Aimé Césaire Drama Analysis
Aimé Césaire’s plays mark a conscious departure in style and artistic attitude from the main body of his poetry and are essential to a full understanding of his career—the career not only of a poet and historian but of a politician as well. With the exception of Et les chiens se taisaient (and the dogs grew silent), which was first included as a dramatic poem in Miraculous Weapons and only later revised in a special “theatrical arrangement” in 1956, all of Césaire’s plays were composed and performed in the 1960’s. In these years, the opportunities for decolonization had apparently increased abruptly. Several African states were for the first time winning their independence, and in the United States, the Civil Rights movement was at its height. As a longtime spokesperson for negritude, Césaire apparently wanted to reach audiences put off by the dense imagery of his Surrealist poetry—especially audiences from the largely illiterate countries in which decolonization was occurring. In the speeches of his characters, Césaire debates the entirely new set of problems created by independence: the problems of rebels in power, of former slaves who enslave others, and of anticolonialists who fight one another instead of the enemy.
As a group, Césaire’s four plays can be said to touch on the principal concerns of his life’s work. If Et les chiens se taisaient belongs to the world of Return to My Native Land, with its exotic invocations of revolt in a general or a metaphysical sense, the next three plays situate themselves in the history of the black movement: The Tragedy of King Christophe in the Caribbean of postindependence Haiti of the early nineteenth century, A Season in the Congo in the Congo of contemporary Africa, and The Tempest in the spiritual landscape of African American politics.
Et les chiens se taisaient
Et les chiens se taisaient describes Césaire’s journey from poetry to theater, and the play has been staged only in German translation. The play’s hero, referred to simply as “the Rebel,” carries on the obsessive interest in negritude from Return to My Native Land—at once enchained and wildly free, eloquent and mute, a descendant of slavery and of royalty. Although the play opens to a more-or-less conventional prison setting, where the Rebel has been condemned to death for killing his “master,” the apparent order rapidly disintegrates into a series of hallucinatory tableaux representing various stages of colonization from Columbus to the present. Here, one finds sudden changes of scenery and quick jumps in time and place. The entire tapestry of characters and events therefore is located, fantastically, within what the play calls “a vast collective prison, peopled by black candidates for madness and death.”
The play is a phantasmagoric record of rebellion and subjugation in their pure states, in which characters with emblematic titles such as “The Administrator” and “The Great Promoter” march before the reader hypocritically lamenting the “burden of civilization,” while a Chorus representing the West Indian people admires the Rebel’s example from a distance, without being able to follow it. “Bishops” and “High Commissioners” confront “Lovers”; statistics confront poetry. The play nevertheless establishes motifs that recur in Césaire’s later dramatic work—particularly the image of the leader who contains perfectly within him the conscience of his race, who retains the memory of both the African royal splendor and its bondage, who employs beautifully the power of the word, but who (in spite of these things) remains isolated from a people who cannot attain his heights.
Césaire’s next two plays, although emotionally and thematically linked to Et les chiens se taisaient , employ a very...
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different theatrical strategy. BothThe Tragedy of King Christophe and A Season in the Congo—the best-known and most widely performed of his plays and among the few translated into English—are frankly historical and rooted in specific social situations. All three of his remaining plays, in fact, were deeply influenced by Jean-Marie Serreau, a follower of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s “epic” school of theater, which sought to dramatize historical conflicts in such a way that the audience might participate in solving them. Serreau produced all three of these plays and commissioned The Tempest.
The Tragedy of King Christophe
The Tragedy of King Christophe is a tragedy of revolutionary decline. Based on an actual historical personage—one of the generals of Toussaint Louverture, who became ruler of Haiti in the early 1800’s—the problem of power after independence is plainly meant to apply to the Third World leaders of the early 1960’s: for example, Ben Bella of Algeria, Fidel Castro of Cuba, and Senghor of Senegal. The play’s action revolves around the irony that Christophe, in order to outmaneuver his French colonial enemies, abolishes the republic and establishes himself as king. The question thus becomes: Can one defeat one’s opponent by becoming like him? As portrayed in the play, the monarchy is a disturbing sight: Christophe conscripts workers to build a royal Citadel on the model of the pyramids, rants about there being “no freedom without labor,” executes his own bishops and emissaries, and calls his people “niggers.” The dramatic tension, however, is in no way one-sided. One is constantly reminded of Christophe’s heroic defiance of the colonizer, his admirable ability to rely on “the will and the grace of [his] two fists.”
The play is strikingly popular in its formal appeals. In an early monologue, for example, the Commentator explains the historical background needed to understand the action. Songs in dialect everywhere punctuate the longer speeches, a court jester entertains and instructs with his lyrical jabs and satirical jokes, and the number of crowd scenes underlines the communal (and not merely personal) significance of the tragic events.
A Season in the Congo
A Season in the Congo is basically a repetition of The Tragedy of King Christophe, merely transplanted to the soil of the modern Congo. Here, the black revolutionary Patrice Lumumba is examined. The play has not generally been received as well as The Tragedy of King Christophe. It is packed with long monologues that are really declarations of positions and little more. Character itself becomes synonymous with a social position and is expressed typically in names such as “First Banker,” “Second Banker,” or “First Belgian Policeman” and “Second Belgian Policeman,” and so on. The broad social nature of the drama is reflected also in the many fleeting glimpses of mass movements, demonstrations, strikes, appeals, and backroom negotiations, all of them contributing to a kind of pastiche of exemplary moments in the history of the Congo (modern Zaire).
The Tempest
The Tempest, as indicated by its French title, calls attention to the unique concerns of “black theater” and seeks to illustrate them all the more clearly by adapting (and intentionally distorting) a well-known Shakespearean play. Prospero is the original colonial intruder, subjugating the black slave Caliban, in his own tropical home, while Ariel, a mulatto slave, makes his own deals with the master, often at Caliban’s expense. As suggested here, the setting is neither the transhistorical mental realm of Et les chiens se taisaient nor the fixed locales of the historical plays but a symbolic model of Caribbean society as a whole, ruled by the dialectic of master and slave and complicated by the unequal status of the subjects themselves—a relationship already seen clearly in Basilio, Lumumba, and Kala Lubu of A Season in the Congo.
According to comments by Césaire, the play was intended to address problems within the Black Power movement of the United States; if it did, however, it did so indirectly. Given Césaire’s intention, many have seen Martin Luther King in Césaire’s Ariel and Malcolm X in his Caliban; evidence for this reading can be found in black power slogans such as “Freedom now,” which appear in English in the original text.
In some respects, the play returns to Césaire’s earlier lyricism. Described in Césaire’s stage directions as having the “atmosphere of a psychodrama,” the work plays up this unreality in at least two ways: by using anachronisms, usually with a satirical twist, as when the crew of the sinking ship in the first scene sings “Nearer My God to Thee”; and the stipulation in the stage notes that actors entering the stage may choose a mask at their discretion. Nevertheless, the specific Caribbean and North American motifs and the implicit challenge to Shakespeare’s own imaginative vision make the play clearly political satire.