Resistance Movements: The Tempest, Resurgence, and Indigenous Performance on Turtle Island

Abstract

Inspired by the reinvigorating theory of Wai-Chee Dimok and Rita Felski, I argue that The Tempest resonates with current theory and performance of Indigenous resurgence in North America. With reference to the work of Indigenous performance theorist Floyd Favel, political thinkers Leanne Simpson and Glen Sean Coulthard, and to plays and performances by Yvette Nolan, Monique Mojica, Kevin Loring, and Spiderwoman Theatre, I describe resurgence as culturally recuperative practices of movement on the land that make it feel more comfortable, establish an Indigenous sense of sovereignty, and diminish shame. I emphasize the ways in which the physical and imaginative mobilities of Shakespeare’s Boatswain and Gonzalo anticipate the comforting—and insurgent—land-oriented movements of Caliban. I argue that Caliban’s sense of natural sovereignty is understood better in terms of free and secure mobility than in terms of rule or possession.

Yvette Nolan’s The Unplugging is set in the woods somewhere north of settlement, in a future after a sudden loss of electrical power around the world. As the play opens, two mature women, Elena from Saskatoon and Bernadette from Winnipeg, are walking north, pulling their supplies with them and sometimes faltering in exhaustion, but willing each other to “get up and move.” ¹ We learn they have been banished from a survivor settlement in the south. Soon they arrive in a land that begins “to look familiar” (8). They start to practice the bush skills Elena remembers being taught as a child, while at the same time she begins to recall the Indigenous language of her grandmother. Elena and Bern survive and regain confidence and energy. However, they also attract the attention of first one, and then more hungry and desperate survivors. They must decide what to share with those survivors.

Nolan acknowledges inspiration from the Athabaskan story “Two Old Women,” as told by Velma Wallis. There is likely at least one additional source of inspiration for The Unplugging: Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The plots of the two plays are very different, but both are about exiles whose banishers eventually return to them. The influence rises to the specificity of allusion, though the Shakespearean elements are distributed and refashioned by Nolan. Seamus, the first visitor to contact Elena and Bern, tells them that the Prospero-like leader of the survivor settlement is becoming troublingly dominant over the other survivors. In the settlement, “There’s lots of—sickness, lots of anger, lots of power stuff going on. Laird is, like, king or something.” As Ariel and Caliban are frustrated by Prospero’s constant dissatisfaction, so Seamus feels that “nothing I did pleased him.” Seamus characterizes Laird as possessive and dominating, like Prospero, and Nolan even seems influenced by critical suspicion of Prospero’s attraction to Miranda. Seamus admits, “There was a girl … Tessera. We were spending time together. And Laird, well, he seems to think that everything and everyone belongs to him” (42). But if Seamus is a Caliban-like figure in relation to Laird, Bern soon becomes a Caliban-figure in relation to Seamus. As their relationship develops, Bern realizes that Seamus has even fewer survival skills than she has and offers to teach him to trap. When Seamus asks if she can catch a moose, she replies:

No. I don’t know how to do that. I haven’t done it yet anyway. But Elena taught me to catch rabbit. So I can teach you to catch rabbit. And I can show you the willow, and how to find water, and what is edible even though it’s Snow Crust Moon. (55)

In Shakespeare’s play, Caliban tells Prospero that he feels he sealed his own fate when he “showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle, / The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile. / Cursed be I that did so!” ² Caliban later repeats his mistake when he offers his knowledge of the island’s natural foods and fresh water to Stephano and Trinculo: “I’ll show thee the best springs. I’ll pluck thee berries. / I’ll fish for thee and get thee wood enough… . / … Show thee a Jay’s nest, and instruct thee how / To snare the nimble marmoset” (2.2.157–68). Nolan evokes Caliban’s repetitions of imprudent willingness to share by means of Bern’s parallel and anaphoric phrasing: “show you the willow, and how to … and what is …” In so doing, she deepens her play’s contrast of natural generosity to settler possessiveness and enhances the play’s suspense as she invokes a potentially tragic likeness between Bern and Caliban. ³

