Abstract
A late example of Nobel laureate Derek Walcott’s career-long interest both in theatre and in echoing Shakespeare, A Branch of the Blue Nile considers the relationship between postcolonial subjects and the culture of their former colonizers, as a Trinidadian theatre company tries to stage an indigenized Antony and Cleopatra. As well as the heritage of shame attached to his heroine’s dark skin because of its reminder of black women’s abjection during slavery, Walcott’s revision of Antony and Cleopatra also takes up questions of representation and performance. While Walcott’s career was marked by his creative negotiations with the cultural remainders of the Caribbean’s colonial past, his Trinidadian Cleopatra is finally unable to negotiate a way of being beyond her formation within the stifling regulation of her island’s sexual and racial histories.
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Notes
- 1.
On Henri Christophe’s Shakespearean modeling, see Edward Baugh, “Of Men and Heroes: Walcott and the Haitian Revolution,” Callaloo 28.1 (2005), 47–49.
- 2.
C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd revised ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 391.
- 3.
I cite A Branch of the Blue Nile in Three Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 217, 218. I’ll provide future references parenthetically in my text.
- 4.
Here, I am following Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), who notes that historical narratives are not the sole property of professional historians; rather, they are equally and powerfully generated by competitors including “ethnic and religious leaders, political appointees, journalists, and various associations within civil society as well as independent citizens, not all of whom are activists” (19). See his discussion of the transmission and power of narratives of historical meaning that often contradict or distort available historical fact, 14–22.
- 5.
In “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature,” Daedalus 103.2 (1974): 73–109. Brathwaite is Walcott’s exact contemporary, born in Barbados the same year that Walcott was born in St. Lucia. Alison Donnell, “‘The African Presence in Caribbean Literature’ Revisited: Recovering the Politics of Imagined Co-Belonging 1930–2005,” Research in African Literatures 46.4 (2015): 35–55, offers a useful extension of Brathwaite’s essay as she discusses how more contemporary Caribbean authors have taken up his interest in writing a “literature of reconnection” (“African Presence,” 81) between Africa and the New World.
- 6.
Interview with the Trinidad Guardian, quoted in Derek Walcott , the Journeyman Years: Occasional Prose 1957–1974, ed. Gordon Collier (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 119.
- 7.
“We are Still Being Betrayed: Interview Conducted by Raoul Pantin for Caribbean Contact,” July 1973, quoted in Collier, 115.
- 8.
I cite Henri Christophe in Black Drama 1850 to Present, 2nd ed. (Alexander Street Press, 2018), 2.
- 9.
“The Muse of History,” in What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1998), 36. I’ll include subsequent references parenthetically in my text.
- 10.
I cite “On Empire” as it appears in Callaloo 31.4 (2008), pp. 1011–1012. It is included in a lightly revised form in Walcott’s collection White Egrets (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 35–36.
- 11.
The term “gardeuse” literally means something like a keeper or shepherdess, but, in Caribbean usage, connotes a woman who mediates between our world and others that remain unknown. In Walcott’s long poem Omeros (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1990), Ma Kilman, owner of a bar called the No Pain Café, is described as “a gardeuse, sybil, obeah-woman / webbed with a spider’s knowledge of an after-life” (58).
- 12.
Charles H. Rowell, “An Interview With Derek Walcott, Part I,” Callaloo 34 (1988), 81, 83.
- 13.
Derek Walcott, “What the Twilight Says,” in What the Twilight Says: Essays, 28. I will provide subsequent citations parenthetically in my text.
- 14.
On Walcott’s work in the theatre, see Bruce King, Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama: ‘Not Only a Playwright, but a Company,’ The Trinidad Theatre Workshop, 1959–1993 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), which discusses A Branch of the Blue Nile ’s premiere in Barbados and a second staging in Trinidad 319–323 and 331–335.
- 15.
Tejumola Olaniyan, “Dramatizing Postcoloniality: Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott,” Theatre Journal 44.4 (1992), discusses Drums and Colours, 490–493.
- 16.
