metropolitan French, policed by its own Academy. (Césaire himself was famously the brilliant scholarship boy from the Antilles who spoke an elegant formal French, even conjugating the imperfect subjunctive.)