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

Caliban has successfully initiated a form of recolonization, imposing on Prospero the gaze that has been under his control. Although he has been able to silence Caliban, the interchanging of roles is inevitable. The image of the fishbowl applies to De Chiara’s statement—the idea that the watcher/gazer is now the object of the original object being gazed upon. The postcolonial subject, at the moment of reappropriation, therefore, begins a questioning process; he begins to search for answers that, until that moment, Prospero had never been able to supply.³ The shedding of predetermined and predisposed labels takes place when Caliban sees Prospero through those very lenses. Thus, a form of mimicry begins to take shape—Caliban starts to impose himself onto Prospero. Caliban’s stance begins by questioning his own existence in relation to his past and that of the imposing culture. To question one’s own existence, however, according to Fernández Retamar, is “to question…our own human reality itself, and thus to be willing to take a stand in favor of our irremediable colonial condition, since it suggest[s] that we would be but a distorted echo of what occurs elsewhere” (3). Rey Chow’s notion of the image used when speaking about the native is echoed by Fernández Retamar. This is because the reflection in the mirror is distorted by what the colonizer/Prospero has imposed. Until the native/Caliban begins to reappropriate that image, he is nothing more than what Fernández Retamar describes as “a distorted echo” of the colonizer/Prospero. Notwithstanding, Caliban’s search for an identity, one that has not