Deciphering Toni Morrison’s Desdemona
Morrison’s Desdemona is a continuation of Othello through exposition, a play, and songs of characters who are already dead. As Sellers put it in the foreword, “Women now have the scope to speak their minds and their hearts, and Africa is real, not just imagined.” (Morrison, p. 11) Desdemona gives women a chance to speak for themselves, tell their stories and express their feelings. More importantly, this continuation sheds light on another elusive figure in Shakespeare's plays, race. Showcasing that there is more to his plays than just white men.
The songs help give understanding of the character’s feelings as well as define the characters themselves. Desdemona’s song shows her contempt for men. “How can you confuse . . . woman with weakness?” And she goes on further to explain in her exposition. She says, “Is it your final summation of me that I was a foolish naif who surrendered to her husband’s brutality because she had no choice? Nothing could be more false.” And in the last sentence says, “But it was my life and, right or wrong, my life was shaped by my own choices and it was mine.” (Morrison, p. 16) Here we see that Desdemona does not agree with men's assessment of women. Their viewpoint not only does not make sense to her, but is completely inaccurate. Thus, we see defiance, intelligence and agency that Desdemona, that women everywhere have. That no matter the life women lead, they are our lives and not men’s lives lived vicariously through us. Morrison’s Desdemona gives women complete autonomy (even if not complete liberation) from men.
Another person who gains autonomy through song is Barbary. The first mention of Barbary is when Desdemona describes the “curtain over [her] willfulness” (Morrison, p. 17) stating “My solace in those early days lay with nurse, Barbary.” (Morrison, p. 18) Here we get the summation of Barbary through Desdemona. Barbary doesn’t even get to tell us who she is. Although we don’t (or at least I didn't) know Barbary is black, we see that she is a servant of Desdemona. That her existence is merely to serve those above her, to never want, or need, or think for herself and only do as she is told. Though she does care for Desdemona as a mother does a child, this is told to us by Desdemona. We don’t know if Barbary has to do these things or does these things for Desdemona because she wants to. Barbary’s description all steams from Desdemona’s perspective, and it is because of how Desdemona describes Barbary, we think Barbary is nice, loving and quite the singer. Yet we don’t know who she is, what she thinks and how feels because of her role.
But in her song, M’bifo (which translates to Thank You), we see that Barbary is lost, lonely, sad and unsure about love. Her song begins with “I thought that strength was in unity. I thought that having you at my side could keep me far from my solitude and my fears. Now I feel lost.” (Morrison, p. 19) Her love has left her and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. All that she thought she knew is gone and thus, she is lost. Despite all those feelings, she concludes, “But I still love the idea of love.” (Morrison, p.19) Barbary still believes in love because, as the title suggests, she is grateful for all the things it has provided her. And through her song, we see Barbary as someone who has loved and lost, is unsure, but still grateful for what she was given. That it isn’t Desdemona who fulfills her but love itself.
And lastly we get Othello, the titular character of the original play Desdemona is based. Loomba and Orkin pose the question, “in what voices do the colonized speak--their own, or in accents borrowed from the masters?” (Loomba and Orkin, p. 7) And when we are introduced to Othello, he is dressed as a soldier. “Glittering in metal and red wool. A commander’s helmet under his arm.” And the first thing he says is, “By your leave, Senator Brabantio.” (Morrison, p. 23) We see that everything about Othello screams Venetian soldier. The only things that point to his race are when Desdemona says, “his eyes identical to the light in Barbary’s eyes” and “In accented language . . .” (Morrison, p.23) We see that Othello is clearly colonized and that his appearance and mannerisms are clearly of those who have colonized him. That who he is, what he thinks and how he feels are but borrowed versions of his masters. He essentially doesn’t have a voice and we see that it wasn’t only women who were underrepresented in Shakespeare’s plays, but people of color as well.
As Hendricks points out in her lecture on Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race, “Practitioners ignore the preexisting inhabitants of the land or, if [settlers] deign to acknowledge the land is inhabited, it’s viewed as uncultivated and must be done so properly.” Though Hendricks is talking about PRS, or Premodern Race Studies, if you swap that out for settlers, colonizers, imperialists, white supremacists, it works all the same. But the reason I am doing it is to show the lack of agency and oppression of Othello. For in the following paragraph, Hendricks says, “In this body of work [colonization], all evidence (or nearly all of the evidence) of the work done to nurture and make productive the land is ignored or briefly alluded to. In other words, the ancestry is erased.” (www.folger.edu) So take Othello, he is both the uncultivated land and inhabitant and must be properly nurtured and made productive. The first thing Othello tells Desdemona is of his background. “As an ophan child a root woman adopted me . . . and sheltered me from slavers. [. . .] Yet soon I was captured . . . a happy day for me to be sold into an army where food was regular and clothes respectable.” (Morrison, p. 31) Though his ethnicity has not changed, he is no longer a Moor but a Venetian soldier. He has been nurtured (by the army) and made productive (used by those who enslaved him) and thus, has lost his ancestry (his upbringing with the root woman).
Of course, we see that Othello is not so at peace with this. In his self-titled song, we get words like anger, rage, fury, ugly, despise, destroy. It would seem that Othello is angry but his anger is ugly, despicable, and thus destructive. Upon initial reading, I thought it was Desdemona talking to Othello, but rereading it, it is Othello referring to himself. For he says, Great Othello . . . only anger can make you lose yourself.” “Man should not make ugly . . .,” “. . . hold back your fury. One does not destroy . . .” (Morrison, p. 24) We see that Othello is trying to be the version of himself the colonizers have made him to be but who he is as a person is angry with what they’ve done? The life they stole? It’s unclear who or what he is angry about, but he is trying to contain himself. Be who they have made him into but also stick to his beliefs. That God made him great and beautiful, and all these feelings go against that. It would seem that not only does Othello lack agency against his oppressors, but maybe he is even lacking agency within himself, struggling between his colonized self, his angry self and his true self.
Works Cited
Morrison, Toni. Desdemona. London. Oberon Books Ltd, 2012.
Loomba, Ania and Orkin, Martin. “Chapter 1: Introduction Shakespeare and the Post-Colonial Question.” Post-Colonial Shakespeares, Taylor & Francis Ltd / Books, 1998, pp. 1-19. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost com.proxy.emerson.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ibh&AN=17867020&site=eds-live.
Hendricks, Margo. “Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race.” https://www.folger.edu/institute/scholarly-programs/race-periodization/margo-hendricks. Accessed September 26, 2021.
