Abstract
Just like Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête, Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax is a parallel narrative of Prospero’s encounter with characters of other skin colour and gender. Both plays, like many others, represent successful efforts in countering the hitherto master narrative, Shakespeare’s The Tempest. They speak back to and destabilize it through different versions that, at once, query and mitigate Shakespeare’s. Using the idea of counter-narrative and writing back, Sycorax is interrogated here through textual analysis and selective close reading with a view to examining its exhumation and foregrounding of the silences, elisions, and under- or misrepresentations of The Tempest. With a highly provocative diction — Irobi’s language is sexually explicit, violent, abusive, and unsettling — and experimental, somewhat postmodernist, dramatic structure, Sycorax intertextually dramatizes the issues of race, enslavement, colonial domination, migration, and gender as well as sexuality. Its relocation of action from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean; resurrection of Sycorax; Caliban’s able-bodiedness, revolutionary zeal, vociferousness and change of name to Caribbean; Ariel’s piebald sexuality as a bisexual hermaphrodite with the liberty to jump from Prospero’s bed to Sycorax’s; and the questioning of Shakespeare himself to answer for his (mis)representations; all exemplify Irobi’s redirection of action and the emergence of new protagonists out of the characters of The Tempest. This article sees Sycorax as part of the work of formerly-colonized writers and artists now engaged in the process of redefining their people, identity, and cultural realities in the face of the preponderant assault of more powerful cultures and narratives that often garble them. Irobi’s politically incorrect, troubling, and highly charged play thus expresses the angst of finding oneself vilified simply on the basis of race, body, or sexuality.
No story is a master over others
Mary O’Neill rightly observes that narratives are disseminated in order “to construct, maintain and repair our reality. [They …] can in fact motivate us to fight and be willing to die for an ideal or a belief” (2009: 2). Moreover, they can achieve “an amplitude that information lacks” (Benjamin, 1992: 89), meaning that, no matter how untrue, stories have the power to implant information and shape ideas. This is why each society re-tells or re-invents its narratives to reflect its own realities. As such, “No story explains everything”; and none should be “politically empowering simply by explaining less” (Hogan, 2001: 510). However, master narratives — a term popularized by Jean-François Lyotard, to signify “authoritative or foundational narratives of Western societies, specifically [those] of emancipation and knowledge” often deployed to “legitimate the power of dominant social classes” (Castle, 2007: 316) — have been essential in the propagation of Western values over other lands and peoples, especially in the assertion of “the superiority of the coloniser” (Brown, 1985: 58). In response to this, independence from colonialism has resurrected newer voices, counter-narratives which “actively […] destabilise the power structures of the originary text [… and] imposed canonical traditions” (Gilbert and Tompkins, 1996: 16). Drama and theatre, more than other forms of literature, deploy strategies by which they imitatively “rework a historical moment or a character or an imperial text or even a theatre building” (Gilbert and Tompkins, 1996: 1). The success of theatre in this endeavour rests on the fact that, much more than written words, it creates and enacts its own counter-positions against master narratives. Its poignancy in visually and tangibly bringing life to the stage is a cogent tool deployed by postcolonial dramatists to punch up and speak to/about their own realities by themselves. They achieve this through inventive and counter-discursive use of language, stage action, dramatic personae, as well as what has been referred to as “the arrangement of theatrical space and time, and the manipulation of narrative and performative conventions of drama” (Gilbert and Tompkins, 1996: 9).
Shakespeare’s The Tempest has been, perhaps more than any other dramatic work, the object of such postcolonial reinterpretations. Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête (1969), for instance, imports the Yoruba trickster-god, Eshu, in a gathering of European gods summoned by Prospero, to create confusion and disperse white deities who are uncomfortable with having a non-white god in their midst. Caliban is elevated over Miranda and Ferdinand, and juxtaposed with historical characters like Malcolm X. Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax takes it further: Caliban’s mother, Sycorax, is resurrected as the eponymous heroine, and Shakespeare himself is disinterred and repatriated to the Caribbean to answer for his choices. The successes of these writing back efforts could be attributed, among others, to the fact that at every point in its history, every country, people, or culture reasserts its peculiarity by taking over the reins of telling its own stories. As Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, “no country […] is a model to another country” (2008: 14).
