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Where Does Caliban’s Name Come From?

John Hamilton Mortimer, Etching of Caliban from Twelve Characters from Shakespeare (1775). From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This post was originally published on February 5, 2018.

Listening to Dr. Lewis’s lecture today about who the island belongs to, I was reminded of when I first read Shakespeare’s The Tempest in high school. I couldn’t figure out who or what Caliban was. On a first reading, it seems a little ambiguous whether he is a supernatural creature, a monster, or just as human as Prospero and Miranda. In the cast of characters at the beginning of the book, he is called “a savage and deformed slave,” with no other mention of his inhumanity (2). Yet, in the early illustrations of the play, he is almost always depicted as a fishy monster, probably in response to Trinculo’s description of Caliban as “A strange fish” (II.ii.28). If we continue listening, however, Trinculo goes on to say that “this is no fish, but an islander that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt” (II.ii.36-38). Even more curiously, in one of those delightful moments of breaking the fourth wall of the stage, Trinculo critiques the audience listening to him, saying that English people wouldn’t give a penny to a poor beggar, but they’ll “lay out ten to see a dead Indian” (II.ii.34). Although most signs point to a small Mediterranean island as the setting of The Tempest, is it possible that we are also meant to read Caliban as an “Indian,” that is, someone from the New World?

We can begin exploring the answers to this question by looking at Shakespeare’s sources. One of the things I’d like to do in this blogpost is introduce you to the enormous wealth of digitized books available on the internet, particularly through a service called Early English Books Online (EEBO), which includes virtually every piece of material published in English between 1473 and 1700. Although the story of The Tempest seems to be original to Shakespeare (unlike most of his other plays), he was inspired by a number of other texts. One source that has begun gaining more attention recently is Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s early compilation of New World accounts from the early days of colonization. Although this Italian historian wrote in Latin for the Spanish crown, his De Orbe Novo was translated into English in 1555 as Decades of the New World by Richard Eden. It compiles the accounts given by Gonzalo Ferdinando de Oviedo of his time colonizing the Caribbean, the rivalry between King Ferdinand II of Spain and Naples and Alonso King of Portugal (Afonso V), Ferdinand Magellan and his pilot Antonio Pigafetta’s circumnavigation of the globe, the voyages of Sebastian Cabot, and even mentions a “greate devyll Setebos” worshiped in Brazil (219; discussed in Stritmatter & Kositsky 25-34, passim). Do any of these names sound familiar? Although there is no mention of a Prospero or a Miranda, there is a great deal of discussion surrounding cannibals in the “West Indies” and South America, a subject we will return to momentarily.

First page of Sylvester Jourdain’s “A Discovery of the Barmudas” (1610). Full text available on Early English Books Online.

In 1611, when Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, the British did not yet have any colonies in the Caribbean. They had, however, just discovered an island in the Atlantic under wondrous circumstances involving a shipwreck. As Dr. Lewis noted in her lecture today, The Sea Venture was blown off-course en route to the Virginia colony, and then wrecked off of coast of the Bermudas, where they spent the next nine months (rough life!). They later built two boats and sailed to the Jamestown colony, and the news of their survival was published in 1610 by one of the sailors, Sylvester Jourdain, in A Discovery of the Barmudas. Jourdain claims that “the Ilands of the Barmudas, as every man knoweth that hath heard or read of them, were never inhabited by any Chiftian or heathen people, but ever esteemed, and reputed, a most prodigious and inchanted place, affording nothing but gusts, stormes, and foule weather,” and thus they have been shunned by European explorers and settlers of the New World (8). However, as Sommers and his crew discovered, it was “the richest, healthfullest, and pleasing land… and merely natural, as ever man set foote upon” (10). As far as I have been able to research, the Bermudas were not inhabited by other people when the English settlers were shipwrecked there. Yet there were both pigs and tobacco on the island when these castaways arrived, neither of which are native to those islands, which suggests that they were brought from somewhere else. In the official True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia, also published in 1610, this was chalked up to God’s providence in providing for the English mission of the new world, for it “increaseth wonder, how our people in the Bermudos found such abundance of Hogs…” (23). Another source often held up as an inspiration for Shakespeare’s play is William Strachey’s account of the Sea Venture Shipwreck, “A True Repertory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight,” in which he surmises that the pigs came as the result of having “escaped out of some wracks” previous to the tempest that drove Sommers and his crew there. Although this report was not published until 1625 as part of Samuel Purchas’ Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, it is possible that Shakespeare had seen a draft of this report prior to writing The Tempest since he was an investor in the Virginia Colony (Vaughan & Vaughan 11-12). (Nerd alert: The digitized copy of Purchas available through archive.org was originally owned by John Adams, second president of the United States, and you can see his signature in the top right corner of the title page.) Dr. Lewis made the case that these convergences of shipwrecks, and a stormy island reputed by most to be inhabited by devils or spirits, (and I would add the apparently providential supply of pigs) might lead us to believe that these accounts of Bermuda shaped the “qualities” of Caliban’s island (I.ii:337).

What of Caliban himself? As Jourdain says, Bermuda was “never inhabited by any Chiftian or heathen people,” so how did this character come to be there? Shakespeare tells us that his mother Sycorax, a witch from “Argier” (Algiers), gave birth to him on the island after she had been exiled there (I.ii. 263-284). Since Alonso and his company have recently come from a wedding in Tunis, these locations in North Africa should bring our attention back to the Mediterranean (II.i.72-74). In the 19^th century there was a theory that Caliban’s name came from an Arabic insult, يا كلب [ya kalib], meaning “you dog” (Vaughan & Vaughan 33). Just like today, Arabic was the common language of North Africa, so it is possible that Shakespeare had somehow heard this expression and decided to use it in his play. Whether or not this is true, it is important that Caliban’s name was given by his mother, not by Prospero. Just like the names Sycorax, Setebos, and Ariel, Caliban does not have a clear European origin.

