precisely the extraordinary outcry that we read in a work by perhaps the most extraordinary writer of fiction who ever existed. In The Tempest, William Shakespeare’s last play, the deformed Caliban—enslaved, robbed of his island, and trained to speak by Prospero—rebukes Prospero thus: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t/ Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you/ For learning me your language!”(l. 2.362-64).
Toward the History of Caliban
Caliban is Shakespeare's anagram for “cannibal,” an expression that he had already used to mean “anthropophagies,” in the third part of Henry JV and in Othello and that comes in turn from the word carib. Before the arrival of the Europeans, whom they resisted heroically, the Carib Indians were the most valiant and warlike inhabitants of the very lands that we occupy today. Their name lives on in the name Caribbean Sea (referred to genially by some as the American Mediterranean, just as if we were to call the Mediterranean the Caribbean of Europe). But the name carib in itself—as well as in its deformation, cannibal— has been perpetuated in the eyes of Europeans above all as a defamation. It is the term in this sense that Shakespeare takes up and elaborates into a complex symbol. Because of its exceptional importance to us, it will be useful to trace its history in some detail.
In the Diario de Navegacion [Navigation logbooks] of Columbus there appear the first European accounts of the men who were to occasion the symbol in question. On Sunday, 4 November 1492, less than a month after Columbus arrived on the continent that was to be called America, the following entry was inscribed: “He learned also that far from the place there were men with one eye and others with dogs’ muzzles, who ate human beings.” 3 On 23 November, this entry: “ [the island of Haiti], which they said was very large and that on it lived people who had only one eye and others called cannibals, of whom they seemed to be very afraid.” On 11 December it is noted “ . . . that caniba refers in fact to the people of El Gran Can, 1 ’ which explains the deformation undergone by the name carib —also used by Columbus. In the very letter of 15 February 1493, “dated on the caravel off the island of Canaria” in which Columbus announces to the world his “discovery,” he writes: “I have found, then, neither monsters nor news of any, save for one island [Quarives], the second upon entering the Indies, which is populated with people held by everyone on the islands to be very ferocious, and who eat human flesh.” 4
This carib!cannibal image contrasts with another one of the American man presented in the writings of Columbus: that of the Arauaco of the Greater Antilles—our Taino Indian primarily—whom he describes as peaceful, meek, and even timorous and cowardly. Both visions of the American aborigine will circulate vertiginously throughout Europe, each coming to know its own particular development: The Taino will be transformed into the paradisical inhabitant of a utopic world; by 1516 Thomas More will publish his Utopia, the similarities of which to the island of Cuba have been indicated, almost to the point of rapture, by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada. 5 The Carib, on the other hand, will become a cannibal—an anthropophagous, a bestial man situated on the margins of civilization, who must be opposed to the very death. But there is less of a contradiction than might appear at first glance between the two visions; they constitute, simply, options in the ideological arsenal of a vigorous emerging bourgeoisie. Francisco de Quevedo translated "utopia” as “there is no such place.” With respect to these two visions, one might add, “There is no such man.” The notion of an Edenic creature comprehends, in more contemporary terms, a working hypothesis for the bourgeois left, and, as such, offers an ideal model of the perfect society free from the constrictions of that
Toward the History of Caliban
Caliban is Shakespeare's anagram for “cannibal,” an expression that he had already used to mean “anthropophagies,” in the third part of Henry JV and in Othello and that comes in turn from the word carib. Before the arrival of the Europeans, whom they resisted heroically, the Carib Indians were the most valiant and warlike inhabitants of the very lands that we occupy today. Their name lives on in the name Caribbean Sea (referred to genially by some as the American Mediterranean, just as if we were to call the Mediterranean the Caribbean of Europe). But the name carib in itself—as well as in its deformation, cannibal— has been perpetuated in the eyes of Europeans above all as a defamation. It is the term in this sense that Shakespeare takes up and elaborates into a complex symbol. Because of its exceptional importance to us, it will be useful to trace its history in some detail.
In the Diario de Navegacion [Navigation logbooks] of Columbus there appear the first European accounts of the men who were to occasion the symbol in question. On Sunday, 4 November 1492, less than a month after Columbus arrived on the continent that was to be called America, the following entry was inscribed: “He learned also that far from the place there were men with one eye and others with dogs’ muzzles, who ate human beings.” 3 On 23 November, this entry: “ [the island of Haiti], which they said was very large and that on it lived people who had only one eye and others called cannibals, of whom they seemed to be very afraid.” On 11 December it is noted “ . . . that caniba refers in fact to the people of El Gran Can, 1 ’ which explains the deformation undergone by the name carib —also used by Columbus. In the very letter of 15 February 1493, “dated on the caravel off the island of Canaria” in which Columbus announces to the world his “discovery,” he writes: “I have found, then, neither monsters nor news of any, save for one island [Quarives], the second upon entering the Indies, which is populated with people held by everyone on the islands to be very ferocious, and who eat human flesh.” 4
This carib!cannibal image contrasts with another one of the American man presented in the writings of Columbus: that of the Arauaco of the Greater Antilles—our Taino Indian primarily—whom he describes as peaceful, meek, and even timorous and cowardly. Both visions of the American aborigine will circulate vertiginously throughout Europe, each coming to know its own particular development: The Taino will be transformed into the paradisical inhabitant of a utopic world; by 1516 Thomas More will publish his Utopia, the similarities of which to the island of Cuba have been indicated, almost to the point of rapture, by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada. 5 The Carib, on the other hand, will become a cannibal—an anthropophagous, a bestial man situated on the margins of civilization, who must be opposed to the very death. But there is less of a contradiction than might appear at first glance between the two visions; they constitute, simply, options in the ideological arsenal of a vigorous emerging bourgeoisie. Francisco de Quevedo translated "utopia” as “there is no such place.” With respect to these two visions, one might add, “There is no such man.” The notion of an Edenic creature comprehends, in more contemporary terms, a working hypothesis for the bourgeois left, and, as such, offers an ideal model of the perfect society free from the constrictions of that
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