Shakespeare’s The Tempest as master narrative
Set in the Mediterranean, Shakespeare’s play opens with a ship carrying the king of Naples being tossed in the sea by a storm conjured through magic by Prospero, who is watching by the shore with his daughter, Miranda. Prospero had earlier been set up by his own brother, with the result that the king, Alonso, exiled him, while his brother replaced him as duke. The raft on which he and his daughter were sent out of Naples brought them to an island where he found Ariel trapped in a tree and freed him, and then learned some magic from him, with which Prospero took control from Caliban, the rightful owner of the island. Ariel, in gratitude for being liberated, became a loyal servant to Prospero, who gave him assurances that he was going to be free from servitude someday. Having been dispossessed of his island, Caliban is presented as the villain: a deformed being deprived of his humanity mainly for his dark skin. His mother, Sycorax, who is absent from the on-stage drama, is considered evil. In the present action, through a web of magic and intrigues, Prospero gets everyone safely on the island, makes the prince, Ferdinand, fall in love with his daughter, and achieves a royal pardon and the promise of restoration to his position. The end of the play proffers positive resolution to all characters, except Ariel, who does not get his freedom, and Caliban, whom the audience does not get to see regain his island.
This play is “the text most widely chosen for counter discursive interrogations of the Shakespearian canon”, for the following reasons: (i) “the play’s figuration of racial binaries and the threat of miscegenation”; (ii) “its representation of the New World ‘other’ as opposed to the European ‘self’”; and (iii) “its pervasive interest in power relationships involving dominance, subservience, and rebellion” (Gilbert and Tompkins, 1996: 25). For these reasons it has become a pertinent choice for anti-colonialist rebuttals. Duke Pesta agrees that “no other work of literature has been as assigned, deconstructed, interdisciplinized, revisioned, trivialized, and ventriloquized” but adds, however, that it “is seldom contextualized in the broader Jacobean and Renaissance culture from which it emerged” (2014: n.p.). He posits further that The Tempest is a “Shakespearean” and “Christian” romance resonant with characteristics of its kind which prevalent postcolonial readings tend to ignore. Ultimately, in his view: What actual tendency toward colonialism appears in the play comes not from Prospero, nor the greedy Alonso, nor even those scheming climbers Sebastian and Antonio, but rather from Caliban himself, in league with the halfwit jester Trinculo and the drunken butler Stephano. (Pesta, 2014: n.p.)
Despite Pesta’s claims, it is somewhat disingenuous to deny a colonialist similitude in Prospero’s successful annexation of this island, and the way the servants, Trinculo and Stefano, stumble on and assume the role of masters over Caliban. Being servants and incapable of speaking in the presence of royalty themselves, it is astounding how they naturally begin to devise ways in which they can become wealthy by exploiting the deformed and dark-skinned Caliban. The naturalness with which Prospero and the servants assume the roles of masters could hardly be read differently than what it shows: dominance over those considered lesser humans. Ania Loomba puts it more succinctly, Shakespeare’s mention of “a shipwreck in the Bermudas” and the fact that the island was inhabited before Prospero’s arrival, “turned the romance into an allegory of the colonial encounter” (2005: 8). Moreover, for many years, “idealist readings” have glorified Prospero by emphasizing “the way in which his hard-earned ‘magical’ powers enable him to re-educate the shipwrecked Italians, to heal their civil-war and, even more important, to triumph over his own vengefulness by forgiving his enemies” (Skura, 1989: 42). He is also “a representation of [the] colonizer” especially in “his assumption of the New World natives […] as uncivilized and even inhuman” (Royanian and Sadeghi, 2014: 4). Amidst all this, his portraiture is that of “a civilized man, rightly establishing and maintaining order on the island […] not […] because he set out to be [leader], but because he is the most competent one to do so being educated, civilized and enlightened” (Alzuhairi and Yimin, 2016: 17; emphasis added). Perhaps it is due to his being “most competent” that he considers Caliban’s mother as the “damned witch Sycorax” who was banished to the island “for mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible | To enter human hearing” (The Tempest, 1.2.266–268). His competence is thus unquestioned based on the portraiture of his character in The Tempest. Furthermore, since he is the one speaking for everyone else, the audience is left in no doubt as to how his presence is beneficial to the island and its occupants, but not immediately also made aware of how the island itself is helpful to his own survival and sustenance.
Prospero feels superior to Ariel and Caliban, and for fear of his magical powers he is able to enlist them in his service (Royanian and Sadeghi, 2014: 5). He “makes sure to remind Ariel of the distinction between Sycorax’s evil magic and his own supposedly benevolent arts” (Singh, 2016: n.p.) and based on that claim usurps Caliban’s privileges, takes over the island, and labels him an ungrateful rapist. Prospero’s daughter, Miranda is seen to also justify her father’s colonialist stance by saying this about Caliban: Abhorrèd 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. (The Tempest, 1.2.357–363).