Sebastiano del Piombo, Portrait of a Man, Said to be Christopher Columbus (1519). From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Another etymology, one I find more convincing, is that Caliban’s name is related to the word “cannibal.” Shakespearean scholars since the late 18^th century have noticed that Caliban’s name is an anagram of the Spanish spelling of this word: canibal (Vaughan & Vaughan 26). We can date with precision the day that this word first came into contact with European languages, since it is a loan word from the Caribbean and is first recorded in Christopher Columbus’s journal of his first voyage to the New World. On Friday, November 23, 1492, a little more than a month after first landing in the Bahamas, Columbus was off the coast of Haiti. Some natives of the Greater Antilles who were on board warned him about the men who lived there:

The wind was East-Northeast, and they could shape a southerly course, but there was little of it. Beyond this cape there stretched out another land or cape, also trending east, which the Indians on board called Bohio [Haiti]. They said that it was very large, and that there were people in it who had one eye in their foreheads, and others whom they called canibales, of whom they were much afraid. (English translation by Clements R. Markham, slightly revised)

When Columbus introduced this word to Europe upon his return, it did not yet mean what we usually think of. Instead, it referred to a specific people who lived in the Eastern Caribbean. The men on board who warned Columbus were Taino or Lucayans, groups that spoke closely related Arawakan languages in the Western Caribbean. The neighbors they feared were a different group of people who lived in the Eastern Caribbean islands and on the northern coasts of South America. These people are the Kalinago, called Caribs in English, and in fact, the words ‘Carib,’ ‘cannibal,’ and ‘Caribbean’ all come from their name.

Taino and Island Carib Territories map from The Decolonial Atlas

How did this come to be? It is difficult to say much with certainty about the languages of the native inhabitants of the Caribbean in 1492. But using historical linguistics we can make educated guesses about the word Columbus may have heard and why he wrote it down the way he did. In the Kari`nja [or Kali`nja] language spoken by the Kalinago today, the word kari`na means “human being,” and Karinago means “the people.” However, the /r/ used to spell this language does not correspond to the same [r] sound we have. Instead, it refers to [ɽ] a sound made by flicking the tongue very quickly against the alveolar ridge behind your teeth. To someone who doesn’t speak Kari`nja [kaɽiɁnʲa], this might sound like an [r] or an [l], which is why their name is variously transcribed as ‘Carib,’ ‘Kali`na,’ ‘Kari`nja,’ ‘Kalinya,’ ‘Cariña,’ ‘Carib,’ or even ‘Galibi.’ Behrend Hoff, a linguist who specializes in Cariban languages, suggests that this word was originally *kari:pona in prehistory (“Language Contact” 35). After the speakers of this prehistoric language spread apart to different parts of the Caribbean, the word came to be pronounced differently in various dialects, and it was also borrowed into other languages like Taino. This could account for how the word took so many written forms. Thus, in modern Arawak (spoken by the Lokono people in Suriname and neighboring Guyana), the word has become karipna; the Garifuna, descendants of Island Caribs and Africans who live on the eastern coasts of Central America, took the word as their name; in the jungles of southern Venezuela, another Cariban group call themselves the Carihona (Aikhenvald 41-43). The dispersion of Carib groups across present-day Venezuela, Suriname, and Guyana led this region to be labeled Caribana on many early maps of South America (Vaughan 28-29). On Columbus’s ship in November of 1492, the word *karibna may have been pronounced *kanibna because the western dialects of Taino did not have an [r] sound and often replaced it in loanwords with [n]. Thus Columbus wrote “caniba,” “canima,” and “canibal” over the course of his journal. But it is possible that eastern Taino speakers would have said *kalibna, that is, Caliban.

It is often claimed that the word cannibal came to have its more familiar meaning because the Caribs that Europeans encountered in the New World really did eat human flesh. However, there is very little direct evidence that this is true. The first time the charge of man-eating is leveled against the Caniba it is second-hand. On December 17, 1492, Columbus’s records his disbelief when his Taino guides accuse the “canibales” of eating their enemies:

The sailors were sent away to fish with nets. They had much intercourse with the natives, who brought them certain arrows of the Caniba or Canibales. They are made of reeds, pointed with sharp bits of wood hardened by fire, and are very long. They pointed out two men who lacked certain body parts, giving to understand that the Canibales had taken bites out of them. The Admiral [Columbus] did not believe it. (English translation by Clements R. Markham)

Although Columbus never saw Caribs eating other people, this accusation is repeated several times in his journal, and is picked up in the accounts of other early European explorers. What Columbus did not know in 1492, but historians now suspect, is that the Taino felt that they were in competition with Caribs over territory. One reason to suspect this is that the inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles in the late 15^th century called themselves Carib, but spoke an Arawakan language called Iñeri. To distinguish them from the Caribs who lived on the mainland of South America, Europeans came to call these people Island Caribs, and they later discovered that the Island Carib men spoke Iñeri in public and to their families, but spoke a reduced version of a Cariban language among themselves. The traditional explanation of this anomaly is that Caribs from the mainland invaded these islands by force, killed and ate all of the men, and then took the women as wives a few generations before Columbus’s arrival, thus creating a gender distinction in language. These same Island Caribs were then encroaching on the islands of the Greater Antilles, such as modern-day Puerto Rico and Haiti.

Roberto Fernández Retamar, Cuban poet and essayist

Whatever the truth might be (and we will return to this later), some strife between themselves and the Carib led the Taino to spread anti-Carib propaganda to their new Spanish “allies.” Although there is no good evidence for the practice of cannibalism among Island Caribs, there is direct evidence from Columbus’s journal and from later adventurers that Island Caribs violently resisted European colonization. And as Philip Bouchard has written, the Spanish found these “grossly distorted charges of man-eating” quite useful in justifying the enslavement and depopulation of Carib people. “Whatever the reality of Island Carib practices, Europeans created the myth of Caribs as ferocious, insatiable cannibals. As with some other peoples who resisted European incursions, Caribs found themselves saddled with this indictment” (7). We might recall here Matthew Restall’s claim that Europeans saw the native inhabitants of the Americas as “cultureless, innocent, or nefarious” (105) and note that these characterizations seem to develop immediately upon contact between Columbus and the people of the New World. Roberto Retamar, a Cuban intellectual, makes this division of nefarious and innocent specific to the Taino and the Caribs in the way they received Spanish colonization.