Like Indigenous Futurism (IF) in speculative fiction, which envisions Indigenous futures in terms of recovery of traditional practice and belief, sometimes after an apocalyptic event, The Unplugging imagines a future world in such a way as to explore theories and feelings associated with decolonization. ⁴ Nolan’s play seems especially interested in testing Indigenous resurgence. Although engagement with the state representatives of settler-colonialism has often proved dispiriting and unproductive for Indigenous people, resurgence instead emphasizes reconnection with land-based traditional practices, culture, and ceremony. Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar and political theorist Leanne Simpson describes resurgence as “re-investing in our own ways of being: regenerating our political and intellectual traditions; articulating and living our legal systems; language learning; ceremonial and spiritual pursuits; creating and using our artistic and performance-based traditions.” And it is “the land,” Simpson insists, which “compels us toward resurgence in virtually every aspect.” ⁵ Resurgence ensures that Indigenous people move toward the redevelopment of energizing and healing cultural practices rather than remaining caught in enervating dialogue with the settler state. Nolan appears to have found The Tempest congenial not only to her development of the contrasting themes of generosity and possessiveness, but also to her dramatic vision of resurgence. Although I can by no means claim that Nolan would necessarily read The Tempest as I will here, I do argue that to understand what The Tempest looks like and feels like when considered in light of contemporary theory and performance of resurgence is to understand how a contemporary playwright might feel the postcolonial force of The Tempest when creating a play about Indigenous resurgence on Turtle Island. ⁶

Despite my opening gesture to The Unplugging, this article will not be a study of Indigenous adaptations or “appropriations” of The Tempest, such as Lewis Baumander’s Skylight Theatre production set in Haida Gwaii (1987), or Robert Lepage’s 2011 Ex Machina Theatre Tempest in collaboration with the Huron-Wendake Nation. ⁷ I will demonstrate that Shakespeare’s play itself inhabits a realm of what Martin Orkin calls “non-metropolitan knowledge” by showing how it anticipates, and can be read in terms of, the energies of Indigenous resurgence. ⁸ Critics have recently attended to the ways in which heretofore silent or invisible agencies inhabit the play. ⁹ These readings should be understood as arising from a critical tradition in which both Caliban and the play as a whole exceed the script ascribed by early modern colonial ideology. ¹⁰ Stephen Greenblatt’s acknowledgment that Caliban is “not simply a warped negation” of Prospero has been an important influence on this tradition. We recognize this supplemental quality in “the rich, irreducible concreteness” of Caliban’s description of his island’s resources, of its “crabs,” “pignuts,” “clust’ring filberts,” and, most importantly, its “young scamels from the rock.” For Greenblatt, “Caliban’s world has what we may call opacity, and the perfect emblem of that opacity is the fact that we do not to this day know the meaning of the word ‘scamel.’” ¹¹ Charles Frey wonders “What happens in the brain when that word is first perceived? One may be totally at a loss.” Frey suggests that we must “go ‘outside’ the play” to grasp Caliban’s language here; the rest of the play does not function as an authorizing gloss on Caliban’s scamels. ¹²

My point will be that understood in terms of its resonances with resurgence, The Tempest’s internalized colonial perspective becomes ever less identifiable with the full force and meaning of the play. The Tempest gains vitality and complexity in what Wai Chee Dimock calls a “transit through new semantic networks.” Dimock argues that texts gain “resonance” as they move through time. For her, “This shift of emphasis from original to interpretive context suggests that resonance is a generative (and not merely interfering) process, one that remakes a text while unmaking it, that pays tribute to time both as a medium of unrecoverable meaning and as a medium of newly possible meaning.” ¹³ In a recent critique of inflexible methods of historical contextualization, Rita Felski cites Dimock as she seeks ways to describe interpretive methods that offer a “less rigidly constricted model of meaning that gives texts more room to breathe.” For Felski, texts “make a difference” when they are “enmeshed in a motley array of attachments and associations” as they move through time, and in which “Reading, in this light, is a matter of attaching, collating, negotiating, assembling—of forging links between things that were previously unconnected.” ¹⁴

