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All my vulnerabilities, my history, my information and experience, my childhood and my manhood…had to be hurled into…the quest for Othello.… We bring private knowledge to a public role.… I understand the state of exile. I understand a need to belong.… My father was born in East Africa—the son of Gujerat [sic] parents. He spent his childhood in an Islamic community born of the ancient Arab trade routes. My father came to England in 1927…and he returned neither to East Africa nor Gujerat (India); to the landscapes that had nourished his pride, his myths, and his morality.… I think this bred in him a sense of displacement. His beautiful English bride…was his perfect Desdemona, and I hasten to add no one conspired to destroy them. But I know the chaos that could rise up in his throat when our English landscape became too alien.… I could see the cry behind his eyes.… ‘‘I want to go home” they used to say; and “I want to go home” went into the crucible to be coined night after night during Othello’s disintegration. (Kingsley 1988:171) |