![]() ![]() The songs interlude with the dialogue, so that Barbary is given almost as much screen time as Desdemona herself. Will you forgive me?In Morrison’s play, Rokia Traoré was chosen to compose these songs and play the role of Barbary on stage. We are left to reflect that Desdemona was raised by an African maid who told her African stories and sang to her African songs. Shakespeare choosing the name “Barbary” implies that here is another African character in this play, not just Othello. In 1600, a delegation of ambassadors from the Barbary court, Africans of high degree, arrived in London to negotiate with Queen Elizabeth – an event that stirred much discussion in London (…as you can probably imagine). The Barbary pirates were hijacking British vessels off the coast of Africa, enslaving their white, British crews. In order to understand the significance of the passage who have to know that in 17th century London, “Barbary” meant Africa. She tells her that she learned this song from her mother’s maid, Barbary, who dies while singing it, of a broken heart. In Othello, Desdemona tells her companion, Emilia, that she can’t get a certain song out of her head. There is another woman who is missing: Barbary. However, Desdemona isn’t the only woman who was silenced in Shakespeare’s play. Toni Morrison, alongside the help of Malian singer and songwriter Rokia Traoré (who provided the lyrics for the songs in this play and performed them on stage) tries to answer these questions by removing Desdemona from the margins and putting her in the centre. In Othello, she is portrayed as this angel (as opposed to Iago who functions more like the devil sitting on Othello’s shoulders) and we are never really let in on her feelings: what did she actually think of Othello? Why did she wanna marry him, even though it would mean to be dismissed by her own family? What was her life like before she met him? Desdemona is a play that tries to give voice to a woman who was never really allowed to speak in the Shakespeare play that she sprung out of. I am not the meaning of a name I did not choose. They knew the system, but they did not know me. ![]() Certainly that was the standard, no, the obligation of females in Venice in the fifteenth century. That it would be subject to the whims of my elders and the control of men. Perhaps being born a girl gave them all they needed to know of what my life would be like. Perhaps my parents believed or imagined or knew my fortune at the moment of my birth. The most prominent example might be Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, a novel in which she fleshes out the character of Antoinette “Bertha” Cosway who only “growls” and “gnaws” in Jane Eyre as Rochester’s first locked-away wife (some of ya’ll might know her as the “mad woman in the attic”), but more recent examples are Meursault, contre-enquête by Kamel Daoud in which he narrates the backstory of the nameless “Arab” of Camus’ L’Étranger and Toni Morrison’s Desdemona. The term “writing back” can also be used more narrowly, referring to marginalised writers “writing back” to the colonial canon by taking silenced characters (either absent or present in the source material) and giving them a voice. Marginalised writers were finally given the opportunity to speak for themselves and instead of being treated as colonial objects by their Western counterparts, could break the silence they were condemned to for literally hundreds of centuries. ![]() Recently, I’ve been getting interested in the postcolonial literary practice of “writing back,” a term that was coined by Salman Rushdie in his now infamous article The Empire Writes Back With A Vengeance, in which he discussed the shift in power in the 1960s that allowed many more marginalised writers to get published and tell their stories. ![]()
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