Resurgence encourages us to remake The Tempest by recognizing Caliban as a performer who is at least partly liberated by his creativity and mobility. Caliban’s liberating performance is not marked as forcefully as (say) Richard III’s campy destabilization of Tudor propaganda, but it does become easier to imagine in a twenty-first century rather than seventeenth-century “semantic network.” Although performance theory has long sought to emphasize that actors’ embodiment on stage distances meaning and characterization from script, recent theorists have attended to the potential for performed movement to liberate actors themselves. ¹⁵ Diana Taylor shifts focus from “literary and historical documents”—the archive—to the repertoire of embodied “gestures, attitudes, and tones not reducible to language” whose performance “transmits memories, makes political claims, and manifests a … sense of identity” among performers themselves. For Taylor, “Embodied memory… exceeds the archive’s ability to capture it” and “allows for an alternate perspective on historical processes of transnational contact.” ¹⁶ Indigenous performance theory similarly emphasizes that such “alternate perspectives” for performers arise from grounded ceremony and tradition. Influential Cree actor, dramaturge, and performance theorist Floyd Favel explains that for Cree people, “Life is movement” and that consequently the way to translate traditional ceremony—particularly ceremonial dance—into contemporary performance is to abstract from the “technical principles” or spatially oriented movements of the tradition: “the position of the body on the earth, the relationship of the feet to the ground, the head to the sky, the different oppositions in the body, balance. It is the enigmatic relationship between these technical principles that creates the dance. These enigmatic relationships are the shadow zone where ancestors and the unknown dwell, and this is where creativity is born, where the impulse is born.” Attention to the body in space as traditionally performed helps Indigenous performers avoid “stasis, conventionality, clichés, easy solutions” and so “it is with a change of life rhythm that I am attempting to seek newness within my impulses and actions.” ¹⁷ Inspired by anti-colonial and Indigenous performance theory, I will read The Tempest with sensitivity to “gestures, attitudes, and tones” that seem to have remained dormant. I will attend to movements arising from the relationships of bodies—and minds—to the land and space rather than only to immobilities imposed by Prospero’s colonial power.

***

Skeptical assessments of the state of reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and Western nation-states dominate current Indigenous political theory. Recent perspectives on resistance to cultural and territorial dispossession have emphasized the importance of an Indigenous turn to land and deeply grounded, distinctive custom, either in place of reconciliatory negotiation with a state primarily interested in exonerating itself or as necessarily preliminary to meaningful reconciliation. Leanne Simpson writes, “As reconciliation has become institutionalized, I worry our participation will benefit the state … In the eyes of liberalism, the historical “wrong” has now been “righted” and further transformation is not needed, since the historic situation has been remedied.” ¹⁸ Glen Sean Coulthard emphasizes that colonized populations must struggle for self-affirmation, “first recognizing themselves as free, dignified, and distinct contributors to humanity.” He suggests that Indigenous people would do better to “‘turn away’ from their other-oriented master-dependency,” away from reconciliatory negotiations promising recognition and toward a nonviolent struggle to retain Indigenous lands and cultures. ¹⁹ Simpson advocates “the rebuilding of Indigenous nations according to our own political, intellectual, and cultural practices,” which requires creating “a generation of people attached to the land and committed to living out our culturally inherent ways of coming to know.” ²⁰ Resurgence includes both nation rebuilding and the land-based, culturally recuperative practices that allow Indigenous nations to feel meaningful to Indigenous people. Importantly, for Simpson, the need to prioritize cultural regeneration on the land over engagement with the state is echoed by the need to prioritize the natural land as teacher over the Western educational system. Simpson summarizes the cultural effect of learning from the land in this way: “The land, Aki, is both context and process. The process of coming to know is learner led and profoundly spiritual in nature. Coming to know is the pursuit of whole-body intelligence practiced in the context of freedom, and when realized collectively, it generates generations of loving, creative, innovative, self-determining, interdependent, and self-regulating community-minded individuals” (151). Simpson believes that even the most reconciliatory Western post-secondary education system “sets both Indigenous Knowledge holders and Indigenous learners up in a never-ending battle for recognition within that system, when the academy’s primary intention is to use Indigenous peoples and our knowledge systems to legitimize settler colonial authority” (171). Consequently, “The thing for Nishnaabeg to do is to stop looking for legitimacy within the colonizer’s education system and return to valuing and recognizing our individual and our collective intelligence on its own merits and on our own terms” (171). The “valuing” of “individual and collective intelligence” is at the core of resurgence, and it arises from traditional activity in the bush, on land sufficiently undamaged that relationship with community, with ancestors and with all other life, can be felt. ²¹

Resurgence on the land is also, necessarily, movement. Simpson derives an important aspect of her sense of resurgence from Gerald Vizenor’s theorization of Indigenous transmotion. She explains:

This is a movement, a mobilization, and a migration towards continuous rebirth. Nishnaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor writes:

The connotations of transmotion are creation stories, totemic visions, reincarnation, and sovenance; transmotion, that sense of native motion and an active presence, is sui generis sovereignty. Native transmotion is survivance, a reciprocal use of nature, not a monotheistic territorial sovereignty. Native stories of survivance are the creases of transmotion and sovereignty.