The Taino will be transformed into the paradisical inhabitant of a utopic world; by 1516 Thomas More will publish his Utopia, the similarities of which to the island of Cuba have been indicated, almost to the point of rapture, by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. The Carib, on the other hand, will become a caníbal – an anthropophagus, a bestial man situated on the margins of civilization, who must be opposed to the very death. (Retamar 6-7)

In the Fall Quarter we saw how Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the Khoisan (i.e. “Hottentot”) people to frame his rejection of “progress,” but we should also recall that the people he refers to as “the people that until now has wandered least from the state of nature” are Caribs (65). Rousseau might be thinking here of Montaigne‘s “On the Cannibals,” which we read for class today and which depicts the Tupinamba people of the Amazon and their rituals of eating human flesh. Yet it also paradoxically praises the nobility of these cannibals:

It is a nation… that hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politic superiority; no use of service, of riches, or of property; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred but common, no apparel but natural, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulations, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them. (qtd. in Shakespeare 103)

If that English translation rings a bell, it is because Shakespeare borrows liberally from it in Gonzalo’s speech about what he would do with Prospero’s island if he were given control of it (II.i.152-61, 164-69). Montaigne’s Essais were translated into English in 1603 by John Florio, one of Shakespeare’s close friends. So we know that Shakespeare was reading Montaigne, and probably also reading Peter Martyr’s account of New World exploration. So when he named Caliban, did he have in mind the noble savage crushed by European colonization, or was he instead thinking of a nefarious man-eater who would kill his neighbors given the chance?

The word “cannibal” does not appear in The Tempest, but Shakespeare does make use of it in some of his earlier plays, each time in reference to a bloody, violent people. In Othello, he makes it explicit, calling them “the Cannibals, that eat each other” (I.iii.473). This is the same way that both Purchas and the English translation of Peter Martyr unambiguously use the term. In the earlier text, there is still an etymological connection observed between the word cannibal and Carib: “The wylde and myschevous people called Canibales, or Caribes, whiche were accustomed to eate mannes flesshe…” (27). Sixty years later when Purchas was writing, this link had been severed, and he could state that Caribs “are certain Canibals, which used inhumane huntings for human game, to take men for to eate them…” (730). This has lead many to see Caliban’s name as an indictment of his character, a not-so-subtle hint that Prospero’s slave, like other cannibals, is “inhumane.”

Joos van Winghe (designer) and Theodor de Bry (engraver), Depiction of Spanish atrocities committed in the conquest of Cuba in Las Casas’s “Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias” (1663). Image from Wikipedia.

But other interpretations are possible. Between 1585 and 1604, England and Spain were in a state of constant but undeclared war, and there was a great deal of Anti-Spanish propaganda circulating in London when Shakespeare was writing his plays. One piece in particular, published in 1583, was entitled The Spanish Colonie, or Briefe chronicle of the acts and gestes of the Spaniardes in the West Indies, an English translation of Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias. This book lays out a devastating eyewitness account of the genocide and cruelty perpetrated by the Spanish in the Caribbean. De las Casas was a Dominican missionary sent by the Spanish crown to convert the Taino, and he lamented that although their souls could be saved, most of them were dead by the time he arrived:

Upon these lambes so mecke, so qualified & endewed of their maker and creator, as hath bin said, entred the Spanish incontinent as they knew them, as wolves, as lions, & as tigres most cruel of long time famished: and have not done in those quarters these 40 yeres be past, neither yet doe at this present, ought els save teare them in peaces, kill them, martyre them, afflict them, torment them, & destroy them by straunge sortes of cruelties never neither seene, nor reade, nor hearde of the like (of the which some shall bee set downe hereafter) … We are able to yield a good and certaine accompt, that there is within the space of the said 40 years, by those said tyrannies & devilish doings of Spaniards …into death unjustly and tyrannously more than twelve Millions of soules, men, women, and children. And verily do believe, and think not to mistake therein, that there are dead more that fifteen Millions of soules. (De las Casas 10-11)

Historians dispute the accuracy of these numbers, and this text is very much a part of the Black Legend that we heard about from Restall (118-119). It is undeniable, however, that Spanish diseases, enslavement, and outright slaughter killed the majority of the native peoples of the Caribbean. This is one of the reasons that we will never know if it were Tainos or Lucayans who introduced the word kanibna to Columbus. His first landfall was in the Bahamas, the homeland of the Lucayans, a few of whom he kidnapped and tortured for information about where to find gold. When Columbus returned as the “Governor of the Indies,” he imposed a tax on every Taino man to produce either one pound of gold or twenty pounds of cotton every year. When people refused, he cut off their hands. Further expeditions from Spain to the Caribbean lead to the outright enslavement and deportation of most of the native inhabitants of the Bahamas to be slave laborers on Hispaniola. By the time de las Casas left Hispaniola, the Lucayans had been completely annihilated, and the Taino population was cut in half. De las Casas says that 500,000 people lived in the Bahamas before Columbus’s arrival; after the last eleven people were deported in 1520, the islands were considered “uninhabited” until 1648, when it was recolonized by the British, just like Bermuda. Indeed, another theory for why Island Caribs spoke both Iñeri and Carib is, according to Boucher, that “in historical times Island Caribs received constant infusions of Arawakan-speakers. Some of these were prisoners of war from the Greater Antilles; others, especially those from Puerto Rico, were refugees from Spanish persecution. Island Caribs, their numbers thinned by Old World diseases and by Spanish slave traders, no doubt integrated, especially the Arawakan women.” This is not to suggest that the Spanish were uniquely cruel. After all it was the British who, after taking the independent island of St. Vincent by force in 1796, slaughtered most of the Garifuna and deported the survivors almost two thousand miles away to the coast of Honduras, a journey upon which half of the prisoners died.

