Ariel, the male sprite forcibly indentured to Prospero in Shakespeare’s conception, becomes a waif-like adolescent cook and housemaid named Ariana. (Lawrence Scott set his recent novel Night Calypso there as well.) His daughter, Virginia, is the Miranda character, and the Caliban is Carlos, the mulatto son of the house’s late owner, a white woman from Algeria - Shakespeare’s “blue-eyed hag”. In Nunez’s novel, Prospero is the Englishman Peter Gardener, a former doctor of medicine, who for sinister and desperate reasons has become a refugee on Chacachacare, a tiny island just off Trinidad’s north-west coast, which was a leper colony during the period in which the book is set. Her disenfranchised children, symbolised by Caliban, are the Africans who “inherited” European oppression from the Caribs and Arawaks. Some critics argue that Sycorax’s island was stolen from her by the invading Prospero, as the Caribbean was stolen from the Amerindians by the Europeans.
Prospero’s Daughter brings to life the postmodernist view of the Prospero-Caliban relationship as a synonym for Europeans and Africans in the Caribbean. The second is a contemporary love story set in New York, but rich with allusions to the Bard’s canon as well as to modern classics such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The first is a retelling of the comedy The Tempest as a pre-World War Two love affair between a Miranda-type and a Caliban-type, set in Trinidad. The sensible way to approach Elizabeth Nunez’s most recent novels, Prospero’s Daughter and Grace, is to read them with one hand on your Shakespeare.
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