This movement in Nishnaabeg thought is expressed through the structure of the language, which utilizes verbs to far greater extent than nouns. In the pre-colonial daily life of Nishnaabeg people, movement, change and fluidity were a reality. Family groups and clans travelled cyclically throughout their territories based on the thirteen moons of the year, the seasons and their knowledge of cyclical change in the natural world… . Centralized government and political structures are barriers to transmotion; this static state is never experienced in nature. Aligned with the natural word, Nishnaabeg people created political, intellectual, spiritual, and social lifeways that enabled them to align themselves individually and collectively with the life forces of their territories. ²²

Indigenous mobility is for Vizenor and Simpson both epistemological and ontological. When Simpson likens spatial motion to linguistic difference and seasonal change, she suggests an array of mobilities related in ways more material than metaphorical. Indigenous mobility is physical and mental; sovereignty is the feeling of alignment that arises from individual and collective movement across a living land with which one feels kinship. ²³

Indigenous dramaturgy is often designed to reinforce and deepen the performer’s feeling for the energies of land and ceremony. Monique Mojica’s 2011 research for her play Side Show Freaks and Circus Injuns, for example, involved an extended exploration of effigy mounds and earthworks in Ontario, the Mississippi Valley, and the southeastern United States. For Mojica, this grounded and embodied performance research was itself a form of ceremony, which “regenerates my creative source by placing me on the life-giving land in an embodied research process that requires me to walk on, touch, feel, smell and absorb the stories, forms, and structures of effigy mounds and earthworks, to connect to the ancestors who built them and to the peoples who still inhabit the region. Simultaneous to this sacred work, I am challenged to “talk back” to colonial erasure …” ²⁴ To overcome the frustration generated by the predictably scripted colonial signage at the mounds, which often refers to their “prehistoric” origins and to the “demise” of the people who made them (222,231), Mojica sought to feel the life sustained by the earthworks: “I sit on the ground by Little Bear Mound to feel the earth beneath me. I begin to hear a rising chorus of song. Many voices. My body feels the heaviness of bear movements dancing. Rhythmic. It is a bear song I am hearing. The ancient ones danced to honour the bears here among layers of earth, layers of worlds. This is real” (229). Similarly, Kevin Loring and his company Savage Society engaged with the Nlakap’amux people of central British Columbia to release a traditional ceremony, used to deter domestic violence, from its early-twentieth-century archived state as recorded on wax cylinder. The resulting play, called Battle of the Birds, was staged at Vancouver’s Talking Stick Festival in 2016. According to Lindsay Lachance, Loring and the Nlakap’amux people “created a space of artistic sovereignty as they envisioned and remembered the stories, languages and teachings that lived inside their bodies and on their lands. The community transformed themselves into birds, land and water spirits from the story.” ²⁵ Battle of the Birds not only seeks to reinforce traditional teaching against domestic violence, but also, like Mojica’s performative movement across and around earthworks, to change the Indigenous feeling of place by attending to the possibilities for movement enabled by the land and the memories it evokes. Resurgent performance prompts a ceremonial place’s cultural energies to flow from past to present, from ancestor spirits to breathing bodies, making stronger communities out of vulnerable individuals as bodies move over its surface and realign themselves with its living energy.

An important element of the emotional transformation enabled by resurgent performance is release from shame. Spiderwoman Theatre’s Persistence of Memory, as performed at Miami University in 2007, uses carefully choreographed movement to release the shame of colonization from its performers. During the play, performers Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel offer family memories including a white doctor calling Muriel’s mother a “savage” as she gave birth, and Lisa recalling her displaced grandfather and friends playing bamboo pipes and weeping, as “old brown men mourning their lost home.” ²⁶ Toward the end of the play, the performers cross and recross the stage; Muriel speaks as if remembering a sign reinforcing the script of the vanishing Indian:

The Botanical Gardens in the Bronx.

The sign reads: Before the arrival of

Christopher Columbus, this area was

inhabited by Algonquian Indians. They

gathered herbs and collected water here.