For example, Alexa Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Margaret Litvin, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Alfredo Modenessi, “Meaning by Shakespeare: South of the Border,” in Sonia Massai, ed., World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (London: Routledge, 2005), 104–111; and the essays collected in a special issue of the annual African Theatre, 12 (2013), “Shakespeare In and Out of Africa.”
- 17.
The Tragedy of King Christophe, tr. Paul Breslin and Rachel Ney (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 93.
- 18.
Derek Walcott’s Nobel Prize lecture was published as “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” Georgia Review 49, no. 1 (1995); here, 296. I will provide subsequent references parenthetically in my text.
- 19.
Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 14, 15. For a helpful discussion of this poem’s attempts to transform the cultural materials of empire, see Emily Greenwood, Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 165–182.
- 20.
Greenwood discusses the painting episode, 166–167.
- 21.
The Caroni is a smaller tributary that drains into Venezuela’s Orinoco River; the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, where the play is set, lay off the Venezuelan coast.
- 22.
On Cleopatra and performance, see Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 131–134.
- 23.
The general critical discussion on the play is not large. See Lowel Fiet, “Mapping a New Nile: Derek Walcott’s Later Plays,” in The Art of Derek Walcott, ed. Stewart Brown (Bridgend, Wales: Seren Books, 1991), 123–138; Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Imitation versus Contestation: Walcott’s Postcolonial Shakespeare,” Callaloo 28.1 (2005): 104–113; Joanne Tompkins, “Re-citing Shakespeare in Post-Colonial Drama,” Essays in Theatre/Études théâtrales 15.1 (1996): 15–22; Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), 22–23; Tobias Döring, “A Branch of the Blue Nile : Derek Walcott and the Tropic of Shakespeare,” in Massai, World-Wide Shakespeares, 15–22; and Stephen P. Breslow, “Trinidadian Heteroglossia: A Bakhtinian View of Derek Walcott’s Play A Branch of the Blue Nile,” World Literature Today 63.1 (1989): 36–39.
- 24.
I’m delighted here to acknowledge my borrowing of the notion of “enchantment” from my colleague Michelle Sizemore, whose book American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) examines how, in the 50 years after the American Revolution, Americans worked to create new notions of political authority which could be embodied and enacted by the people themselves rather than experienced through the mediation of royal authority. I see Walcott’s postcolonial subjects as living in a similar watershed moment, trying to articulate their own standing as cultural, rather than formally political, makers in the aftermath of independence.
- 25.
Debby Thompson, “‘Is Race a Trope?’: Anna Deveare Smith and the Question of Racial Performativity,” AAR 37 (2003), 128.
- 26.
See especially W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 98–119; and Lauren Love, “Resisting the ‘Organic’: A Feminist Actor’s Approach,” in Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, ed. Phillip B. Zarilli (New York: Routledge, 2002), 277–290.
- 27.
On the historically “unthinkable” (73) quality of the Haitian Revolution, see Trouillot, 70–107. On the revolution as a continuing source of political inspiration, see James, Black Jacobins, and Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). On its resonance in performance, see Jeremy Matthew Glick, The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 2016).
- 28.
This section of my paper is indebted to Kennan Ferguson, “How Peoples Get Made: Race, Performance, Judgment,” Theory and Event 1.3 (1997): 63 pars., esp. paragraphs 22–28.
- 29.
Here, I am much inspired by the work of Daphne Brooks, especially Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), and “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe,” Meridians 8.1 (2008): 180–204. Also see Melissa Blanco Borelli, “Hip Work: Undoing the Tragic Mulatta,” in Black Performance Theory, ed. Thomas F. deFrantz and Anita Gonzalez (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 63–84.
- 30.
“Sex, Race, and Empire in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra ,” Literature and History, 5.1 (1996): 60–77. Other discussions of the implications of Cleopatra’s color include Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, 122–127; Hall, Things of Darkness, 153–158; John Michael Archer, “Antiquity and Degeneration: The Representation of Egypt and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,” Genre 27, no. 1–2 (1994): 1–27; and Carol Mejia LaPerle, “An Unlawful Race: Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and the Crimes of Early Modern Gypsies,” Shakespeare 13, no. 3 (2017): 226–238. For the story of how Apollo’s half-mortal son Phaethon lost control of the chariot of the sun and scorched half the earth and its people, see Metamorpheses 2: 106–337.
