The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire: Bilingual Edition

WESLEYAN POETRY

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

English translations, English and French annotations and notes © 2017 by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman

Les armes miraculeuses © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1970

La Poésie by Aimé Césaire © Editions du Seuil, 1994 et 2006

The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, French text © 1939 The Estate of Aimé Césaire

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Césaire, Aimé author. | Arnold, A. James (Albert James), 1939-

translator editor. | Eshleman, Clayton translator. | Césaire, Aimé.

Poems. | Césaire, Aimé. Poems. English.

Title: The complete poetry of Aimé Césaire / translated by A. James Arnold

and Clayton Eshleman ; introduction, notes and glossary by A. James Arnold.

Description: Bilingual edition. | Middletown, CT : Wesleyan University

Press, 2017. | Series: Wesleyan poetry | Includes bibliographical

references. | Description based on print version record and CIP data

provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016049093 (print) | LCCN 2017012568 (ebook) | ISBN

9780819577511 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819574831 (cloth : alk. paper)

Classification: LCC PQ3949.C44 (ebook) | LCC PQ3949.C44 A2 2017 (print) | DDC

841/.914--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049093

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INTRODUCTION

Aimé Césaire is a master of twentieth-century French poetry. His work gives an original new direction to the long line of predecessors that includes Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Claudel, and Péguy. The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire makes available, for the first time in English, the original editions of his published œuvre. Taking a genetic or prospective approach to his work was necessary in order to make accessible the unexpurgated collections Césaire published between 1939 and 1950. When he died in Martinique in April 2008 at the age of 94, Césaire was hailed in the press as the bard of negritude, which placed a vague political stamp on his body of work. The long arc of his poetic career moves through several stages, only one of which has been seriously studied. Consequently the term negritude, which his poetry is presumed to reference, has been interpreted in terms of his poetics from the mid-1950s to the 1960s (ALL). Roughly three-quarters of his œuvre has been neglected, either because it was obscured by the self-censorship that presided over the rewriting of Solar Throat Slashed for the 1961 edition in Cadastre, or because—like i, laminaria. . . (1982) and the 1939 text of the Cahier/Notebook—it does not conform to the norms derived from Césaire’s political turn in the 1950s. Well-intentioned critics have long invoked Rimbaud’s claim that the poet is a seer (voyant), but rarely have they connected this trait with his equally strong prophetic stance and its frequent Old Testament overtones. Similarly, Lautréamont has been called upon to justify Césaire’s most aggressive images but without connecting them to the practice of free associative metaphor (métaphore filée) characteristic of the surrealist poetry he wrote in the 1940s. If negritude is what Césaire’s poetry was about, then that slippery term needs to be considered as a different episteme from the one that has driven political readings of his work.

In our notes on the poems, we reference the volume that made first editions of Césaire’s poetic œuvre available in French: Poésie, Théâtre, Essais et Discours, edited by A. J. Arnold and an international team of specialists (Césaire PTED). Publication of PTED has enabled us to translate a considerable amount of new material in many of Césaire’s poems. For example, in Batuque (from The Miraculous Weapons) there are 269 changes from the version published in the 1983 Collected Poetry. In our new translation of the Ferraments collection, there are 1,042 changes from the 1983 version. Of the eight collections comprising The Complete Poetry (CCP), three have been translated by Arnold and Eshleman exclusively: The Original 1939 Notebook. . ., Solar Throat Slashed, and Like a Misunderstanding of Salvation. With regard to the Eshleman-Smith translation of The Collected Poetry, Eshleman was solely responsible for the final version. As he wrote in At the Locks of the Void, I met with Césaire in Paris twice on my own and once, when we had our questions down to a dozen, with Annette. At the point that a final draft was possible, I holed up for two weeks in the stacks of the Cal Tech library with a typewriter and piles of reference materials (ELV).

In conversation with Daniel Maximin in 1982, Césaire said of his poetic career: We are men of the sacred. I am not an initiate, or I have been initiated through poetry, if you like, and I believe that I am a man of the sacred. . . So I believe that the sacred exists in us, but it is a sacred that has been profaned, that has been clichéd. . . To find the sacred again means to restore its energy; in other words, to restore to the sacred its revolutionary dimension, in the strict sense of the word (MFV, 242, 243). Most readers in the English-speaking world have approached Césaire through one or another of the post-1956 editions of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, and his Discourse on Colonialism. They quite understandably see Césaire as a political poet whose work is tied tightly to the struggle to decolonize the African continent in the 1960s. It is true that from 1956 onward, Césaire encouraged this view by allowing Présence Africaine to present it as an African poem: [Previous editions] are far from satisfying the needs of the African public. Does the public at large know that this song whose style and vocabulary have discouraged so many well-intentioned French readers, this avant-garde song, whole passages of which are recited by young people in French Africa who sometimes have had little schooling but hunger ardently for it? (CCR). The phrase each of us Africans suggests on the same page that the author of this publicity material may have been the Angolan poet Mario Pinto de Andrade, who served as secretary to the publisher during this crucial period (PCH, 15-16). The Orphic descent into hell that many readers had already noted in Césaire’s long poem was characterized in 1956 as specifically African: Some readers admire a virile and harsh descent to the infernal regions, a unique experience in modern African culture. Finally, the 1956 version of the poem is justified by the fact that the author modestly considers it as a simple stage in his evolution. In 1960, Présence Africaine printed a second edition with minor modifications, demonstrating that the 1956 version was in no way definitive. Moreover, the 1956 edition was implied to be the first; this claim was both commercially and ideologically motivated. By making the Présence Africaine edition of 1956 appear to be the terminus ad quem of Césaire’s long poem, it was henceforth possible to ignore the three versions that preceded it. From 1939 to 1947, each subsequent edition appeared in a different cultural and historical context and was modified accordingly, a fact that has led L. Pestre de Almeida to stress the instability of the text of the Notebook (PCH, 14). In the headnote to the 1939 version printed here, we include a brief description of the major alterations and their formal and ideological purpose in 1947 and 1956. The 109 stanzas of the original edition were maintained in the same order in every subsequent version of Césaire’s long poem.