The descendants of these people still live today along the coast of Central America. Their music and culture are world renowned, as you can see in this 2013 music video for “Móungulu” by The Garifuna Collective, a group based in Belize who sing in Garifuna.

English brutality towards the residents of St. Vincent began more than a century and a half after Shakespeare died. Perhaps, like Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, Caliban represents a problematic, misunderstood, but very human character. In the context of the Anglo-Spanish wars and the Black Legend, it is possible that we are meant to sympathize with poor Caliban suffering under Prospero’s heel (as Dr. Lewis mentioned, Milan in Shakespeare’s day was ruled by the Spanish Habsburgs). Although it is unlikely that Shakespeare knew this, it seems like more than mere coincidence that Caliban’s name means “human being” in the Cariban languages, and that his last words in the play highlight his intention to “seek for grace,” whatever that might entail (V.i.296). For Roberto Retamar, Caliban is the symbol of the Caribbean people and their struggles against European colonialism.

This is something that we, the mestizo inhabitants of these same islands where Caliban lived, see with particular clarity: Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood… I know of no other metaphor more expressive of our cultural situation, our reality. (Retamar14)

It is not impossible that Shakespeare might have agreed.

Works Cited

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. The Languages of the Amazon. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2012. Print.

Boucher, Philip P. Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Print.

Hoff, Berend. J. “Language Contact, War, and Amerindian Historical Tradition: The Special Case of the Island Carib,” Wolves from the Sea: Readings in the Anthropology of the Native Caribbean. Edited by Neil Whitehead. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995. 37-60. Print.

Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.

Retamar, Roberto Fernández. Caliban and Other Essays. Translated by Edward Baker. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Print.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Basic Political Writings. Translated and Edited by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011. Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Edited by Robert Langbaum. Newly Revised Edition. New York, Signet Classics, 1998. Print.

Stritmatter, Roger A. and Lynne Kositsky. On the Date, Sources and Design of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2013. Print.

Vaughan, Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print.

Ben Garceau is a scholar of early medieval and late antique literature with particular interests in early Britain, translation studies, and critical theory. He received a dual Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and English from Indiana University in 2015. His work has appeared in PMLA, Translation Studies, and the Yearbook of Comparative Literature. He has also contributed to the HC Research Blog on the topic of textual criticism and the Aeneid. When he isn’t leading seminars in Humanities Core, he likes hiking, working on his science fiction novel, and digging through record shops.

“limbo like me”: A Reading of Kamau Brathwaite’s “Caliban”

Kamau Brathwaite, image from New Directions Books

Someone called Edward Brathwaite makes a brief appearance in Roberto Fernández Retamar’s famous 1974 essay “Caliban: Notes toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America.” Like Caliban in Aimé Césaire’s play A Tempest, Edward Brathwaite later changed his name. But whereas Césaire’s Caliban demands that Prospero “call me X” (20), Brathwaite chose the name Kamau. It was suggested to him by the grandmother of the Kenyan novelist and theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who currently teaches at UC Irvine! The name Kamau itself ultimately comes from the east African Kikuyu language and is said to mean “quiet warrior.”

Brathwaite’s journey from a highly conventional English name to a subtle and empowering African one is a journey toward an ancestral identity that holds the possibility of self-determination. A similar journey was taken by Brathwaite’s native island Barbados, which gained independence from its 341-year-old identity as an English sugar colony in 1966. Like many other Caribbean islands, Barbados has long had a large, poor population of African descent; its own name means ‘bearded ones’ in Spanish and might refer to the hanging roots of trees or to the beards worn by the indigenous people encountered by the Spanish when they arrived in the fifteenth century. The island’s original name in Arawakan is “Icirougandin,” meaning red land with white teeth; today the people who live there simply call it Bim.

The people of Bim speak a ‘creolized’ English that is richly mixed with the rhythms and vocabularies of the African cultures of their ancestors. The uniquely fluid music and dance forms of the island grow out of those same traditions. Distinctive to Barbados and shaped by the embodied history of its people, the rhythms of these songs and movement patterns infuse Kamau Brathwaite’s poems. The poems themselves have been published in books whose titles— The Arrivants, Middle Passages, and Masks—retrace Afro-Caribbean histories of slavery and dislocation. Yet Brathwaite’s poems are vibrant with life and hope as they embrace the possibilities of an ever-changing world. Brathwaite himself coined the phrase “tidalectics” to describe linguistic patterns in which different idioms, sounds, voices, rhythms, and moods flow, unite, disperse, and then reunite in new configurations.

The cover of then-Edward Brathwaite’s Masks (1968), later appearing in the collection The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1978).

These fluid energies animate Brathwaite’s poem “Caliban,” which first appeared in his 1968 volume Masks. What is a mask? It is an assumed identity, one that often frees the person behind the mask to access and express buried parts of his or her own identity. Masks also play a vital role in African religious rituals, where they sometimes channel supernatural powers and sometimes provide protection from them. By calling his collection of poems Masks, Brathwaite tells us that he is interested in ways to tap into one’s deepest identity while also playing with alternative identities. Shielded by a mask, we are sometimes emboldened to speak the truth.

In “Caliban,’ Brathwaite puts on the ‘mask’ of Shakespeare’s Caliban so he can speak the truth of a decolonizing subject’s search for identity. Written in Caliban’s own voice, Brathwaite’s poem starts in an unidentified Caribbean city that sometimes seems to be Cuba’s capital, Havana. The city is awash in the grim debris of colonization. As colonization’s high tide has receded and European powers have departed, the island peoples have been left destitute, invisible, erased by history. Brathwaite’s poem starts out with a grim tally whose heavy weight is reinforced by repetition and a ponderous rhythm from which it seems there can be no escape: “Ninety-five per cent of my people poor /ninety five percent of my people black/ ninety-five percent of my people dead.” Caliban speaks not for himself but for “my people.” He even speaks as his people, or allows them to speak through him.

