In this video adaptation of the above lines from Brathwaite’s Letter Sycorax, I used an internet chatroom and a proliferation of mosaic images to visually depict Caliban’s spirit journey in a way that illustrates the depth of his emotions and spiritual resolve to develop a definitive voice as he communicates in his own language with his “Mamma” in real time, referencing the above lines. The chatroom expands upon Brathwaite’s SycoraX style by adding a time dimension with the lines appearing one at a time. The lines are also reordered such that the text is read upwards as new lines appear at the top of the screen instead of downwards, as is convention. This simulates how Caliban is forced to push Prospero’s language and culture up the “slope” but is “slide / in black down,” a situation analogous to that of the Greek legend of Sisyphus, who is eternally forced to push a boulder up a hill but slide back down just before reaching the top. Although Caliban is using the chatroom to speak directly to his mother in real time and convey his feelings, this new style of communication also shows Caliban using technology in a way that disrupts and resists cultural convention as the chat images mimic internet spam with repetitions and targeted messaging in an unsolicited and seemingly incoherent manner. This also lends support to Brathwaite’s implicit idea that Caliban’s thoughts cannot be properly translated to conventional language. In addition, Caliban’s chosen chat icon is that of a nurse, which symbolizes his desire to help, heal, nurture, and give a voice to others like him.
Though the Caliban in my video wears contemporary clothing and has a human body, the wildness of his hair shows that he cannot be completely colonized. My visual interpretation of Caliban’s thoughts also focuses on the difficulty of arising from the hell of his colonial condition as it depicts Caliban’s submerged culture and the spirit behind his conscious effort to develop the authenticity of his voice and identity through his growing inability to spread color, which represents the expression of his culture. As much as society and colonization try to destroy Caliban’s spirit and drive it “into de under / grounn” and succeeds in submerging his culture and language (changing the world to grayscale), it can neither take his spirit nor change his essence, as depicted with his colored eye, which remains even when the rest of the video is grayscale. The shadowy nature of Caliban’s figure depicts depression as Caliban “cyann get nutten / write” as he is condemned to the Sisyphean task of dealing with the burden of hypocritical modern society as it is “helpin we up while e push. / in we black dung.” Yet, while Caliban finds himself in the endless, perpetual staircase of hell, returning again and again to the same place without being able to communicate his message (spread his color), in the end, he realizes that he must never give up on trying to find a place in the foreign modern world as the video ends with Caliban’s figure standing on a high building roof, still retaining his spirit (red eye) even as the rest of the world loses color completely.