Here, Miranda burnishes the weapons of Western coloniality, presenting its encroachment and conquest of other lands as providential and beneficial to the natives only. What Prospero does on the island is regarded as a burden, a responsibility to civilize other peoples and their lands, to make them more Western and thus more acceptable. It is this kind of thinking that is being contested with these emergent, more contradictory versions of The Tempest. Writers like Césaire and Irobi have simply latched on to what has been referred to as “the oppositional versions articulated by Ariel, Caliban and even Miranda” (Kingsley-Smith, 2017: 291), and have used them quite potently to counter and question Shakespeare’s position.
Irobi’s Sycorax as counter-narrative
Esiaba Irobi belongs to the newer generation of Nigerian playwrights. Isidore Diala rightly differentiates him from Soyinka, especially, as follows: the younger dramatist’s vision (in spite of his apparent admiration of Soyinka’s stagecraft) differs considerably […]. While Soyinka is interested in the legend of the sacrificial victim as the savior, Irobi is fascinated by the myth of the savior as the executioner of the guilty. […] Soyinka foregrounds the modesty of our human nature that inhibits our assumption of responsibilities for our communities, especially when the penalty for the expiation of communal guilt is the sacrifice of life itself. Irobi’s hero, on the other hand, boasts of having worn out a whetstone sharpening his matchet. His world is the opposite of the victim’s and, predictably, his enthusiasm mounts where Eman and Elesin
1
founder. (2005: 95)
Leon Osu further describes Irobi’s dramatic opus as that of “a non-orthodox Marxist writer” who writes in the “mode of Brecht’s epic theatre” purposely because he “experiments with some special alienation effects [… and] makes his exhortations for revolutionary change by […] confrontational dialectics and […] wit borne by his deft proverbs, allusions, songs and dirges, humour and symbolism” (2011: 163). Diala adds elsewhere that Irobi’s recurrent theme “has been the frustration and marginalization of Nigerian youth [and he] has been equally fascinated by the psychopathology of dispossession and its violent manifestations (2006: 61). Diala posits also that one “abiding insight” in Irobi’s plays is that “even for the humane, talented, and creative, material dispossession erodes a balanced personality by destroying personal integrity and self-worth: for the oppressed, violence is cathartic” (2006: 61). For Irobi’s Sycorax, Diala holds that it was intended to advance several aesthetic and polemical positions Irobi had taken in his preceding work: primarily, an even more self-conscious modelling of his work on indigenous theatrical practices and an overt censure of colonialism for the failures of the postcolony. (2012: 27)
Diala avers too that Sycorax “endorses a familiar indictment of Shakespeare’s play as [what Thomas Cartelli (1999) calls] an ‘unmistakable embodiment of colonialist presumption’ and a ‘foundational paradigm in the history of European colonialism’” (2012: 27).
Sycorax is a theatrical maze, a challenge for any director who chooses to stage it. It is a theatrically fluid play because it flows freely from beginning to end with minimal breaks and scene changes. It is complex, however, due to its myriad staging techniques — flashback, play-within-a-play, multiple role playing, and the use of narration to bridge the gap between differences in time, persona, and location. Set in the Caribbean island of Jamaica, it opens with three characters — Sycorax, Caribbean (not Caliban as in Shakespeare), and Ariel 2 — who take turns chiding the bard for misrepresenting them. Sycorax frees Ariel from the bole of a tree where Prospero had him immured before taking leave of the island. They are lovers and Sycorax is obviously exploiting Ariel sexually. The major part of the play’s action is the re-enactment and narration of the travails of an ex-director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Adrian, who got sacked and also divorced for attempting to stage The Tempest with a multicultural cast back in England. Through a mix of flashbacks and narration, Adrian’s loss of job, family, reputation, and livelihood is presented. His problem started with his choice of a weed-smoking Rastafarian, Sugar Cane, as Caliban; who after reading Paget Henry’s Caliban Reason (a book he brandishes like a weapon) revolts against Shakespeare’s depiction. He then gives the director two difficult options: either he plays Prospero (a white role, with his black skin), or he rewrites/interprets Caliban. Following these disagreements, the production fails.
