Shakespeare and Your Mountainish Inhumanity
by Ruben Espinosa
The privately funded border wall erected along a half-mile of mountainous terrain on the U.S. Mexico border near El Paso, Texas does not look so much like an open wound as it does something cleanly sutured and yet utterly disgusting. What comes to mind, then, is not the herida abierta (open wound) that Gloria Anzaldúa evokes to describe the U.S. Mexican border — “where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” — but instead something more sinister.
Among the leadership team of “We Build the Wall,” the group behind this May 2019 project, are former Kansas State Secretary Kris Kobach and Steve Bannon. Despite the group’s stated aims for the barrier to “stop smugglers and undocumented immigrants,” this wall vandalizing la frontera exists as a symbol of inhospitality. It is a manifestation of the xenophobia and white supremacy that made its way into the White House and then made its way to a border community that has long prided itself on its binational and bicultural identity.
The irony of outsiders entering this border community to erect a wall in an effort to keep outsiders from entering is not lost on me. Their true aim was to alter our physical and ideological landscape. So, here we are, and, as we all know now, it only grew worse. Before I arrive there, however, I want to consider how and why Shakespeare has been put into conversation with the anti-immigrant sentiments that have governed so much of what recently transpired in El Paso.
As long-standing racist, anti-immigrant attitudes were amplified in recent years, many looked to Hand D of Sir Thomas More in an effort to lend validity to — and to bolster with unmistakable cultural capital — the need for an ethics of hospitality. There it is, for all of us to see, in Shakespeare’s own handwriting no less, evidence that the Bard believed in a compassionate understanding of immigrants. Chastising the anti-immigrant London crowd who seeks “the removing of the strangers” by force, the Thomas More of Shakespeare’s imagination says:
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage,
Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silenced by your brawl . . . (6.80–4)
The pathos behind More’s appeal clearly carries contemporary currency, as one cannot help but imagine the plight of refugees in our day. Later, More urges his audience to imagine their fates after their “great trespass” against the king: “What country, by the nature of your error, / Should give you harbour?” (6.142–3). The answer, he suggests, is none, and thus they would likely face the kind of deadly violence they sought to exact on the immigrants. “What would you think / To be thus used?” More asks, and then continues, “This is the strangers’ case, / And this your mountainish inhumanity” (6.154–6). Simply put, it is an appeal for his audience to treat immigrants with dignity. If only it were that easy.
On various levels, it isn’t difficult to look to Shakespeare’s contribution to this collaboration and locate within it a compassionate appeal for his audiences — both then and now — to employ an ethics of hospitality. Indeed, in the short film produced by International Rescue Committee and Shakespeare’s Globe, “The Strangers’ Case — Shakespeare’s Rallying Cry for Humanity,” a number of refugees from Syria, Sierra Leone, and South Sudan recite Shakespeare’s speech alongside professional actors in a call for audiences to stand with refugees. Through these varied voices, we locate within Shakespeare the compassion we desire in our own world. It is hopeful.
In this moment, however, that hope feels distant. Indeed, the delineation of what constitutes foreignness is precisely the problem behind the recent horrific mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, TX. The fundamental design of the shooter, Patrick Crusius, was to target “Mexicans.” Believed to be “the author of a statement posted online shortly before the attack that decried what it called a ‘Hispanic invasion of Texas,’” Crusius drove nearly ten hours from his affluent Dallas suburb to El Paso to target those he felt were reshaping the U.S. However, we, brown of skin, have lived here and shaped our community for so very long. But in Crusius’ eyes, and in the eyes of so many in my country, we simply don’t belong and never will.
To drive home this point, he deliberately chose a Walmart with heavy traffic of Latinxs and unloaded his AK-47 killing 22 people. The correlation between his hateful, racist views and the hateful, racist views of Donald J. Trump is firmly in place for all of us to behold. And so, merely months after that awful wall was erected along a mountainside near El Paso, another white supremacist came into this community and forever altered our landscape. This — this epitome of white rage — is the mountainish inhumanity that so very many people of color are forced to contend with day in and day out.
One might wonder, do we really need Shakespeare to understand this? My firm answer is: No. But I wholeheartedly believe that Shakespeare needs us.
It is up to those of us committed to issues of social justice to locate in Shakespeare the moments that will allow for the candid and necessary discussions in our classrooms regarding race, racism, and white supremacy — at every turn, and not just when we teach Othello. I did not immediately think of Sir Thomas More when contemplating Shakespeare in the aftermath of the shooting, because — quite frankly — I wasn’t hopeful. I was angry. I thought of the racist complicity abound in his works — of Portia’s ugly intent to espouse white supremacy beyond the borders of Belmont in The Merchant of Venice, of every white character who abides by the racist commentary in Othello, of Lavinia’s casual racist remarks about Aaron in Titus Andronicus, of every poetic reference to fairness of skin as indicative of moral superiority.
I thought of all the whites in Shakespeare whose value is set against those darker of skin. After all, it isn’t really my brown skin that makes me vulnerable — it is the workings of whiteness that imagines me as a threat because of my skin and thus threatens my very existence. It is your mountainish inhumanity that haunts me. And standing here amid that barbaric wall and the open wound of this borderland community, I urge you not just to stand with refugees, immigrants, and those dark of skin, but to stand against white supremacy by committing to antiracist efforts any time you sit to read, sit to write, or stand before your students who are seeking to make sense of the world around them.
Ruben Espinosa is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is the author of Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England(2011) and co-editor of Shakespeare and Immigration (2014), a collection of essays exploring the role of immigrants, exiles, and refugees in Shakespeare’s England and work. In 2018, he was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Shakespeare Association of America. He is currently at work on his next two monographs, Shakespeare on the Border: Language, Legitimacy and La Frontera, and Shakespeare on the Shades of Race (forthcoming with Routledge).
