Ah, the dead, the unended, endlessly ending dead...; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down.
Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh.

1In act 5 of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra the Egyptian queen expresses one more time her determination not to be ‘dis-placed’ from Egypt, not to submit to Caesar’s ‘triumph’ (5.1.65) in Rome, not to become some kind of live ornament in the latter’s ‘imperious show’ (4.15.23): ‘Shall they hoist me up, /And show me to the shouting varletry/Of censuring Rome?’ (5.2.57).1 She also articulates her fear that she will become a parodic version of herself in a different kind of play as well as her deep aversion to the idea of being ‘translated’ into a body of a different gender:

The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’ the posture of a whore (5.2.215-20).

2Cleopatra’s decision ‘to do that thing that ends all other deeds, /Which shackles accidents, and bolts up change’ (5.2.5-6)—to perform a highly theatrical suicide that also puts an end to the ‘infinite variety’ of her performances—guarantees, or should guarantee, that she remains ‘untranslatable’ in terms of geographical movement (from East to West, from Egypt to Rome), genre (from tragedy to grotesque comedy), and gender (from female to male). But, if one considers the historical period in which Shakespeare’s play was first performed, aren’t Cleopatra’s words here also drawing attention to the early modern stage conventions she simultaneously disavows? Isn’t an English audience witnessing a boy actor impersonating Cleopatra on an English stage? And isn’t the play in which she is acting—Shakespeare’s play—at least in part the play she imagines and fears?

3This is to suggest that the name ‘Cleopatra’ stands for multiple aporias. And, I want to argue, it is the singularity of her enigmatic and oblique in-betweenness; the peculiarity of her being, that is, simultaneously translatable and untranslatable into the language and grammar of the Roman Empire, that crucially contributes to the appeal she continually exerts.2 Not even her death escapes the logic of aporia. As Ania Loomba points out, she inhabits contradictory positions, and this until the very end. At the moment of her death, she presents herself as an emblematic tableau, as ‘both the goddess Isis, with an asp at her breast, as well as Antony’s Roman wife’.3 It is worth citing Caesar’s reaction to her dead body on display: ‘She looks like sleep, /As she would catch another Antony/In her strong toil of grace’ (5.2.344-46).4 Her dead body bears an uncanny resemblance to life. In-between absence and presence, like a ghost, she inexorably affects, also in a traumatic way, and promises to enchant the future.

4In the course of this article, I focus on how this Shakespearean spectre manifests itself in Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile (1983), a play which is to a large extent about a Trinidadian theatre company’s attempt to put on a production of Antony and Cleopatra, a company directed by Harvey St Just, a white Englishman who has gone back to Trinidad to raise the standards of the local theatre.5 I argue that this spectre circulates trauma but it is also part of a process of re-articulation of the stage as a place where the ‘familiar’ and the ‘foreign’ interrogate one another. In particular, by responding to the spectre, the play marks a movement from a ‘writing against or without’ Shakespeare to a more complex sense of writing with Shakespeare, which is not an uncritical appropriation of the Bard.

5In ‘Egypt, Tobago’, a poem published four years before A Branch of the Blue Nile, Derek Walcott shows us, to recall Caesar’s words I cited earlier, ‘another Antony’ caught in Cleopatra’s ‘strong toil of grace’, a ‘numb Antony’ who ‘lies like a copper palm/tree at three in the afternoon/by a hot sea / and a river, in Egypt, Tobago’ (368-9).6 Walcott’s Antony is remarkably similar to Shakespeare’s but has gone one step further than his Shakespearean counterpart in terms of his embracing of ‘otherness’: he ‘stares, inert’, like a ‘fallen column’ (369), at a Cleopatra who has ‘young brown blood’ (370) in her veins, a Cleopatra who is repeatedly likened to a sleeping child (‘She sleeps with the soft engine of a child’), but whose sleep has no less than the power of undermining the white masculinity of the Roman Empire. Indeed, this child’s sleep is a ‘sleep which scythes/the stalks of lances’ and ‘fells the harvest of legions’ (370). It turns Empire into a farce: it ‘makes Caesars... drunkards, comedians’ (371).

