The Search for Afro-Caribbean Identity

The Search for the Afro-Caribbean Identity

Brathwaite’s “Caliban” depicts an islander descended from Africans who had endured the hardships and horrors of the slave ships on the Middle Passage. Brathwaite reconfigures Shakespeare’s Caliban, the subjugated native, as the persona of the islander who is trying to recover his African roots and create a new decolonized tradition in the Caribbean. Driven by his quest to achieve racial wholeness, Caliban finds a way to emerge from the depths of uncertainty about his identity by defining Caribbean popular culture and art. “Caliban” conveys the main components of Caribbean culture: song, dance, and language; each element derives from the African adoration of nature which is also seen in both Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Césaire’s A Tempest. Nature serves as the heart of their practices and traditions, in a sense, similar to the worship of a divine nature. Brathwaite examines each of the human art forms of the Caribbean to reveal the spirit and culture of the islands, which simultaneously characterize the Afro-Caribbean people.

“Caliban” begins with an evocation of the prerevolutionary Havana, where “these modern palaces have grown out of the soil, out of the bad habits of their crippled owners” (Brathwaite, 1.34). The modernization of Havana is depicted to be decadent because it is an assault on nature. Harmony with nature is crucial in African culture and thereby is also rooted in the culture of the Afro-Caribbeans. While they have a greater appreciation and respect for nature, the white society is considered to be the “Anti-Nature,” a name that Caliban calls Prospero in A Tempest (Césaire 52). For Brathwaite, the legacy of European and American power in the Caribbean is the death not only of the sons of Africa, but also of songs, of sunshine, of birds, and of coral (Brathwaite, 1.34). The hyphen across the stanza-break in the word ‘mindless’ passes judgment on the Western white man. The economic development comes “out of the coney/ islands of our mind-,” but the “mind” is transformed into “our mindless architects” (Brathwaite, 1.34). Brathwaite turns “mind” to “mindless” to rebuke the whites for their attempt to master nature (Brathwaite, 1.34). Caliban, however, maintains a connection to the natural world. His proper utilization of nature proves to be a solution to overcoming the Westerners, whose abuse of nature licenses the destruction of nature and hence of mankind. Where Ariel’s song in The Tempest imagines a transformation from dead bone to living coral, economic progress is portrayed as the destructive transformation of living coral into dead cement (Brathwaite, 1.34; Shakespeare, I.2.398). He critiques against the urbanized, artificial Europeans, for their methods to dominate the earth results in nothing but corruption and decay. Meanwhile, the islanders become more powerful as they discover