Othello’s Moorish identity made his monstrous fate inescapable regardless of his actions.

Evidence

Othello’s race identifies him as a monster. Even though he tries to act human, he meets an inescapable fate. Like Edward Scissorhands returning to the house on the hill, Othello cannot escape what he is—a monster. He ultimately proves, “abluis Aethiopem, quid frustra”—“You wash the Ethiopian, Why the labor in vain.” Othello is and will always be a monster, “demonic hellfire, burnt by hellfire and cursed by God.” The text is quite clear on Othello’s nature, calling him “horrible and grim.” Othello’s identity is suggested when he discloses his intimate knowledge of monstrous races, at one point telling Desdemona about “[t] he Anthropophagi, and men whose heads, Do grow beneath their shoulders,” creatures he has obviously seen in person. He knows about the cannibals and Blemmyae because he had lived among them. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 319

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s question 1: which figures carry which Western anxiety. Here the Moor-as-monster carries the anxiety that racialized difference is unchangeable essence, coded as demonic even when the character acts nobly.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the medieval/Renaissance episteme held Muslims to have intimate knowledge of the monstrous domain inverts the later orientalist frame of the Muslim as naive; here the Muslim is dangerous precisely because he is fluent in monstrous geography.
• BMF: Resonates obliquely with the tragic inevitability in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, where Okonkwo cannot escape his culturally-determined self, mirroring Othello’s inescapable monstrous fate imposed by his African identity.