Toni Morrison's 'Desdemona'
(The last post this academic year on Othello: go here for lots more on the play).
In Toni Morrison’s play Desdemona (a collaboration with the Malian musician Rokia Traoré), we have the opportunity to listen in to the conversation one of the great figures of contemporary literature had with Shakespeare’s tragedy, and what Peter Sellars in his introduction calls its darkly-resonant, open-ended poetry. Of course, this needs to be seen in production, but the script still holds thought-provoking material.
Before we get to Morrison, a pleasure is that punchy and provocative Sellars essay (he was the first director of the play). He calls Shakespeare’s story
A permanent provocation, for four centuries the most visible portrait of a black man in Western art. It is a play seething with innuendo, misinformation, secrets, lies, self-deception, cruelty, and strangely luminous redemption.
This project, he writes, grew
Out of an astonishing line which appears late in Act IV.
This refers to the comment Desdemona makes to Emilia about her mother’s maid as she sings her ‘willow’ song, shortly before her murder:
My mother had a maid call'd Barbara [or ‘Barbary’]:
She was in love, and he she loved proved mad
And did forsake her: she had a song of 'willow;'
An old thing 'twas, but it express'd her fortune,
And she died singing it: that song to-night
Will not go from my mind; I have much to do,
But to go hang my head all at one side,
And sing it like poor Barbara. Prithee, dispatch.
Sellers writes:
It was a black woman who taught Desdemona how to love and now, Desdemona chooses to offer her love to a black man.
In this play, Toni Morrison has created a safe place in which the dead can finally speak those things that could not be spoken when they were alive. Mainly this means the women of the play, including the ‘silent woman’ Emilia, who appears in nearly every scene of the play and almost never speaks (she does at some length later on, perhaps too late). Morrison’s Desdemona accuses her maid of complicity in Iago’s malice.
Sellars concludes his thoughts by referring to Des-demon-a confronting her demons, leading us on to Morrison’s first line
My name is Desdemona. The word, Desdemona, means misery. It means ill fated. It means doomed.
But she refuses to accept this limitation, ending the page with
I am not the meaning of a name I did not choose.
Later she resists the idea that she was foolish and naive because she surrendered to Othello’s brutality:
My life was shaped by my own choices and it was mine.
She reflects on Othello’s courtship of her, still wounded by grief following Barbary’s death, and we hear the marvellously eloquent version of the tales he told her in Shakespeare’s story, which captured her imagination and her heart. Later, section 10 shows us the married couple meeting again after death, and Othello accusing the wife he murdered:
It’s clear now. You never loved me. You fancied the idea of me, the exotic foreigner who killed for the State, who will die for the State
But Desdemona stands up for herself. Her voice will not be cowed. As she says close to the end when he asks her if it is too late for them:
‘Late’ has no meaning here. Here there is only the possibility of wisdom.
Finally, Rokia Traoré, Tina Benko and others perform the first song of the play, ‘Desdemona’.