So as to make the plight of “my people” universal, Brathwaite’s Caliban next invokes the prophet Jeremiah, the biblical book of Leviticus (which is preoccupied with laws that separate the living from the dead, the pure from the corrupt), and the modern existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Caliban’s island—apparently Cuba—suffers under the weight of dead modern machines left behind on land that also seems dead, incapable of yielding the vital substances that the living need, such as cotton or bread. Echoing Shakespeare, Brathwaite’s Caliban turns to Ariel’s beautiful song of transformation from death to life (“Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made”). But when Caliban echoes Ariel’s song, life becomes death. Caliban’s modern island has become a world of dead ends: “out of the living stone out of the living bone/of coral, these dead/towers.” Caliban remembers political revolutions that should have brought freedom but resulted only in more oppression in the form of police abuse and even addiction to the toys of capitalism. While there is the hint of an impending storm (“the sky was cloudy, a strong breeze”), the weather only marks the Caribbean islands’ vulnerability to hurricanes, today thought to be more intense and destructive than in the past, thanks to global warming—a legacy of the European scientific enlightenment, and thus also a legacy of European colonialism. The Europeans, other words, are gone but they have left death, sorrow, and devastation in their wake. Caliban’s “people,” lifeless and impoverished, must somehow recreate themselves out of these materials.

And yet Braithwaite’s poem does not end in this world of death. Far from it! The final lines are bright with hope, and alive with new rhythms and images: “the dumb gods are raising me/up/up/up/and the music is saving me.” Caliban, who at first could only helplessly lament the plight of his people, now feels himself lifted and saved. Those early, ponderous verses sinking into blocks have dissolved and the poem stretches out long, its verse suddenly free and lithe, pulsing with life as it moves “up/up/up” along with Caliban himself.

But just how does Caliban find his way from death to life, from stasis to movement, from despair to hope? He is, to course, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Caliban, who likewise longs to break free of the chains Prospero has put on him. This modern Caliban takes Shakespeare’s own imagery and plays with it until it begins to play for him. But in order to revitalize that imagery, he infuses it with the tempos and cadences of Caribbean speech, dance, and and music. This is a poem that celebrates the sound of the human voice. The best way to appreciate that is to listen to this recording of Brathwaite reading the poem.

When you listen, you will hear the voice of the Caribbean islands, melodious, playful, its own thing. That doesn’t mean that Brathwaite’s Caliban leaves Shakespeare’s Caliban behind. The middle part of his poem is an extended riff on Caliban’s euphoric “‘Ban, Ban, Caliban; have a new master, get a new man.” This is the song Shakespeare’s Caliban sings when he believes he has found a way to break free of Prospero’s tyranny. Without escaping from Prospero’s language, Shakespeare’s Caliban plays with it, rearranging its syllables to suggest new meanings, “new” possibilities of identity and power, and even “freedom.”

But Caliban fails to break free of Prospero. By the end of the play, he is back under the magician’s thumb. That isn’t true of Brathwaite’s Caliban: he has broken the spell! But how? Is it just because he has access to other traditions and realities that belong to him and his people, not the colonial powers that have killed and erased “ninety-five percent of” them?

The key is what we might call the “middle passage” of Brathwaite’s poem—the part between its beginning and its end. I borrow this term from Brathwaite’s later volume of poems Middle Passages, where you can find his other Tempest-inspired poem, Letter Sycorax, in which Caliban steals Prospero’s laptop and uses it to reconnect with his mother’s language and “curse [Prospero] wid his own cursor.” The “middle passage” refers to the forced transportation of human beings from Africa to the Caribbean; many went to the North American colonies, and many others died in transit. Throughout his work, Brathwaite is keenly aware of the middle passage as part of the tragic history of ‘my people.’ The middle passages of his poems—the parts in the center that move us from the beginning to the end—are always important.

So what happens in the middle passage of Caliban? This is where Caliban breaks into dance, and as he “prance[s],” he begins breaking words down, experimenting with new ways of ordering them, literally creating space for himself with dashes and wide-open margins:

And
Ban
Ban
Cali-
Ban
like to play
pan
at the Car-
nival;
pran-
sing up to the lim-
bo silence
down
down
down

Here the playful, lifting cadences of island music displace the heavy, meter of the first part of the poem. The longer this Caliban sings in his native voice, the more possible it is to “ban”—get rid of—the legacies of colonial rule. Brathwaite’s Caliban liberates himself through free “play” and unbridled pleasure, through joyful experiment with what words might do spontaneously. The middle of the poem—again, the part that connects but also separates the bleak, heavy scene at the beginning from the energy of hope at the end—consists entirely of such play, thus showing how creative language can be a passport to freedom, allowing Caliban to create himself as he wishes. Hence Caliban dances as well as sings, “pran-/cing up to the lim–’/bo silence..”

But just what is the “lim–/bo silence”? Limbo in Catholic theology is the suspended state between heaven and hell. By suspending the word “limbo’ itself between two lines, Brathwaite captures this sense of suspense and makes it part of the active experience of his poem. By isolating the syllable “lim,” Brathwaite also echoes the word “limb,” evoking the part of a tree that can be turned into a stick.

The limbo itself is a dance involving a stick. You may have done the limbo yourself at a skating rink. This internationally popular game originated in the Caribbean islands. There dancers pass under a horizontal stick suspended between two vertical ones which is lowered after everyone has gone under it. Of course, not every dancer manages this; those who do not are eliminated, while those who succeed get more and more creative, often showing off their talent for contortion and fluid movement. Because of the physical skill and personal creativity involved, the limbo is a popular tourist attraction in Barbados, and even a source of income for many Caribbeans. This gives it a double meaning: the limbo celebrates versatility, flexibility, and originality. But it is also performed by acrobatic native dancers for the pleasure of American and European visitors whose money holds up the islands’ fragile economies. Here ‘s a picture of a street performance of the limbo:

The Irwin Clement Caribbean steel band in London, 1963. Image from Heritage Images/Getty.