With the interchangeable personae of Sugar Cane and Caribbean, Irobi alludes to African slaves, the West Indies, and sugar cane plantations. This effort validates Michelle Cliff’s belief that in reclaiming its history, the Caribbean must find the art forms of its African ancestors and mix in the “form taught us by the oppressor, undermining his language and co-opting his style, and turning it to our purpose” (1985: 14). Furthermore, in the Caribbean, Sugar Cane’s interpretation prevails over Shakespeare’s. We see a more assertive Caliban, without deformity. Sycorax is not silenced, but instead she frees Ariel and they start a mysterious kind of amorous relationship. Prospero is presented as a man full of flaws, with suggestions of incestuous relations with his daughter Miranda, as well as flirtation with Ariel. He unsuccessfully tries to marry off his daughter to Ferdinand because the young prince is gay, and is set to leave the island when Caliban (Sugar Cane) “pulls the trigger of his detonator” (Irobi, 2013: 139)
3
and the vessel explodes into smithereens before it can set sail. But the play does not end here. Sycorax comes up to explain that the version in which all Europeans died has been changed. She states: We changed it because all the European characters had changed. So, why kill them off just as Shakespeare killed me off because he did not know what to do with me and my powers in his own play? We could have blown them to pieces but… we let them go. […]
In the following second ending, the stage direction states that the ship sails away with all the Europeans on board, including Ariel. Then the duo of Sycorax and Shakespeare present a lengthy epilogue in which the latter finally admits he made some errors in his version and admonishes humanity to accommodate each other despite differences of race, sex, and gender. This concluding statement is a pointer to what Irobi designed his version for: an accommodationist kind of narrative that downplays differences of any kind.
The politics of race, gender, and sexuality
The main characters of Irobi’s Sycorax are deployed variously in dealing with the themes of the play and the associated politics of postcolonial assertiveness. Irobi starts this off with the construction of a Sycorax that is visible, self-confident, non-conformist, and revolutionary. Laurie Scott-Reyes has observed that “by suppressing Sycorax, [Shakespeare] sustains her”, because his “inclusion of a powerful African witch was progressive”. As such, by Scott-Reyes’ observation, and rightly so too, whether Shakespeare did it “consciously or unconsciously, [Sycorax] is a symbol of enduring feminine power” (2017: 61–62). Irobi’s version thus moves from merely naming this character to creating her, and in this text, she alleges that Shakespeare killed her because he did not know what to do with her and the powers she wielded (140). This is to suggest that her assertiveness and superhuman abilities, in conjunction with her being an African woman, were so transgressive that Shakespeare had no choice but to submerge her beneath Prospero’s gigantic personality. Irobi inverts this by making her not to cower beneath, but to tower above Prospero. Her disinterment and presence frames her as a heroine, a black, female, and possibly bisexual Sycorax. Shakespeare’s Caliban, unlike his Sycorax, has a presence and a voice, albeit a distorted reality. But in spite of his being physically present in Shakespeare’s version, both he and Sycorax are the only ones vilified, demonized, and not allowed to speak for themselves. Thus, they bear the representations of themselves as presented by others such as Prospero and Miranda. Consequently, it is rather difficult to have any meaningful positive portraiture from the same individuals who view them as inferior and less-than-human beings.
Gayatri Spivak and Sneja Gunew “somewhat derisively” consider a situation where individuals are meant to have a say or not based on their skin colour and/or genitals as “chromatism” and “genitalism” respectively (1990: 62). These terms “indicate the fallacy of making simplistic and stereotypical distinctions of race and gender and to suggest that the range of difference within these categories is a matter of representation and discursive construction” (Ashcroft et al., 2000: 33). Hence, where Shakespeare’s dark-skinned Caliban is presented as a beast, his equally black Sycorax did not even qualify to have a presence for being female as well as being racially inferiorized. This suggests that with the paucity of female presence in The Tempest, a black female persona is most unlikely to have a presence at all. Irobi, in response to this unfair gender representation, peoples his play with other islanders, some of whom are women; invents a female character, Lady Francisco, among the Milanese visitors; creates a cast of Adrian’s production that includes women; and then restores and foregrounds Sycorax, while retaining Miranda. Irobi thus presents a vision of profusion, diversity, and interchangeability in his Sycorax through the creation of racial and gender balance that offers implicit critique of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and its privileging of white, male power.