We include headnotes for the Cahier/Notebook and each of the collections edited in The Complete Poetry. They situate both Césaire’s poetic accomplishment and his principal references when he published the original edition of a given collection. We believe the experience will be revelatory, as indeed it has been for us as translators. This is especially true as regards our understanding of the vexed term negritude. From the 1939 Notebook and The Miraculous Weapons (1946) to Solar Throat Slashed (1948), the poems trace a mythic transformation of the colonized nègre to what Alain Locke called the New Negro. In 1960, Ferraments introduced references to colonial Africa consonant with the Africanization of the Notebook in the 1956 Présence Africaine edition, thus reinforcing the assessment of Césaire as a political poet. During the decade of decolonization of France’s African colonies, Césaire published no new collections, preferring to write for the theater. Two decades were to elapse between Ferraments and i, laminaria. . . (1982), which took a decidedly nostalgic and elegiac view of Césaire’s heroic posture as prophet of negritude in the 1940s. Moreover, when one knows that the original goal of Césaire’s negritude project was spiritual, the meaning of the title Like a Misunderstanding of Salvation becomes practically transparent. In 1994, it was his poetic last will and testament.

The chronology that closes our introduction to The Complete Poetry draws parallels between Césaire’s activity as a poet and practical politician. As mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy in the French National Assembly, he participated in the crucial debates on decolonization and its aftermath. We have also been attentive to his position as a spokesman for the African diaspora, a role that put him at odds with the African-American intelligentsia in 1956. Notes on the poems can be found in the critical apparatus, along with an extensive glossary of difficult and problematic terms starred in the text.

CHRONOLOGY

1913-1924: Early life in contact with Martinique’s plantation economy

On June 26, 1913, Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, the second of seven children, to Fernand (1888-1966) and Éléonore Hermine (1885-1983). Fernand was then a plantation steward.

During his elementary school years (1918-24) in Basse-Pointe, Aimé and his siblings had their homework supervised by their paternal grandmother, whose African traits they associated with the Jola people of Senegal. Fernand read the French classics aloud to his children.

1924-1931: From middle through secondary school, Aimé excelled at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, where Fernand had become a civil servant in the colonial tax department. Aimé’s geography and English teachers noticed his exceptional promise. His friendship with L. G. Damas, from French Guiana, dates from this period.

On May 6, 1931, the Paris Colonial Exposition opened in the Parc de Vincennes. During its six-month run between 7 and 9 million visitors enjoyed natives in traditional costume demonstrating typical occupations in human zoos.

1931-1935: A competitive scholarship allowed Aimé to prepare for the École Normale Supérieure at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. There, he met L. S. Senghor from Senegal, who was several years his senior; their friendship lasted until Senghor’s death in 2001. Memorable teachers were A. Bayet (French and Latin) and R. Le Senne, whose courses in philosophy stressed an idealist dialectic.

In 1935, the tricentennial celebration of colonial status in the French West Indies included special editions of magazines and commemorative postage stamps. Local celebrations by the Catholic Church reinforced the legitimacy of colonial rule. Frequent references to 300 years in Césaire’s poetry allude to these events.

In February 1935, Césaire published L’Étudiant noir in L’Étudiant martiniquais, praising Imagination and Nature at the expense of Reason and Culture. The title of the mimeographed student paper was changed to L’Étudiant noir the following month. Césaire, as new editor, had preferred L’Étudiant nègre, which was overruled as too aggressive.

In March, his Nègreries: Jeunesse noire et assimilation in the first issue of L’Étudiant noir stressed the danger to assimilated black students by the rising tide of fascism in France.

In the May-June issue, his Nègreries: Conscience raciale et révolution sociale for the first time used négritude to express an ethnic ideal: to plant our negritude like a beautiful tree until it shall bear its most authentic fruits.

In the same issue, Césaire translated Richard Wright’s I Have Seen Black Hands and Sterling Brown’s Strong Men.

1935-1939: Césaire succeeded against general expectation in the entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) but experienced exhaustion and depression over the summer, which he spent with Petar Guberina on the Adriatic coast of Croatia. View of the island of Martiniska triggered memories of home that Césaire began to transfer to a notebook.

On October 2, 1935, Italy announced its intention to invade Ethiopia, the only independent African state.

At the ENS, Césaire revolted against intellectual cramming and began writing as therapy. Several friends considered him depressed during this period.

On May 3, 1936, Léon Blum of the French Section of the Workers International (S.F.I.O.) was elected Prime Minister; first paid vacations for French workers.

Summer 1936: Césaire returned to Martinique for the first time in five years.

1937: On July 10, Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Roussi were married in the city hall of Paris’s 13th arrondissement. Their first son, Jacques, was born the following year.

1939: Césaire failed the competitive agrégation exam but completed an advanced studies diploma (D.E.S.) on the Role of the South in Black Literature in the United States.

On July 18, Césaire received a military deferment, presumably on grounds of health; soon thereafter he was named professor in the Lycée Schoelcher.

In late August, the Césaires returned to Martinique; Suzanne was pregnant with their second son, Jean-Paul. Francis was born in 1941, Ina in 1942, Marc in 1948, and Michèle in 1951.

On September 1, Hitler invaded Poland; two days later France and England declared war on Germany.

On September 14, Admiral Paul Robert arrived in Martinique as commandant of France’s Western Atlantic theater of war. After the fall of France in June 1940, he administered the colony in the name of Vichy, exercising a racial oppression previously unknown in Martinique.

1940-1943: Aimé Césaire’s courses on modern poetry were received enthusiastically by students, who included E. Glissant. Although he was not Césaire’s student, F. Fanon considered his innovative teaching to be a watershed in awakening Martinican identity.

Censors enforcing the Vichy government’s administration of Martinique kept a close watch on the Césaires’ and their colleagues’ publications in Tropiques from April 1941 to mid-1943.