The rocks, spring, vegetation have been

preserved in their natural state. Much of

what is now New York City looked very

much like this preserved area.

As the performers cross the stage again, Muriel responds:

Are you ashamed of me? Are you?

Are you embarrassed?

Are you embarrassed by your mother, your

Grandmother?

Are you afraid I won’t act right, wear the

wrong clothes, just not fit in?

But as the stage movement continues, the shame of displacement and deterritorialization diminishes. Muriel speaks: “I understand. I was ashamed of my mother. / My mother was ashamed of her mother. / Are you embarrassed? Don’t be … We go back eons. Where you place your / hand, your foot is padded with generations / of us. We came from way, way ago to be / here with you” (53–54). Movement and memory help overcome the feelings of disconnection and powerlessness that had generated collective and individual shame.

A variety of themes arise in these highly mobilized performances: reclamation of space or place, reconnection to land and ancestry, renewal of energy, reassertion of traditional sovereignty, release from fear and shame, and the assertion of sustained Indigenous presence on Turtle Island. At its core, I would argue, resurgence seeks to make full use of the way physical movement on the land catalyzes well-being and resilience. It is inconsistent with the kind of state-enforced settlement that prevents the feeling of ancient, comfortable relation to the land, and so resurgence necessarily contests alienation and deterritorialization. Resurgence resists the static sovereignty of the state and seeks to reconstruct a feeling of sovereignty arising from mobility across a land with which relationship is felt. Resurgence is the creative, mobile, and liberating performance of relationship to and on the undamaged, unexploited land. The Tempest responds well to interpretation in terms of resurgence because it anticipates similar concerns. The play gives us a variety of characters who seek comfort, release from fear, and liberty from constraint in mobilized and reconceived alignments with spatial structures both wide and local. Interpretation grounded in resurgence allows us to see how the play links imagination and creativity to physical mobility as related elements of unauthorized or even insurgent performance. Movements of various sorts enable Caliban’s resistance to imposition and allow him to maintain a sense of sovereignty on a land understood as a site of relationship rather than of domination.

***

The Tempest begins with characters trapped on a boat in a storm and ends with Prospero’s epilogue, in which he begs the audience for “release” from being “confined by you.” In Shakespeare’s most classically unified play, confinement and immobilization found dramatic action. ²⁷ We quickly learn that Prospero and Miranda have been trapped on the island for many years after their expulsion from Milan. From this original loss of freedom comes Prospero’s obsession with restricting the physical and emotional movements of everyone around him: first Miranda, then Ariel, Caliban, Ferdinand, Alonso’s party, Stephano, and Trinculo. Prospero frequently leaves those around him “spell-stopped” (5.1.61). Two of the play’s great verbal images are the “cloven pine” in which Ariel was imprisoned by Sycorax and the oak into which Prospero threatens to “peg” him once again (1.2.279–97). Prospero sustains his own feeling of sovereignty—a sovereignty Gerald Vizenor might describe as “a monotheistic territorial sovereignty”—by fashioning the island through illusion for his subjects. Ferdinand expresses the enchanting effect Prospero’s theatrical power has on him: “Let me live here ever! / So rare a wondered father and a wife / Makes this place Paradise” (4.1.122–24). Caliban’s experience of disenchanting loss in the overthrow of his “dam’s god, Setebos” seems entirely contrary (1.2.376), and yet both speak to Prospero’s fearful capacity to restrict and immobilize.

On and around Shakespeare’s island, embodied movements and reorientations of mind become mutually constitutive as forces of resistance to Prospero’s restrictive plot. ²⁸ Prospero’s storm at sea provides the condition for the irreverent thoughts and movements of the sailors and so initiates both restriction and resistance. “What cares these roarers for the name of king?” bitterly asks the Boatswain of Gonzalo, moments before indifferently brushing aside and either walking past or turning away from the shocked aristocrat: “Out of our way, I say” (1.1.16–17, 27). But if in these opening moments the power of the storm displaces the authority of the king and his court in the minds of the sailors, liberating their movements, even the power of the storm cannot immobilize the attention of Gonzalo, whose mind wanders from the danger of the storm-tossed sea to the comforts of the land: “Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground: long heath, brown furze, anything. The wills above be done! But I would fain die a dry death.” Gonzalo imagines this “barren ground” only briefly, but the particularity of his detail—long heath and brown furze—suggests that he lingers with the image just long enough to experience at least a momentary release from fear of “the wills above” (1.1.65–67). ²⁹ Gonzalo had already, though more tentatively or experimentally, released his mind from fear when he imagined seeing “no drowning mark” on the face of the Boatswain, and so briefly generated for himself an image that must take place on land: the hanging of the Boatswain (1.1.30). The opening scene condenses the play’s central themes and reveals that performances of mobility and security are facilitated by detailed images of the ground characters seek.

