Title: A Tempest (Une Tempête) Author: Aimé Césaire Creation Date: 1969 Location: Paris (Éditions du Seuil) Collection: Empire and Its Shadows
Brief
Aimé Césaire wrote Une Tempête in 1969, commissioned for the Festival of Black Arts and adapted for the Martinican company he had long championed. Éditions du Seuil published it the same year, and Richard Miller's English translation arrived in 1985, by which time the play had already become indispensable on stages across Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and North America — wherever Shakespeare's island had served as cultural touchstone, and wherever colonial history had made that touchstone uncomfortable.
The play is not a critique of The Tempest but an expropriation. Césaire takes Shakespeare's skeleton — Prospero the sorcerer, Ariel the compliant spirit, Caliban the enslaved monster — and reverses its centre of gravity. Caliban is no longer the deformed savage but a political consciousness with a Yoruba inheritance and a vocabulary drawn from Black Power. Eshu, the trickster-deity of crossroads, interrupts Prospero's masque with obscenity and laughter. Ariel becomes the assimilationist — the negotiator, the gradualist — and the quarrel between Caliban and Ariel becomes the quarrel between revolution and reform played out in verse. The famous line about being taught to speak only in order to curse comes directly from Shakespeare, but in Césaire's mouth it becomes a manifesto.
What makes A Tempest canonical is its theatrical intelligence. Césaire understood that Shakespeare's text was so embedded in Western cultural authority that any genuine response had to engage it line by line. The play does not satirise from a distance; it inhabits the original and detonates it from within. It is best read as a companion piece to Shakespeare's The Tempest — the two plays speak to each other across three and a half centuries, and the conversation has not been resolved. For the literature of decolonisation, A Tempest is the founding theatrical act, and the figure of Caliban it produced has continued to walk through anglophone, francophone and lusophone postcolonial writing ever since.
The Imperial Machine
The colonial system Césaire stages is simultaneously specific and universal. Shakespeare's island is every European seizure of a non-European territory; Césaire's reference points are the French Caribbean and European settlement in the Americas. Prospero arrives, reframes the island as unclaimed, imposes his language and cosmology as the conditions of all exchange, and converts the original inhabitants into labour through force and the rhetoric of civilisation. The pattern is recognisable from Cortés in Mexico to French colons in Martinique to settler farmers in Kenya. What Césaire's play insists on is that the pattern is not natural but performed.
The French colonial system Césaire grew up inside was built on the Code Noir of 1685 — the legal framework defining enslaved Africans as moveable property, prescribing Catholic instruction, and authorising specific punishments. Martinique, where Césaire was born in 1913, transitioned from slavery's abolition in 1848 into a colonial economy of sugar production and racial hierarchy that emancipation did not fundamentally alter. In 1946 Martinique became a département d'outre-mer — a law Césaire himself helped draft as deputy. The play was written twenty-three years into this departmental status, and the unresolved tension between formal equality and actual cultural subordination is one of its animating pressures.
Prospero's magic is the machine's most precise metaphor. His power derives not from physical strength but from mastery of a symbolic system the colonised cannot access — the structure of colonial education, distributing knowledge selectively, creating intermediaries (Ariel) and labourers (Caliban). Eshu, the Yoruba trickster who disrupts Prospero's masque, represents what the machine cannot incorporate: a cosmology predating Prospero's arrival, operating on principles his magic cannot comprehend. The colonial machine's fundamental claim — that European knowledge is universal — is refuted by Eshu's mere presence on a stage Prospero believes is his.
The Subjected People
Césaire splits the subjected into two figures who personify the anti-colonial movement's central debate. Caliban is the revolutionary who refuses the terms of his subjection and insists on total rejection of the coloniser's authority. Ariel is the reformist who accepts the colonial framework provisionally, believing that persuasion and gradual education can produce change without revolution's destruction. The argument between them is staged twice at length and is never resolved.
Caliban's interiority is the most radical departure from Shakespeare. Césaire strips away the degradation and replaces it with political consciousness. His Caliban names the theft of the island, the imposition of language, the erasure of his mother Sycorax from the historical record. His claim that Prospero's language serves only for cursing prefigures what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o would develop two decades later in Decolonising the Mind. Caliban's spiritual life is equally important — he invokes Shango, the Yoruba god of thunder, and African drumming accompanies his scenes. Césaire insists that the colonised subject has not been emptied of culture, that beneath the imposed language an older cosmology persists. This is Négritude applied theatrically: African civilisation is not absence but presence.
