Why decolonise Shakespeare when all the world's a stage for his ideas on injustice?

The trend for cultural reappraisal risks upholding the very ideas it aims to dismantle

- Kenan Malik

“My quarrel with the English language,” James Baldwin wrote in his essay Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare, had been “that the language reflected none of my experience.” And so “I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression”.

Then, he “began to see the matter in quite another way”: “Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.”

As he did so, “My relationship... to the language of Shakespeare revealed itself as nothing less than my relationship to myself and my past. Under this light, this revelation, both myself and my past began slowly to open, perhaps the way a flower opens at morning, but more probably the way an atrophied muscle begins to function, or frozen fingers to thaw.”

Baldwin is one of America's most important writers, a novelist and essayist of great acuteness and humanity, a moral conscience for the nation as he chronicled the turbulent years of the 50s and 60s. Like many of his essays, Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare is a beautifully crafted account of Baldwin wrestling with demons, his own and those of America; a portrait of a man brimming with rage at the ferocity of the racism that encased him and struggling to find a language that could speak to his condition and help him transcend it.