Caliban imports all of these aspects of the limbo dance in his poem: “down/down/down”; “knees spread wide.” And the “limbo stick” itself appears many times in the poem, as if to transform Prospero’s magic stick—an instrument of domination—into a toy for Caliban to play and dance with. Appropriating Prospero’s stick into a new dance allows Caliban to appropriate its power for his own purposes of freedom and self-creation. As he dances, the verse form of the poem mirrors the alternation between flattening and lengthening that is part of the dance.

It would be very nice if this were all that is going on in the middle passage. But as Caliban dances the limbo, more troubling elements creep in. This is a dance for tourist consumption and as such it suggests continuing dependence on American and European money. More significant still: where did the limbo come from? As he dances, Caliban tells us;

limbo like me
long dark deck and the water surrounding me
long dark neck and the silence is over me
limbo
limbo like me
stick is the whip and the dark deck is slavery . . .

What is happening here? It turns out that the limbo is not just a popular nightclub dance. It was originally developed by African slaves who had survived the middle passage. It was even performed at wakes—rituals in which survivors sit beside the bodies of the dead. The pattern of increasing confinement mimics the often fatal experience of being crowded into the hold of a slave ship and dehumanized inside its “long dark neck.” Here is a schematic image of that crowding so you can see what it was like:

A plan of a British slave ship, showing how 454 slaves were placed on board. According to transport records, however, this same ship reportedly carried as many as 609 people. This image was published by the Plymouth Chapter of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and is now held by the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division.

As the limbo “stick” lowers, dancers reenact that suffocating confinement. When they manage to come out of it, they celebrate the triumph of release. But each time the is stick lowered, fewer people make it under, through, and up. The limbo is thus a dance of elimination, if also of triumph for those who survive. In this way, the dance is a form of living cultural memory. In its negative side, it recreates the condition of death. In its positive side, people survive and emerge on the other side, unfold and rise in the miracle of survival. Even the spirits of those who die might be imagined to have been released by death into the freedom of an afterlife that this very ritual perpetuates. But the message is a mixed one.

By turning Shakespeare’s ship of nobles into a slave ship and Prospero’s wand into a stick he can play with and master, Caliban finds his own voice. He gives “My people” a common history and shows them how to use it to move forward. We hear “drummers” and feel the action of “dumb gods” who can still speak through the body. That is why. at the end of the poem, Caliban sings that “the music is saving me.”

The last thing we experience in the poem, is Caliban’s “hot/slow/step/on the burning ground.” He is remembering how to walk again on the shores of a foreign land. But this is also an image of hell. Destruction goes with creation. And Caliban’s steps are slow. The way forward is painful and difficult. Will he find his way? If he does, it will not only be because he transforms the dark past but because he has learned to traverse its troubling surface.

Works Cited/Referenced

Brathwaite, Edward. Masks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Print.

Césaire, Aimé. A Tempest. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: TCG Translations, 2002. Print.

Retamar, Roberto Fernández. Caliban and Other Essays. Translated by Edward Baker. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Print.

Jayne Lewis is a professor of English at UC Irvine, a faculty lecturer in the current cycle of Humanities Core, and the director of the Humanities Honors Program at UCI. Her most recent book, Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794 (Chicago, 2012) looks at how, when and where “atmosphere” emerged as a dimension of literary experience—an emergence which links the history of early fiction with those of natural philosophy and the supernatural. She is also the author of The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1650-1740 (Cambridge, 1995), Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (Routledge, 2000), and The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots: A Documentary History (Bedford, 2000). Her present research and much of her ongoing teaching focuses on middle modern generic forms in relation to changing narratives of illness and healing, including a course on the “sick imagination” that explores illness narratives from the Book of Job through 21st-century poetry and graphic fiction. She has previously contributed to the HC Research Blog on the topic of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.

Rape and the Aeneid

Dido and Aeneas. Ancient Roman fresco in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples; fresco from the House of Citharist in Pompeii, Italy (c. 10 BCE–45 CE)

How does our re-reading of favorite texts and images change over time, as the world changes around us? Like so many readers before me, I’ve always noticed how Virgil presents the queen of Carthage as a strong, intelligent ruler and civic planner who “plans her escape, collects her followers” and their treasures: “and a woman leads them all.” (1.440-448). By the time Virgil shows us Aeneas’s inspection of her achievements, the “ramparts” of the “new city of Carthage” are rising, along with the “gates,” “laws,” “harbor,” and “theatre” (1.510–519). After Aeneas, having inspired her passion and learned from her example, abandons her to found his own new city, I used to thrill to their passion, and think I could only mourn her self-destructive suicide.

But today, driving into work and listening to the radio stories of women assaulted and raped, I thought about Dido differently. Where does the fire of her passion come from? I wondered if I could read it differently: Venus plopping Cupid into her lap, forcing love on her, telling him to “breathe [your] secret fire into her,/ poison the queen and she will never know.” (1.818-820). “She will never know–“ I thought of her listening to the tales of assault and Roofies. Giving sexual targets Rohypnol and other drugs if they’re not aware of it, I think, that’s rape. So do I think Venus has arranged for the rape of Dido so that Aeneas can gain power? I didn’t think of it this way before, but I did this morning. I wouldn’t quite say Rome was founded on rape, but the thought occurred to me. I rejected it, but I thought it.

And then I thought, parking the car and getting out: Where do the Romans find the other founders of Rome, the women who bear their children? That’s the Rape of the Sabine Women, isn’t it? The historian Livy (59 BCE–17CE) tells their abduction this way: “When the hour for the games had come, and their eyes and minds were alike riveted on the spectacle before them, the preconcerted signal was given and the Roman youth dashed in all directions to carry off the maidens who were present. The larger part were carried off indiscriminately, but some particularly beautiful girls who had been marked out for the leading patricians were carried to their houses by plebeians told off for the task.”

