Prospero's Daughter

Channeling Shakespeare: Prospero's daughter turns a classic plot inside out to examine questions about colonization, race and rape

IMAGINE ME, A 14-YEAR-OLD BROWN-skinned girl, fixing on the island of Trinidad, a colony of England. I am lucky enough to have won a scholarship to one of the premier secondary schools that the British colonial government had helped to establish for the children of the plantation owners and the British colonial masters. Imagine I am sitting in Mother Perpetua's class (not her real name). We are reading The Tempest, a play by William Shakespeare. In that play, a European, Prospero, and his daughter, Miranda, have been set adrift on the ocean by Prospero's envious, evil brother. Prospero and Miranda end up on an isolated, tropical island. There are two creatures on the island, one a deformed, freckled male savage called Caliban, and the other an airy spirit, Ariel.

When the play begins, Prospero and Miranda have been on the island for 12 years. We learn that it is only recent that Prospero has imprisoned Caliban. Prospero tells us why. He says Caliban "didst seek to violate the honor of my child." In other words, Caliban had attempted to rape Miranda.

Mother Perpetua does not hide her revulsion. I think it is not our hot, tropical climate that makes her face turn beet red. I think it is this talk of sex, the picture she has formed in her head of a black man raping a young white woman. Her voice rises and perspiration pearls on her top lip as she reads lines from the play where Prospero calls Caliban a savage, a lying slave, a misshapen knave whose body grows uglier with age, "a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick."

Mother Perpetua takes out her handkerchief and wipes her brow. Caliban is an ungrateful brute, she tells us, unappreciative of the kindness Prospero has extended to him. Her indignation is as righteous as Prospero's when Prospero lashes out at Caliban for his ingratitude: "I have us'd thee / (Filth as thou art) with humane care, and lodg'd thee / In mine own cell...."

On Being Colonized

I cringe in my seat because, even at 14, I cannot miss the parallels between my situation in a British colony and Caliban's. In both our cases, Europeans have come to our islands, and though surely they have laid claim to our land, they have given us much in return. I am proof of their beneficence, siring in a classroom, getting an education they have been kind enough to provide for me. Prospero, too, makes it clear that his stinging condemnation is directed not only at Caliban. Caliban is "a lying slave / Whom stripes may move, not kindness" He later says Caliban belongs to a "vile race."

But Caliban does not cringe. He strikes out at Prospero. He taunts him: "You taught me language; and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse. / The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!"

Imagine me now an older teenager, giddy with the pride that has overtaken my island, now that Trinidad has gained its independence from England. The Barbadian writer George Lamming publishes The Pleasures of Exile. He proclaims Caliban a hero, a Caribbean man who defies the colonizer and claims his rightful ownership of his island. I reread The Tempest. I commit to memory Caliban's audacious assertion: "This island's mine by Sycorax my mother / Which thou tak'st from me."

Imagine me now in graduate school in the United States, working on a dissertation for a Ph.D. in English literature. I ask my professor to explain what Prospero means when he says Caliban's mother was "a blue-eyed hag." Was Caliban's mother a white woman? I ask. Oh surely not, my professor says. Caliban is meant to be a sort of savage, a colored man, his name a derivative of cannibal. Hag is the operative word. Caliban's mother was an old black woman whose eyes had turned blue because of cataracts, he explains. Tricky Shakespeare! Let's say Caliban's mother had Caliban at 20 (which is old, given that she slept around), she would have had to be at least 75 for the cataracts to thicken so her eyes would appear blue.

Which means Caliban was a dirty old man around age 55 when he attempted to rape a 15-year-old virgin. Must one add lecherous old man to the names Prospero calls Caliban? To what degree must one suspend logic to avoid identification with Caliban?

In Killens Class

Imagine me now a professor at Medgar Evers College. I am chairperson of the Humanities Division. The extraordinary African American writer John Oliver Killens joins our faculty as writer-in-residence. He asks me if I have ever been interested in becoming a writer. I have been waiting years for someone to ask me that question.

Encouraged by his genuine interest and his kindly manner, I dare to show him some scraps of paper on which I have scribbled the beginnings of a novel. The next week, I am in his Saturday writing workshop. In it are Terry McMillan, who is working on Mama; Doris Jean Austin, who is writing After the Garden; and Arthur Flowers, who has started De Mojo Blues.

Killens inspires us. He tells us that every time he picks up his pen or strikes a key on the keyboard, his intent is to change the world. He tells us that writers of color have a responsibility to use their talents to change the negative ways in which people of color see themselves, and the negative ways in which they are portrayed by others. He makes me think of the days I hung my head in shame as Mother Perpetua castigated Caliban. He makes me think of my outrage later on, after I read Lamming. He makes me try to examine my attitude toward the British, why in spite of my anger for their colonization of my island, I continue to admire them and find it impossible to summon up a rage similar to the rage that many of my African American friends have toward white America.

Killens dies too soon, four short years after I met him, one short year after he and I worked together to organize the first National Black Writers Conference at which the venerable Maya Angelou spoke, and which I continued to direct for 17 more years, drawing on the capital Killens left behind, which brought distinguished writers to our college who had not forgotten how generously he had shared his talent and knowledge with them. I write five novels, but I continue to be haunted by Killens's charge to writers of color; I continue to be haunted by my discomfort with scholarly interpretations of The Tempest. I ask myself questions I had not asked in my doctoral dissertation. I ask why, after 12 years of an apparently amicable relationship with Caliban, does Prospero turn on him? What actually happened between Miranda and Caliban? What connection is there in the coincidental timing of Prospero's desperation to find a husband for Miranda and his accusation that Caliban attempted to rape her?

I write a novel to find the answers. I write Prospero's Daughter. It is a contemporary novel about an English doctor, Philip Gardner, who, with his daughter, Virginia, is stranded on a former leper colony off the coast of Trinidad. Living on the island is a boy, Carlos, whose eyes, like his mother's, are blue, and a girl, Ariana. Twelve years later, Gardner accuses Carlos of attempting to rape Virginia. Why? What really happened on the island between Carlos and Virginia? What part does Gardner play in the events that lead up to this accusation? Is Ariana, as Caribbean scholars have said of Shakespeare's Ariel, a wilting lackey to Gardner? Is she, like Ariel, a spy for the European? What hold does Gardner have on her?

It takes me four years, writing and rewriting, destroying page after page--at one time, almost a hundred pages--to discover the answers to these questions. Prospero's Daughter, of course, was many more years in the making.

Elizabeth Nunez, City University of New York Distinguished Professor at Medgar Evers College, is the author of five other novel, including Bruised Hibiscus