Quite adjoined to the issue of race are contemporary issues of non-white migration from the global south to north. Considering himself as a “Biafran exile”
4
when living and working in the US, UK, and even in what was supposedly his own country, Nigeria (Balme, 2014: 17), Irobi saw himself as one who is perpetually in exile. He never presented himself as a Nigerian, but always held on to Biafra, consistently seeing the Nigerian government and state as an occupying force in the same way that the islanders in Sycorax view Prospero and the entire royal retinue from Milan as they land on their shores. The disorientation that accompanies such existence is captured in this statement by Ariel: All shipwrecked men and women always lose a sense of time and place. They enter a time warp; a liminal threshold where they are in a place that is no place, a time that is no time. A time of marvels. They have hallucinations. They see apparitions. They have illusions. (118–19)
This is the product of nostalgia; a deep-seated longing for one’s homeland which, Ariel further remarks, “forces us to rename the landscape we have been exiled to with the names of the places we were uprooted from” (16). This kind of renaming can be seen all over the world: “Look at Australia, the USA, Canada, Barbados and Jamaica. Do these places not ricochet with the names of cities, boroughs, parishes of English towns and country sides the castaways came from?” (16). But while white immigrants have become dominant over their settler colonies, it has largely been different for non-white migrants. For the latter group, their experience of discrimination and marginalization is often intensified by racism. Even Ariel, a black individual arriving in majority-black Jamaica, is labelled “an illegal immigrant from the Dominican Republic” (20). Due to the disempowerment that accompanies the undesirable status of immigrant especially for non-white individuals, Ariel is forced to become a sexualized toy for Prospero, first, and then Sycorax; such sex work is an agonizing reality for innumerable Africans in the West today.
Irobi also interrogates the disparity between instances of forced emigration for whites and non-whites. Prospero is forced into exile, but on arrival on the island, just before the curtain rises in both plays, he overthrows Sycorax, enslaves her son, and takes over the island. In Shakespeare, this act is a divine right, but in Irobi’s play it is abominable. Furthermore, alluding to the brutalities meted out to indigenous peoples in Australia by those subject to transportation from Britain, who despite their position as supposed criminals in a penal colony, expropriated land and embarked on extermination, Sebastian prays for “[a] world in which criminals banished to foreign islands will not enslave its inhabitants, exterminate the native owners of the land, crush them into ashes and fine grains of sand…” (123). Equally, through Ariel, Irobi counters the master narrative of Christopher Columbus as explorer/discoverer in the “West Indies” (10–11), and the history of slavery in the Americas which followed: When Christopher Columbus landed here in his first journey […]. He wasted millions of the indigenes of these islands in goldmines where he forced them to search for gold by clawing at earth with their bare hands and bleeding fingernails. […] [A]fter that it became necessary to import shiploads of Africans to look for more gold and work as slaves in the sugar cane plantations. Sixty million Africans died in the sea crossing before they got here from Africa. Did you know that? (120)
Here, it is obvious that the natives and the imported blacks share a common history of subjugation and maltreatment, justified by colonial racial logic. Their masters saw prosperity in their trade and wrote about it only; but the oppressed saw death and deprivation. Thus, in honour of those who had these detestable experiences, perhaps, Sugar Cane goes to the sea to “commune” with his drowned ancestors, thrown overboard and “eaten by sharks, piranhas and other monsters of the deep. My ancestors, male and female, whose bones and skeletons are laid like a rail road on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean” (46).
Moreover, Irobi’s treatment of gender as regards Ariel is multivalent and complicated. S/he describes him/herself thus: Listen friends, my real name is Icarus. I am an actor. I come from the Dominican Republic. And I am neither man nor woman. I am a he/she. (removes his costume and exposes his breasts) A transgendered transvestite… (22)
But Ferdinand calls him/her a “hermaphrodite” (83) leaving one to wonder which one s/he is — transvestite or hermaphrodite. This is instructive because in Ariel, Irobi deliberately creates a character that is fe/male, neither male nor female, at the level of gender while possessing both male and female biological attributes as a hermaphrodite. Thus, Ariel is gender fluid as evidenced in the statement “transgendered transvestite”; which means that s/he performs different gender forms depending on individual situations and personal choice. Additionally, it is worthy of note that the stage direction, in Ariel’s statement above, refers to this character as male, an indication perhaps, that even though the authorial voice considers them as male, the character themself is constructed to perform diverse and non-binary gender roles.
On sexuality, Ariel’s sexual and gender fluidity queries not only their sexual proclivity but also that of their ex-lover Prospero, and present lover Sycorax. The eponymous heroine describes Prospero’s sexual preference as “AC/DC”, meaning that he goes both ways; he is bisexual (25). She says further that Ariel also dated him prior to her own slavish amorous liaison from which s/he continues to seek for release till play’s end (25–26). This relationship between the duo bears the form of BDSM role play because Ariel serves Sycorax’s sexual needs as gratitude for her releasing him/her/them from the “bole of a sea grape” (26); and not necessarily because he/she/they love(s) her. Ariel is obviously an unwilling, but pliant partner in Sycorax’s sexual satisfaction. His/her/their definition of their relationship goes thus: “she asked me to suck out her pussy seven times a day…” (26); “I have become your little sex toy, haven’t I? […] Sycorax, I no longer love you. […] You are too domineering […] You are insatiable!” (27). Stemming from these statements, Ariel can best be described as being gender/sexually fluid, on the one hand, but entirely coerced, on the other. His/her/their relationship with Sycorax — born out of unending gratitude and feeling of indebtedness, libidinal fantasies, constant sexual availability, and exploitation — parallels the entire gamut of unquantifiable colonial expectations projected onto black or brown colonized bodies and communities.
