A Tempest by Aim Cesaire

 

Thanking Activity:   A Tempest Aim Cesaire.

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        Here I'm going to write about A Tempest by Aim Cesaire this topic is part of our Syllabus .

     

        # About Aim Cesaire  #

   

   Aimé Césaire was born June 26, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, a small town on the northeast coast of Martinique in the French Caribbean. He attended the Lycée Schoelcher in Martinique, and the Parisian schools Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.

   He was "one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature". 

  A response to Shakespeare's play The Tempest, and Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism), an essay describing the strife between the colonizers and the colonized. His works have been translated into many languages.

   

                # A Tempest # 

      

               A Tempest is a postcolonial revision of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and draws heavily on the original play—the cast of characters is, for the most part, the same, and the foundation of the plot follows the same basic premise. 

            A Tempest by Aime Cesaire was originally published in 1969 in French by Editions du Seuil in Paris. Cesaire, a recognized poet, essayist, playwright, and politician, was born in Martinique in 1913 and, until his death in 2008, had been instrumental in voicing post-colonial concerns. In the 1930s, he, along with Leopold Senghor and Leon Gontian Damas, developed the negritude movement which endeavored to question French colonial rule and restore the cultural identity of blacks in the African diaspora. 

       Aime Cesaire Cesaire transforms the characters and transposes the scenes to reveal Shakespeare’s Prospero as the exploitative European power and Caliban and Ariel as the exploited natives. Cesaire’s A Tempest is an effective response to Shakespeare’s The Tempest because he interprets it from the perspective of the colonized and raises a conflict with Shakespeare as an icon of the literary canon. Besides that in In The Tempest by William Shakespeare one might argue that colonialism is a reoccurring theme throughout the play because of the slave-master relationship between Ariel and Caliban and Prospero.

It is also noticeable through the major and minor changes in status among the temporary inhabitants of the island like Trinculo and Stephano. These relationships support the theme that power is not reciprocal and that in a society. A Tempest as a proclamation of resistance to European cultural dominance a project to “de-mythify” Shakespeare’s canonical text. In A Tempest, Caliban attempts to authorize his own freedom by speaking it, positioning speech as a tool to empower the colonized. By placing Caliban, the speaking slave, in the pages of a new play with a specific historical trajectory, Cesaire’s message of colonial empowerment forces a second critique of Shakespeare while also inhabiting a space of its own. To connect speech with power, Cesaire’s text focuses on the role of dialogue within the colonial system, emphasizing its unique ability to move between the disparate subjective spaces of the colonizer and the colonized. Infusing speech theory with politics, Cesaire points out the dual possibilities of negotiation between the colonizers and colonized in his play; speech functions both to disrupt and reaffirm the identities of his players in the colonial system. By presenting colonial power structures as contestable, negotiable, and provisional, A Tempest exists outside the boundaries of a simple revision, as it engages with The Tempest to reveal the potential for language to act.

    The action in the play closely follows that of Shakespeare's play, though Césaire emphasizes the importance of the people who inhabited the island before the arrival of Prospero and his daughter Miranda: Caliban and Ariel. Both have been enslaved by Prospero, though Caliban was the ruler of the island before Prospero's arrival.

  Caliban and Ariel react differently to their situation. Caliban favors revolution over Ariel's non-violence, and rejects his name as the imposition of Prospero's colonizing language, desiring to be called X. He complains stridently about his enslavement and regrets not being powerful enough to challenge the reign of Prospero. Ariel, meanwhile, contents himself with asking Prospero to consider giving him independence.

   At the end of the play, Prospero grants Ariel his freedom, but retains control of the island and of Caliban. This is a notable departure from Shakespeare's version, in which Prospero leaves the island with his daughter and the men who were shipwrecked there at the beginning of the play.