SOURCE: "Aimé Césaire," in Voices of négritude: The Expression of Black Experience in the Poetry of Senghor, Césaire & Damas, Judson Press, 1970, pp. 53-62.

[in the following essay, Jones discusses the defining characteristics of Césaire's work.]

In her excellent book on Aimé Césaire and his works, in the Poètes d'Aujourd'hui series, Lilyan Kesteloot appraises the extraordinary talent of this Afro-French, West Indian poet as follows:

Je ne vois pas dans I'histoire de la littérature française une personnalité qui ait à ce point intégré des éléments aussi divers que la conscience raciale, la creátion artistique et l'action politique. Je ne vois pas de personnalité aussi puissamment unifiée et à la fois aussi complexe que celle de Césaire. Et c'est là, sans doute, que réside le secret de l'exceptionnelle densité d'une poésie qui s'est, à un degré extrême, chargée de toute la cohérence d'une vie d'homme.¹

I do not see in the history of French literature a personality who has so highly integrated such diverse elements as racial consciousness, artistic creation, and political action. I do not see any personality so powerfully unified and at the same time so complex as that of Césaire. And, without doubt, therein resides the secret of the exceptional density of a poetry which has, to an extreme degree, taken on itself all the coherence of a man's life.

Paying eloquent tribute to Césaire's rare poetic gifts in his Préface to Césaire's first major collection, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, the "high priest" of French surrealistic poetry, André Breton, who discovered Césaire during a visit to Martinique, has this to say in that Preface, titled "Un grand poète noir" [To a Great Black Poet]:

Et c'est un noir qui manie la langue française comme il n'est pas aujourd'hui un blanc pour la manier. Et c'est un noir celui qui nous guide aujourd'hui dans l'inexploré, établissant au fur et à mesure, comme en se jouant, les contacts qui nous font avancer sur des étincelles. Et c'est un noir qui est non seulement un noir mais tout l'homme, qui en exprime toutes les interrogations, toutes les angoisses, tous les espoirs et toutes les extases et qui s'imposera de plus en plus à moi comme le prototype de la dignité.

A black man it is who masters the French language as no white man can today. A black man it is who guides us today through unexplored lands building as he goes the contacts that will make us progress on sparks. A black man it is who embodies not simply the black race but all mankind, its queries and anxieties, its hopes and ecstasies and who will remain for me the symbol of dignity.²

Just who is this black poet who has elicited such flattering appraisals from persons best equipped to appreciate his genius? To understand Césaire's complexities and the magnitude of his anger, we are reminded by his biographer that one must understand the island which gave birth to him: Martinique, in the French West Indies, where dazzling luxury and wealth on the part of the few (whites) are in sharp contrast with the abject poverty of the masses (blacks)—where hunger, disease, and ignorance stalk the land—where former slavery and present-day exploitation have combined to crush the black masses of the population. This is especially true of Martinique, where Aimé Césaire was born in 1913, "… a miniature house which lodges in its guts of rotten wood dozens of rats, as well as the turbulence of my six brothers and sisters, a tiny cruel house whose intransigence infuriates the last days of the month …"… une maison minuscule qui abrite en ses entrailles de bois pourri des dizaines de rats et la turbulence de mes six frères et soeurs, une petite maison cruelle dont l'intransigeance affole nos fins de mois …").³ His family was, however, in the "middle" (moyen) on the scale of local wretchedness, his father being, for a time at least, an "employee of the lower-echelon government" (petit fonctionnaire) in the town of Basse-Pointe.

Even worse than the material poverty afflicting the island was the spiritual and moral bankruptcy resulting from years of domination and exploitation: the complete resignation, loss of the will to resist, and the despair and constant fear of hunger, unemployment, and the like. Moreover, a color elite had developed among non-whites, which further aggravated the real blacks.