Irobi’s exploration of sexuality in this text is excessive and overspilling. Apart from Ariel and Sycorax’s excessively queer sexual affiliations, Ferdinand is indubitably homosexual (58). His specialty is deflowering young virgins, an allusion to the abuse of young altar boys by Catholic priests:
There are no virgins left in Italy.
Why?
The Catholic priests disvirgin them very young during confession. (84)
Then, Miranda herself is here, unlike in Shakespeare’s text, seeking out avenues to rape Caribbean. She is a nudist (49), sexually voracious (62–63), and having possible incestuous relations with her father Prospero, especially through oral sex (88, 94). She tells Ferdinand:
This unsavoury tirade on penis sizes underscores the possibility that Prospero could have had oral sex with Miranda, and thus reveals a form of sexuality that defies any kind of normative bi-, hetero-, or homosexual relations. There is also a suggestion that he could be sexually violent or abusive, as seen in Ariel’s warning to Ferdinand that if he gets stranded on that island, my master (points at Prospero’s cell) an expert in three-hour retrograde ejaculations will fuck you in the arse three times a day until you bleed like little altar boys in the sacristy of the Catholic Church and die from cancer of the rectum. (85)
In a hyperbolic manner, Ariel defines Prospero’s sexuality as violently and transgressively sadomasochistic. Lastly, there is the duo, Trinculo and Stephano, who are having sex under a blanket on stage (99); but Stephano at the same time claims that he wants to marry Miranda, and go back home to become king of Italy (107). His plans after marrying the princess and becoming regent are interesting for the way that they conflate sexual fantasy with that of (neo)colonial exploitation, as seen in the following statement of his: We will make love seven times a day on this island or in my palace in Rome. […] We will fuck up the “turd” world […] in every glistening orifice. (109)
Through the rush of incontinent sexuality, perversity, and cruelty in Sycorax, Irobi exhumes the real viciousness underpinning Shakespeare’s text — that of the whole history of empire. He brings to the surface the violence which goes unnamed and unacknowledged in Shakespeare’s play (that of colonial expropriation and enslavement), and the one which is foregrounded (Caliban’s supposed wish to rape Miranda). These intermixtures elicit relationships bordering on colonial histories of domination, violence, and forms of political rapaciousness (traced, for example, in the line “we will fuck up the ‘turd’ world”). The stark contrast between European mobility taken up freely, in the name of mercantilist expansion and colonial subjugation, and the enforced movements of African people occasioned by slavery, colonialism, extreme poverty, and wars that serve the interests of nations more powerful than theirs, is an instance of how the “turd” world is messed up. It is this that compels Sugar Cane (the character that is to play Caliban in Sycorax) to rewrite Shakespeare’s play to reflect his and his people’s realities (37). Sugar Cane is particularly incensed by the manner in which Caliban and his mother are vilified, and at the climax of his outburst, Sugar Cane violently throws his copy of Paget Henry’s Caliban’s Reason at the Director, hitting him directly on the chest (47). This book of Henry’s is renowned for its resuscitation and insistence on Afro-Caribbean philosophy, and its figuring of Caribbean abstract thought through the figure of Caliban. It is thus a veritable weapon to chuck at a director who adamantly refuses to see the one-sidedness of the script she or he is working with. This is part of Irobi’s theatrics: pelting Adrian with Caliban’s Reason to make him see “reason”, to be tolerant of other views, and be more receptive of multiculturality.
