¶ … Shakespeare's The Tempest and Chamoiseau's Solibo the Magnificent would seem to share little in common with one another. The former almost certainly takes place in the Mediterranean; the latter in the Caribbean. Yet both tragicomedies touch upon both the causes and the effects of European colonialism. After all, Naipaul dubs the Caribbean "Europe's other sea, the Mediterranean of the New World," (212). Shakespeare penned The Tempest well after European discovery of the New World. Therefore, the playwright may have contemplated the potential short- and long-term impact of colonialism on the indigenous societies of Europe's other sea. Because there is little to no Italian colonization of Caribbean islands, the Milanese context of The Tempest provides a relatively neutral framework from which to explore issues like language, colonialism, and racism. In Solibo the Magnificent, Chamoiseau focuses on the French Caribbean island of Martinique to offer a sardonic portrait of racism, language, and colonialism. Both Shakespeare and Chamoiseau highlight the multifaceted ways colonialism is the external manifestation of European cultural, economic and political hegemony. Language plays a major role in both The Tempest and in Solibo the Magnificent. Language designates and demarcates social class, thereby being closely connected with social status and political empowerment. In Solibo the Magnificent, for example, French is the language of government and formal education. French is an elite tongue, contrasted sharply with...
Creole as the language of the people enables an ironic self-empowerment on the part of the indigenous and mixed-blood locals in Solibo the Magnificent. The police look plain stupid because of their inherent lack of understanding of the language of the very island on which they live; their stupidity is the poignant point of ridicule that propels the narrative of Solibo the Magnificent. Chamoiseau reveals the irony in assuming French superiority; because the French-speaking police cannot solve their crime from their position of presumed cultural and linguistic superiority. In spite of their using the language of the Mother country, the police come across as being total buffoons.
The different understandings of the world are indicative of differences in class just as they are a cause for racism, and again the characters of Solibo Magnificent have found a way to work in this system rather than resisting it. In addition to systems of class distinction and outright racism, other instances of general discrimination can be found throughout these texts. The Tempest has only one character that is necessarily
Tempest Shakespeare's the Tempest and Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnificent Slavery Slavery is one of the central themes in The Tempest. However, there are many different levels of slavery included other than the typical master and servant relationship that is based on ownership. There are also instances of mental kind of slavery that it carried out by Prospero who can control the minds of others. The two forms of slavery are closely intertwined in a
He notes that "anticolonialist critics have sought to "demystify the national myths" of empire and to write an alternative history of the colonial encounter" by focusing on "the politics of the early modern English-Native American encounter" with an eye towards "moments of textual rupture and contradiction in early modern texts such as The Tempest" (Cefalu 85). One may identify the scene of Prospero's accusation as one such moment, and
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