6In A Branch of the Blue Nile, one finds a different kind of Antony in the character of Chris, who is not only an actor but also the author of the folk play the troupe is rehearsing at the same time as Antony and Cleopatra. Chris plays the role of Antony only off stage, in his private life, as it were, since he’s having an affair with Sheila, the lead actress of the troupe who plays Cleopatra. He has, of course, a blond English wife, a simulacrum of Shakespeare’s Octavia, and will eventually move to Barbados with her.7 Yet he implicitly refuses to play Antony’s role on stage. He never speaks any of Antony’s lines during rehearsals. In the first scene of A Branch of the Blue Nile, which opens with Sheila delivering part of Cleopatra’s ‘farewell speech’ (‘Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have immortal longings in me’) (213),8 he mockingly appropriates some of Cleopatra’s lines from Shakespeare’s play (‘Saw you my lord?’) (214),9 as does Gavin, another actor who has returned to Trinidad after some demeaning experiences as a black actor in the United States. Mockery soon turns into obscene jokes, whose target is mostly Sheila qua Cleopatra. It is almost as if Cleopatra’s fears of being ‘translated’ into an irreverent grotesque play had materialised here, on this stage. To an extent, therefore, Chris and Gavin act as ‘the quick comedians’ (5.2.215) Cleopatra mentions. Most certainly, they do ‘boy [her] greatness’ (5.2.219).10

7The rehearsal of Chris’s ‘dialect piece’, not unlike the Shakespearean rehearsal, does not proceed smoothly. This is mainly because ‘Shakespeare’ interferes in a number of ways: first of all, in the form of received English pronunciation (i.e., Shakespeare’s English), when Marylin, who plays Serafina, the peasant girl married to Gavin/Dolphus, switches from the dental sound ‘t’ to the aspirate sound ‘th’—she says ‘throw it away’ instead of ‘trow it away’, ‘beneath’ instead of ‘beneat’ (243-44)—and claims to ‘have [Shakespeare’s metre] in [her] head’ (244); second, when Gavin decides to offer an extemporaneous sketch of Richard III.11 It can thus be argued that ‘Shakespeare’ gets in the way by means of pronunciation (i.e., the aspirate) as well as by offering a paradigmatic ‘high’ model of social aspiration such as the Duke of Gloucester’s, an example Gavin sets against not only the rustic couple’s inadequate social ambitions, triggered by the fact that they have won the lottery and are therefore not ‘po’ people no mo’ (242), but also against Chris’s lack of ambition as a writer: ‘You’re [a] writer. How can you take any pride, any pleasure, in keeping your head empty?’ (249)

8Chris’s reaction to these Shakespearean intrusions is a violent outburst. Addressing Gavin specifically, who has experienced firsthand the lack of opportunity for black actors in mainstream productions in the States, he defends his play on the grounds that it goes some way toward ‘healing’ the black actor’s ‘nervous condition’: ‘This thing here would have restored you to your origins, your roots, your language, your childhood’ (250).12 He also claims, echoing the indictment of Western cultural icons in Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain, that the great European classics are far removed from life in the Caribbean: ‘I ain’t care who the arse is Shakespeare, Racine, Chekhov; nutting in there had to do with my life, or the life of all them black people out in the hot sun of Frederick Street at twelve o’clock trying to hustle a living’ (246).13 Not only is Chris, therefore, unlike the lyrical Antony of ‘Egypt, Tobago’; he is also the means whereby the play provisionally re-articulates the apposition ‘Egypt, Tobago’—the yoking together of two geographical locations—as insurmountable difference, a clear-cut opposition. In other words, Shakespeare’s Egypt is precisely just this: Shakespeare’s Egypt, a Western production of the East.