The performance of race, gender, and sexuality
Irobi deploys a piebald theatrical form that includes spectacle (exemplified by an emphatic, overblown, and/or carnivalesque theatricality), provocatively lewd diction, multivalent characters, and a divergent plot line, thereby making his play an open form which is at once democratic and anticolonial. His play reads in a manner comparable to French dramatist Antonin Artaud, 5 who advocated for a kind of theatre that seeks to release human consciousness through the staging of excessive violence in his Theatre of Cruelty. Sycorax’s carnivalesque-patterned representation of sexuality which involves shocking (and at the same time somewhat comic) graphic depictions of rape and assault, especially between Ariel and Sycorax, acts as a force of the weak against the strong and aids the recuperation of submerged female identities and assertiveness. The inversion of power relations, which results in the emergence of a more emboldened Sycorax and Caliban, forms part of Irobi’s dramatic vision. His play thus goes beyond the mere discussion of politics to the enactment of protest and resistance. Beyond the striking aspects of its spectacular theatricality, complex plot, and outrageous characterization, its sexualized language and on-stage action are intentionally highly provocative. This is vividly exemplified in the band members who are “All over the beach rubbing up and fondling each other in their moist and tender places” (18–19), the Obeah woman who stands astride Shakespeare’s grave causing him to resurrect with an erection (66), as well as Shakespeare’s consideration of whipping as foreplay (79).
Irobi’s language and dramatic vision have always been provocative and unsettling: in Nwokedi (1991), the eponymous hero executes his own father and brother-in-law for being corrupt public officers; in Hangmen Also Die (1989), youths of an oil-producing community go on a killing spree to rid themselves of corrupt leaders who have been colluding with oil companies in deceiving the people; The Fronded Circle (1999) chronicles the misdeeds and eventual demise of Onwutuebe, an old man who magically prolongs his life by exchanging it with his children’s; while ultimately, his poem, “An African Poet Curses His English Head of Department” (2007), is laden with vituperations and curses on his departmental head whom he calls “Head of Donkey”. 6 None of these earlier works equals Sycorax in the deployment of extreme and disquieting diction; but their general predilection nonetheless positions Irobi’s oeuvre as one that exudes unsheathed dramatic rage. Spivak and Gunew explain this condition with the suggestion that people “develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written […] an abject script” about them, and because of that they attempt “a historical critique” of their positions as the investigating persons, to earn “the right to criticize, and […] be heard” (1990: 62; emphasis in the original).
In Sycorax therefore, Irobi proposes a new style of theatre which offers plays as drafts that will be “open maps and negotiating tools” to allow actors and audiences to participate, especially in places “where indigenous populations have either been exterminated or excluded from mainstream theatre”, with a view to seeing “how this new democratic approach to theatre-making subverts the aesthetics and political ideologies of Western master narratives such as The Tempest both on the page and the stage” (5–6; emphasis in original). Irobi calls this predilection the “‘akpankoro’ 7 theory of theatre-making” which he avers “can go towards the recuperation of submerged female identities, presences, epistemes of performance in our theatre histories and aesthetics” (6). The akpankoro game destabilizes inequities through the enablement of equal opportunities for all participants. It negates assumptions of superiority based on where or who an individual is. It can be repeated in every location with the same level of evenness. In the theatre, therefore, what Irobi suggests is that a play like Sycorax is his own interpretation in accordance with the realities of his own existence as a diasporic African. At the same time, every other individual is enabled to re-adapt the script in ways that are suitable to their own conditions. Hence, the fact that the adapted versions are dissimilar does not matter because they individually represent realities that are valid to sections of humanity that deserve to be heard and not silenced for any reason.
Consequently, Irobi’s reality requires that Sycorax is re-personified as a counter-discursive character so she can directly respond to Shakespeare’s misrepresentation of her: she was never a witch (9); she was the one that freed Ariel after s/he was imprisoned by Prospero (19); and it was Prospero that molested Ariel without ever freeing him/her (25). Here, she is the heroine, portrayed favourably and imbued with overarching assertiveness which enables her to challenge Prospero, even conquering him and taking over her rightful place in a society that is hers. She is so humanely presented in Irobi’s version that even Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, describes her with great warmth: [She] [k]new the name of every single plant and root in the island. Loved to cure illnesses and diseases. She was a healer. And like a mother to me. Used to carry me in her arms and sprinkle the juice of strange herbs on me each time I had a fever or a cold. (pause, tears come to her eyes) She loved me very much. (88)
Miranda further recounts how Sycorax loved her father (89). Thus, Sycorax becomes the heroic victim here, Prospero the irrational brutalizer. She is not only given her own voice to speak, but also the perspective of another woman character, who can vouch for her. In the same vein, Sugar Cane augments Sycorax in the projection of a drama that disrupts the status quo of colonial misrepresentations as epitomized by The Tempest. This is seen in the manner in which he queries Adrian’s casting for the play:
Sugar Cane,
Yes, like Miranda, a virgin. Ariel, an angel. Prospero, the Alpha and Omega of the universe. With power over life and death on the island. But Caliban? Caliban is a monster. A smelly, cursed, deformed, monstrous thing. (Bitterly) A thing of darkness. A slave and savage who babbles like the natives on the banks of the Congo river in Joseph Conrad’s
He then wonders what black people will take away from a theatre that marginalizes them, while Adrian is embroiled in self-deception by downplaying the racial dimensions of his preferences. And to support the agitations of the duo of Sycorax and Caribbean, Irobi creates a community of rebels. When Sycorax is done telling Adrian that since black people do not find themselves on the English stage, they have decided to stay away (56), other islanders give him a roll call of Shakespeare’s racial others (57). The combined effect of these interjections propels Sycorax to declare interest in playing Miranda (58) and as the character herself protests, she retorts after giving her “three rapid slaps”: What you take me for? A Spook? Some shadow? A silhouette? Some invisible and intangible thing that has no form or shape. A pillar of darkness? Don’t you think I deserve a chance to play a lead role in a Shakespearean play once in this life time. (begins to choke her) (58–59)
The essence of this outburst transcends the immediate issues that stirred it, to touch on all forms of segregation that exclude women, people of colour, and queer subjects from playing lead roles. The stage action is therefore used to symbolically “choke” all unfavourable conditions of uneven existence.
