Imitation versus Contestation: Walcott's Postcolonial Shakespeare

A great deal has been written already on the topic of Shakespeare and the postcolonial. A number of postcolonial writers and theorists have marked out positions vis-á-vis Shakespeare, and one can make two broad generalizations concerning this body of material. First, postcolonial theory has largely presented the postcolonial as in opposition to the classic. Salman Rushdie, in a famous phrase, referred to how the "Empire writes back," and this implies a position of antagonism or contestation, of a critical stance toward the European/colonial past, including the literary past.¹ A major theme of postcolonial literature has indeed been to "write back" against the European descriptions of the postcolonial world, whether that be Achebe's and other African writers' critique of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Coetzee's and other writers engagement with Daniel Defoe, especially Robinson Crusoe, or a variety of Indian reactions against Kipling and Forster. For writers in English, it is perhaps not too much to say that the figure of the literary past is Shakespeare, so a general stance of contestation vis-à-vis the literary past should lead directly to a stance of contestation toward him. Yet it is perhaps worth noting that the purest example of writing back against Shakespeare is not found in Anglophone literature, but rather in the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, which is a chilling retelling of Othello written in Arabic and set in contemporary England and the Sudan. The other key site of such a critical engagement with Shakespeare can be found in the involvement of many Caribbean writers with the themes of The Tempest, again an involvement which expresses itself in the work of Aime Cesaire and Roberto Fernández Retamar as well as Anglophone writers such as George Lamming.²

Nonetheless, the stress on contestation, on writing back, found in postcolonial theory does not do full justice to postcolonial literature. I would like to suggest that postcolonial theory has been far more committed to the notion of antagonism between the postcolonial and the European literary tradition than the writers have themselves. To rewrite a text means necessarily to have a complex set of attitudes toward the model one is rewriting; contestation alone in my view does not ever fully explain the traffic between the original and the rewrite. The way many postcolonial writers take off from classic texts, rewriting them with a complex mixture of motives and emotions, is in crucial respects a continuation of the heritage of modernism.³ Joyce is a particularly useful reference point here: in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the young Stephen Dedalus is committed to an aesthetic of 'writing back,' as is expressed in the famous scene with the Dean of Studies where they discuss the word tundish. As Stephen subsequently reflects when thinking about the scene later:

How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

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Moreover, much of the way Homer, Shakespeare, and other models are handled in Ulysses is comic and deflationary in a way which can be read as an anticipation of the antagonism found in something like Season of Migration to the North. Yet Joyce extends Homer as much as he deflates him: his imitation—although creative or strong, not weak—is an homage as much as a critique. Imitation coexists with contestation in a way which is not new in literary history. My sense is that this double-voiced relation is far more characteristic of the relation between works of postcolonial literature and their models than any more simplistic model of writing back. Relevant here in general is the fact that postcolonial writers seek to establish relations to classics in their own cultural traditions nearly as often as they do to classic Western texts: examples...