Ariel vs. Caliban in Cesaire's 'A Tempest': The Complexity of the Colonized Anonymous 12th Grade

Aimé Césaire’s 1969 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest strives to provoke postcolonial sentiment in its audience by demoting the shipwreck plot and instead focusing primarily on the unjust relationships between the sorcerer Prospero and his slaves Ariel and Caliban. It is immediately made clear that Prospero plays the role of the tyrannical colonizer in Césaire’s allegory and that the slaves represent his colonized victims, but still the question might be asked: why two victims? If colonizer versus colonized is such an intense dichotomy, why complicate things with a third party? While it is true that excluding Ariel from Prospero’s and Caliban’s rivalry may have put a finer point on the tension, Césaire keeps him around as not to oversimplify the role of the colonized. The differences he draws between Ariel’s and Caliban’s physical, emotional, and behavioral dispositions attest to the diversity within a colonized people, and moreover to the fact that there is not just one way to exist as a victim.

The first mention of Ariel can be found in the character notes, where he is prefaced as “a mulatto slave,” rendering him literally in the middle of Prospero and Caliban on the racial spectrum. It is not surprising then that his...