In April 1941, André Breton, Wifredo Lam, and Claude Lévi-Strauss arrived as refugees from Marseille on a ship chartered by Varian Fry for the Emergency Rescue Committee; André Masson joined them one week later. Breton, who chanced upon the first issue of Tropiques while looking for a ribbon for his daughter, was introduced to the Césaires. They gave the surrealists a tour of Martinique; Tropiques declared itself surrealist shortly thereafter.

One year later, the fifth issue of Tropiques included En guise de manifeste littéraire (By Way of a Literary Manifesto) dedicated to Breton. With a few cuts and modifications, Césaire inserted it into the bilingual edition of Memorandum on My Martinique (title of the Goll and Abel translation), completed in 1943 but published only in January 1947 by Brentano’s in New York.

In January 1943, Retorno al país natal (Return to the Native Land) was published in Havana. Lidia Cabrera translated the 1939 text; Benjamin Péret prefaced it; and Wifredo Lam illustrated the volume with three line drawings.

In May 1943, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire co-signed, with a score of exiled surrealists, the preface to La Parole est à Péret (Péret Has the Floor), published in New York.

1944: From mid-May to mid-December, Césaire was in Haiti at the invitation of Pierre Mabille (surrealist, doctor, and researcher in the occult) as a representative of the Gaullist Free French provisional government of the French West Indies. His first encounter with Vodun dates from this visit, during which he met A. Métraux.

On September 28, at an international philosophy conference on epistemology in Port-au-Prince, Césaire read a paper on Poésie et connaissance (Poetry and Knowledge) in which he attacked the foundations of European reason (from Aristotle to Pascal and Kant) and praised the superior powers of anarchistic imagination, bolstering his argument with quotes from Freud, Claudel, Lautréamont, Breton, Mabille, Bachelard, and Jung.

1945: At war’s end, Césaire found himself unexpectedly elected to two local posts with the help of his friends in the Martinique section of the French Communist Party.

On May 27, 1945, Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France on the Communist ticket, although he was not a member of the party.

In September, Césaire joined the Communist Party; on November 4, he was elected deputy for the first district of Martinique to the Constituent Assembly in France.

On November 12, the Césaires left Martinique for Paris by way of Haiti, Miami, and New York. At Miami International Airport, they were obliged to use colored facilities, and in New York, the service elevator to Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment for a reception in his honor.

1946-1947: Césaire was co-sponsor of the law that transformed France’s Old Colonies (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, and Réunion) into overseas départements. Success in the legislature on March 13, 1946, was followed by delaying tactics, which postponed implementation of the law—freighted with amendments—for two years and resulted in colonial status under another name. As deputy, Césaire intervened regularly in debates to denounce systematic sabotage of the law he had sponsored.

On April 19, 1946, Gallimard published Césaire’s wartime poems, collected under the title Les Armes miraculeuses (The Miraculous Weapons) to a cool reception by the Communist press.

In January 1947, Brentano’s bookstore in New York belatedly published the Cahier/Notebook Césaire had sent to A. Breton in 1943. The markedly surrealist French text remained essentially unread and unknown until the publication of PTED in 2013. The English translation by I. Goll and L. Abel chopped up the long stanzas into more recognizably modernist American verse.

In March, a new revision of the Cahier, published by Bordas in Paris, made concessions to sociopolitical considerations that the Brentano’s text had pointedly refused.

A. Breton and M. Duchamp edited the catalog of the 1947 international surrealist exhibit at the Maeght Gallery in Paris, to which Césaire contributed Couteaux midi (Noon Knives). His continuing collaboration with the surrealists created tensions with his colleagues in the Communist party.

1948-1949: Tensions between Césaire’s surrealist poetics of the 1940s and his commitment to decolonization increased considerably.

On April 23, 1948, the Paris publisher known as K released Soleil cou coupé (Solar Throat Slashed); on the front and back cover, 60 copies were illustrated with original engravings by the German surrealist Hans Hartung. Antonin Artaud was also published by K.

In July 1948, a first draft of Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism was published by the conservative magazine Chemins du monde under the title L’Impossible contact (The Impossible Contact). The political climate was tense, and repression in the colonies severe: in Madagascar, the French army estimated that it killed 89,000 rebels in 1947; the Sétif massacre in Algeria on May 8, 1945, (V-E Day) had resulted in at least 6,000 Muslims killed, some of them lynched by French colonists.

In April 1949, on his return from a trip to Romania, Césaire participated with Picasso, Aragon, and other communist intellectuals and artists in an international peace conference in Paris. Aragon presented Césaire as a young Communist poet and a worthy successor of Neruda and Mayakovsky. Picasso, who had met Césaire at a conference in Wroclaw (Breslau) the previous year, was then collaborating on Lost Body.

In October, Mao Tse Tung declared China Communist.

1950-1955: Césaire’s essays and published speeches during this period created the climate in which revised editions of his poetry would be read at the end of the decade.

In 1950, Césaire’s collaboration with Pablo Picasso on the collection Lost Body was marked by a more relaxed syntax, less reliance on métaphore filée (free associative metaphor), and a shorter poetic line. For eleven years, however, the collection was read only by collectors because of the price of the richly illustrated volume.

In the same year, the Discourse on Colonialism was published as a pamphlet by the Communist-affiliated Éditions Réclame.

In 1952, Frantz Fanon published Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) in Paris.

Présence Africaine was founded as a pan-African magazine by A. Diop in 1947. Prior to 1955, Césaire maintained a discreet distance, presumably to avoid directly confronting his Communist colleagues for whom ethnic identity had to be subsumed under the class struggle. Between 1955 and 1959, Présence Africaine published eight of Césaire’s poems collected in Ferraments in 1960.