9Of course, it would be wrong to assume that Chris’s positions reflect in any way Walcott’s own views on roots, origins and language. In fact, Chris can be said to embody the ‘manic absurdity’ Walcott speaks of in ‘What the Twilight Says’, in that he seems to ‘confuse two graces: the dignity of self-belief and the courtesies of exchange’ (Walcott 1998: 27). As I have begun to show, the other members of the troupe do not share Chris’s positions. For Gavin, ‘the scene is corny shit’ (250). Sheila brands Chris’s outburst as ‘macho dialect bullshit’ (253). In short, Chris’s local play is not the play. As Tobias Döring points out, A Branch of the Blue Nile stages strong reservations against Chris’s ‘local project’ (Döring 2005: 20): to what extent do folk clichés provide a satisfactory ‘translation’ for the ‘real life’ out there, in the streets, in the Caribbean?14

10This is not to argue that ‘Shakespeare’ offers a more adequate language for the representation of life in the Caribbean, or that it is not contaminated by the local project it contaminates. In fact, on the night of Antony and Cleopatra’s première, the local project comes back to haunt, in the form of ‘a cut-out of bananas or fig trees’, a prop from Chris’s play which Wilfred, a stagehand, wrongly rolls out on stage just as Cleopatra is about to complete her suicide speech (264). The local critic censures the production on the grounds that it departs from the original, which amounts to ‘desecrating the Bard’ (267), but applauds Marylin, the lighter-skinned actress who has by now replaced Sheila: ‘Miss LaLune [i.e, Marylin’s stage pseudonym]... illuminates our tawdry stage like the moon herself’ (271). Yet Marylin’s picture in the paper with ‘half [her] chest out’ (271) shows that, to the critic’s eye, this local Cleopatra is far from transcending the tawdry stage she treads.

11Referring to the disastrous première, Tobias Döring claims that Walcott’s play also raises questions about the viability of Harvey St Just’s project (Döring 2005: 20). I want to argue that this has only marginally to do with the contingency of the accident on the production’s opening night. What is from the point of view of the critic an attack on ‘Shakespeare’ as the Western icon that upholds civilisation—‘Certain things remain sacred, or else our civilization is threatened’ (269)—is in fact merely a circumscribed intervention on Harvey St Just’s part in what is ‘local’ in the world of Shakespeare’s play: the rewriting of the clown’s speech into local dialect,15 which, to Harvey, finds its raison d’être in the Bard’s own practice of rewriting: ‘I felt since the Bard had swiped a prose hunk off old Plutarch, and since in old Willy’s day the clowns spoke dialect, and since our dialect is so Jacobean, I felt quite justified’ (268). Harvey’s is some kind of philological operation, a historical and geographical update of Shakespeare’s play which nonetheless fails to address the complex relationship between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ Antony and Cleopatra arguably dramatises through the enigmatic figure of Cleopatra. Put differently, Harvey’s Antony and Cleopatra remains a Roman play, which restricts the spectral ‘Cleopatra-effect’ to a male fantasy of possession of the alluring body of the East. The local critic and Harvey disagree on the position of ‘Shakespeare’ in a postcolonial context, but they implicitly agree on what Cleopatra is and how she should be performed.16

12That Harvey implicitly shares the local critic’s views can be shown by referring to the very beginning of A Branch of the Blue Nile, when the first rehearsal of Cleopatra’s suicide speech takes place. Harvey reprimands Sheila, the original Cleopatra, for failing fully to convey Cleopatra’s sexuality: ‘What’s all this sexual hesitation, Sheila? You know how sensual [Antony’s] corpse is to her?’ (213) Other male members of the troupe re-emphasise the director’s point. Her fellow actor Gavin, for instance, tells Sheila: ‘To get her, to really get her right, you should become, up here, at least, what Antony calls her, a great slut with a crown’ (226).

13Sheila’s reluctance to play the part of Cleopatra in such a way as to accentuate the queen’s sexuality has little to do with the actress’s individual traits. As Joyce Green Mac Donald argues, ‘to play Cleopatra persuasively’ (i.e., to play the version of Cleopatra the other members of the troupe circulate within the play) means, to Sheila, ‘to come into contact with that aspect of the Egyptian queen that seems to affirm [her] worst fears about her own bodily presence’.17 It means, that is, to confine her to a powerful system of racial signification that relentlessly associates the black female body with unrestrained sexuality.

