by Ben Okri
Iago is a lonely and bitter man. He is the man who utterly refuses to transcend himself. He does not accept reality and he refuses to face history. And yet he is in his twisted way an intelligent man. He has not found the vocation in which to utilise his considerable imaginative gifts. He is so seemingly friendly, so seemingly on your side, he is all appearance. He is the supreme test for those who will not see clearly; who will not see deeply into people. He thinks more intensely than anyone else in the play. In fact, he has the mind of a playwright, manipulating people around his plots. When the plot gets out of hand, when the characters don’t behave as expected, like a poor playwright he kills them off. Iago is the scourge of those whose thinking is muddled. He depends on their faulty vision to pervert reality.
One of the great themes of the play, for me, is the war between Appearance and Reality. Appearance strives to be, but Reality is. Appearance can command the gaze, distort things, but Reality is the eternal present. It is what things are in all their secret phases. It is what Appearance strives to become. Reality is the future of all secrets.
Othello is caught in the nightmare that history has made real. And there is something frightening about a majestic man who believes what they say about him. He believes too much in appearances. Here is a man of royal birth, who was taken as a slave, and rose to become a general. Whatever bitterness or bewilderment he might have had has been taken from him. In their place he has been fed bubbles of power. He fed them to himself.
Iago is the most perceptive person in the play: so coldly does he calculate the shallowness of Othello’s rise, how much he must have paid, how much rage he must repress. And because Othello can’t really release his rage, as it would hinder his rise, he can’t transform his anger into something higher. He can’t therefore transcend his jealousy when it swoops into his soul like a green bird of prey. All Iago has to do is get that repressed rage to turn on itself and to open up in Othello the element of self-destruction.
Othello can’t really be honest to himself. He couldn’t have risen that high and in such fearful isolation if he were. Unlike Iago, he accepts too much. He even wholly accepts the blind logic of the world in which he has sacrificed his history for ambition. That is why he has to be so trusting. Trapped in ambition, marked by his colour, refusing to confront his predicament, he is the authentic self-betrayer. He is the white man’s myth of the black man. But he is also a negative myth for black people in the West. Signposts along roads that can lead to hell also have their own peculiar value.
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It must be admitted that there is something unbelievably simple about Othello. He comfortably personifies jealousy, and his particular manifestation of it is taken as a quality of his otherness. But there he is, a man of royal birth, taken as a slave, and he has no bitterness. He doesn’t possess an ounce of anger, or even a sense of injustice. It is difficult to believe that he has got so far as a warrior, climbed so high in office, and yet possesses no cunning and no ability to penetrate appearances. The most irritating thing of all is his nobility, which, in his predicament, is a sort of naivety. When a black man is portrayed as noble in the West it usually means that he is neutralised. When white people speak so highly of a black man’s nobility they are usually referring to his impotence. It is Othello’s neutrality and social impotence that troubles me.
James Baldwin has said that people will face in your life only what they would face in theirs. But to this must first be added the condition that people accept your humanity as essentially equal to theirs. Shakespeare, as a white man of his era, could not fully concede Othello an equal status of humanity. It seems that the only way white people can see black people, and begin to accept them, without really having to face them, is by lessening their internal realities. Their external difference, their skin colour, is romanticised, taken as exotic.
And their souls are filled with blankness. This is why a lot of white people can know what black people suffer daily all over the globe and not be really bruised in their humanity: because they assume that black people are used to their pain, that they feel things differently, and that suffering is their unchanging condition. When you reduce the reality of the other there is the obvious benefit of not having to face the fullness of their being, their contradictions, their agonies.
Those who hate black people and those who romanticise them mean the same thing when one speaks of the colour as ugly and the other speaks of it as attractive. Both of them deny black its own unique condition and existence unto itself. The weirdest thing about Othello is that his colour is empty of history. It is the accepted thing to comment on Othello’s jealousy, but few critics seem to realise that his colour, his otherness, must imply a specific history in white society. It seems that into the vessel of Othello’s skin, Shakespeare poured whiteness. It is possible that Othello actually is a blackened white man.
He certainly is a lost man. His author cheats him of a satisfying period of sex with Desdemona. Instead of sex, Othello is allowed coitus interruptus. Instead of anger, he is given an almost idiotic naivety. He has no real friends. In spite of his apparel of power and glory, he is a naked man, a deluded man. And why does he have to be trapped in that unending cycle of murder and suicide? Does the denial of someone’s humanity inexorably lead them to murder? Or is it that in an abnormal situation only an abnormal action becomes possible? And when no human solution seems possible is suicide the inevitable consequence? Or is suicide a twisted affirmation of freedom? It is also a fantasy, a wishing away of reality: it avoids the problem of race. It is amazing that Othello’s suicide is seen as an extension of his nobility, when in fact it is the inescapable logic of his impotence. The whole machinery of the play is set in motion by the presence of this lone black man. By the end he has killed himself. Iago who is responsible for so many deaths is dragged away, unrepentant. Without Othello, the universe of the play becomes homogenous, diminished. There are always alternatives. We always need the other.
