Re-engaging master narratives: Re-encountering Shakespeare's The Tempest in Esiaba Irobi's Sycorax

Just like Aime Cesaire's Une tempete, Esiaba Irobi's Sycorax is a parallel narrative of Prospero's encounter with characters of other skin colour and gender. Both plays, like many others, represent successful efforts in countering the hitherto master narrative, Shakespeare's The Tempest. They speak back to and destabilize it through different versions that, at once, query and mitigate Shakespeare's. Using the idea of counter-narrative and writing back, Sycorax is interrogated here through textual analysis and selective close reading with a view to examining its exhumation and foregrounding of the silences, elisions, and under- or misrepresentations of The Tempest. With a highly provocative diction - Irobi's language is sexually explicit, violent, abusive, and unsettling - and experimental, somewhat postmodernist, dramatic structure, Sycorax intertextually dramatizes the issues of race, enslavement, colonial domination, migration, and gender as well as sexuality. Its relocation of action from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean; resurrection of Sycorax; Caliban's able-bodiedness, revolutionary zeal, vociferousness and change of name to Caribbean; Ariel's piebald sexuality as a bisexual hermaphrodite with the liberty to jump from Prospero's bed to Sycorax's; and the questioning of Shakespeare himself to answer for his (mis)representations; all exemplify Irobi's redirection of action and the emergence of new protagonists out of the characters of The Tempest. This article sees Sycorax as part of the work of formerly-colonized writers and artists now engaged in the process of redefining their people, identity, and cultural realities in the face of the preponderant assault of more powerful cultures and narratives that often garble them. Irobi's politically incorrect, troubling, and highly charged play thus expresses the angst of finding oneself vilified simply on the basis of race, body, or sexuality.