- 31.
Ruben Espinosa discusses the conjunction of darkness and female divinity in “Marian Mobility, Black Madonnas, and the Cleopatra Complex,” in Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World, ed. Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 250–272.
- 32.
Margo Hendricks, “Visions of Color: Spectacle, Spectators, and the Performance of Race,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 511–526.
- 33.
Ferguson touches on Fanon in his paragraph 14.
- 34.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 109. I will provide subsequent citations parenthetically in my text.
- 35.
Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 11.
- 36.
For a discussion of Fanon’s limited analysis of black women’s standing as postcolonial subjects, see Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 141–172; T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); Gwen Bergner, Taboo Subjects: Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 1–18, and Lola Young, “Missing Persons: Fantasizing Black Women in Black Skin, White Masks,” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (Seattle: Bay Press for London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996), 86–101.
- 37.
See, for example, bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 147–154.
- 38.
Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, 117–123. On race in casting stage productions of Antony and Cleopatra , see Carol Chillington Rutter, Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (London: Routledge, 2001), 57–103; and Celia Daileader, “The Cleopatra Complex: White Actresses on the Interracial Stage,” in Colorblind Shakespeare, 205–220.
- 39.
Croll is quoted in “Dark Star: Dea Birkett Asks if her Latest Incarnation Could Bring Cleopatra’s Whitewashing to an End,” The Guardian 15 May 1991.
- 40.
Jyotsna Singh’s “Renaissance Antitheatricality, Antifeminism, and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra ,” RenD 20 (1989): 99–121, memorably argues that Cleopatra’s histrionic power particularly challenges Roman ideas of gender and masculinity. Here, I build on Singh by pointing out the degree to which a black Cleopatra intensifies that category crisis by calling Roman racial authority into doubt as well.
- 41.
From the collection The Star-Apple Kingdom (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979), 29, 30. I will provide subsequent citations parenthetically in my text.
- 42.
Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott : Politics and Poetics (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), trenchantly observes that “Walcott’s resistance to history has involved a specific call for amnesia,” for forgetting the European past “embodied in the canonical texts that have been used to prop up power” (67). Her discussion of Walcott’s relations to the past, 63–90, is relevant here, as is Mary Fuller, “Forgetting the Aeneid,” ALH 4 (1992): 517–538.
- 43.
In The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 90. Ahmed’s discussion of how affect “sticks” to certain kinds of bodies is concerned with brown Muslim bodies after 9/11 but her point about the adherence of shame and disgust is relevant here to my discussion of black women’s bodies.
- 44.
“Public Spectacles: Caribbean Women and the Politics of Public Performance,” Small Axe 13 (2003): 1–16 (1). But also see Jennifer Thorington Springer, “‘Roll It Gal’: Alison Hinds, Female Empowerment, and Calypso,” Meridians 8.1 (2008): 93–129, for a discussion of how a modern female calypso performer challenges and subverts prevailing social ideologies that public calypso is inappropriate for respectable women.
- 45.
English is Broken Here, 73.
- 46.
On how reimagined colonial and literary histories manage to resonate into the present in Omeros, see Ted Williams, “Truth and Representation: The Confrontation of History and Mythology in Omeros,” Callaloo 24 (2001): 276–286; David Farrier, “Charting the ‘Amnesiac Atlantic’: Chiastic Cartography and Caribbean Epic in Derek Walcott’s Omeros,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39.1 (2004): 23–38; and Srila Nayak, “‘Nothing in that Other Kingdom’: Fashioning a Return to Africa in Omeros,” Ariel 44.2–3 (2013): 1–28.
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Green MacDonald, J. (2020). Bodies, Race, and Performance in Antony and Cleopatra and Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile: Memory’s Signatures. In: Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3_4
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