Reinaldo Arenas, Caliban, and Postcolonial Discourse By Enrique ...

has been colonized, forced to recognize what is foreign to him and adapt its values into his consciousness, accepting them as superior to his own. Caliban is forced to reinvent and rehistoricize a past in order to understand his future. He does so because he has been robbed of his identity, which has been replaced by a new and homogenized ideal of culture, society, and a sense of home. Frantz Fanon states that the native has no past—any connections to ancestral traditions have been de/reconstructed by the colonizer. It is a way for Prospero to maintain control, a way to manipulate who Caliban is. Fanon adds that the colonization process not only controls but remolds/reshapes/renames everything that the native subject has known prior to the encounter with the colonizer (Fanon 170). Conquest and control of Caliban is the manipulation of identity that creates a sense of inferiority and a reflection of Prospero’s sense of superiority. This argument reverts back to Chow’s statement regarding the image of the other. By interpreting the differences through binary opposites, Prospero justifies the oppression and marginalization of a specific group. Caliban’s silence allows Prospero to speak in his place, denying the colonized his own voice. However, Caliban will reappropriate and reinterpret the concept of image-identification by which Prospero’s identity depends on what he is lacking.

Nevertheless, Caliban attempts to resist and reappropriate identity, his voice that had been repressed, and begins to counterattack the idea proposed by Hall regarding agency and agent: Caliban not only is the object spoken of, but will become the agent as well. Therefore, the speaker and the subject are identical. Hall adds, “[T]hough we speak, so to say ‘in our own name,’ of ourselves and from our own experiences, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place” (392). Caliban’s voice, which has been silenced by Prospero, is often in conflict because the