Aime Cesaire appropriates The Tempest by William Shakespeare with his own version, A Tempest, in the process reacting to European colonialism. Cesaire's agenda is to show Prospero as the exploitative usurper of Caliban's self-determinism and Caliban as the oppressed native asserting his right to freedom. Cesaire accomplishes his project by using language common with civil rights activists, as well as by embellishing Shakespeare's characters to strengthen supporting characteristics.

In Cesaire's Tempest, Prospero is drawn as a slave-driving exploiter, preying on Caliban's weaknesses and using his magic to deprive Caliban of his freedom. Here Prospero demonstrates the inferiority complex which Rob Nixon describes. Unlike Shakespeare's Tempest, Prospero here has no uplifting or generous characteristics. He is instead reduced to greed and hunger for power.

Likewise, Cesaire transforms Caliban from Shakespeare's ignorant savage to a colonized native whose language and culture have been displaced by Prospero's. Caliban is much more vocal and articulate in A Tempest, and his arguments for freedom derive not from a betrayal, as Mannoni would read in The Tempest (Nixon, p. 564), but in reaction to being conquered and enslaved. I don't find that Cesaire is using Caliban wholly and exclusively as the voice for his politics because I find that Caliban is parodied as much as Prospero. For the author to degrade the speaker of his (author's) voice would be to discredit his own ideas. Perhaps Cesaire's object is not to articulate his politics with Caliban's mouth, but to synthesize his position from the interplay of Caliban and Prospero. Thus we can observe how his arguments take shape, how Eurocentric arguments compete with that, and how each succeeds or fails in the context of their dialogue.

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