A Song for Caliban

The sci-fi novel Caliban by Roger MacBride Allen, set in Isaac Asimov's world of robots and humans. It fits there as well, maybe better as Caliban is not actually human in that story. I quite like the book and this poem has the same haunted/hunted feel as the novel.

Thank you for your thoughtful and interesting comments on Caliban.

I was taking Caliban as the archetype for the beast in us or Id which I think but cannot be sure Shakespeare was intending. I did want to make sure that nothing I wrote contradicted what was in the Tempest but actually there does not seem a huge amount. At the start Prospero is mightily pissed off as Caliban has been trying to screw Miranda and Caliban is unrepentant. Thereafter, Caliban is taken up entirely with attempts to overthrow Prospero. I may have missed some here. I find Shakespeare very difficult going, partly because I do not understand a fairly high number of the words (a problem I suspect that many of his audience had at the time) and more significantly the patterns of speech have shifted in the past four hundred years.

Most of all I wanted to show that our connection with Caliban is much deeper and more worrying than we tend to think. Thus we think ‘Yes, I have urges but no way am I a rapist, murderer or sadist’ – all of which I showed Caliban to be.

The first thing is Caliban’s anger – all absorbing and corrosive. And of course, Caliban feels totally justified in that anger. Anger is right and useful in its proper context but we nurse and hang on to it like a dirty comfort blanket. It gives us a lovely boost of adrenalin and endorphins. We are addicted to it. Over ninety percent of the time, our anger is a form of moral cowardice, a burst of pleasure to distract ourselves from uncomfortable things we do not want to face. It is as addictive as alcohol and more damaging both to those round us and to ourselves.

Secondly, as Caliban says in the penultimate verse, we all tend to self justify the things we want. Thus a paedophile is not evil because of the desires he has – he is to be pitied for that. He is evil for giving in to those desires but most of all for twisting the truth to tell himself and brain wash his young victims that it is a ‘loving relationship’. We are lucky enough not to have those desires but how much do we give in to the desires we do have and to what extent do we twist the truth to say it is ‘right and true’. We may eat too much or pick away at our spouses in ways that we know will undermine them – but convince ourselves that we are OK. Small evils or sometimes not so small. I am told that murderers, rapists and perverts all believe that fundamentally they are ‘OK guys’. We are probably more evil than we fondly imagine – because we do not face the twisting and hiding that we do.

In terms of race etc, while I have little doubt that Caliban has been depicted in the play with a black face for at least two hundred years, that is not Caliban as Shakespeare wrote him. Caliban was not ‘local’. Caliban’s mother was from Algeria, known then as the Barbary Coast. Known to Shakespeare’s audience as slavers that removed and enslaved entire villages in Ireland and South West England as well as the Mediterranean. Thus Caliban is not the descendant of slaves – he is the descendant of slavers. His antecedents are probably in the Italian theatre and back to Homer’s Odyssey. He is a grotesque and his closest relatives are Mr Punch, Quasimodo and the various monsters in the Odyssey (all presumably with white faces). His name is an anagram of the Spanish for the Carib people – who were exterminated rather than enslaved (hardly preferable for them though). The Tempest is set away from England as the story would have little credibility if they were shipwrecked in Norfolk (despite what some people say about the good people of that county). Foreign parts are where strange things are possible – maps can have the sign ‘here be dragons’.

Caliban is white, mixed or indeterminate race. I am not really happy with a colonial or post colonial view of him. He is in all of us. He is all of us. That is my view anyway.

You know that "literary" poetry is not my strong point, and I wish I could say I remember Caliban from what little Shakespeare I have read - but this offers a very compelling story and you could substitute any name and have been effective. After Spiced Lamb, this is my favorite of yours

If you have interest, and you obviously do, in the story of Caliban and Ariel, I suggest reading Aimee Cesaire's "A Tempest." Chock full of post-colonial goodness and absolutely amazing in its insight. We start the play off with an interracial marriage, of course. Cesaire takes it all up a notch by showing that Ariel and Caliban both are simply the results of colonization (Caliban) and miscegenation (Ariel.) I was especially taken by Ariel's role in Cesaire's work: a blend of two distinct worlds. Speculation about Sycorax (the unseen "mother" of Caliban and arguably Ariel) the "blue-eyed hag" suggests that there was a load of race mixing. Interesting piece and much respect for writing about this amazing work of literature.

The first thing I look for in a lengthy poem is needless repetition. I read this several times and didn't see any. Of course, I'm not as familiar with "The Tempest," nor Shakespeare, for that matter, as I would like to be, and perhaps there were lines that were superfluous, and I just didn't know.

That said, I like "portraiture" in a poem to display a side to a historic figure or in this case a literary one. We all know about deSade, given the noteriety of his name, but how much do we really know about him? I think you "painted" a very effective portrait of Caliban, and yes, I think your first take about Shakespeare's intent was correct. We all have a little bit of Caliban in us, although we try to hide it, sometimes, from ourselves unlike Caliban.

That it was a first person monologue instead of your describing the same events in the third person made the poem even more effective in my opinion.

I also look at the diction in a poem, ie, choice and order of the words, whether the poem is long or short. I have to say I was impressed with how the words flowed in this lengthy poem. I thought there were one or two "clunky" lines, but that may be my reading of them and placing the emphasis where it doesn't belong.

All in all, a very thought provoking read.