Cultural Intertexts (Oct 2017)
Diaspora Theatre and the Yoruba Sacred Tradition: Aimé Césaire‘s A Tempest
Abstract
Poet and playwright, Aimé Césaire occupies a prominent place in the history of Caribbean literature generally, and postcolonial Shakespeare adaptation scholarship in particular. His adaptation of Shakespeare‘s The Tempest, entitled A Tempest, described by Peter Dickinson as a ―classic of postcolonial drama,‖ has continually been examined by scholars in light of how the play engages, and consequently exposes, Shakespeare‘s text as a ―foundational allegory of the experience of colonization and the expression of cultural imperialism‖ (Dickinson 2002: 194-5). Most commentators have however neglected to explore the play‘s cultural content, while those who did merely acknowledged without detailing how, and to what extent, Césaire has deployed African rituals both in characterisation and in the area of theatricality. This essays re-examines the text with particular attention on the ritual aesthetics under which the political metaphor is subsumed. The paper argues that the ritual aesthetics in question derives from the Yoruba epistemology, and then links diaspora theatre and Césaire‘s dramaturgy in the play to both The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963) and A Season in the Congo (1967), and to the same Yoruba ritual source.