On July 9, 1955, Présence Africaine organized a public debate on national poetry to launch its double issue for April-June, which contained Césaire’s Reply to Depestre Haitian Poet: Elements of an Ars Poetica. The ensuing polemic with Louis Aragon, who in 1953 had attempted to enforce a social-realist poetics on members of the Party, made Césaire’s break with the Communists merely a matter of time. The October-November issue of Présence Africaine summed up Césaire’s contribution to the debate under the title Sur la poésie nationale (On National Poetry).

Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism was reissued by Présence Africaine in preparation for the Congrès International des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs (First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists) to be held the following year.

1956: In one year, Césaire published the remainder of the essays that would confirm the political turn of his poetry in the minds of his contemporaries.

In its April-May issue, Présence Africaine published Césaire’s preface to D. Guérin’s book Les Antilles décolonisées (The Decolonized West Indies), in which Césaire called for the creation of nation-states in Martinique and Guadeloupe that could, sometime in the future, constitute a confederation on the model of the British West Indies. This position paper, which resembles E. Glissant’s thesis in Caribbean Discourse, remains little known today.

Césaire’s address to the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists on September 20, Culture et Colonisation (Culture and Colonialism), was the high point of the four days of meetings at the Sorbonne, according to James Baldwin. Members of the black élite from the United States declared their opposition to Césaire’s claim that they were colonized within their own country; Haitian delegates objected to Césaire’s denial of the possibility of a hybridized culture. African delegates, on the other hand, thrilled to the concept of a pan-African socialist politics. The French newspaper of record, Le Monde, devoted three substantial articles to the congress, which was widely reported elsewhere in France and abroad.

On October 24, Césaire wrote a letter to Maurice Thorez, First Secretary of the French Communist Party, announcing his resignation in the name of pan-African solidarity: "There will never be an African or Malagasy or West Indian variant of Communism because French Communism considers it more convenient (commode) to impose its own on us." France-Observateur published extensive sections of the letter the following day; Présence Africaine issued it as a pamphlet at the end of the year.

The version of Et les chiens se taisaient (And the Dogs Were Silent), rewritten for the stage and published by Présence Africaine, would be read in the context of Césaire’s aggressive anticolonialism, which effectively buried the mythological allusions present in the 1946 text.

1957-1959: From the French Communist Party to independent socialism in Martinique.

In July 1957, Césaire joined the group of African federalists in the National Assembly. Three days later, he voted against ratification of the European Economic Union on the grounds that it would damage the economy of Martinique.

On September 22, 1957, Dr. François Duvalier was elected president of Haiti.

On January 3, 1958, the West Indies Federation united British colonies in the Caribbean; the federation collapsed four years later because of tensions between independent Jamaica and Trinidad.

In late March 1958, the Parti Progressiste Martinique (P.P.M.) was formed as an independent socialist party with Césaire at its head. In April, the P.P.M. published as a brochure Césaire’s speech calling for the transformation of Martinique into a region within the federal French Union (Union Française Fédérée).

In the April 1958 local elections, the new P.P.M. surged ahead of the Communist Party and the traditional socialists (S.F.I.O.).

In September 1958, after André Malraux’s visit to Martinique as representative of de Gaulle, Césaire called on the P.P.M. to vote in favor of the referendum that established the Fifth Republic and a new presidential system under Charles de Gaulle.

From March 26 to April 1, 1959, the Second International Congress of Black Writers and Artists was held in Rome. Césaire’s address L’Homme de culture et ses responsabilités (The Responsibilities of the Man of Culture) resonated with a passion for total commitment to the decolonization process. Whereas his focus at the first congress was on individual responsibility, on the eve of decolonization of France’s African colonies, he stressed the necessity to hasten the maturation of collective consciousness, without which there will never be decolonization (PTED, 1553).

In December 1959, Césaire published in Présence Africaine La Pensée politique de Sékou Touré (The Political Thought of Sékou Touré); Touré was the only African leader to refuse the 1958 French referendum, choosing immediate independence for Guinea (Conakry) instead. Césaire’s Rousseauist interpretation of African socialism was soon belied by Sékou Touré’s repressive dictatorship. At the time, Césaire said he had visited Guinea in preparation for his essay; in 1971, he claimed to have visited Africa only once, in 1966.

1960-1961: During these two years, Césaire published the collections that were to confirm him as the poet of decolonization. In 1960, Togo, Madagascar, Benin, Niger, Upper Volta, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, the Central African Republic, Congo (Brazzaville), Gabon, Senegal, Mali, and Mauritania acceded to independence.

In February 1960, Seuil published Ferrements (Ferraments), which collected the best of his production of the previous decade. To an interviewer for Afrique Action he replied in November that, whereas Africa was sure of its independence, the French West Indies may have already lost their soul (CAA).

In his preface to B. Juminer’s novel Les Bâtards (The Bastards), Césaire wrote that more atrocious still than the colonial massacres or the grand, spectacular punishments is the spectacle of mediocrity slowly but surely devirilizing a people (CBB). The people in question are the French Guianese of Juminer’s novel and those of the French West Indies more generally; genocide by substitution enters the language.

On January 17, 1961, Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in the newly independent Congo (Kinshasa).

In April, the Seuil publishing house released Césaire’s Cadastre, which combined a revised edition of Lost Body with a severely reduced and politically correct version of Solar Throat Slashed. It was to be his last new collection for twenty-one years.

In its final issue for 1961, Présence Africaine published the first act of Césaire’s new play The Tragedy of King Christophe. In Act 1, Scene 5, the character Métellus represented the idealistic, universalizing, and spiritual version of negritude; he was condemned to death by Christophe in the name of political realities (CTC, 26-27).

On December 6, Frantz Fanon died of leukemia in Bethesda Naval Hospital.

1962-1965: Césaire’s poetry was refocused during these years as a sociopolitical enterprise, both through his own published statements and the efforts of Lilyan Kesteloot and Janheinz Jahn.

In his preface to Anna Vizioli and Franco de Poli’s Italian translation of twenty-four poems from Miraculous Weapons and an extract of the Notebook, Césaire declared that the reader will learn everything worth knowing about me and certainly more than I myself know (EAC1, 343).

