What was the reality of Africa for Shakespeare? Did he know any Africans? Clearly the man who called his theater “The Globe” was interested in Africa, and his two “multicultural” plays set in Venice, Othello and The Merchant of Venice, are filled with references to Africa.
This project grew out of an astonishing line which appears late in Act IV of Othello. Othello has just visited Desdemona in her bedroom and threatened her with terrifying and pointed menace. He leaves, and Desdemona, deeply shaken, asks her companion, Emilia, to help her get ready for bed. Entering an eerily emotional twilight that will lead to her violent death, she tells Emilia that she can’t get a certain song out of her head. She learned this song, she tells Emilia, from her mother’s maid, Barbary, who died while singing it, of a broken heart.
In one line, Shakespeare has suddenly given us a series of startling images. The appearance of the word “mother” tips us off – Shakespeare’s plays are filled with mysterious, missing women and this is only the second reference to Desdemona’s mother in the entire play. But it is the word “Barbary” which triggers surprising associations. In seventeenth-century London, “Barbary” meant Africa. The Barbary pirates were hijacking British vessels off the coast of Africa, enslaving their white, British crews. In 1600, a delegation of ambassadors from the Barbary court, Africans of high degree, splendidly dressed, arrived in London to negotiate with Queen Elizabeth. That advent stirred much discussion in London. That Shakespeare, writing Othello in 1603, uses the name “Barbary”, implies that there is another African character in his play.
Shakespeare has already been at pains to demonstrate in Act I that Desdemona’s parents don’t know their own daughter, and now as she sings her famous “Willow Song,” the quiet, dark, emotional still-point of the night, we are left to reflect that Desdemona – this tender, brilliant, courageous, generous young woman – was raised by an African maid with African stories and African songs. “Barbary” is one of Shakespeare’s powerful and enigmatic “missing women” – he did not write for her, but he imagined her. In Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré’s Desdemona, we meet her at last, and Desdemona meets her again.