Furthermore, Irobi deliberately blurs any line of division between his own adaptation of The Tempest and his character Adrian’s stage rendition of that play within his text. Sycorax intertextually blends the actions of the play-within-a-play into that of Irobi’s rewriting of Shakespeare’s play, thereby leading to a fusion of actors and characters within Sycorax. This conflation of actors and characters is essentially Irobi’s manner of creating a dramatic world of people who represent diverse interests, explore multiple identities, and address the multifarious issues of contemporary existence within formerly colonized societies. Consequently, there are personality shifts for the major characters of the play as seen in Sugar Cane who is also Narrator, Caribbean, and Caliban; Adrian who also becomes Prospero, Shakespeare, Director, and Priest; and then Sycorax who plays Obeah Woman, as well as Miranda shown in many other roles. These character transitions go beyond multiple role play to being representative of the range of myriad issues arising from colonial exploitation and subjugation of black people which Irobi concerns himself with in this play. Sycorax and Obeah Woman, for instance, have an axe to grind with Shakespeare and obviously want him brought back so he can answer for his silencing of black femininity. The transition into Obeah Woman imbues this composite character with a religious essence that also alludes to the contributions of her kind in being the spiritual guides of their communities while they were being enslaved and colonized. Prospero transits between being the Director and Priest — the very roles that typify colonial dominance and subjugation of the colonized — and as Shakespeare, he is the chronicler of a history of colonization which speaks badly of the natives and gloriously of the colonizer. With the emergence of Sugar Cane as himself and as Narrator, Irobi dramatically dispossesses the bard of his pen and gives it to a young local who now takes up the onerous duty of rewriting his people’s story; a better narrative of the Caribbean and its inhabitants, which he eventually personifies. Then as an assertive Caliban, we see a fearless persona who accosted the two lovebirds, Trinculo and Stephano, who, in a bid to intimidate him, told him that they were gods: I am a Caribbean. (Picks up a bottle, smashes the bottom on a stone. Displays the jagged edge) And we Caribbeans … are god-killers. (101)
Both take to their heels. In this new environment, this Caliban does not cower. He does not run from powers that want to dominate him. Thus, by unapologetically relocating the place of action to the habitat of formerly colonized peoples in the Caribbean, Irobi upends the power balance, as all the white characters find themselves outnumbered and overwhelmed by their formerly characteristic serfs. The tables have turned, and a new Caliban has emerged!
Irobi’s Sycorax takes on a colossus, melts it down and rebuilds it in an entirely different form, making sure that in the process it throws away its weaknesses and one-sidedness. This does not suppose that it is a perfect work or one that is superior to Shakespeare’s. It is rather a voice, albeit a counter-discourse, which could have its own flaws but is, however, buoyed by its strength which is that it is the tale of those who The Tempest elected to ignore or silence. They have found their voices and are now able to speak for themselves. The ingenuity of Irobi’s work is that through his suggestion of a new theatre game — akpankoro — he offers Sycorax as a working script for others who might be interested in unearthing other silences. In other words, Sycorax is a counter-discursive text which envisages other dissenting dramatic voices that could use it as a basis for their own utterances.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
Izuu Nwankwọ E. is also affiliated to Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies (STIAS), South Africa.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper was developed during the Carnegie Fund’s African Humanities Program (AHP) Manuscript Development Workshop in Kampala, Uganda in 2016 and by ACLS (American Council for Learned Societies) which runs AHP.