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In three centuries of Othello committing murder and suicide on the stage no significant change in attitude towards black people has occurred. I doubt that Othello really disturbs people as much as it should. Society has become smothered by complacency. Add to this the fact that Othello as a lone black man on the stage is not threatening. White audiences must merely look upon his phenomenon. It is a basic truth of literature that if you can’t enter the centre of a work, then it can’t really shake you. How can white people imagine themselves in Othello’s skin? History does not support it. Othello is a character with only one road leading out of him, but none lead into him. The black person’s response to Othello is more secret, and much more anguished, than can be imagined. It makes you unbearably lonely to know that you can empathise with them, but they will rarely empathise with you. It hurts to watch Othello.
Which brings me to another element. Othello is powerless, and Iago the real enemy, and yet I can’t wholly blame Othello for trusting him. Of all the people in the play, with the natural exception of Desdemona, Iago is the only one who expresses what he feels for Othello. He is lying, but nonetheless he expresses. It means a lot to the isolated to have someone declare their affection. It means a lot to be loved.
Any black man who has gone out with a white woman knows that there are a lot of Iagos around. If the woman is desirable then the situation is more insidious. The question the new Iagos ask themselves is: why him and not me? Then they might put it down to the myth of the black man’s sexuality – a myth invented by white people in the first place. Iago’s obsession depends obviously on Othello’s success. If Othello were a failure and hadn’t won Desdemona’s love he would not have begun to exist in Iago’s hell. It is also crucial that Iago is a failed human being. He is full of self-loathing. The real jealousy at work in the play is not Othello’s, but Iago’s. When he speaks of jealousy as a green-eyed monster Iago knows what he is talking about. He’s been there. He’s stuck there. He has lived with jealousy for a long time. The fascinating and at the same tim
e repellent thing about Iago is his refusal to confront his failure. The angle of his humanity is very thin. He is the man of short cuts. And so he becomes a specialist in the art of projecting his bitterness. And to crown all this: he has to mask his failure, mask his resentment, his self-obsession. And so he mingles with the crowd.
Iago today would not be a member of a fanatical racist group. He is not that much of a failure. He would attend the right marches, say the right things, and he would be unmistakably vocal in his objection to racism. He would be invisible because he is – almost – like everyone else. He lives in the closed universe between cynicism and hell. He is the perfect hypocrite in the sense that you would never think of applying the word to him. And he is an almost flawless actor and a superb ironist. Most of what Iago says has a sinister truth. It is the fact that he speaks from his own condition which gives his utterances their weird and elusive honesty. His smile should send shudders of terror through us. But it warms us a little, because we despise him and feel bad about it, because he too is human, and more seriously because we don’t really know him. But he knows us. He has insinuated himself into our lives. And he loathes us, loathes everything. And in our midst he spins his web of hate. Iago is a more authentic creation than Othello. Wherever human beings fail to transcend aspects of themselves there lie the conditions for the birth of an Iago. He is the universal negative man, foil for heroes. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t glimpsed that curiously satisfying vengeance of drawing the hated world into the depths of our own hell. It is Iago’s complete and secretive dedication which makes him so unique.
Othello, today, would not be a radical. He is too ambitious to let anger get in the way. He has come from nothing and has fought his way up in a new world. He wouldn’t want to face the truth about himself because it would destroy him. He wouldn’t want to face the falsity of his yearnings. To face his predicament would mean accepting the fact that he has become a willing victim of the dream that enslaved him in the first place. He is merely rising up the ladder available to him, not building his own.
And then there is Desdemona, innocent and sweet and passive. She and Othello are an unfortunate pair. Neither of them has any guile. She is too young to perceive the danger Othello is in. She takes too much for granted and believes too much in the simplicity of everything and everyone. They are mutually deluded. What did she see in him? She saw his nobility, rather than his vulnerability, his strength, rather than the weakness of his position. She is just the type who likes romances and is seduced by exoticism. Today she might be an ardent lover of a glamorised Africa. She would be just the kind of girl who believes that love makes everything right, and that the world would want for her what she wants for herself. She would have heard of slavery but never have thought about it. She would be shocked to hear that black people are treated badly because of their colour, that they have their homes burnt down, and are beaten up and mercilessly discriminated against. She would be shocked because she has never been allowed to confront reality, to face the Medusa-like truths of the world. The source of her delusion is ignorance. She is the redemption and the victim of her history.
