The Tempest is set on an island after a shipwreck. Miranda, daughter of Prospero, the Duke of Milan, is chaste, obedient, tender, graceful, beautiful, and, as her name suggests, a ‘wonder’. At one point, she, a woman defined against a raced other, is described as a ‘Goddess’. Miranda’s radiance is explicitly set against the shadow of Caliban – her father’s slave. His name is often assumed to be an anagram of the Spanish word canibal, from which the English cannibal is derived. Columbus had introduced the term canibal into Spanish. He used it to refer to the people he encountered in the Caribbean.

In the play, Caliban is presented as ‘hag-born’, ‘filth’, and, although ‘honoured with/A human shape’, a ‘monster’ described as both ‘scurvy’ and ‘abominable’. Prospero tells Caliban that:

. . . I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes
With words that made them known.

Prospero is convinced that Caliban has his daughter in his sights and is bent on rape. In 1952, Frantz Fanon would observe that: “Prospero adopts an attitude toward Caliban that the Americans in the south know only too well.”
Miranda’s radiance is also implicitly set against the absence of any women from among Caliban’s people. We hear white representations of his mother, ‘the foul witch’, the ‘damn’d witch Sycorax’ from Algiers who has the power to control the moon. In 1960, George Lamming observed that Sycorax “arouses [Prospero] to rage that is almost insane”. Caliban asserts his claim to the land in her name: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother”. But Sycorax herself, Sycorax as a person, is always absent. Miranda is the only woman on the island.

Wynter argues that when the modern world was formed in the Caribbean: “the only women were white and Western . . . you had true women on one side, the women of the settler population, and on the other you had Indianwomen and Negrowomen”.

Land. Labour. Language. Rape. The gendering of race and the racialization of gender. Much of the basic grammar of the colonial condition is here. Much of it remains intensely contemporary. It’s no wonder that Caribbean writers, of various kinds, including Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, George Lamming, Sylvia Wynter, Paget Henry, Neil Roberts and, most recently, Safiya Sinclair, have returned to The Tempest again and again.

Césaire initially set out to translate the play into French but found himself rewriting it: “When the work was done, I realized there was not much Shakespeare left”. In Césaire’s reworking of the play, first published as A Tempest in 1969, immediately after the global tumult of 1968, the black woman remains absent. But Caliban’s first word is ‘Uhuru!’, he demands to be called ‘X’ and prefers death to “humiliation and injustice”. Caliban’s final remarks to Prospero come straight out of the black power moment of the time.