Thanks to native intelligence, industry, and promise, Césaire was to be sent to France to pursue his secondary and higher education. The former was acquired at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, in Paris, where he met and began his lifelong friendship with Léopold Senghor. He then attended the Sorbonne and the École normale supérieure, the teacher-training school where to be admitted is an enviable distinction. Like Senghor, he graduated from both and was agrégé in literature. It was while Césaire was at the École normale supérieure, in 1935-1936, that this writer met him and introduced him to Sterling Brown via his poetic collection, Southern Road. Some years later, Césaire was to become mayor of Fort-de-France, capital of Martinique. After entering politics, he was elected delegate (délégué) to the Assemblée nationale in Paris; and in 1946, like Senghor, he was a member of the Assemblée constituante which framed the Constitution for the Fourth Republic in France (1946-1958).

Césaire's bitterness attracted him to the Communist party, a recognized political party in France's multi-party set-up, which he later abandoned. Ultimately, his ardent Communist activities made him somewhat unpopular among literary circles in France, where he still lives with his wife and daughter and continues to write.

A co-founder of L'Étudiant Noir in Paris, Césaire was also one of a group of Communist and surrealist West Indian students who founded in 1932 a magazine known as Légitime Défense.

Thus this black poet who, in the eyes of another great poet, possesses qualities of soul and genius which brought the two men together in a deep and abiding friendship also possesses a universality of interest and appeal which makes him the voice not only of his native Martinique but of all mankind. Indeed, Césaire's song is a social lament which elicits a ready response from all those who suffer from social, economic, and political injustices.

First of all, Césaire is a poet: he is essentially a singer of songs. His native sense of rhythm and his power to transform into poetry the commonest and even the ugliest aspects of life make of him a truly great poet. To quote André Breton again:

… la poésie de Césaire, comme toute grande poésie et tout grand art, vaut au plus haut point par le pouvoir de transmutation, qu'elle met en oeuvre et qui consiste, à partir des matériaux les plus déconsidérés, parmi lesquels il faut compter les laideurs et les servitudes mêmes, à produire on sait assez que ce n'est plus l'or la pierre philosophale mais bien la liberte.

Césaire's poetry, like any great poetry or art, draws its supreme value from its power of transmutation which consists in taking the most discredited materials, among which daily squalor and constraints, and ultimately producing neither gold nor the philosopher's stone any longer but freedom itself.⁴

Césaire's poetry, whose rhythm is suggestive of the weird and mysterious beat of the tom-tom, is replete with the exotic and luxuriant beauty inspired by the flora and fauna of the tropics. It excels in colorful and vivid imagery.

Behind the exquisite beauty of Césaire's verse there is a profound and prophetic meditation on the social injustices of which his people, especially in Martinique, are victims. The bard of Martinique sings of the wretchedness of colonial peoples and bemoans their exploitation by a handful of European parasites, who, frequently in defiance of the law, set themselves up as cruel, inhuman masters of an unhappy people forced to resign themselves to a status of virtual slavery. He sings of the evils of this system of colonization as they manifest themselves in the daily life and activities of his native island—in poverty, miserable housing, poor health, ignorance, superstition, and prejudice. He sings of "… the hungry West Indies, pitted with smallpox, dynamited with alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dirt of this city sinisterly stranded" ("… les Antilles qui ont faim, les Antilles grêlées de petite vérole, les Antilles dynamitèes d'alcool, èchouès dans la boue de cette baie, dans la poussière de cette ville sinistrement échouées").⁵

Césaire's major work, for our purposes, at lest, is his Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, written in Paris in 1939 on the eve of the poet's return to his native Martinique after completing his work at the École normale supérieure. This work was published in the review Volonté in 1939, but it did not attract attention until it was republished by Bordas in 1947. As the young poet makes ready to return to his native soil after a highly successful academic sojourn in Paris, he is haunted by the real and tragic vision of the West Indies inflicted with hunger, disease, alcoholism, and moral turpitude—fruits of a despicable, though doomed, system of economic exploitation and social abuse. He thinks particularly of his native city:

Au bout du petit matin, cette ville inerte et ses au-delà de lèpres, de consomption, de famines, de peurs tapies dans les ravins, de peurs juchées dans les arbres, de peurs creusées dans le sol, de peurs en dérive dans le ciel, de peurs amoncelées et ses fumerolles d'angoisse.