In October 1962, Césaire made his acceptance speech at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich; he had been elected a corresponding member in 1960.

L. Kesteloot’s 1962 essay on Césaire’s poetry, published in the Seghers contemporary poets collection, denied his active collaboration with the surrealists: It was not his encounter with Breton, as has been claimed, that drew Césaire into the ‘divagations’ of surrealism (KAC, 30). The same essay convinced readers that the 1939 Cahier/Notebook constituted fragments of a longer poem. This misinformation died hard.

In the 1963 edition of her Aimé Césaire, Kesteloot published an interview Césaire gave her at the 1959 Rome Congress that was to obliterate his early definition of negritude as a transcendent, spiritual quest: ". . .negritude entails neither racism, nor denial of Europe, nor exclusivity, but on the contrary a fraternity with all men. . . . Thus defined, negritude is, for the black man, a condition sine qua non of the authenticity of creation in any and every domain whatsoever" (KAC, 93). Variations on this phrasing appeared in interviews regularly thereafter.

In 1963, the Free University of Brussels published the dissertation in literary sociology that L. Kesteloot had presented for her doctorate in April 1961. Under the title Les Écrivains noirs de langue française: Naissance d’une littérature, it presented the research that was summarized in her 1962 Seghers volume (KAC). E. C. Kennedy’s translation of The Negritude Poets disseminated her interpretation of negritude as a political ideology in the United States from 1975 onward.

During the last week in April 1963, Césaire and Janheinz Jahn, his German translator, worked at the rococo Eschenau castle on a bilingual edition of Solar Throat Slashed and Lost Body that revised and restored some of the poems cut from the Paris edition of Cadastre. The hybrid text of An Afrika was published in 1968 by Hanser in Munich. E. Ruhe discussed its importance in detail (ROM).

In May 1963, Césaire attended the summit of independent African nations that founded the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Césaire visited Salvador de Bahia in the Northeast of Brazil with A. Adandé, who was to create the ethnographic museum of Porto-Novo in Benin in 1966. The syncretic Afro-Brazilian culture of the region had a powerful effect on Césaire.

Aimé and Suzanne Césaire were divorced in 1963; Suzanne died of a brain tumor in May 1966.

Présence Africaine published La Tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe) in which Césaire treated Henri Christophe as a tragic figure torn between the West and Africa.

In 1964, J.-L. Bédouin published in the anthology La Poésie surréaliste an extract from the Cahier/Notebook and the poems Noon Knives and Barbarity (from Solar Throat Slashed), thus countering Kesteloot’s thesis in KAC and LKN.

In January 1965, Césaire told an interviewer for the Senegalese magazine Bingo that negritude was not fundamentally different from Nkrumah’s African Personality or the Harlem Renaissance. He stressed the African diaspora in defining the scope of negritude (EAC1, 376).

1966-1969: Césaire’s oeuvre was introduced into the United States as the New Left and the Black Panthers came to the fore; its pan-African dimension dominated discussion.

In 1966, Clayton Eshleman and Denis Kelly published State of the Union, an anthology of poems translated from The Miraculous Weapons, Cadaster and Ferraments. This was the first serious attempt to present Césaire to American readers of poetry.

On February 21, 1966, Malcolm X was assassinated in New York City.

In March, Une Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo) was published by Seuil. The play focused attention on the rise of Mobutu Sese Seko in the former Belgian Congo through collusion of the western powers and the United Nations; Patrice Lumumba emerged as a tragic figure. In two revisions of the text (1967 and 1972), Césaire first softened his characterization of Mobutu, then heightened the ferocity of the Congolese dictator (EAC1, 388-89).

On March 30, Césaire traveled with André Malraux to the Casamance region of Senegal, where the traditional queen bore a strong resemblance to his paternal grandmother.

In April, Césaire served as vice president of the First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar, Senegal. His impromptu speech on African art (Discours sur l’art africain) rebutted the official remarks made by A. Malraux as French Minister of Culture. Césaire stressed the necessity for art in Africa to define itself against Euro-American civilization, the industrial civilization that covers the globe with its network and reaches . . . the most remote places on the planet (PTED, 1562). After stressing that "no word annoys me more than the word négritude, he acknowledged that negritude literature has been a literature of combat and that negritude poetry had so much shock value only because it disrupted the image that white people held of black people (PTED, 1564-65). In essence, he updated the argument of Poetry and Knowledge" (1944) without changing its fundamental thrust.

In October, Césaire affirmed in his homage to André Breton, who had died on 28 September, that their meeting in Fort-de-France in 1941 decisively reoriented my life (EAC1, 395).

From January 4 to 11, 1968, Césaire participated in an international cultural conference in Havana; on that occasion, he met Fidel Castro and renewed his friendship with Wifredo Lam.

On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.

In May, Negro Digest published the interview Césaire gave E. C. Kennedy at the World Festival of Negro Arts two years earlier. He stressed the remarkable unity of the black world against M. Herskovits’s claim that Africa presented a diversity of cultures. He further declared his sympathy with grassroots movements like the Black Panthers who rejected the assimilation of the black bourgeoisie into white culture.

In June, Césaire visited Harlem at the invitation of the Black Panther Party during a layover on his flight from Paris to Fort-de-France.

In its July-August issue, Casa de las Américas published Césaire’s interview with S. Aratán in which he stressed the role of surrealism in his own liberation and expressed irritation at the systematization of negritude as an ideology.

The same issue of Casa de las Américas published a long conversation between Césaire and Depestre that was translated into English and published by Marxist journals in the United States and Jamaica. In 1972, it prefaced the edition of Discourse on Colonialism published by Monthly Review Press.

Présence Africaine, in its final 1968 issue, published Une Tempête d’après La Tempête de Shakespeare: Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre (A Tempest: based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Adaptation for a Black Theatre), released the following year by Seuil in its Theatre collection. Césaire gave up his plan to write a play on the inner-city revolts that followed the assassination of Dr. King and agreed to adapt Shakespeare’s play as a colonial allegory for the director J.-M. Serreau, with Caliban as Malcolm X and Ariel as Martin Luther King, Jr.

