It would be difficult to examine the notion of poetic function in relation to Aimé Césaire without taking into consideration the tension and ambivalence of Césaire's situation as a black intellectual and as a poet, functioning within a profoundly alienating white French socio-cultural context. On the one hand, as a black man, and particularly as a black Martinican-Frenchman, Césaire is constantly confronted by identity issues, grounded in the unhealed and perhaps unhealable wound of slavery, of colonization, and of relatively forced assimilation into an alien culture, as well as in potential isolation and separation within the black/African diaspora. As a poet and black intellectual, Césaire serves as the voice of a leader for an audience and a people (fellow Blacks) on whom he depends and to whom he is inextricably linked for the integration of his identity. Césaire's situation therefore suggests the tension of a poetry that would tend to function simultaneously inwardly and outwardly, personally and politically, as both link and lance: as a link for exploring identity issues, a means of searching and solidifying, of facilitating and articulating identity; as a lance, a weapon of personal and political liberation, but also an instrument to open the festering wound of alienation and self-hatred in order to create hope and healing.

At the same time, Césaire is a citizen of France, albeit black and Martinican, writing poetry in the French language within an established French literary tradition with its own socio-symbolic order. While Césaire's awareness as an educated black man might tend to incline him towards consciously or unconsciously rejecting or subverting the French social order, he does not become "un-French," and both his use of the French language and his renown as a French (Caribbean) writer would tend to validate, and contribute to the survival of, the French social order to which he belongs.

A discussion of poetic function in relation to Césaire should therefore take into account the peculiarities of his French Caribbean situation and the ambivalence of his relationship to a metropolitan French literary tradition. The term poetic function itself, however, though part of the rhetoric of the Western sociocultural tradition, tends to be somewhat elusive. Its meaning, for the purposes of this study, may be said to lie within the parameters of two modern critical and linguistic approaches, advanced by Kristeva and Jakobson. Kristeva's approach captures the irony of Césaire's position vis-à-vis metropolitan French society. She posits a revolutionary and subversive function for poetry or poetic language within the context of a sociosymbolic order; poetry thus serves paradoxically both to transform the social order and to ensure its survival:

Dans cet ordre socio-symbolique ainsi saturé sinon déjà clos, la poésie—disons plus exactement le langage poétique—rappelle ce qui fut depuis toujours sa fonction: introduire, à travers le symbolique, ce qui le travaille, le traverse et le menace. Ce que la théorie de l'inconscient cherche, le langage poétique le pratique à l'intérieur et à l'encontre de l'ordre social: moyen ultime de sa mutation ou de sa subversion, condition de sa survie et de sa révolution. …¹

Kristeva's approach in relating poetry to the context of a social order shares linkages with Jakobson's analysis of linguistic communication. Jakobson identifies six constituent factors in linguistic processes: "destinateur," "destinataire," "message," "contexte," "code," and "contact." He relates poetic function to emphasis placed on the "message" itself: "l'accent mis sur le message pour son propre compte est ce qui caractérise la function poétique du langage. …"² Césaire's poetry indeed necessarily emphasizes the "message," since it serves as a concrete manifestation of a communication link between poet and self and poet and people. In this study, therefore, poetic function will refer to the role of the poet and of the poem in relation to the sociopolitical context within which the poet writes.

The interpretation of Césaire's poetry as revolutionary, in relation to the nature and direction of the poet's communication, was suggested, long before the articulations of Jakobson and Kristeva, by Aristide Maugée, Césaire's close friend, fellow Martinican and co-contributor to the early 1940s Martinican journal, Tropiques. In a 1942 article, Maugée suggests aspects of the functions of Césaire's poetry that will become almost clichés in the years that follow: the poem as liberation, as verbal magic, as a means of exploring and discovering inner truths. He asserted:

[Césaire] façonne des mots nouveaux, crée des images nouvelles pour exprimer la nuance exacte de sa perception, trouve des sonorités neuves pour libérer son chant intérieur.

Magie du son. Sortilège du Verbe.

[ … ] par la désintégration du réel, le poète recherche un monde nouveau: un monde de beauté et de vérité.

Où le trouvera-t-il sinon dans la profondeur de sa conscience?³

Moreover, Césaire himself, in his 1943 article in Tropiques, "Maintenir la poésie," had indicated that poetry as he conceived and practiced it had a deliberately subversive function, in relation to the existing social order:

Se défendre du social par la création d'une zone d'incandescence, en deça de laquelle, à l'intérieur de laquelle fleurit dans une sécurité terrible la fleur inouïe du "Je"; [ … ] conquérir par la révolte la part franche où se susciter soi-même, intégral, telles sont quelquesunes des exigences qui [ … ] tendent à s'imposer à tout poète […].

