Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 57orthodoxy, he views his new bride as a significant “acquisition,” per-
haps one that confirms his legitimacy and self-worth in a vaguely
hostile society. This acquisition, as he sees it, therefore inevitably
brings with it the fear and jealousy of its being lost to competing
males: “I now possess an object of beauty and danger, and I know
that, henceforth, all men will look upon me with a combination of
respect and scorn” (p. 148). Being an outsider, and a black one at
that, the character’s paranoia would have been particularly acute,
a fact that goes some way toward—if not justifying—then at least
explaining the murderous rage the reader anticipates. Such a contex-
tualization, which is not provided to the same extent in Shakespeare’s
play, is outlined in more explicit terms in an essay Phillips wrote on
Venice a full ten years before The Nature of Blood :
You cannot expect a man with [Othello’s] history to behave rationally.
And he does not. It is not a ‘f law’ in the man, it is what you have made
him into [... ] Before we meet Othello he has been called, barely within
the space of thirty-five lines, ‘an old black ram,’ ‘a Barbary horse,’ and
‘a lascivious Moor.’ Othello’s military reputation, already established as
well earned and unchallengeable, is undermined by the bitter lack of
respect for him as a man.^76Phillips closes the “Othello” narrative with the inclusion of an
intrusive voice, ostensibly that of an African or African American,
who rebukes the latter for leaving his “home” continent and mov-
ing to faraway Venice: “My friend, an African river bears no resem-
blance to a Venetian canal. [You] run like Jim Crow and leap into
their creamy arms [... ] Peel your rusty body from [Desdemona’s]
and go home” (p. 183). For Maurizio Calbi, these words emanate
from a “disembodied, ahistorical, and decontextualized [... ] black
super-egoic voice that fails to respond to the multilayered experi-
ence of the outsider.”^77 Such a static and reactionary sense of ethnic
identity evokes the extreme racial politics espoused by the incarcer-
ated Williams in Higher Ground (p. 66). However, the “ahistoricity”
of its intrusive voice is of more significance here because it pres-
ents a violent break from the “Othello” narrative’s original setting.
The labels “Jim Crow,” “grinning Satchmo,” and “Uncle Tom” are
clearly derived from nineteenth- and twentieth-century American