Ariel's position is more uncomfortable and, in some ways, more interesting. He genuinely abhors slavery and wants freedom as urgently as Caliban does. But he believes the path lies through the coloniser's conscience rather than his overthrow. Césaire treats Ariel with sympathy but also with the clear-eyed assessment of a man who watched the French left promise colonial reform for decades without delivering it. Ariel's strategy is tenable only if the coloniser is susceptible to moral argument — and the play's Prospero, who stays on the island, unable to relinquish power, suggests he is not. Caliban's solitary struggle carries the weight of every figure the play cannot stage: the enslaved Africans of the Antillean plantations, the indigenous peoples the colonial system exterminated.
The Reckoning
Césaire's most devastating reckoning is with Prospero himself. In Shakespeare, Prospero forgives his enemies, releases Ariel, abjures his magic and returns to Milan — the colonial episode ends, the European goes home improved. Césaire refuses this entirely. His Prospero sends the Europeans home but cannot leave. He stays, raving and diminished, unable to exist without the relationship of domination. The colonial master, Césaire argues, is as much a prisoner of the system as the subject — perhaps more so, because the subject at least knows what was taken, while the master cannot admit what the taking has cost him.
This is the argument Césaire first made in his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism: that colonialism brutalises the coloniser as surely as the colonised. Prospero alone on his island, answering voices that no longer answer back, is Europe after decolonisation — still structured by habits of mastery, still unable to conceive of itself except in relation to those it once governed. His magic, once the instrument of absolute authority, becomes the symptom of his dependency. He cannot set it aside because without it he has no identity; the colonial relation has consumed whatever self he brought to the island.
The play's implied reader is the postcolonial subject — the Caribbean intellectual, the African dramatist, the Indian student of English literature reading Shakespeare in a syllabus inherited from the Raj. Césaire is offering them not just a critique of The Tempest but a method: the canon of empire can be read against itself, line by line, until its assumptions are visible and refusable. The play closes with Caliban's cry of "Freedom!" hanging unanswered in the air. There is no guarantee of fulfilment. There is only the certainty that the man who cries it has not been broken, and that the silence Prospero requires for his magic to function will not be supplied. A Tempest is what Shakespeare's island sounds like when the island talks back.
The Reading
Before the play begins, a Master of Ceremonies steps forward and distributes roles. Choose your masks, he tells the actors. This one will be Prospero. This one Caliban — a Black Caliban. This one Ariel — a mulatto Ariel. The casting is declared, the choices visible. Nothing that follows will pretend to be natural. The colonial arrangement about to be staged is performed, chosen, and therefore refusable. Take your positions. The play begins.
The Storm
A storm tears the sky open. A ship breaks apart. Survivors wash up on an island that is Mediterranean and Caribbean at once — Alonso, King of Naples; his son Ferdinand; the usurping Antonio; Sebastian; Gonzalo the humane counsellor, whose dream of an ideal commonwealth Caliban has already lived and lost. Trinculo the jester and Stephano the drunken butler arrive separately, soaked and bewildered. But the island has one more presence the Europeans did not bring and cannot command: Eshu, the Yoruba trickster-deity of crossroads and boundaries, summoned not by Prospero's magic but by the island itself. Eshu answers to nothing in Prospero's books.
Prospero and His Daughter
Prospero rules this island through magic and through Caliban's labour. He is the deposed Duke of Milan, and his exile has become an empire of one. His daughter Miranda has grown up knowing no other world. She is innocent — genuinely so, not ironically — the colonial daughter raised on stolen land, knowing nothing of the theft, embodying what colonial ideology calls natural right. She is not the villain. She is the system's most successful product: a young woman whose kindness is real and whose capacity to question the conditions of that kindness has never been activated. Ferdinand will court her. Two Europeans will fall in love on an island whose native inhabitant is not consulted about the arrangement.
Ariel the Negotiator
Ariel arrives bearing news of the storm's success. He is bound to Prospero by a debt of liberation — Prospero freed him from imprisonment in a pine tree by the witch Sycorax — and he serves now as messenger, spy and enforcer, performing each task with anguished willingness. He is the perfect colonial intermediary: the one who hates the system and operates it flawlessly. He asks Prospero, again, when his service will end. Prospero answers, again, with the elaborate procrastination of an employer who has no intention of paying his bill. Ariel withdraws to deliver the next storm. He believes still that Prospero will eventually awaken to his own injustice and release him voluntarily. He has been believing this for years.