As Gonzalo and Adrian work to distract and comfort Alonso, they elaborate on the strategy of liberating mind from fear by transforming the perception of place. Despite the mockery of Antonio and Sebastian, a mockery that cannot help but seem heartless in performance, Adrian asserts that “Though this island seem to be desert … Uninhabitable … It must needs be of subtle, tender, and delicate temperance.” Gonzalo strives to enhance Adrian’s poetic achievement of release from dreary hopelessness by adding detail to the personification: “How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green!” (2.1.37-55). From this point Gonzalo’s speech wanders from optimistic reinterpretations of the court’s recent harrowing experiences, through the marriage of Claribel in Tunis, and to his unexpected reference to “widow Dido.” Gonzalo’s unconventionality and unpredictability, his failure to show respect for the authority of conventional interpretation, is itself an unauthorized movement of thought and emotion. Like the Boatswain during the storm, Gonzalo circumvents the authority of interpretive propriety, and so weakens the feeling of restriction under which they are all laboring. ³⁰ Although his optimistic reinterpretations can be perceived as naive, they can also be understood as creative. If Tunis can arise from Carthage, so place can be transformed and the feeling of place can change. A new and changed territory may grow in an old land, and convention may give way to freedom. ³¹ For Simpson and Vizenor, physical movement and liberated thought enable “alignment” with the natural world and life forces of Aki, the living, unexploited land. Gonzalo makes use of a liberated and mobile thought to make alien ground into a place of comfort and belonging.

Caliban, too, tries to comfort and strengthen himself through performative reconstitution of a feeling for his naturally sovereign place on the land. First, Caliban will not easily leave his own “confine.” Prospero calls Caliban three times, angrily naming him “slave,” “earth,” and “poisonous slave, got by the devil himself” (1.2.316–23). As Caliban slowly enters, he verbally counters Prospero’s insistence on his relation to the land or ground as shameful: “As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed / With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen / Drop on you both! A southwest blow on ye / And blister you all o’er!” (1.2.324–27). Caliban’s inner struggle is evident in his inability to fully escape the imposed perception of his mother’s magic as anything but “wicked,” yet he strives here to feel for himself the energetic, mobile opposition of nature to Prospero and to rebuild relationship with his mother in memory. Caliban’s personifications allow him to begin to cleave the feeling of wickedness from his memory of his mother by transferring that wickedness to nature itself. While the dew and the fen and the wind take on Sycorax’s wickedness, they also cannot be anything but natural. What this enables Caliban to feel is the fraudulence of Prospero’s enervating morality. If Prospero thinks mobility in nature is wicked, Prospero’s seemingly benevolent imposition of immobility can only be unnatural, and Prospero himself becomes the object of nature’s innate hostility. ³² By expressing this imagined mobility of land in alliance with himself, Caliban strives to neutralize Prospero’s sense of natural entitlement to and comfort in the island and its resources, and to naturalize his own insurgent desires. ³³ For this resistant performance, Prospero threatens Caliban with complete loss of muscular control and mobility: cramps, hedgehog stings, and pinches. In fact, Prospero attacks Caliban’s claim to the mobile energies of the island, asserting his own mobilization of its hedgehogs and bees. After these lines, Caliban’s seemingly irrelevant “I must eat my dinner” comes as a verbal accompaniment to further embodied resistance (1.2.333). This line makes little sense if it is not accompanied by a literal, if brief, turn away from his master’s degrading threats. ³⁴ More certainly, this short, punchy line’s assertively staccato sound seeks to undo the force of Prospero’s copious accumulation of threats. If this moment of resistance-in-motion is not as obvious as the Boatswain’s slighting of Gonzalo, it nonetheless opens a temporal and psychological space in which Caliban can both reinterpret the colonial history of the island in terms other than Prospero’s and assert his desire for reclamation. It leads directly to Caliban’s angry lament for his lost sovereignty: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou taks’t from me” (1.2.334–35). Readers and audiences otherwise sympathetic to Caliban have taken his claim to sovereignty—“this island’s mine”; “Which first was mine own king” (1.2.345)—as a problem. ³⁵ But sovereignty, as we have seen, can be imagined in positive terms for Indigenous people. As Vizenor writes, “That sense of native motion and an active presence, is sui generis sovereignty.” Having grasped the dialogue between Prospero and Caliban as a contest for comforting mobility on the island, we should now reconsider what Caliban means by “mine.” What has distressed him is not loss of kingship, but loss of unimpeded, natural access to the island: “here you sty me / In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me / The rest o’ th’ island” (1.2.345–47). What Caliban claims is a space of unimpeded movement, as if he is saying the island is the space that is “mine in which to move” rather than defining it as a place of regal dominance or settled ownership.