14But at times Sheila is also able to redraw the contours of the ‘constraining production’ of the black female body as a body-in-excess.18 For instance, after replying to Harvey that she is not Cleopatra, and that she ‘can’t play all that’ (213), she seems to ‘get [Cleopatra] right’ (226) in the way her fellow actors as well as the director suggest. She is so enthused that she exclaims: ‘Sheila! Fuck Sheila! My name is Cleopatra! ’ (220) Yet, after this moment of elation, she jokingly but bitterly asserts, in a conversation with her lover Chris, that her racialised body constitutes an impediment to her ‘talk[ing] Shakespeare’: ‘Lips too big’ (229). But she also states in the same scene that Harvey has ‘made [her] elemental, a white fire’ (238), which recalls Cleopatra’s line ‘I am fire, and air’, when she dismisses her other, baser ‘elements’ before her suicide (5. 2. 288-9). To refer to Mac Donald’s argument again, her body is not only subjected to a system of racial signification; it is also a ‘potential gateway... into the production of a truly new New World [Cleopatra]’ (2005: 193). To her fellow actress Marylin, who asks what playing Cleopatra felt like, she describes her experience as an escape from the body’s constraints, a form of transcendence that also signifies resistance: ‘When I was small, I hated my hair, my lips, my life. All of that’s gone. Now... It was like being in a state of grace’ (256).

15Sheila’s to-and-fro movement from one position to another bears witness to the fact that Cleopatra’s ‘toil of grace’ does not exclusively ‘catch’ male characters (5.2.344-46). Sheila’s is a relation of identification and ‘dis-identification’ with the figure of Cleopatra. She is and is not Cleopatra, not least because Cleopatra is not quite herself but is also often elsewhere.19 Put differently, and to adapt from Jacques Derrida’s more general argument about the ‘Thing “Shakespeare”’, Cleopatra qua ghostly ‘Thing’ seems ‘to authorise each one of the translations [i.e., Sheila’s shifting of positions], to make them possible and intelligible without ever being reducible to them’20 ‘Cleopatra’ is infinitely appropriable but she is also an untranslatable remainder: ‘She makes hungry/Where most she satisfies’ (2.2.247-8). She is an ensemble of spectral marks that affect. In this sense, Sheila’s contradictory positions are a way of coming to terms, in a necessarily provisional manner, with the aporia Cleopatra is, with her being in excess of herself that is markedly seductive but also circulates trauma.

16Significantly, the ‘first encounter’ between Cleopatra and Sheila, according to the latter’s account, occurs in a mysterious and enigmatic way through the mediation of an old African woman, a palm-reader who sees in Sheila’s right palm the Nile’s inscription, ‘a river with seven branches tracing it’ (240).21 This retrospectively reconstructed episode is also associated with the origin of Sheila’s gift, a gift which is ambiguously theatrical and religious. This is a gift Sheila does not want. It is an absolute gift in that it is entirely asymmetric. It cannot be given back and exceeds exchange. It can only be passed on, and it seems to circulate in an all-female world, from Cleopatra to Sheila and then to Marylin.22

17As I have begun to show, the (poisonous) gift Cleopatra’s ghost bestows inflects Sheila’s identity in a traumatic way and causes ‘dis-adjustment’.23 This is perhaps nowhere clearer than when Sheila, who is by now a member of the Adventist church, comes back to the theatre and explains to the troupe why she walked out on them. In the long run her appropriation of Cleopatra had become the latter’s relentless appropriation of her whole body and identity, an invasion that left no respite:

My body was invaded by that queen. Her gaze made everywhere a desert. When I got up in the morning, when I walked to work, I found myself walking in pentameter...; I heard my blood whispering like the Nile, its branches, instead of traffic.... I was the river (285).

18Sheila asserts that she has ‘killed her’ (285). But, in psychoanalytic language, this is a symptom of repression rather than the sign of successful suppression. She carries ‘ [Cleopatra’s] corpse inside [her] body the way a woman... can carry a stillborn child’ (285). She claims to have ‘encased her like... a sarcophagus’ (285).24 She has literally ‘en-crypted’ her. But, as with the process of ‘cryptic incorporation’ described by Derrida, Sheila’s ‘encasing’ of Cleopatra turns out to be plagued by ‘a certain ceaselessly threatening instability’.25 One cannot keep the other safe within one’s self. The repressed does not fail to come back.

