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Ambereen Dadabhoy
Abstract for Global Arab and C16 Forum

“Othello Was a Lie”: Global Arab Identity through Shakespeare

In 1833, Black American actor, Ira Aldridge stepped into the role of Othello in London at

the Theatre Royale in Covent Garden. Aldridge’s singular performance was possible because

famed Shakespearean actor, Edmund Kean, had collapsed and later died from the demands of the

stage.1 Aldridge’s “authentic” performance—he is listed as “a native of Senegal,” and “an

African Roscius,” in the playbill was roundly rejected by London critics, who claimed, “The

tragedy of Othello was performed, the part of the Moor by an individual, of Negro origin, as his

features sufficiently testify, […] Such an exhibition is well enough at Sadler's Wells, or at

Bartholomew fair, but it certainly is not very creditable to a great national establishment. We

could not perceive any fitness which Mr. Aldridge possessed for the assumption of one of the

finest parts that was ever imagined by Shakespeare, except, indeed, that he could play it in his

own native hue.” The comment on hue is important, not simply because Aldridge was a Black

man inhabiting the role voiding the racial impersonation enacted by white performers, but also

because the actor he was replacing, Kean, was famous for his “coffee-colored,” or “cinnamon”

Othello. This bronze Othello, popularized in the nineteenth century, bespeaks the racism of the

elite and intellectual class that couldn’t fathom Shakespeare writing Othello as a Black, African

man. As Coleridge hysterically justifies, in his notes on the play: “Can we imagine him so utterly

ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth,—at a time, too, when negroes were not

known except as slaves?” As we are aware, this statement would not have been accurate in

Shakespeare’s time, but it seemed so in the nineteenth century, where centuries of plunder,

traffic, and bondage in African people’s had resulted in a racist belief that Shakespeare’s Moor

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https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2017/02/17/ira-aldridge/
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must be light-skinned, tawny, and of Moorish extraction that bespoke an Arab rather than

African heritage.

I take this digression through the nineteenth century before arriving at my theme: the way

in which blackness and its denial have shaped our understanding of early modern constructions

of Moor and how Tayeb Salih’s twentieth-century postcolonial novel, Season of Migration to the

North, deliberately locates the construction of black and Muslim identity that Shakespeare

represents within an Arab and African cultural framework. I argue that Saleh’s refrain in the

novel, “Othello was a lie,” underwrites its postcolonial concerns, not only by rejecting the

Shakespearean inheritance imbued on black, African, and Arab peoples but also through a

celebration of African and Arab culture and a rejection of the masculinist violence of those

cultures.

I’d like to return for a moment to the racial ambiguity that seems to cling to

Shakespeare’s Moor. The controversy and debate in the nineteenth century and beyond over the

specificity of Othello’s identity and the meaning of Moor, despite the many references to his

Black skin in the play, announce the white European discomfort with Blackness and Africanness

even as these attitudes approve a more appropriate form of Otherness, that of the so-called

“Oriental,” the Arab and Muslim. These terms, however, are as capacious as we have been told

Moor was in the early modern period: Arab identity and culture stretches from the Arabian

Peninsula across North Africa to the Atlantic ocean, while Muslim identity was as global in the

early modern period as it is now. While not all of those Muslims were Arab, there were certain

porous cultural and religious boundaries that created affinities among Muslims that might have

prompted the widespread and imprecise use of Moor as a collective identity marker. My point,

here, is that Arab, Muslim, and Moor are all elastic identities that are not in conflict and don’t
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prohibit one from occupying all three. There are ways in which the critical move to render Moor

hyper-malleable have also successfully put into question Othello’s textual blackness, seeming to

evacuate from Moor a definitive identity category. Looking backwards at Arab and Muslim

identity through Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, then, demonstrates the intersections of

Black, African, Arab, and Muslim identity in the context of Shakespeare’s Othello.

Set in wad Hamid a village on the banks of the Nile in Sudan, Season of Migration to the

North offers a meditation on identity in relation to prescribed imperial and cultural discourses.

The novel centers on two men, the unnamed narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed, our Othello proxy.

Their intimacy lies in their familiar itinerary, their almost identical journeys to the north, to

England, to study in the very heart of imperial darkness. Where Sa’eed is destroyed by the legacy

of imperial expectations, degredations, exocitizations, and desires, the narrator is forced to

critically re-examine his connection to his homeland, particularly the values of the village as they

inhere in and through patriarchal power and control. While Shakespearean critics have rightly

focused on Salih’s use of Othello as a recurring motif through which to interrogate the

subjectivity of Black identity in the novel and the role of Othello in the construction of that

identity, less work has been done to limn the contours of the Black and Arab identity Salih

presents in the novel. For scholars of Shakespeare, the novel’s utility has simply been as an

appropriation, so that primacy of place goes to Shakespeare and England, rather than to Africa

and to Arabic, the language that Salih chose to write in. I emphasize this point because it is

suggestive of a kind of Eurocentric and imperialist orientation toward these objects, which are

paradoxically mandating anti-imperialist values. What would it mean, then to marginalize

Shakespeare in this text? What would it mean to focus on the African setting and the local

Sudanese-Arab culture in which Salih sets half of this novel? It might mean ceding the authority
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we grant to our “author of all time.” To accept the prejudice, bigotry, and racism built into

Shakespeare’s texts, which are repeated in the demands for a cinnamon Othello centuries later, a

demand that seeks to limit what Arab, Muslim, and Moor signify. It would also require an

epistemology attuned to the kinds of knowledge about Blackness, Africanness, and Arabness

produced by people at those identity intersections.