At the end of the dawn, this inert city, with its lepers, consumption, famines, fears hidden in ravines, fears perched in trees, fears sunk in the soil, fears drifting in the sky accumulations of fears with their fumeroles of anguish.⁶

These conditions with which the poet's hometown is afflicted invariably breed social vices and warp human personality and destroy human souls. The poet reflects:

Au bout du petit matin, l'échouage hétéroclite, les puanteurs exacerbées de la corruption, les sodomies monstrueuses de l'hostie et du victimaire, les coltis infranchissables du préjugé et de la sottise, les prostitutions, les hypocrisies, les lubricités, les trahisons, les mensonges, les faux, les concussions—l'essoufflement des lâchetés insuffisantes, l'enthousiasme sans ahan aux poussis surnuméraires, les avidités, les hystéries, les perversions, les arlequinades de la misère, les estropiements, les prurits, les urticaires, les hamacs tièdes de la dégénérescence. Ici la parade des risibles et scrofuleux bubons, les poutures de microbes très étranges, les poisons sans alexitère connu, les sanies de plaies bien antiques, les fermentations imprévisibles d'espèces putrescibles.⁷

At the end of the dawn, the odd stranding, the exacerbated stench of corruption, the monstrous sodomies of the offering and the sacrificer, the dauntless prows of prejudice and stupidity, the prostitutions, the hypocrisies, the lubricities, the treasons, the lies, the frauds—the concussions, the breathlessness of halfhearted cowards, the smooth enthusiasms of budding bureaucrats, the avidities, hysterias, perversions, the harlequinades of misery, the injuries, itchings, urticarias, the dreary hammocks of degeneracy. Here the parade of contemptible and scrofulous bubos, the gluttony of very strange microbes, the poisons for which there are no known alexins, the pus of very ancient wounds, the unforeseeable fermentations of species destined to decay.⁸

Further in his dream of his return home, M. Césaire depicts the advent of Christmas in his native city. His reminiscences on this most beautiful of all Christian celebrations are all the more vivid because of the contrasts which they evoke between the economic extremes of the city. He announces the approach of Christmas in high poetic images:

Et le temps passait vite, très vite.

Passés aoùt où les manguiers pavoisent de toutes leurs lunules, septembre l'accoucheur de cyclones, octobre le flambeur de cannes, novembre qui ronronne aux distilleries, c'était Noël qui commençait.

And quickly, time went by.

From August, when the mango-trees were decked with lunulas, to September, midwife of hurricanes, to October, incendiary of sugar canes, then November, purring in the distilleries, and suddenly Christmas was there.⁹

Then he depicts the joy that reigns habitually in the city at Christmas time:

… et le bourg n'est plus qu'un bouquet de chants, et l'on est bien à l'intérieur, et l'on en mange du bon, et l'on en boit du réjouissant et il y a du boudin, celui étroit de deux doigts qui s'enroule en volubile, celui large et trapu, le bénin à goût de serpolet, le violent à incandescence pimenteé, et du café brûlant et de l'anis sucré et du punch au lait, et le soleil liquide des rhums, et toutes sortes de bonnes choses qui vous imposent autoritairement les muqueuses ou vous les distillent en ravissements, ou vous les tissent de fragrances, et l'on rit, et l'on chante….