19It comes back in the form of theatricality. Sheila joins the church in order for her body to turn into a transparent medium for the word of God, which is for her a way of counteracting the system of racial signification’s production of the black female body as a body-in-excess, in both theatrical and sexual terms. Yet the church inadvertently becomes yet another domain of theatrical representation and artificiality: the congregation turns into an audience; her disciplined and transparent body becomes a body which acts, in spite of itself. Brother John, the Head of the Church, warns her that what is ‘natural in the theatre’ is inappropriate in a church: ‘Sister..., the congregation is not an audience, and the devout aren’t actors’ (287).

20It is worth pointing out that the return of the repressed, or at least its climax, coincides with Chris’s return from Barbados.26 He is a different Chris. For the first time, he addresses Sheila as Antony does Cleopatra, calling her ‘Egypt’ (291). He then quotes a fragment of a dialogue between a local boatman and a tourist taken from a new play he has been working on while in Barbados:

It have a bird here, mister, call the ibis. The colour is pure flame. Like fire, self. And from what I hear, it have the same bird in Egypt, a sacred bird, with long legs, by the Nile. Now, how that bird reach here, I self don’t know.... But the bird live here, like the same bird in Egypt. Neither bird is more beauteous than the next (291-2).

21Using local dialect, Chris allegorically attempts to recreate, at one and the same time, the link between two geographical locations as well as the association between Sheila and Cleopatra (i.e., the two ibises) he had crucially contributed to put under erasure before leaving for Barbados. It is almost as if the title of Walcott’s poem ‘Egypt, Tobago’ made sense again. To Chris, by taking refuge in a church, Sheila hides her beauty, her blackness, and her Cleopatra-like gift of acting. The ibis-Sheila ‘loses her colour in captivity’ (292), just as Cleopatra would if taken to Rome.

22The play Chris is quoting from is called ‘A Branch of The Blue Nile’, a play which is supposed to be an exact recording of the events that have taken place and which is therefore the ‘same’ the audience, as well as us, the imaginary audience, have been watching. This self-referential, meta-dramatic gesture induces the audience to reconsider aspects of the play such as the viability of Chris’s local project and Harvey’s Shakespearean project: to what extent do they fail? Do they fail only to succeed? In particular, and also given Chris’s Shakespearean allusions and his acceptance of the ibis-Cleopatra’s trans-national movement from Egypt to the Caribbean, significantly articulated in local dialect, this meta-dramatic gesture forces the audience to reassess the incompatibility between ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘real life in the Caribbean’, between ‘Shakespeare’ and one’s roots and origins, which had previously found in Chris its most fervent propounder. Writing against or without Shakespeare, which was an integral part of Chris’s previous project, gives way, almost furtively but nonetheless powerfully, to a more complex sense of writing with Shakespeare, a writing which implicitly acknowledges the uncanny presence of Shakespearean spectrality.

23According to Tobias Döring, Walcott’s play ultimately ‘exposes the limitations of both uncritical appropriation and absolute rejection of Shakespeare’s global legacy’ (Döring 2005: 21). As argued earlier, the ‘limitations’ of the ‘uncritical appropriation’ of Shakespeare are mostly evident in Harvey’s ‘Shakespearean project’. They mainly have to do with this project’s failure to address the ‘Thing “Shakespeare”’ as an ensemble of indeterminate ghostly marks that exceeds ‘Shakespeare’ as an essential ‘Thing-in-itself’, as some kind of reservoir of original meanings that can simply be updated.27 As to the ‘absolute rejection’ of Shakespeare, Chris’s metamorphosis indicates that this is not an option. Tobias Döring also points out that it is highly significant that Chris emerges as the (fictional) author of the play, as this implies that the search for local authenticity yields to a process of ‘transference and cultural transformation’ (Döring 2005: 21). This is a process in which ‘Shakespeare’ is involved, too, and I now want to reinforce this point by looking at the play’s ending.28