In the remaining time I have, I would like to pause on the refrain that haunts Season of

Migration to the North and that has pulled the critical focus toward Shakespeare rather than

toward the African milieu that is central to the novel: “Othello was a lie.” Appearing first when

Mustafa Sa’eed recounts his history, specifically his sojourn in England and his many deliberate

seductions of English women who were fascinated by his racial, ethnic, and cultural difference,

we hear an echo of this phrase when Mustafa Sa’eed is on trial ostensibly for the murder of Jean

Morris but also for the related suicides of Ann Hammond, Sheila Greenwood, and Isabella

Seymour. As his lawyer defends him, “Mustafa Sa’eed, gentlemen of the jury, is a noble person

whose mind was able to absorb Western civilization but it broke his heart. These girls were not

killed by Mustafa Sa’eed but by the germ of a deadly disease that assailed them a thousand years

ago,” Sa’eed expresses his own desire to cry out “I am no Othello. I am a lie” (29). The reference

to Othello obviously points to Othello’s murder of Desdemona, and here the Iago figure stoking

the fatal encounter, is the colonial fantasy that constructs the allure of the savage, dangerous, and

Black Other. A few pages later, as Sa’eed rehearses his first encounter with and seduction of

Isabella Seymour, Othello, returns as an important referent. This time, it’s in response to Isabella

querying Sa’eed about his identity, “What race are you?’ she asked me. ‘Are you African or

Asian?’ ‘I’m like Othello—Arab-African,’ I said to her” (33). Here Othello operates as a cultural

touchstone, a familiar object through whom identity can be constructed and understood.
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Othello’s Arabness and Africanness not a contradiction, but a palimpsest that accords with the

historical reality of the geography from which he originates.

While Sa’eed traffics in his exoticism, the postcolonial world that the narrator belongs to

is deeply divided by the pull of custom and tradition on the one hand and the demands of

“modernity” and nation-building on the other. Othello seems to have no purchase here, and yet

the domestic violence and sexism so vital to animating the fatal jealousy of the play similarly

infects the idyllic rural landscape of the narrator’s village. Wad Hamid, so far removed from the

political intrigues and machinations of Khartoum, is as “infected the germ of the deadly disease,”

as the young women of London, this germ is not the result of imperialism but of cross-temporal

and cross-cultural forms of patriarchy. The deadly spectacle with which the novel culminates,

like its Shakespearean source, is also a marital murder suicide, is also a scene of unspeakable

domestic violence. The events that lead up to this fatal encounter between Hosna bint Mahmoud,

Mustafa Sa’eed’s widow, and Wad Rayyes, a companion of the narrator’s grandfather, highlight

for the narrator the various kinds of injustice that permeate his society, the oppressions that

women must endure that are not unlike the degradations experienced because of the colonial

encounter. Hosna is forced to marry Wad Rayyes against her will, and despite her many attempts

to thwart this outcome. When the narrator is presented with Wad Rayyes’ proposal, and his

grandfather’s attempts to sway him into persuading her to accept Wad Rayyes, he is infuritated

“I felt real anger, which astonished me for such things are commonly done in the village” (72).

While his own complicated feelings for both Sa’eed and Hosna might influence his reaction, a

few lines later, the narrators thoughts emphasize the complicity between the regimes that have

circumscribed their lives and identities, “I imagined Hosna Bint Mahmoud, Mustafa Sa’eed’s

widow, as being the same woman in both instances: two white, wide-open thighs in London, and
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a woman groaning before dawn in an obscure village on a bend of the Nile under the weight of

the aged Wad Rayyes. If that other thing was evil, this too was evil.”

The lie of Othello is not the exotic eroticism of the Other or the violence that the Other is

capable of, but that this violence only matters in the context of a cross-cultural encounter, that it

can be located and pathologized within some bodies. This lie, is also what inhibits certain forms

of critique of formerly colonized cultures, because to suggest at the violence to be found within

this culture might seem to affirm the imperial lie of savage Other and civilized self. Moreover,

this lie motivates various forms of anti-blackness, which might claim an Arab Othello but limit

what Arab can mean, excluding black from the signifying register. To return to the nineteenth

century moment with which I began, it is important that we interrogate the critical motivations

that seek to create suitable and unsuitable others, the cinnamon Othello is no more Arab than the

black Othello, and as Season of Migration to the North reminds us, we should not want any of

them to be so because “Othello was a lie.”