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Desdemona fell in love with Othello because of his stories. He had lived a heroic life. Her father thought Othello had used sorcery on her. There is no greater sorcery than poetry, than the imagination of the storyteller. Desdemona is a bit of a rebel and her humanity is large. But humanity without scepticism, without knowledge, is dangerous. In real terms she would not find happiness in her choice unless she became a little wise along the way, and the costliest price is always paid for wisdom: the tearing down of as many illusions and lies as the human frame can bear. She would have to love Othello without illusions. It would be a hard kind of love, a rigorous love, that demands constant vigilance. She would have to alter the way she sees her history, and that would alter almost everything else. She would have to be strong. There would be many compensations but she would have to manage the difficulty of being both romantic and wise. And this is the crux of Desdemona’s situation. The romantic reduces black people to a fantasy. And then they love the illusion they themselves have created. They do not face black people as they are, each in their own particular individuality. Othello and Desdemona are a doomed alliance: for he doesn’t face her reality either. He never questions the true basis of her love, and consequently doesn’t understand her illusions, her lack of cunning and fear. Neither of them knew their predicament and so they didn’t stand a chance. And love alone is never enough. That is how those who remain unaware, blind to their predicament, are always betrayed. They are betrayed as much by those who don’t care about them as by those who love them.
I think that the play is less about jealousy than about accepting the other, about opening the doors of consciousness to more of reality. Or having to become less. Rejecting is easy: all it takes is confusion and ignorance. But facing the complexity of others, their history, their raw humanity – that takes courage, and is rare.
Whose heart is not pierced when at the end of the play Othello asks Ludovico that in his letters telling of the tragedy he should ‘speak of me as I am: nothing extenuate, Nor set down in malice. Then you must speak of one that loved not wisely, but too well’? These are the crucial lines of the play. Speak of me as I am. Don’t beautify me. Don’t simplify me. Don’t make me less. Don’t make me more either. I am not sure if Shakespeare faced up to that injunction, which is probably the most challenging to a writer. But he put the injunction there. And in doing so he spoke from the depths of Othello’s life. That failure to love wisely applies to every main figure in the play – to Desdemona, to her father, to Iago – and to all of us. Here Othello is speaking at the threshold of death. An incomplete creation, a man who throws no shadows, a man who has no secret life, he is about to pass into our dreams. It doesn’t really matter that Shakespeare didn’t, and quite possibly couldn’t, get Othello fully in focus, nor looked at him closely enough. What matters is that because of Shakespeare’s genius Othello haunts the English stage. He won’t go away. He is always there on the stage, a reminder of his unexplained presence in the white consciousness, and a symbol of the fact that black people and white are bound on the terrible bed of history. Doomed to his relentless cycle, he will not vanish from our dreams. And yet I dream of ways of liberating him from that bondage.
A friend of mine insists that you can choose your sins. You can also choose your nightmares. Somewhere between marriage and murder Othello must wake up to the necessity of vigilance. Leaping out of Shakespeare’s terror, he could stand transcendent. Franz Fanon might have been thinking of the long nightmare at the end of Othello’s sleep when he wrote in the closing sentences of Black Masks, White Skins: ‘O my body, make of me a man who always questions.’
When victims stop seeing themselves as victims and discover the power of transformation, forces are born on this planet. The possibilities of a new history depend on it. What is done with these possibilities depends on how wisely we love. And ultimately we are bound in fate with whoever the other may be. We are bound in the fact that we have to deal with one another. There’s no way round it. Rilke seemed to be saying something of this when he wrote: ‘That’s what fate means:/ to be facing each other/ and nothing but each other/ and to be doing it for ever.’
The way we see the other is connected to the way we see ourselves. The other is ourselves as the stranger.
Beyond Words
For Robert Fraser
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We began before words, and we will end beyond them.
It sometimes seems to me that our days are poisoned with too many words. Words said and not meant. Words said and meant. Words divorced from feeling. Wounding words. Words that conceal. Words that reduce. Dead words.
If only words were a kind of fluid that collects in the ears, if only they turned into the visible chemical equivalent of their true value, an acid, or something curative – then we might be more careful. Words do collect in us anyway. They
collect in the blood, in the soul, and either transform or poison people’s lives. Bitter or thoughtless words poured into the ears of the young have blighted many lives in advance. We all know people whose unhappy lives twist on a set of words uttered to them on a certain unforgotten day at school, in childhood, or at university.
We seem to think that words aren’t things. A bump on the head may pass away, but a cutting remark grows with the mind. But then it is possible that we know all too well the awesome power of words – which is why we use them with such deadly and accurate cruelty.
We are all wounded inside in some way or other. We all carry unhappiness within us for some reason or other. Which is why we need a little gentleness and healing from one another. Healing in words, and healing beyond words. Like gestures. Warm gestures. Like friendship, which will always be a mystery. Like a smile, which someone described as the shortest distance between two people.
Yes, the highest things are beyond words.
That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless moments. Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary condition and become something higher. Art wants to move into silence, into the emotional and spiritual conditions of the world. Statues become melodies, melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions.
When things fall into words they usually descend. Words have an earthly gravity. But the best things in us are those that escape the gravity of our deaths. Art wants to pass into life, to lift it; art wants to enchant, to transform, to make life more meaningful or bearable in its own small and mysterious way. The greatest art was probably born from a profound and terrible silence – a silence out of which the deepest enigmas of our lives cry: why are we here? What is the point of it all? How can we know peace and live in joy? Why be born in order to die? Why this difficult one-way journey between the two mysteries?