A Call for Freedom: Aime Cesaire's A Tempest/ Appel a la Liberte--Une Tempete D'aime Cesaire (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION African poet Aime Cesaire's play A Tempest, a postcolonial adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, explores the relationship between Prospero the colonizer and his colonial subjects Caliban and Ariel from the perspective of the colonized. As an African black who received French education, Cesaire found that what colonization has taken away from him is not only land, but also his language, culture and identity. This originates the idea of Negritude, the underlying theme of his first published poem Return to My Native Land. The concept of Negritude (2) or black consciousness is used as a rallying point for freedom and liberation, for acceptance and pride of the blacks' racial identity. Since then, Cesaire has used his words as weapons to wake the world to the possibilities and opportunities of making true the dream of freedom. While The Tempest mirrors the rationale of colonization unconsciously (3), Cesaire overtly voices his politic views in A Tempest. His conception of Negritude is still the essence of this play. Focusing on the colonizer/colonized relationship, this paper tries to illustrate that in drawing his images of Prospero, Caliban and Ariel, Cesaire shows in the play his attitude toward colonization and delivers his idea of Negritude through Caliban and Ariel. Therefore, A Tempest is Cesaire's call for freedom and his ponderings on feasible ways laying ahead, which are interwoven in Caliban and Ariel's struggle for freedom.