Still thinking about the women whose defeat built Rome, I looked “Sabines” up in the index to our edition of the Aeneid and I found that Virgil treats this incident as an important factor in Aeneas’s triumph, depicted on his shield by the god Vulcan: “the workmanship of the shield,/ no words can tell its power… […] and the Sabine women brutally/ dragged from the crowded bowl when the Circus games were played” (8.738–739, 748–749). Not a game for them, as the translator’s words “brutally” and “dragged” suggest. The end of the story is supposed to be a happy one: years later, the women prefer to remain with their abductors and the families they have established. Our edition’s introduction by scholar Bernard Knox is more upbeat than the translation by Robert Fagles that it precedes, pointing out that “the Romans carried off the Sabine women to marry them” (34). As classicist Mary Beard points out, Roman plots involving rape “are not now best known for their subtlety. The ‘happy ending’ to some of [Plautus and Terence’s comedies] can appal modern readers: ‘Good news — the rapist was her fiancé all along'” (202). There’s no happy ending here for Dido, of course, whatever the Sabines’ decision.

But the image of that “so-called rape” stayed in my mind from a picture by Nicolas Poussin, a painting I knew and was shocked by as a child, because it’s in my hometown of New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Nicolas Poussin, The Abduction of the Sabine Women, oil on canvas (probably 1633-4)

These women are being taken to increase the power of Rome. Their twisted limbs, their signals to their husbands, their forced abandonment of their children and parents at the signal from the red-clad ruler on the pillar – that’s rape to me.

So how does this change my reading of Dido? I used to think the two ways I had of seeing her were in conflict – the leader and builder, the self-destructive victim. But now I think that if she went on the radio with her story, Dido would say: Look! Even capable, intelligent, strong women can be taken advantage of, in the power structure I know.

I’ll hope that message can make changes.

Works Cited

Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015. Print.

Livy. History of Rome. Trans. Canon Roberts. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co, 1912. Print.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.

Vivian Folkenflik is an emeritus lecturer in the Humanities Core Program, where she taught for over three decades. She is the editor and translator of Anne Gédéon Lafitte, the Marquis de Pelleport’s novel The Bohemians (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and An Extraordinary Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Staël (Columbia University Press, 1992). She is also the author and archivist of our program’s institutional history at UC Irvine. Her thought and teaching have been at the center of many cycles of Humanities Core, and she continues to act as a pedagogical mentor for seminar leaders in our program. She has blogged previously for the Humanities Core Research Blog on the intersection of race and gender in past course texts.

Is the Aeneid We Are Reading the Same One That Virgil Wrote?

Aeneas and Achates entering Carthage, as pictured in the Vergilianus Vaticanus folio 13r, found at the Apostolic Library, Vatican

This post was originally published on September 29, 2016.

For educated people in the European Middle Ages, the Aeneid was probably the most important piece of literature next to the Bible: it was the greatest epic poem written in Latin which was the standard language of learning across Europe. It is no accident that Dante chose Virgil to lead him through the Nine Circles of Hell in Inferno. As a scholar of Late Roman and Medieval European literature, then, the Aeneid is an important book for me to be pretty familiar with.

One of the most important questions I have to ask myself at the start of any research project – but particularly about such an old text – is whether or not I can trust the edition I am working with. This is obviously a problem when we are reading in translation, but even if we were all reading the Aeneid in Latin in Humanities Core, we would still have to ask… is this really what Virgil wrote? Here’s why.

The version of Virgil’s Aeneid that we are reading is an excellent translation by Robert Fagles. But let me ask you a question: where did he find his text to translate from? The Aeneid was written between 29 and 19 BCE, but printed type was not introduced into Europe until around 1440 CE. How did the poem exist between when Virgil composed it and when Fagles translated it into English for us?

You may be surprised to know that there is no single “original” version of the Aeneid from 19 BCE that all of our printed copies comes from. Virgil, like most Romans, probably wrote his works on papyrus sheets or scrolls. Now in a dry environment like Egypt, papyrus can last a very long time, but in a more humid climate like Italy, a papyrus scroll would begin to fall apart within a century. This meant that scribes had to make new hand-written copies (manu scripta in Latin) of important texts like Virgil’s works in order to preserve them. Almost all of these scrolls turned to dust long ago.

Near the end of the Roman Empire, however, it became more common for scribes to write on a new material made of dried and stretched animal skin called parchment, and to bind these pieces of parchment together into a codex: what we would call a book. The Getty Museum has produced a short but excellent video about how manuscripts were made.

Parchment is far more durable than papyrus, and it is no coincidence that the seven earliest versions of the Aeneid that still exist today are parchment copies from around the year 400 CE, more than four centuries after Virgil’s death (Courtney 13). Thanks to a number of digitization projects at archives and libraries around the world, you can actually look at digitized versions of some of these manuscripts online, like the Vergilius Vaticanus and Vergilius Romanus, both preserved at the Apostolic Library of the Vatican. All of these surviving manuscripts are incomplete, damaged, or compromised in some way. There were in all likelihood many other parchment and papyrus copies from this early date that were completely lost or destroyed during the violent dissolution of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Even if we had a totally complete, undamaged copy of the Aeneid from 400 CE, however, it still might be affected by scribal errors. Since each copy was made by hand, it is easy to see how scribal mistakes, mis-readings, and other variations could grow and become compounded in later copies. It is unknown how many copies of copies were made between Virgil’s own text of the Aeneid and these seven “witnesses,” but the text of all seven differ from each other. Some of these variations are clearly mistakes or corruptions of the original text; other differences between the manuscripts are harder to adjudicate, and it takes scholarship known as “textual criticism” to be able to tell which text is closer to the original. Sometimes, mistakes in the manuscripts will not be noticed for more than a thousand years.