… the little town is now only a bouquet of songs: you are well inside, you have good things to eat, wine to drink, and there are sausages, one kind is thin as two fingers tightly wound, the other big and dumpy, the soft kind tastes of thyme, the strong of red-hot spice, there is burning coffee and sugary anise, punch with milk, and the liquid sun of rum, and all sorts of good things which despotically work on your mucous membrane, distilling delights or weaving fragrances, and you laugh and sing….¹⁰

But all these good things associated with the celebration of Christmas were reserved for the fortunate few in Basse-Pointe, the poet's native city. The observance of Christmas in the poet's own family contrasted sharply with the affuence and abundance of good things (bonnes choses) described above. He remembers his family abode, rat-infested and dilapidated in an ill-smelling, unsanitary street, as the scene of a laborious mother tirelessly pedaling a Singer sewing machine in order to feed her numerous brood, while his indolent, irascible, and sickly father sat idly by. To such people, Christmas was hardly any different from any other day. The poet remembers this scene in these words:

Au bout du petit matin, une autre petite maison qui sent très mauvais dans une rue très étroite, une maison minuscule qui abrite en ses entrailles de bois pourri des dizaines de rats et la turbulence de mes six frères et soeurs, une petite maison cruelle dont l'intransigeance affole nos fins de mois et mon père fantasque grignoté d'une seule misère, je n'ai jamais su laquelle, qu'une imprévisible sorcellerie assoupit en mélancolique tendresse ou exalte en hautes flammes de colère; et ma mère dont les jambes pour notre faim inlassable pédalent, pédalent de jour, de nuit, je suis même réveillé la nuit par ces jambes inlassables qui pédalent la nuit et la morsure âpre dans la chair molle de la nuit d'une Singer que ma mère pédale, pédale pour notre faim et de jour et de nuit.¹¹

At the end of the dawn, there is another tiny house stinking in the narrow street, a miniature house which lodges in its guts of rotten wood dozens of rats, as well as the turbulence of my six brothers and sisters, a tiny cruel house whose intransigence infuriates the last days of the month and my fantastic father chewed by a certain ailment, I never discovered what, my father whom an unanticipated sorcery makes drowsy with melancholy sweetness or exalts to the high flames of anger; and my mother, whose limbs, in the service of our tireless hunger, pedal, pedal, day and night, I am even awakened at night by those tireless limbs which pedal the night, by the bitter punctures in the soft flesh of the night made by the Singer machine my mother pedals, pedals for our hunger day and night.¹²

As the time for the poet's return approaches, he takes inventory of the rupture, which has developed during his stay in France, between him and his people, not only the relatives in the smelly little house but also all men of color similarly situated, and he seeks to repair that rupture. The first step in the process of repair is to destroy his refound cowardice (lâcheté retrouvée) which revealed itself to the poet one day when, on a Paris tramway, he had renounced his racial allegiance and solidarity with "a comical and ugly Negro" (un nègre comique et laid) whose presence was a source of embarrassment to the poet in the occidental setting so unsympathetic with this comical Negro (an incident described earlier). This impetuous and thoughtless decision was foolish, the poet concludes, and he must accept all that is characteristic of even the most backward of his people, all that has been imposed upon them by years of disease, poverty, and ignorance. All this he must accept as his heritage, and he must identify himself fervently with the cause and fate of Negroes. This he does:

"J'accepte, j' accepte tout cela … [toute cette négritude]…."¹³ He accepts the bad along with the good, but he does it in the conviction that the future holds a promise of liberation, of complete and real freedom for his people and for all peoples. He believes that the conquest of liberty has only begun: "… but the work of man has only begun … and there is room for all at the rendezvous of conquest" ("… l'oeuvre de l'homme vient seulement de commencer … et il est place pour tous au rendezvous de la conquête").¹⁴

The Negro, Césaire believes, is destined to have a part in mankind's liberation from "this serfdom of our time," a liberation of mind and body. As a poet, M. Césaire is resolved to fight for the former, and as a politician he is in the thick of the struggle for social and economic liberation. In his poem "A l'Afrique" he looks into his poetic crystal ball and foresees a pestilence that will depopulate the West, and he exhorts the peasants, with a philosophy suggestive of Voltaire's "cultivate your garden" (cultivez votre jardin), to continue to strike the earth, identifying himself with the toilers of the land, the tillers of the soil.

