When Caliban writes back: Alameddine’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest

ABSTRACT

Arab American Rabih Alameddine’s novel The Angel of History appropriates Shakespeare’s The Tempest to comment on its representation of Caliban and his mother, Sycorax, and show how distorted images of Arabs and Muslims have been disseminated in US popular culture in the post-9/11 era. Alameddine’s novel, like Shakespeare’s romance, is populated by spirits, demons, and angels, and his protagonist, Jacob, is referred to at one point as “Caliban” due to his dark skin colour. He shares Caliban’s “bastard” origins and his status as the “devil’s son”. Both Caliban and Jacob learn a new language to relate their versions of history: Alameddine’s protagonist uses English to narrate his mother’s story – one suppressed in The Tempest. Through its innovative narration and use of the language of the colonizer, the novel subverts dominant stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, exposing both contemporary US consumerist attitudes and 17th-century European prejudice towards “the other”.

KEYWORDS:

• The Tempest
• Rabih Alameddine
• The Angel of History
• adaptation
• writing back
• Arab American fiction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yousef Awad

Yousef Awad is a professor of Arab diaspora literature at the University of Jordan. His monograph, The Arab Atlantic: Resistance, Diaspora, and Trans-cultural Dialogue in the Works of Arab British and Arab American Women Writers, was published in 2012. Since then, he has published a number of articles exploring a range of themes in the works of Arab writers in diaspora in Critical Survey, Borrowers and Lenders, Arab Studies Quarterly, and Middle Eastern Literatures.