1970-1983: This long decade constituted a first summing up and a poetic testament.

In April 1972, Césaire lectured in Québec and participated in seminars at Laval University, where a special issue of Études littéraires introduced Francophone Canada to his Discours sur l’art africain (unpublished since he read it at the 1966 Dakar conference on the arts in Africa). In a discussion session, Césaire considered the Duvalier regime in Haiti a perversion of negritude.

On December 14, 1974, Césaire was made doctor honoris causa by the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, in the presence of Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica. In the same year, he was made an honorary fellow by the Modern Language Association of America.

In 1976, Désormeaux (Paris and Fort-de-France) published an expensive three-volume edition of Césaire’s Oeuvres complètes, edited by his son Jean-Paul. This edition, which contained numerous editorial and typographical errors, served as the reference text for Eshleman and Smith’s Collected Poetry in 1983. Thirteen of the seventeen poems in the Noria section were collected in moi, laminaire. . . (1982).

On June 25, 1979, Césaire addressed the annual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of French in Trois-Îlets, Martinique, on the topic La Martinique telle qu’elle est (Martinique as she is). Ostensibly a mini-course on Martinican geography and history for the visiting foreigners, his text referenced Sorel, Spengler, and Frobenius on the myth that unites a people. He cited Proudhon on Italian unification and (quoting from memory) Valéry on the composition of the nation. Marxist-Leninist references are notable by their absence. (See PTED, 1573-84.)

In 1982, Césaire was the second recipient of the National Grand Prize for Poetry (Grand Prix National de Poésie) presented by the Ministry of Culture.

In April 1982, Wifredo Lam collaborated with Césaire on Annonciation, a richly produced art book published in Milan, Italy, by Grafica Uno (CDP).

On September 11, Wifredo Lam died in Paris.

In November, the 10 poems Césaire contributed to his final collaboration with Lam were published by Seuil, along with 51 poems written since 1960 and a longer piece in honor of Miguel Ángel Asturias who died in 1974, under the title moi, laminaire. . . (i, laminaria. . .). The elegiac tone present in some poems of Ferraments dominated the collection.

1983-2013: Retirement, New Editions and National Honors.

In July 1983, D. Maximin published a new edition of the Cahier/Notebook at Présence Africaine with André Breton’s 1943 Un Grand Poète noir (A Great Negro Poet) as postface. Clearly the intention was to encourage readings outside the political context of the two previous decades.

In 1992, the Library of the National Assembly (Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale) bought the annotated typescript of the Notebook used by the printer for Volontés in 1939. The typescript contains late manuscript additions and a letter to the editor.

In April 1993, nearing age 80, Césaire stepped down from his position as deputy in the French National Assembly, where he had served since 1945.

In 1994, D. Maximin and G. Carpentier published Césaire’s collected Poésie at Seuil, including twenty-two new poems under the title Comme un malentendu de salut.

In February 2001, Césaire presided over his final city council meeting as mayor of Fort-de-France. He was almost eighty-eight years old and had served for fifty-six years. His constituents knew him as Papa Aimé.

In 2005, Césaire as honorary mayor of Fort-de-France refused to receive President Sarkozy whose government had recently passed a law that called for the recognition of the positive aspects of colonialism.

On April 17, 2008, Césaire died at age ninety-four. Three days later, he received a national funeral in Fort-de-France. Nicolas Sarkozy as President of the Republic participated in laying to rest the eminent Martinican who had refused to receive him three years earlier.

On April 7, 2011, President Sarkozy gave a speech on the steps of the Panthéon, where France honors its great men and women, praising Aimé Césaire and inaugurating the plaque that memorializes the poet-politician.

In 2013, Césaire’s centennial year, symposia on his work were held in Martinique, France, and the United States. A genetic and critical edition of his poetry, plays, and essays was launched in Paris in December (PTED). Earlier in the year, Wesleyan University Press published the bilingual Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (CNR).

THE COMPLETE POETRY OF

AIMÉ CÉSAIRE

NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE

NATIVE LAND ¹

In August 1939, Paris readers of the avant-garde literary magazine Volontés opened issue 20 to find a long poem by a student who had just left the École Normale Supérieure to return to Martinique. Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) was laid out in 109 stanzas in four sequences of mixed prose and verse. The rhythms of the stanzas recalled the long lines Paul Claudel had pioneered in his Cinq grandes odes (Five Great Odes) at the beginning of the last century. Claudel had laid claim to a physiological grounding of his rhythms in the diastolic/systolic rhythm of the human heart. The linking devices between the stanzas suggest Charles Péguy’s insistent use of repetition, anaphora, and paratactic construction in poems much longer than Césaire’s that were highly praised between the two world wars. Passages in the later sequences of the 1939 Notebook indicate that Césaire had taken to heart Rimbaud’s goal of visionary poetry. In denouncing the effects of colonialism on his Caribbean island home, Césaire demonstrated that he had also understood the corrosive poetics of Lautréamont.

Césaire postponed identifying his speaker in order to foreground the collective suffering of colonial society. The first twenty-four stanzas are a panoramic presentation of the island—poor, diseased, lacking a real identity—in which personification allows the hills (mornes), the shacks, and the unsanitary conditions of the little towns that grew up around the sugar plantations to express the physical degradation and the moral ugliness resulting from three centuries of colonial neglect. The population is present in the aggregate, an undifferentiated one or you that is then disarticulated into body parts—mouths, hands, feet, buttocks, genitals—in the Christmas festivity section. Punctuation is typical of parataxis: commas, semicolons, colons, which serve to pile up effects until they overwhelm the reader’s senses. The I emerges only in stanza 20, where Césaire focuses on a foul-smelling shack as a synecdoche of colonial society. Introduction of the speaker’s family at this point stresses the mother’s sacrifice for her children and the father’s moods alternating between melancholy tenderness and towering flames of anger. The transition from the first to the second sequence involves a shift of focus away from the sickness of colonial society to the speaker’s own delusions. He alludes in stanza 29 to betrayed trusts and uncertain evasive duty. He imagines his own heroic return to the island: I would arrive sleek and young in this land of mine and I would say to this land. . . . In the course of the second sequence, the speaker comes very gradually to a realization of his own alienation as a consequence of colonial education. Moral prostration and a diminished sense of self are related directly to the colonial process and its cultural institutions. The same stanza includes the long narrative segment devoted to the old black man on the streetcar. Césaire multiplies signifiers of blackness that clearly denote both his physical and moral self. Centuries of dehumanization have produced a masterpiece of caricature.