24Chris presents his play as an unfinished project and entrusts Sheila with the task of completing it: ‘It’s up to you to finish it. I don’t know the end. It’s up to you’ (291). At the end of Walcott’s play one finds four characters on stage: Wilfred and Iris, who are rehearsing the ‘private’ conversation between Chris and Sheila from Chris’s play, which corresponds to the third scene of the first act of the play we have been watching; then Sheila, and finally Phil, a ‘derelict’, as the dramatis personae has it, a hybrid combination of King Lear’s ‘Mad Tom out in the rain’ (247) and a local artist who had a hit back in the sixties with his band ‘Phil and the Rockets’.29 While Wilfred and Iris are rehearsing Chris’s play, playing respectively Chris and Sheila, the ‘real’ Sheila enters the stage unseen and appropriates Iris’s line ‘You might look very small’, which is of course one of her own lines from act 1 scene 3. Iris screams in fear at this sudden intrusion: ‘I thought you a ghost’ (309). After learning of Harvey’s death, Sheila employs Cleopatra’s speech after Antony’s death to address Harvey’s memory: ‘The soldier’s pole is fall’n’ (310), which seems to be an appropriate form of mourning since Harvey himself, at the airport, before leaving for England, speaks the line Antony speaks before dying: ‘I am dying, Egypt, dying’ (302).30 Sheila’s Shakespearean speech catches Wilfred and Iris off their guard once again. She explains that the speech is ‘from the play’ (310). But which play? Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra or Chris’s? Sheila plays herself (i.e., her fictional self) and plays Cleopatra, but she also plays herself playing Cleopatra. She recites and re-cites.

25The uncanny—the ‘familiar’ coming back as ‘strange’, the ‘same’ coming back as ‘other’—permeates the last scene of A Branch of the Blue Nile. It re-marks a movement toward a re-articulation—a ‘re-siting’—of the stage as a place where the ‘familiar’ and the ‘foreign’ interrogate one another. This movement is perhaps inevitable. It finds its raison d’être in the fact that this theatre conjures up ghosts that undermine the presence to itself of each of the terms of the supposedly opposing couple ‘familiar’ versus ‘foreign’. As Sheila points out, ‘this place is full of shadows. Shadows and voices’. It is a ‘place’ haunted by a host of voices, including the voice of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, voices that refuse to leave: ‘A theatre is never empty. It’s like a church. The voices stay in it’.

26The play’s last words are Phil’s, who speaks Creole as if to complete the spectrum of shadows and voices that hover round at the end of the play. He underlines that the ‘actor is a holy thing. A sacred thing’, and insists on the actor’s ‘gift’. He incites Sheila as follows: ‘Do what you have to do. For all our sakes.... Continue. Do your work’ (312). Once again, Sheila is faced with an assignation to respond, a responsibility toward the other/the other voices, an injunction which this time comes from a character such as Phil who by the end of the play situates himself in-between the ‘Shakespearean’ and the ‘local’. She hesitates. She is about to leave the stage, then she returns and starts her breathing exercises until, as the stage directions have it, ‘her breathing, driven to the pitch of exhaustion, fills the lungs of the theatre’ (312).

27There is no re-articulation or mutual interrogation of the ‘familiar’ and the ‘foreign’, the play’s finale seems to suggest, without the body of the actress. It is primarily through her body that Sheila endeavours to find ‘in-spiration’31 and to reactivate the power of the actress’s ‘gift’, a gift that does not seem to be tied to any specific location. (In Phil’s words: ‘it don’t matter where it is: here, New York, London’) (312). This is a gift, of course, which Cleopatra infinitely possesses, and even in the most difficult of circumstances. As Enobarbus recounts in Antony and Cleopatra, ‘I saw her once/hop forty paces through the public street, /And having lost her breath, she spoke, and panted, /That she did make defect perfection, /And, breathless, power breathe forth’ (2.2.228-32).

28It is worth referring to Cleopatra’s ghost one last time first of all because Sheila’s task is as daunting as the one Cleopatra successfully carries out; second, because the play she is getting ready for— a play which is uncannily proximate to the one she is already in and has in fact already partially begun—is also a play in which she will presumably try to face the challenge of ‘learning to live with ghosts’.32 These are ghosts—and Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is also one—that are symptomatic of a sense of ‘dis-adjustment’; they also signify, however, an unrealised potential for this theatre that is not necessarily coincident with the actualisation of a possibility.