Caliban the Refuser
Caliban enters with a different posture entirely. He does not bow. He does not perform gratitude. When Prospero greets him, Caliban responds in his own language — Uhuru! — the Swahili word for freedom, and the word is its own argument. His resistance is not parochial. It speaks to the African continent, to the diaspora, to every slave revolt and independence movement of the twentieth century. Prospero corrects him into French. Caliban refuses. The names Prospero taught him are Prospero's names for Prospero's things; the island had its own names before Prospero came, and those names were not inferior but merely different. His mother Sycorax — not a witch to be reviled, which is Prospero's word, but a queen, a ruler, a woman of power who governed the island before Prospero's arrival and who was exiled and degraded by those who feared her. The island is Caliban's inheritance. Prospero's claim is theft rationalised as civilisation.
The exchange between them is not debate; it is two incommensurable accounts of the same history, and neither can absorb the other. Prospero cannot hear what Caliban is saying because hearing it would require him to acknowledge that his entire presence on the island is a crime. Caliban cannot hear what Prospero is saying because accepting it would require him to be grateful for his own subjugation. "You taught me language," Caliban tells him, "and my profit on't is I know how to curse." The coloniser's tongue, learned under compulsion, turned back as a weapon. The curse is not failure of eloquence; it is the only honest use of a language that arrived with the chains.
The Quarrel of Methods
Ariel comes to Caliban privately, fearful, hoping for moderation. The way forward is persuasion, he argues. Patience. The gradual education of Prospero in his own injustice. He fears violence not from cowardice but because he has seen what violence does to the oppressed who attempt it without sufficient force. He imagines a day when Prospero will awaken to his own inhumanity and release the island voluntarily.
Caliban has no patience for this fantasy. The enslaved man who negotiates freedom, he tells Ariel, negotiates on behalf of his captor's comfort, not his own dignity. Freedom is not given; it is taken. The negotiator who asks the master to recognise his humanity is already conceding that the master's recognition is required — and this concession is itself a form of continued enslavement. Ariel cannot answer. But Caliban cannot walk away triumphant either, because the methods he proposes carry costs neither man can minimise. The argument hangs unresolved. Both men leave the stage holding what they came in with. Revolution against reform, violence against persuasion, immediate rupture against the long patient work of changing minds — the quarrel between them is staged twice and is never resolved.
The Masque Disrupted
Prospero stages a masque to celebrate Ferdinand and Miranda's betrothal. The Roman goddesses Juno, Ceres and Iris arrive in their European pageant costumes to bestow the appropriate blessings — fertility, abundance, marriage. The Greco-Roman pantheon, the courtly aesthetic, the assertion that Prospero's magic commands not just the island's elements but the full archive of European myth — all condensed into spectacle.
And then Eshu arrives. Uninvited. Obscene. Singing a ribald song that reduces the goddesses to embarrassment and the masque to shambles. He laughs, exits, leaves the stage in disorder. Prospero cannot command him because Eshu does not come from Prospero's books, does not answer to Prospero's magic, does not recognise Prospero's authority as anything other than a temporary occupation of someone else's land. The European theatre Prospero stages — borrowed from Ovid, choreographed by his books — is interrupted by a cosmology he cannot incorporate. The colonised world has its own gods, its own rhythms, its own performance traditions, and these will not be silenced to accommodate the masque.
The Drunken Conspirators
Trinculo and Stephano find Caliban under a rock during a storm and share their wine. Caliban does not mistake Stephano for a god — he is not naive about Europeans; he has lived under one for years. But he needs them, needs their bodies and weapons for a revolt he cannot achieve alone. He proposes a plan: kill Prospero, free the island. Stephano fantasises about kingship; Trinculo is simply drunk. But Caliban is in earnest, and his tragedy is the tragedy of the insurgent forced to build revolution from whatever materials the world provides, however unsuitable.
The alliance with the drunken Europeans is not a failure of judgement; it is the desperate arithmetic of someone who has no other allies. You take what you can get, knowing what you get may not be enough and may compromise the cause it was meant to serve.
The Revolt Defeated
Prospero, forewarned by Ariel, sets spirit-dogs on the conspirators and the revolt fails. Caliban is beaten but not broken. He returns to defiance almost immediately, his spirit undiminished even as his body registers the cost. The royals are brought before Prospero; Ferdinand and Miranda are revealed, their future marriage announced. The European order is being restored. The shipwrecked nobles will return to Naples. The dynastic alliance has been arranged. From inside Prospero's worldview, the resolution is conventional.
