The memory of Pringle as Prospero, or the cannibal that faked Caliban: issues of authority and representation in Thomas Pringle’s ethnographic poetry

Abstract

This article argues that, with the benefit of hindsight, Thomas Pringle’s poetry demands of his twenty-first-century readers that they measure its commitment to manumission by the balance between the syllables of his ethnographic poetry and force of his advocacy for manumission. The two measures, though, necessitate interdisciplinary forages into his work, albeit that the risk of either full leverage or attenuation may result from any interdisciplinary exercise that straddles history, anthropology, and literature. This paper ascribes primacy to that risk. It proceeds to point out a trajectory of earlier over-simplistic ethnographic poetry from a white colonist that, upon reflection, gives way to the later scripts of manumission of his work. It disavows an ahistorical reading of Pringle’s poetry that imposes his anti-slavery sentiment as informing his poetry in general and ethnographic poetry in particular, and so demonstrates that Pringle’s ethnographic poetry – unlike his celebrated manumission epistolary archive – does not support a singular reading of a humanizing intention. Pringle’s poetic sensibility – however much laudable – remains at odds with his political convictions: he inaugurates a Calibanesques axis through which Southern Africans in the settler colony vacillate between ‘Othering’ silence and colonized ‘voicing’. All told, Pringle’s ethnography poetry is shown to render the indigenous subjects as Calibanesque and, by that very fact, ‘cannibalizes’ him as he devours and usurps their right to self-representation.

Keywords:

• Thomas Pringle
• memory
• decoloniality
• ethnographic poetry
• epistemic violence
• Calibanesque

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Replete with contradictions, Thomas Pringle’s intended oxymoron is a flagrant form of schadenfreude: it inferiorizes and dehumanizes the ‘speaking’ African subject and, at the same time, readily calls to mind Caliban of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who curses Prospero: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t /Is I know how to curse” … (Act 1:II, lines 363–364). Notably, unlike in either Shakespeare overt version or Pringle’s subtler renditions, in Aime Cesaire’s version of A Tempest, where Caliban is empowered enough to play the protagonist.