The caustic candor and cutting irony of the selection that follows point up the characteristic rage of Césaire when he is forced to defend blacks against the whites who have victimized them, reduced them to a status of social and economic inferiority, and then castigated them for being "inferior," for not having excelled as inventors, discoverers, explorers, philosophers, scholars, and so forth.

Ceux qui n'ont inventé ni la poudre ni la boussole
ceux qui n'ont jamais su dompter la vapeur ni l'électricité
ceux qui n'ont exploré ni les mers ni le ciel
mais ils savent en ses moindres recoins le pays de souffrance
ceux qui n'ont connu de voyages que de déracinements
ceux qui se sont assoupis aux agenouillements
ceux qu'on domestiqua et christianisa
ceux qu'on inocula d'abâtardissement
tam-tams de mains vides
tam-tams inanes de plaies sonores
tam-tams burlesques de trahison tabide¹⁵

The Cahier d'un retour is above all a song, a lament, perhaps the greatest lyrical creation of our time. No lesser than M. André Breton has characterized it as "the greatest lyrical monument of our times" ("le plus grand monument lyrique de ce temps").¹⁷

Truly, M. Césaire, equipped with all that he could learn from the white man and his civilization, belongs, at least as far as his literary genius is concerned, body and soul to the vast collectivity of the proletariat, to the millions of laborers whose voice he becomes as he sings their joys and sorrows, their tribulations and aspirations. And Césaire's voice is in truth, as M. Breton has described it, "beautiful as nascent oxygen" ("belle comme l'oxygéne naissant").¹⁸

As Lilyan Kesteloot puts it, Le Cahier is a decisive date in the birth of black consciousness, and it has for twenty years served as a standard for the revolutionary youth of colonized countries,"¹⁹ whether in Africa or the West Indies or elsewhere. It may well be studied by black youth today in their efforts to set the current struggle in historical perspective. Alioune Diop characterizes this work as "the sum-total of Negro revolt against European history" ("la somme de la révolte nègre contre l'histoire européenne").²⁰

At once an epic and a lyrical poem, it defies classification as a poetic creation. Like the medieval literary form (chante-fable), there is an alternation of verse with prose passages. It is unique, resembling only itself. Its surrealism is often hard to penetrate and to interpret. But where its social commentary is clear—which often it is not, thanks to surrealistic verbiage—it is a scathing denunciation of European colonialism and an eloquent apology for the dignity of man and his equality with all his fellowmen.

Notes

¹ Lilyan Kesteloot, Aimé Césaire (Paris: Editions Pierre Seghers, 1962), p. 9.

² André Breton, "Preface: Un grand poète noir," in A. Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal [Return to my native land], tr. Emile Snyder (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956), pp 14-15.

³ Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal [Return to my nativeland], tr. Emile Snyder (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956), pp 50-53.

⁴ André Breton, op. cit., pp. 18-19.

⁵ Césaire, Cahier ďun retour au pays natal, pp. 30-31

⁶Ibid., pp. 34-35.

⁷Ibid., pp. 39, 41.

⁸Ibid., pp. 38, 40.

⁹Ibid., pp. 44-45.

¹⁰Ibid, pp. 46-47.

¹¹Ibid., pp. 51, 53.

¹²Ibid., pp. 50, 52.

¹³Ibid., p. 137.

¹⁴Ibid., pp. 138-141.

¹⁵ Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, p. 111.

¹⁶Ibid., p. 110.

¹⁷ André Breton, op. cit., pp. 16-17.

¹⁸Ibid., pp. 26-27.

¹⁹ Translated from Kesteloot, Aimé Césaire, p. 25.

²⁰Ibid.