2006 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the translation into English of Octave Mannoni's Psychologie de la Colonization, which became, in English, the provocatively titled Prospero and Caliban. Mannoni's psycholanalytic investigation of the colonizer-colonized dynamic in his native Madagascar paved the way for a half-century in which postcolonial interpretations of Shakespeare's Tempest, casting Prospero as inhumane aggressor and Caliban as exploited innocent, have dominated the literature on Shakespeare's delightful but haunting late romance. This postcolonial turn has inspired a number of retellings of The Tempest in which Caliban becomes a sympathetic and even heroic character. The central philosophy of such retellings is that espoused by the Cuban Fernández Retamar in his essay "Caliban": "What is our history, what is our culture," Retamar asks, "if not the history and culture of Caliban?"

Elizabeth Nunez's latest novel, Prospero's Daughter, set on an island off the coast of Trinidad, places itself squarely in this tradition. Carlos Codrington, her Caliban figure, is the son of an English mother—raised in Algiers—and a Trinidadian father. Its three parts are each told by a different narrator, and in the second part, Carlos tells his story. Orphaned from a young age, he lived with his mother's housekeeper, Lucinda, and her daughter Ariana, until, the morning after a terrible storm had ravaged their house, a mysterious Dr. Gardner arrived and offered to help rebuild. Gardner soon establishes himself as the master of the house, intimidating Carlos, Lucinda, and Ariana into submission and treating them strictly and often cruelly.

The main action of the story unfolds in the first and third parts, the first told from the perspective of an English police officer from Trinidad, and the third from the perspective of Virginia—Gardner's daughter. When Carlos reveals his desire to have children with Virginia, Gardner, obsessed with his daughter's virginity, confines Carlos to a grotesque, dung-filled cage and presses charges. We soon discover, however, that Gardner has a compromising criminal past of his own, while Carlos and Virginia's affair is much more two-sided than the racist Gardner is willing to admit.

Although the details of Nunez's novel are certainly her own, in the overall scheme of her adaptation, she does not diverge at all from the basic postcolonial reading of Shakespeare's play. Dr. Gardner is an exaggeratedly arrogant and racist colonizer: Carlos tells us that "he did not call me a savage directly (soon enough he would make it plain to me that that was what he thought of me)." Later on, when Gardner discovers that Carlos can read, he exclaims, "he can read. The little savage can read." While Nunez's depiction of Gardner as the domineering and self-assured colonist probably does accurately reflect the sins of colonialism, most of today's readers do not need another reminder of the errors of European imperialism, and will find Nunez's moralizing on the excesses of Dr. Gardner and his ilk outdated and pointless.

A more convincing motivation for Nunez's rewriting may be found in what appear to be occasional, subtle jabs at contemporary American foreign policy. Though Dr. Gardner is primarily a representative of the last wave of British imperialism in the '50s and '60s, Nunez uses him to critique early American expansionism as well: Gardner speaks of "the right of his people, their manifest destiny, to rule the world." And Gardner 's imprisonment and torture of Carlos—like Gardner himself, almost too cruel and too absurd to be effective—nonetheless do raise the specter of the U.S. Army's misdeeds at Abu Ghraib and especially at Guantanamo Bay (located on another Caribbean island). Such references could be more frequent and more pointed, for they alone make the novel's critique of colonialism feel timely or necessary.

Shakespeare's Tempest, however, is not only, or even primarily, concerned with exploration and colonialism. His Prospero is a magician—one who employs spirits to control the weather and torture his enemies, among other things. In the early seventeenth century, when The Tempest was first written, the boundary between magic and science was far from well-defined, and critics today still argue over a precise characterization of Prospero's "art." However, a consensus has emerged that, like many of the other literary magicians of the Renaissance, Prospero serves as a reminder of the limits of human knowledge—whatever form that knowledge takes.

Nunez's Dr. Gardner is, like Prospero, somewhere between a scientist and a magician—he uses modern science to grow new and often alarming species of fauna. Carlos ominously suggests that Dr. Gardner is more than merely a creative botanist:

he showed me how to create a new flower by grafting the stem of one flower onto the stem of another...how to do the bee's work and spread pollen from one plant onto the stamen of another. But I did not believe that grafting and cross-pollinating were the only magic he used to change the texture of petals on roses, to make bougainvillea bloom in colors that were shocking to me.

When we remember that Dr. Gardner (along with many of the other white characters in the novel) is essentially an inheritor of the Nazis' racial purism, Nunez's wariness about Dr. Gardner's experiments—and about contemporary work in genetic engineering to which those experiments clearly refer—Nunez's concerns seem justified. Racism and racial purism—and the horrors they led to, from gas chambers to colonial injustices—are recent enough in our history that ethical concerns ought to be paramount as we continue to toy with the science of life.

The point, however, would be clear enough without Nunez's several descriptions of Dr. Gardner prancing around his garden in a starry red cape brandishing a gnarled magic staff. Like much else in the novel, the moral tenuousness of Dr. Gardner's status as an ambiguous, Propero-like scientist-magician would be more compelling if it weren't so overdone. Nunez rarely trusts her readers to draw out connections for themselves, and as a result the novel sometimes feels heavy-handed, especially in its often-awkward (although occasionally clever) incorporation of Shakespeare's lines into the text. The title alone suffices to suggest the links between the novel and Shakespeare's play, but Nunez insists on weaving many of Caliban's lines into her novel, often with gratuitous and inelegant results: "You taught me your language well and I use it now to curse you. May you burn in hell, motherfucker!"

Towards the end of the second part, Nunez declares her debt to Shakespeare once and for all, and far too clearly: an older, now well-read Carlos proclaims that "every day I saw more and more of Prospero in Gardner." It is unclear why Nunez has Carlos declare so decisively what should be obvious from the first pages of her novel. A character within a retelling of Shakespeare's Tempest has become intimately familiar with the play itself, but Nunez's novel never lives up to the promise of playfulness offered by this interweaving of the novel with its source. So while Prospero's Daughter is far from a dull read, much of what renders it interesting—its critique of American foreign policy, its potential for clever narrative complexities—remains undeveloped, while other aspects—especially its earnest but tedious attacks on colonialism and racism—are laid on much too thick and soon become tiresome. Perhaps The Tempest is in need of a contemporary retelling—Nunez's novel may convince us of that—but Prospero's Daughter does not quite meet the challenge.

 

Guilio Pertile is full of noises.