Shakespeare

The Merchant of Venice is full of touchy topics like anti semitism, that I knew, but teaching the play in a Kenyan village school brought out controversies to converse about that I am quite sure Shakespeare never imagined. Portia, the story's heroine, is beset with suitors who want to try their hand at winning her as a wife. She does not, however, have a choice over her future husband, rather she is forced to marry the man who solves the test her late father has left behind. It is an arbitrary challenge to select one of three caskets, like a contestant selecting what's behind door number three on a game show, that the men have to conquer in order to wed the richest girl in Venice.

Portia voices her discomfort, "O me, the word 'choose!' I may neither choose whom I would nor refuse whom I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father. Is it not hard that I cannot choose one nor refuse none?" And it occured to me, in the midst of prepping a lesson, how like Portia my young female students were. It is the common practice of both Maaisai and Kikuyu families to marry their daughters off at exceptionally young ages to older men, without giving the girl any voice in the selection or the timing. Often these girls are taken from school, kidnapped either figuratively or literally, and married at twelve and thirteen years of age to men twice their age. It rarely seems to occur to the men in the society that this tradition is stealing the best years of a child's educational life or that girls deserve a right to "choose whom they would or refuse whom they dislike." Even one of the teachers at Oloile, a funny and energetic man named Mr. Mirie, admitted to me that his wife of seven years is now 19 years old, a secondary school aged student herself with a child in primary school. And it is hard not to mention the lack of choice these same girls have in the ceremonial mutilation of their genitals as they come of age, in what has been dubiously named female circumcision, a sicekening practice still followed by most. So it was into this paradigm that I threw out a question to my class. "Do you think it is fair that Portia does not get to make a choice about who she will marry?" I tried with all my might not to steer the conversation toward my own cultural bias, but I did push the girls in particular to partake in the discussion. They said things like, "It's fair because her father knows what is best" or "It's not fair because she may not love the man she marries." It is, of course, hard to say from the simple opinions shared what conclusions we came to that day in class, but I pray the seeds planted will fuel more questions.

And I wonder if Big Bill ever knew his sex jokes would cause such a stir in this tiny place so far from Venice. Portia pokes fun at one of her suitors, the Neopolitan prince, for boasting about the size of his parts. "Ay, that's a colt indeed, for he doth nothing but talk of his horse; and he makes it a great appropriation to his own good parts, that he can shoe him himself. I am much afeard my lady his mother played false with a smith." Let me just say, the rolls of laughter were a great treat in the class when the students finally understood the dirty point of the pun.

There is one character in the play that I have never thought much of: The Prince of Morocco. He is pompous and his scenes are a bit wordy, maybe even boring to some. But when the only African character in the story entered the stage for the first time, and said his famous "Mislike me not for my complexion, the shadow’d livery of the burnish’d sun", my students sat up in a way that made me look at the Prince again. "Based on Shakespeare's characterization of the Prince of Morocco, what is being depicted about Africans?", I asked. And the answers poured in, observations like "Africans are scary to fight", "Africans brag a lot", and "Africans are not equal". Who knew how much relevance five hundred year old Elizabethan poetry and prose had to contemporary life in the African bush?