Césaire’s rich and insightful adaptation of The Tempest draws on contemporary Caribbean society, the African-American experience and African mythology to raise questions about colonialism, racism and their lasting effects.

A Tempest

"a magnificent country! Bread hangs from the trees and the apricots are bigger than a woman's full breasts" and Baudelaire is quoted. A final scene, a departure from the original, has an old Caliban and an older Prospero still playing out their eternal struggle on the island. Ariel and Caliban are depicted as brothers with divergent paths. The narrative is clearly trying to make us see history -- and literature -- differently, but within that it doesn't have a didactic good-bad binary. It's complicated.

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