Caliban’s feeling of immobilization as loss of sovereignty helps make sense of the most difficult and troubling aspect of the dialogue as it proceeds. Prospero reminds Caliban of what Prospero understands as the attempted rape of Miranda, to which Caliban infamously replies:

Oho, Oho! Would ‘t had been done!

Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else

This isle with Calibans.

—1.2.352–54

Ania Loomba’s important analysis of the way in which The Tempest here contributes to the “myth of the black rapist” as “aware of the damage they can do by making sexual advances toward white women” is correct to the extent that the play privileges Prospero’s feelings and perspective. ³⁶ But Loomba also acknowledges that the play “functions as ‘the embodiment of colonial presumption’ only when [its] tensions and ambivalence … are erased” (156). The dialogue as given in the play offers the possibility that Caliban and Prospero are talking past each other in their understanding of the phrase “violate / The honor of my child” (1.2.350–51). What Prospero remembers or reconstructs as attempted rape is not perceived in retrospect by Caliban solely (or even at all) as an attempt to create “damage” but as an expression of felt and innate sovereign agency in no way derived from Prospero. Caliban’s point in this dialogue (which is not necessarily the same as the irrecoverable reality of whatever happened, about which we are given no clear insight by Miranda) is that his desire to share the island freely and to be able to imagine it as a place in which he will be recognized with respect even by his descendants is as natural to him as the sexual drive that allows for populating. ³⁷ What Caliban can be understood to hear from Prospero is less about Miranda than about the island being something he, a shameful creature, would have to take illegitimately. His response is a performative reinforcement of his sense of legitimate, natural belonging on a land of relations. Gonzalo’s utopian vision of an island in which “nature should bring forth, / Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance” is here anticipated (2.1.165–67). ³⁸

For Caliban, movement makes the island’s revitalizing natural abundance accessible and edifying. When Caliban appears in 2.2, his interactions with Stefano and Trinculo begin with another disengaging reorientation: “Here comes a spirit of his, and to torment me / For bringing wood in slowly. I’ll fall flat. / Perchance he will not mind me” (2.2.15–17). Caliban’s fall to earth reflects his fear, but also positions him to attend closely to what the ground of the island brings to his mind. This is the scene in which Caliban is sufficiently liberated to take a fearless joy in thoughts of pignuts, “clustering filberts,” and of course “scamels.” Here, Caliban thinks about fishing, gathering, and trapping in ways that are distinctly his own. Like Monique Mojica walking Indigenous earthworks, Caliban now can “‘talk back’ to colonial erasure.” He recognizes Prospero as a “tyrant” and asserts:

No more dams I’ll make for fish,

Nor fetch in firing

At requiring,

Nor scrape trenchering, nor wash dish.

‘Ban, ‘Ban, Ca-Caliban

Has a new master. Get a new man!

—2.2.178–83

It is not hard to grasp Caliban’s lyricism in terms of Leanne Simpson’s elaboration of Vizenor’s related concepts of transmotion and survivance, a relation “expressed through the structure of the language, which utilizes verbs to far greater extent than nouns.” Caliban’s reiterative, physically forceful poetry, emphasizing the bilabial stops of “‘Ban, ‘Ban” with their compressions and expulsions of air, as well as varying line lengths, moves in alignment with his memory of the sustaining land and against Prospero’s appropriation of natural energy. These pneumatic and rhythmical movements accompany Caliban’s feeling of renewal; he is becoming a new man in a land from whose abundance he will no longer be alienated. ³⁹

