‘My quarrel with the English language,” James Baldwin wrote in his essay Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare, had been “that the language reflected none of my experience.” And so “I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression”.
Then, he “began to see the matter in quite another way”: “Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.”
As he did so, “My relationship… to the language of Shakespeare revealed itself as nothing less than my relationship to myself and my past. Under this light, this revelation, both myself and my past began slowly to open, perhaps the way a flower opens at morning, but more probably the way an atrophied muscle begins to function, or frozen fingers to thaw.”
Baldwin is one of America’s most important writers, a novelist and essayist of great acuteness and humanity, a moral conscience for the nation as he chronicled the turbulent years of the 50s and 60s. Like many of his essays, Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare is a beautifully crafted account of Baldwin wrestling with demons, his own and those of America; a portrait of a man brimming with rage at the ferocity of the racism that encased him and struggling to find a language that could speak to his condition and help him transcend it.
The sense that Shakespeare spoke the language of the oppressors, yet also a language that helped think beyond that oppression, was not unique to Baldwin. It is revealed in the way so many writers and directors from the global south have constantly reworked the 16th-century playwright to illuminate contemporary struggles and tensions. From well-known adaptations such as Akira Kurosawa’s Ran and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespearean trilogy to lesser-known works such as Belarus Free Theatre’s King Lear and Sulayman al-Bassam’s The Speaker’s Progress, Shakespeare has long possessed a global presence. All of which gives an ironic edge to the current debate about “decolonising” Shakespeare. The controversy began when the Sunday Telegraph lambasted the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT) for seeking to “decolonise” the Bard. As virtually all the documents quoted were several years old, it is unclear why this should be a news story now. Nevertheless, the issues raised deserve debate.
The SBT, interim CEO Rachael North says, “is an organisation formed during the period of empire-building. We are constantly looking at the history of our collection and our interpretation of it.” Which is as it should be. Yet, framing reappraisal as a matter of “decolonising” suggests a project shaped by broader themes. And while North insists that the SBT is re-evaluating not the playwright himself but the objects for which the trust is responsible, it is difficult not to see it as a reconsideration of Shakespeare, too. “Decolonisation” has become such a voguish movement in recent years, with universities and museums tapping into the trend, and calls to decolonise everything from counselling to photography, that even some of its advocates now decry the “bandwagon”. To decolonise used to mean winning national independence from colonial rule. Today, it describes the desire to erase colonialism from knowledge, a desire resting on the belief that “colonial knowledge” continues to be “produced, consecrated, institutionalised and naturalised” throughout society.
It’s a belief that runs through the project to decolonise Shakespeare. The project’s core theme, though, is a critique of the claim that there is a “universal” quality to Shakespeare’s work. “The notion of universality,” writes Helen Hopkins, an academic whose work has helped shape SBT’s decolonising project, “is deeply intertwined with imperial logic” that “privileges white Anglo-centric, Eurocentric” views. The “narrative of Shakespeare’s greatness has caused harm,” she adds, “anchored” as it is in “whiteness” and undermining “pride in native culture”.
The argument draws on a longstanding critique of ideas emerging from the Enlightenment as being “Eurocentric” and “white”. In so doing, it conflates ideas and identity, the value of a claim being indexed by the group to which the claimant belongs, a perspective that ironically mirrors colonial approaches to race and knowledge.
The argument also conflates the imposition of western power with ideas that might have emerged from within the western tradition but which are essential to challenging such power. It was universalism – the belief that equality, democracy and self-determination belonged to all rather than the property of a privileged few – that fuelled the great radical movements that have shaped the modern world, from anti-colonial struggles to battles for women’s rights.
The problem, as many recognised, was not universalism but the exclusion of so many from universalism’s reach. “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not,” wrote WEB Du Bois, historian, philosopher and the most important African American campaigner before the civil rights movement. “I summon Aristotle and Aurelius, with what soul I will, and they come all graciously, with no scorn nor condescension.” “Is this the life you grudge us?” he demanded of America.
Troubling, too, is the insistence that claims of universalism harm “native culture”. It veers dangerously close to a perception of cultures – of “native” cultures at least – as “mummified” objects, in Frantz Fanon’s words, “put into capsules” and embraced as “authentic”, rather than as living entities continually “grasped anew” through interaction with the wider world.
The African American novelist Ralph Ellison was as contemptuous of essentialist notions of culture as Fanon. A writer like Baldwin, he insisted, was the product not “of a Negro store-front church but of the library”. As was Ellison himself. It was through reading “Marx, Freud, TS Eliot, Pound, Gertrude Stein and Hemingway”, and “books which seldom, if ever, mentioned Negroes” that he had been able to “release” himself “from whatever ‘segregated’ idea I might have had of my human possibilities”.
Questioning the ways in which we think of national icons and the place they occupy in our culture is always a useful task. Yet, long before the decolonial bandwagon rolled in, the appropriation of Shakespeare by myriad global cultures should have told us something about his relationship to those challenging injustice and seeking to speak truth to power.
It should have warned us, too, against ways of thinking that reinscribe colonial ideas about culture and knowledge in the name of challenging such ideas. The greatness of Shakespeare, Baldwin wrote, lay in his desire “to defeat all labels and complicate all battles”.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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