The third sequence introduces a series of interrogations about the meaning of blackness or negritude in the context of the speaker’s alienation from those values he will posit as African. From this point on, the speaker adopts a prayerful attitude that is signalled formally by ritual language. Stanzas 64 through 67 afford a positive response to the negative characteristics of colonized peoples expressed in stanza 61. In this new sequence, Césaire evokes the Ethiopian peoples of Africa, whose fundamental difference from Hamitic peoples he learned from Leo Frobenius’s book on African civilization. Suzanne Césaire described these traits in Tropiques: Ethiopian civilization is tied to the plant, to the vegetative cycle. // It is dreamlike, mystical and turned inward. The Ethiopian does not seek to understand phenomena, to seize and dominate exterior reality. It gives itself over to living a life identical to that of the plant, confident in life’s continuity: germinate, grow, flower, fruit, and the cycle begins again (GCD). ² The third sequence sets up a contrapuntal structure in which the Ethiopian characteristics of sub-Saharan Africans, as the Césaires understood them, are opposed positively to the Splengerian evocation of European decadence found in stanzas 39 and 70. A reversal of attitude on the part of the speaker, who in stanza 61 could see only the negative connotations of these same characteristics, results from this dynamic. The beginning of his own personal transformation shows him that these peoples are truly the eldest sons of the world and, indeed, the flesh of the world’s flesh pulsating with the very motion of the world.

A dozen stanzas, from 80 to 91, detail the sufferings of African slaves torn from their native cultures to toil, suffer, and die in the plantations of the Americas from Brazil through the West Indies to the southern United States. Names of diseases are enumerated like rosary beads in stanza 87 before the speaker intones a litany of the punishments permitted by the Black Code that governed slaves’ lives until abolition in 1848. No doubt because of stress placed on the political implications of the version published in 1956, the network of religious allusion in which Césaire’s denunciation of slavery is couched has gone largely unnoticed. It is probable that Césaire intended to give voice to Du Bois’s double consciousness. His goal in 1939 was surely to create for colonized blacks in the French empire a version of Alain Locke’s New Negro. Like many modernists in the English-speaking world, he used the language of religion—or, more accurately, a comparative mythology that includes the Bible—to elaborate a vocabulary and syntax of spiritual renewal. As the penultimate sequence of the Notebook comes to its climax, the speaker prepares to undergo a profound transformation. Stanzas 88 and 89 present the geography of suffering black humanity. The latter stanza replies directly to the claims made by scientific racism in stanza 52 in the context of the speaker’s assimilationist delirium. His infernal descent hits bottom in stanza 90: and the Negro every day more base, more cowardly, more sterile, less profound, more spilled out of himself, more separated from himself, more wily with himself, less immediate to himself. The isolated line that constitutes stanza 91 reiterates the spiritual motif of sacrifice: I accept, I accept it all. The process of anagnorisis is then complete; with self-awareness comes a new consciousness of what is at stake. The speaker must, in conclusion, reach a position that transcends the colonial dead end.

The speaker’s spiritual renewal opens with a pietà. The body of his country, its bones broken, is placed in his despairing arms. In stanza 92, the life force overwhelms him like some cosmic bull that lends its regenerative power. The initially bizarre image of the speaker spilling his seed upon the ground like the biblical Onan invites the reader to consider a far more primitive scene of the fecund earth being impregnated by the speaker’s sperm. The round shape of the mornes, which early on had assumed a symbolic role in the geography of the island, now signifies the breast whose nipple is surrounded by a life-giving force. The entire island becomes a living, sexualized being that responds to the speaker’s firm embrace. Cyclones are its great breath, and volcanoes contain the seismic pulse of this primal mother goddess with whom the speaker breaks the taboo of incest. The consequences of this life-giving embrace are both immediate and transformative. Already in stanza 93, the island is standing erect, side by side with her lover-son who through stanza 96 will denounce the centuries-old process of pseudomorphosis.

Pseudomorphosis was readily identifiable in 1939 as a key word in the lexicon of Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West was much discussed between the two world wars. By including this technical term toward the end of the third sequence of his long poem, Césaire named the process by which the speaker and his island society had come to be physically ill, morally prostrate, and ideologically deluded. In Césaire’s view, colonial society had been impeded from developing its own original forms and institutions by the imposition of French cultural norms on a population transported from Africa. Négritude as it is presented in the poem did not yet exist in 1939, still less was it the harbinger of any movement. Négritude in the 1939 Notebook is the ideal result of an inner transformation that must overthrow the old behaviors (la vieille négritude) so that a new black humanity (negritude in its positive sense) might emerge.