Gonzalo's Commonwealth
Gonzalo speaks of an ideal commonwealth — a land without work, hierarchy or property. Antonio and Sebastian mock him. But the mockery the island supplies is sharper than theirs: Gonzalo dreams of abolishing labour on an island where Caliban is enslaved to labour, dreams of abolishing hierarchy on an island where Prospero's magic enforces the most absolute hierarchy imaginable. The speech becomes not a charming utopian fantasy but an indictment — the European capacity for imagining justice in the abstract while practising injustice in the particular. Gonzalo is the most sympathetic of the Europeans, the kindest, the most humane, and his speech is the most damning because it demonstrates that even European kindness operates within a framework that cannot see the Caliban standing right beside it.
Prospero Who Cannot Leave
The Europeans board the ship to sail home. Prospero sends them away. But he stays. He cannot leave the island. He tells himself he is staying to continue the civilising project, to watch over Caliban, to ensure the experiment continues — to complete, as he says, his work. But it is clear to anyone watching that he is incapable of leaving. The relationship between master and slave has hollowed him out as much as Caliban; he is dependent on the domination he practises, unable to conceive of himself except as the one who rules. He paces the empty island, shouting orders at a jungle that no longer answers. The tropical vegetation begins to reclaim the cleared spaces. Termites are eating his books. The staff and the robes of his magic become costume rather than instrument. His speeches grow longer and less coherent — the monologues of a man explaining himself to an audience that has already left.
Colonialism is not just what it does to the colonised but what it does to the coloniser. Prospero is not the liberated European returning home; he is a man unmoored by the exercise of absolute power, who has only the island, only the magic, only the servant he cannot release and the native he cannot discipline into submission. He has become the relation he depended on; without it he is nothing.
The Voice from the Trees
And from somewhere beyond Prospero's stage — beyond the proscenium, beyond the theatrical frame his magic controls — Caliban is calling. The voice is unmistakable. Liberté! The cry is not yet answered. It will not be silenced. Prospero shouts back into the jungle, demanding obedience, demanding the silence his magic requires. The jungle does not oblige. Drums accompany the cry — African rhythms moving across the stage, refusing the European theatrical decorum Prospero attempts to maintain. Drums have accompanied Caliban's scenes throughout, ritual movement, a performative vocabulary that is not European — the physical presence of African and Caribbean traditions Prospero's books cannot contain.
Eshu haunts the edges throughout — at the masque, in the storm, in the verbal texture of Caliban's resistance, in the drumming. The island has a spiritual life predating Prospero that will outlast him. The gods Caliban keeps are not primitive superstitions overcome by European reason. They are a counter-cosmology, a different account of how the world is organised and who has authority within it. Prospero's magic is theatrical, borrowed from books — the magic of the European intellectual tradition, powerful but derivative. Caliban's gods are older and do not answer to theatrical convention.
What the Play Refuses
There is no victory for Caliban. No staged liberation. No easy satisfaction of revolution accomplished. The island remains occupied. Prospero remains, raving and diminished but still present. Caliban remains, free in his refusal but not yet free in his condition. What is offered instead is the refusal itself — the voice from the trees, the cry of Freedom!, the certainty that the man who cries it has not been broken.
The play runs perhaps ninety minutes in performance. It reads quickly on the page. But its compression is intellectual density, not thinness. Every line carries the weight of debates sharpened over twenty years — in the pages of Tropiques, in the Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, in the Discourse on Colonialism that named the relationship between European humanism and European brutality with an anger that still startles. The enslaved man is not the exception to Western civilisation's values but the proof of what those values actually mean in practice, and the only honest response — the only response that preserves dignity while the island remains occupied — is refusal.
The cry of Freedom! carries no guarantee of its own fulfilment. It carries only the certainty that the man who cries it has not been broken, and that the silence Prospero requires for his magic to function will not be supplied.
This post is part of Empire and Its Shadows, a series on colonialism, power, and the books that answer empire back. See the full collection →
The standard English-language paperback is the Theatre Communications Group edition translated by Richard Miller, first published in 1985 and reissued with a new introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley. It is the teaching text in most universities and the version that brought Césaire's play into the anglophone postcolonial canon.
Translated by Richard Miller, with an introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley. The Theatre Communications Group paperback — the standard English text and the version most commonly performed.
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