Ici poésie égale insurrection [ … ]4

Césaire's poetics have perhaps been most comprehensively articulated in "Poésie et connaissance,"⁵ in which he established an opposition between poetic and scientific processes of knowledge, affirming the superiority of the poetic process as a means of true cosmic knowledge. Césaire thus aligned himself with the revolutionary adventures of poets like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Apollinaire and Breton. "Poésie et connaissance" ended with a summary of Césaire's poetics, expressed in seven propositions, the first of which asserts that "la poésie est cette démarche qui par le mot, l'image, le mythe, l'amour et l'humour m'installe au cœur vivant de moimême et du monde" (169).⁶

Césaire's explicit alignment with these luminaries of modern French poetry has opened the door for Euro-centered critical approaches to his own poetry. Such approaches, however well meaning, however brilliantly executed, feed into the same dilemma from which Césaire as a French Caribbean writer has tried so courageously to escape: absorption into a socio-politico-cultural entity that has, through slavery, colonization, and assimilation, consistently denied a voice to him and his people. French Caribbean poets like Césaire are necessarily characterized by the problem of cultural identity, including the struggle of separation from France, and their textual voice is grounded in the geographical and sociocultural reality of the French Caribbean. Because of the peculiar situation of such poets, in terms of the dynamics of geography, language, history, and culture, it is inevitable that the signs of this situation will be literally inscribed in the texts produced. If these signs are unrecognized or ignored, much of the "significance" of the literary work will be missed.

Moreover, any approach to Césaire's poetry and indeed to the literature of the Caribbean that ignores the existence of an authentic and valid voice which compensates for an orality lost or repressed over the last few centuries will inevitably fall short of determining the profound significance of the literature.

No analysis of French Caribbean literature is ultimately meaningful if it does not directly engage the problematic of cultural identity with which every Caribbean writer is confronted. Approaches to Caribbean texts through the mediation of European theories tend to devalue and deny the pivotal thrust of French Caribbean literary production, which is ultimately to proclaim and assert its validity as an authentic cultural manifestation.

A problem arises, however, for, while it may be inappropriate to rely on Euro-centered critical approaches to explicate French Caribbean poetry, there is a lack of alternative approaches sensitive to this problematic. Since critical practice necessarily has political implications, there is a need for critical activity by scholars sensitive enough to the challenge posed by the special situation of French Caribbean letters not to adopt the easier task of imposing a traditional, metropolitan critical framework on French Caribbean texts, but to seek to develop approaches which will support the evolution of a French Caribbean literary canon on its own terms.

The investigation which follows centers on the notion of poetic function in Césaire's Cadastre, with specific reference to five poems. Cadastre, published in 1961 by Seuil, is the re-edition of poems from two previously published collections, Soleil cou-coupé of 1948 and Corps perdu of 1950, with some of the original poems omitted and others revised.⁷ Césaire's poetic practice in this collection has been analyzed by A. James Arnold, who has sought to reconcile contrasting modernist and negritude approaches to Césaire. Arnold's assertion of a paradox in the negritude movement in that it "simultaneously cultivated a rhetoric of protest and an intensely subjective poetics," which colors his readings of Césaire's poems, suggests a practical and unreconciled separation between "lyrical" and "polemical" functions in Césaire's poetry not borne out by the texts themselves. Ronnie Scharfman, who has also produced penetrating analyses of many of Césaire's poems, seeks to address and supplement "the absence of a problematic that could simultaneously articulate the difficulties of Césaire's poetic discourse and its political engagement"⁸ Scharfman consequently reads each text "as an enactment of some conflict by or for the subject." While her analyses are consistently insightful, she has, by defining Césaire's genius as the "textualization of marginality," and by imposing European critical approaches on Césaire's poetic practice, perhaps underestimated the importance of the relationship existing between Césaire and his chosen "others."

As the title of this collection (Cadastre) suggests, the poet is concerned with making a survey—taking an inventory of his situation as a black man and as a poet. The poems suggest the tension implicit in the ambivalence of the relationship between the poet and the social order within which he functions, and serve to concretize the message of liberation. As mentioned earlier, Césaire's poetry operates in two directions simultaneously, inwardly and personally, and outwardly and politically: inwardly, the poetry serves as a vehicle for the poet to explore and resolve issues of personal identity and liberation, and as a means of personal salvation; outwardly, the poetry operates as a means of communicating with his people and with the supporters of the alienating social order, and as a means of affirmation, education, disalienation, and even of subversion.

Linking these two functions which represent the personal and political thrusts of Césaire's poetry is a connecting function which may be identified as creative, concerned with the poet's exploitation of the magical and prophetic potential of poetry. By a close textual reading that resists the temptation to assimilate the poetry into a predetermined European theoretical model, and that refrains from considering the poetry as other than what it is (French Caribbean poetry), I propose to illustrate the specific ways in which these functions operate. I shall attempt to answer the following questions: What voices speak within the poem? What are the roles and characteristics of the poetic voice? Whom does the poet address within the poem? How does the poem link poetic voice, addressee and context?