Césaire finally exorcises the memory of the slave ship in stanzas 103–105. He first announces its death throes: The ghastly tapeworm of its cargo gnaws the fetid guts of the strange suckling of the sea! He then details the horrors inflicted upon slaves carried on ships surprised on the high seas after the abolition of the trade. The sole surviving edited typescript is accompanied by a manuscript conclusion that begins with the last five lines of stanza 108. In an accompanying letter to the editor of Volontés, Césaire called his new ending more conclusive than the one he had originally submitted for publication. ³ In the final stanza, the speaker identifies with the mauvais nègre who calls all of nature into play during his transformation. He enjoins the spirit of the air to take over from an unreliable sun: encoil yourself, devour, embrace, and especially bind me. The images of binding by the wind (6 repetitions) complete the series begun by devour and encoil. The speaker is to be bound to his people in a sacrificial act that sanctifies the transition from individual to collective identity. If the reader has followed the multiple biblical allusions that have sustained the vehicle of this transformation, it becomes clear in the final dramatic stanza that the Holy Spirit of Christianity has been supplanted by an ancient divinity of the natural world. This is particularly apparent in the final image of a celestial Dove that, after ritually strangling the speaker with its lasso of stars, bears him up to the heavens. After expressing an earlier desire to drown himself in despair, the speaker utters a final sybilline phrase that brings the poem to its abrupt conclusion: It is there I will now fish / the malevolent tongue of the night in its immobile veerition!

The publication history of the Cahier/Notebook in French presents the reader with a palimpsest in which each subsequent version (two in 1947, one in 1956) foregrounds new elements while pushing others into the background. The New York bilingual edition published by Brentano’s in January 1947 is fundamentally different from all others in its allegiance to surrealist poetics and radical individualism. In October 1943, after revising the 1939 text for publication in New York, Césaire wrote that To Maintain Poetry one must defend oneself against social concerns by creating a zone of incandescence, on the near side of which, within which there flowers in terrible security the unheard blossom of the ‘I’. . . . ⁴ With respect to the 1939 text, Césaire proceeded in 1947 by accretion, adding new elements to heighten a poem that he intended to remove even further from socio-political concerns. Specifically, he inserted at the beginning of the third movement of the poem, at stanza 63, a sequence of some fifty stanzas that he had published in 1942 under the title In the Guise of a Literary Manifesto. In the wartime magazine Tropiques, it was dedicated to André Breton. ⁵ The effect of the new passage is precisely that described in the excerpt from To Maintain Poetry quoted above. When the Brentano’s text was printed in January 1947, it was already anachronistic. It embodied Césaire’s commitment to the surrealist program of psychic liberation and freedom from constraints of all types during the second world war.

The first Paris edition of the Cahier, published by Bordas just weeks after the New York edition but prepared some four years later when the poet was a sitting Communist member of the French legislature, is clearly a transitional version. We can locate it midway between the spiritual quest of the 1939 text and the politically committed text of 1956, both in its formal and its ideological aspects. Formally, the long sequence adapted from In the Guise of a Literary Manifesto was moved from the third to the second movement of the poem, beginning at stanza 37, so as to give the impression that the speaker’s transformation has already begun at that early stage. Still more conclusively, Césaire wrote a new initial stanza, the effect of which was to disrupt the impersonal tone of the entire first movement, from which the I was absent from 1939 through the New York edition of 1947. All readers of the post-1956 editions of the poem recall it because of its aggressive tenor:

At the end of daybreak . . .

Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it, I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Beat it, evil grigri, you bedbug of a petty monk. Then I turned toward paradises lost for him and his kin, calmer than the face of a woman telling lies, and there, rocked by the flux of a never exhausted thought I nourished the wind, I unlaced the monsters and heard rise, from the other side of disaster, a river of turtledoves and savanna clover which I carry forever in my depths height-deep as the twentieth floor of the most arrogant houses and as a guard against the putrefying force of crepuscular surroundings, surveyed night and day by a cursed venereal sun. ⁶

One can scarcely overestimate the effect of this passage, which situates the speaker personally and politically over against a society that is policed by the flunkies of order. Moreover, on the threshold of this new iteration of the poem, the speaker already knows the lessons revealed only in the conclusion of the 1939 text. As a frame tale, this vision worthy of Lautréamont places in a recent past the evocation of the sick colony (stanzas 1-24) that was in fact the narrative present of the poem in its two earlier versions. Finally, readers of The Miraculous Weapons, published just a year earlier, could recognize in the other side of disaster one of Césaire’s recurring metaphors for the slave trade and its consequences. The frame tale inaugurated by the new overture to the Cahier/Notebook was completed in the 1947 Bordas edition by four new stanzas that Césaire placed strategically just prior to the finale:

by the clinking noon sea

by the burgeoning midnight sun

listen sparrow hawk that holds the keys to the orient

by the disarmed day

by the stony spurt of the rain

listen dogfish that watches over the occident

listen white dog of the north, black serpent of the south

that cinches the sky girdle

…

and for this reason, [white-toothed] Lord, the frail-necked men

receive and perceive deadly triangular calm ⁷

This new material contained a political allegory alien to earlier texts of the poem. In the context of the looming Cold War, images of whiteness, predatory dogs, and dogfish sharks designated clearly enough the capitalist world of the West that Césaire set over against the Soviet sparrow hawk that holds the keys to the orient. Political allegory was absent from the poetics of the Cahier/Notebook from 1939 to the 1947 New York edition. Still more important perhaps was the rhythmic break the new material introduced just prior to the speaker’s final revelatory vision. By redirecting the reader’s attention from the spiritual transformation of the speaker onto a political plane, the frame of reference and the conditions for producing meaning were strategically modified. The Bordas text thus represents both a denial and a reorientation of the poetics Césaire had practiced in revising his long poem between 1941 and 1943. They certainly resulted from Césaire’s frustration over the French government’s refusal to grant full political and economic rights to its West Indian citizens from 1946 to 1948.

In a clear break with his previous editorial practice of accretion and transposition, Césaire in 1956 for the first time engaged in substantive suppression of elements in the text that no longer resonated with his new political orientation. Since we have published a detailed summary (AFM), a few representative samples will suffice here:

In stanza 63 of the Brentano’s edition, maintained in Bordas at stanza 37, Behold then the horsemen of the Apocalypse clearly referenced the Book of Revelation (translated as Apocalypse in French). When the line was suppressed in 1956, the reference to the apocalypse of monsters in stanza 31 lost much of its spiritual connotation.

In the same stanza, the question Who and what are we? contained in the answer a