Although Caliban’s scenes with Stephano and Trinculo are easily viewed as comic mockery of Caliban’s aspirations to freedom, there is good reason to find in these scenes Caliban’s resistance to immobile, shameful privation. Certainly, they may be taken to reveal the play’s own contradictory perspective on Caliban’s resistance to immobilization. When Trinculo calls Caliban “A most ridiculous monster, to make a wonder of a poor drunkard” (2.2.163–64) there is some force to the disparagement. Yet the play itself also warns us against mockery of inconsistent and incomplete drives for freedom; the audience that laughs at Caliban begins to duplicate the all-too-telling behavior of Antonio and Sebastian. To insist on interpreting the scenes solely as mockery is to induct Caliban into the colonial archive in a way that Shakespeare does not demand. It is no less reasonable to envision the entire scene as Caliban’s performative, memorially reiterative resistance to the enervating immobilization that Prospero would impose on him. We should remember that Act 2, Scene 2 begins with Caliban’s insistence that he will not be “lead … out of his way” and that he will struggle to sustain his “barefoot way” against Prospero’s biting and stinging spirits. An important element of reclaiming his “way” involves reminding himself that those spirits are artificially moved out of their own ways and forms—they are only “like apes” and “like hedgehogs”—by Prospero’s magic. The spirits are not naturally Caliban’s enemies, for “they’ll not pinch … unless he bid ’em” (2.2.4–12). Part of what Caliban hopes to gain as he reasserts his own mobility on the island is a renewed relationship with the island’s other inhabitants. It is precisely the fact that Caliban thinks Stephano and Trinculo have “dropped from heaven” (2.2.135) and so “be not spirits” (2.2.116) controlled by Prospero that allows him to engage with them in a relational mode that emphasizes shared experience. He will show Stephano and Trinculo “every fertile inch o’ th’ island” precisely because they seem to him to be like gods who are free from Prospero (2.2.146–47). What Caliban wants from Stephano and Trinculo is a relationship in movement across the island to its various gifts as a means of compensating for the natural relations he has lost under Prospero’s restrictions.

As he moves across the island with Stephano and Trinculo, Caliban is not the same man he is in proximity to Prospero. Because his fear is much weaker, he remembers the comforts the living land gives him: “Be not afeard,” he tells Stephano and Trinculo, “The isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. / Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments / Will hum about mine ears” (3.2.136–39). Caliban does not regularly subordinate his movement to that of Stephano and Trinculo. When, just before Caliban’s song begins, Stephano says “prithee now, lead the way” Caliban is already moving toward those “Young scamels from the rock.” ⁴⁰ Within the land-based Indigenous performances of empowering mobility that displace colonial education and subordination, release from shame accompanies the development of generous, non-hierarchical relationships among those who share the equally generous land. The mobilized Caliban anticipates precisely this.

Caliban can hardly be seen as an unambiguous example of what Katherine Brokaw calls the “liberated imagination” of the “re-writing” actor. ⁴¹ He is terrified of Prospero, and says so: “I must obey. His art is of such power / It would control my dam’s god, Setebos, / And make a vassal of him” (1.2.375–77). Caliban may even evoke William Worthen’s description of actors overawed by the playwrights to whose scripts they give life. ⁴² Nevertheless, the punishment of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo for rebellion is brutal, and so speaks to Prospero’s vulnerability in the face of a rebellious mobility that reconstructs relationships among those who are in alignment with the land. Ariel has left them pricked with thorns in their shins and immured in “th’ filthy mantled pool” (4.1.182) and even then Prospero insists further on their immobilization: “Go, charge my goblins that they grind their joints / With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews / With aged cramps” (4.1.260–62). The fears of Caliban and Prospero make Caliban’s struggle to perform his place on the island in the face of those fears, and to feel the island as the place that makes his movements meaningful, more urgent. And so, I have tried to show that in The Tempest resistance to constricting power and centralized sovereignty inheres in mutually constitutive physical and imaginative mobilities and that such mobilities are particularly resonant with Indigenous resurgence. The movements of the Boatswain, Gonzalo, and Caliban, as they seek new and renewing land and a shared feeling of comfort in the land, are not necessarily “opaque” to all contemporary audiences and readers. Although the play does not have a language for Indigenous resurgence, the patterns of imaginative and physical mobility can be especially visible to residents of Turtle Island, for whom sovereign movement is entirely natural. Their vision may give The Tempest more of what Felski calls “room to breathe.”