“Finally she speaks”: Toni Morrison’s Desdemona

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s Desdemona (2012) lends a critical twist to William Shakespeare’s Othello (1604) by reimagining the source text through monologues, dialogues, and songs of the silenced characters in Othello: Desdemona, her ‘missing’ mother M. Brabantio, her African nanny Barbary, Emilia and Othello speak boldly to reveal their untold stories. In Desdemona, Morrison challenges Shakespeare’s text in two ways: Firstly, the experimental form of the play suggests a departure from the traditional play since Desdemona is a collaborative project involving Toni Morrison as the playwright, Malian singer Rokia Traoré as the musician and Peter Sellars as the director. This collaboration offers the possibility of re-visioning Othello on a more democratic ground and interpreting Desdemona as an ‘appropriation’, which Julie Sanders (2006) defines as “a decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product or domain” (p. 6). The second critical interpretation lies in Morrison’s taking on Othello using the lenses of the dead women: The reader and/or the audience witness Desdemona’s story through fragments from her girlhood and afterlife and now, she encounters Barbary, Othello and Emilia in the world of the dead. This feminist re-vision is enriched by Morrison’s restoration of a voice to Barbary who raised Desdemona with African stories and songs. In addition, reimagining the Barbary-Desdemona encounter to discuss the scars of colonialism creates a postcolonial feminist space through which Morrison ‘talks back’ to Shakespeare. This article discusses the postcolonial and feminist dimensions embodied in Desdemona and explores the possibility of reading this contemporary project as ‘an appropriation’ rather than ‘an adaptation’ within the framework of adaptation studies.

Keywords

• Toni Morrison
• Desdemona
• William Shakespeare
• Othello
• appropriation

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