Let me give you a few examples to illustrate what I mean. Take the scene from Book I (lines 423-29) when Aeneas and Achates have entered Carthage and are marveling at all of the city construction projects as they climb the hill to the top. Fagles translates this as follows:

The Tyrians press on with the work, some aligning the walls,
struggling to raise the citadel, trundling stones up slopes;
some picking the building sites and plowing out their boundaries,
others drafting laws, electing judges, a senate held in awe.
Here they’re dredging a harbor, there they lay foundations
deep for a theater, quarrying out of rock great columns
to form a fitting scene for stages still to come.
(Book I, lines 513-19, pp. 61-62)

If we look at our manuscript witnesses from the Vatican, we can see that they disagree about a few of the details. Neither one is totally correct; instead, both have to be compared because they equally point back towards their lost original exemplar. Since it may be difficult to read the manuscripts, I’ve written out a transcription of the two texts:

Image found at the Apostolic Library, http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.3225

INSTANTARDENTESTYRIIPARSDUCEREMUROS
MOLIRIQUEARCEM·ETMANIBUSSUBUOLUERESAXA
PARSOPTARELOCUMTECTOETCONCLUDERESULCO
IURAMAGISTRATUSQ·LEGUNT·SANCTUMQUESENATUM
HICPORTUSALIIEFFODIUNTHICLATATHEATRIS
FUNDAMENTAPETUNTALIIIMMANISQUECOLUMNAS
RUPIBUSEXCIDUNTSCAENISDECORAALTAFUTURIS˙

Image from the Apostolic Library, Vatican

INSTANT·ARDENTES·TYRII·PARS·DUCERE·MUROS
MOLIRI·QUE·ARCEM·ET·MANIBUS·SUBUOLUERE·SAXA
PARS·APTARE·LOCUM·TECTO·ET·CONCLUDERE·SULCO
IURA·MAGISTRATUSQ:LEGUNT·SANCTUM·Q:SENATU
HIC·PORTUS·ALII·EFFODIUNT·HIC·ALTA·THEATRIS·
FUNDAMENTA·LOCANT·ALII·IMMANIS·Q:COLUMNAS
RUPIBUS·EXCIDUNT·SCAENIS·DECORA·ALTA·FUTURIS

Notice that in the third line Rom. has the word aptare, while Vat. has optare. Fagles (or, rather, the edition of the Latin text that Fagles translated) chose to use optare here, since he translates the line as “some picking the building sites.” If he had translated aptare, it would have said something like “fitting the building sites” instead. Yet he chooses against the Vat. text two lines later: the workers “lay foundations / deep for a theater,” matching alta theatris / fundamenta locant. Had he followed the Vat. text, he might have translated lata theatris / fundamenta petunt as “they seek foundations broad for a theater,” which doesn’t make quite as much sense. Still, some editors choose to read the text this other way (cf. Conington 75). Switching alta for lata is probably the scribal equivalent of a “typo.” Mixing up locant and petunt, on the other hand, is harder to explain. We moderns are not the first to notice this discrepancy, however: if you look closely, an early medieval reader has put a little mark that looks like a percentage sign (%) over the word petunt, and noted a correction “LOCANT” in the left-hand margin.

Even if all the manuscripts agree, however, this still doesn’t mean that we have access to the original text as Virgil wrote it: it just means that all of the manuscripts we have are descended from a common source which may not be Virgil’s original. In this same passage given above about city projects from Book I, you may have noticed something strange. The poem focuses here on the physical work of building a city, except for one line. It may not strike you at first, but the central line about “drafting laws” and a “senate held in awe” doesn’t totally match its surroundings, does it? In fact, even though this line appears in this spot in all seven witnesses, some readers from the classical era to the present day doubt that this line was in the original poem, and believe that it was added by a later scribe.

Why should you care about such minutiae as this? There are at least two reasons, the first more general, and the second more specific for Humanities Core. First, what I have said above about how texts change from manuscript to manuscript does not just apply to the Aeneid, or to ancient literature, or to things written by hand. In fact, all texts are subject to this kind of corruption and variation, even texts that might seem totally modern and well-established, which is why many important books are released in critical editions even if they were written in America in the 20^th century. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the interaction between Bilbo and Gollum in the first edition of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien compared to the second edition that came out after he had written The Lord of the Rings. There are also differences between the British and American versions of the Harry Potter series. Needless to say, if there are variations in these texts, there are also variations in the various printings and editions of books like Waiting for the Barbarians, The Tempest, and every other thing you will read this year in Humanities Core.

This brings me to the second reason you should care about textual criticism. Let’s say I was writing a paper about the Aeneid and I wanted to make the claim that for Virgil there was an implicit connection between the physical foundation of a city and the institutional foundation of its laws. I might want to use this passage from Book I, since it shows the senate and the laws coming into being at the same moment, even in the same sentence, as the pillars and stones of the city. If I simply quoted this section, however, and my reader knew that the line about the laws was probably added later (or taken from a different section of the poem, see Campbell 161), they could trash my argument, saying it proved nothing because the line wasn’t original to the poem. If, on the other hand, I incorporated textual criticism into my research, I could argue that constructing the law and constructing the city were tied together in the Roman mind, and that this is demonstrated by the fact that some Roman editor or scribe added the line about the laws and the Senate to the original, and most people after that either didn’t notice it as strange or felt that the poem was better or more interesting this way. My argument has changed and deepened from one about Virgil’s psychology – something that is ultimately impossible to prove – to one about critical reception and the history of the Aeneid within Roman culture.

Works Cited

Campbell, A. Y. “Aeneidea.” The Classical Review 52, 2 (Nov. 1938): 161-63. Print.

Conington, John and Virgil. The Works of Virgil with a Commentary by John Conington, M.A. Vol. II. London: Whittaker & Co., 1876. Print.

Courntey, E. “The Formation of the Text of Virgil.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 28 (1981): 13-29. Print.

Virgil. Bucolics, Aeneid, and Georgics of Virgil. Edited by J.B. Greenough. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1900. Digital text available online at The Perseus Project. Accessed 30 Aug. 2016. Web.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Robert Fagles. Introduction by Bernard Knox. New York, Penguin Books, 2006. Print.

Ben Garceau is a scholar of medieval literature with particular interests in early Britain, translation, and critical theory. He received a dual Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and English from Indiana University in 2015. His article “Passing Over, Passing On: Survivance in the Translation of Deor by Seamus Heaney and J. L. Borges” is forthcoming in PMLA. When he isn’t leading seminars in Humanities Core, he likes hiking, working on his science fiction novel, and digging through record shops in Los Angeles.