Black poetry from Africa and the Caribbean has become the focus of interest in courses ranging from "Black Studies" to studies of Francophone literature in general. Black poets are as varied as the countries from which they come but they all share common concerns with the black man's alienation and suffering. Singing songs of despair and revolt, of nostalgia and hope, they bring new vocabulary and images to the poetic canon and express the complex black experience in frequently unfamiliar forms. Aimé Césaire's "Barbare" is typical of many poems of social protest and revolt but the constant motifs of black poetry achieve passionate formulation within the poem. A study of the extraordinary power of Césaire's language will serve as a key to the poem's meaning as well as an introduction to the emotionally charged themes of black poets writing in French.

In "Barbare," an unrhymed free verse poem from the Surrealist work Soleil cou-coupé,¹ Césaire unleashes the generative power of the word Barbare to create a poetic text and re-create man. Césaire's belief in the power of the Word to create reality and in the power of poetry to change life stems from two widely different traditions which fuse in the Sorbonne-educated Martiniquan. On the one hand, the tradition of French poetry since Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud has been to escape from a conventional vision of the world and to create a new and more authentic universe by means of "l'alchimie du verbe." Surrealism, with which Césaire had a brief but important association in the 1940's, carried the mystique of language to the frontiers of the Absolute by attempting to bring forth the surréel through automatic writing. André Breton emphasizes the importance of that "opération qui tendait à restituer le langage à sa vraie vie … il faut que le nom germe pour ainsi dire, sans quoi il est faux." As Breton also recognized, the power of language to name and create has been part of all cultures. "L'esprit qui rend possible, et même concevable, une telle opération n'est autre que celui qui a animé de tout temps la philosophie occulte et selon lequel … l'énonciation est à l'origine de tout…."² Especially in the magical rites of African religion, Césaire discovered language as invocation and incantation which explains his penchant for nomination:

En nommant les objets, c'est un monde enchanté, un monde de "monstres" que je fais surgir sur la grisaille mal différenciée du monde; un monde de "puissances" que je somme, que j'invoque et que je convoque … à interpréter à l'africaine.³

While African tradition is less strong in Césaire's poetry than in the poetry of Léopold Senghor whose ancestors never left the continent, African sources nonetheless inform Césaire's rhythms, images, and symbols⁴ and the African belief in verbal magic underlies Césaire's concept of poetry as "magie, magie."⁵

For Césaire, founder of negritude in 1934 together with Léon Damas and Senghor, the function of poetry is clearly defined. It must sound a call to the black man to assume his blackness and the racial consciousness of negritude which is, in the words of Césaire, "… conscience d'être noir, simple reconnaissance d'un fait qui implique acceptation, prise en charge de son destin noir, de son histoire et de sa culture."⁶ To this end, "Barbare" becomes a rallying cry but only when its etymological and historical meanings have been negated and reinterpreted since, in a context of cultural relativism, barbare is always a pejorative term denoting the Other. From the Greek âÜñâáÜïò meaning "foreign," it signified to Ancient Greeks one living outside the pale of Hellenic civilization, i.e., someone non-hellenic and therefore primitive and brutal. For Romans, the term pertained to one outside the Roman Empire, hence an outsider who was uncivilized and uncultured. For Christians of the Middle Ages, it referred to one outside the pale of Christian civilization, i.e., the Saracen or heathen. As applied depreciatively to foreigners, barbare as both substantive and adjective expressed the negative function of the hyphenated prefix of non-Hellenic, non -Roman and non -Christian and articulated the prejudices of the dominant culture against uncivilized, uncultured, and therefore less than human (sub-human) ethnic groups.

Contemporary Western civilization has done no less. In Race and History Claude Lévi-Strauss describes the persistent "ethnocentric attitude" of modern man who uses sauvage in the same sense as barbare:

Underlying both these epithets is the same sort of attitude. The word "barbarous" is probably connected etymologically with the inarticulate confusion of birdsong, in contra-distinction to the significant sounds of human speech, while "savage"—"of the woods"—also conjures up a brutish way of life as opposed to human civilization. In both cases, there is a refusal to admit the fact of cultural density; instead, anything which does not conform to the standard of society in which the individual lives is denied the name of culture and relegated to the realm of nature.⁷

Although the enlightened eighteenth century heard Rous seau's defense of primitivism and the "noble savage," the dominant belief in progress perpetuated conventional notions about nature. Even when Voltaire, who was hardly a supporter of primitivist theory, used barbare in Alzire ou les Américains to describe the Spanish conquerors and not the natives, he reversed only the target of the insult and not the meaning of the word. By attaching the epithet to the Europeans, Voltaire attacked their un-Christian attitude in forcing Christianity upon the New World:

Les Espagnols sont craints, mais ils sont en horreur:
Fléaux du nouveau monde, injustes, vains, avares,
Nous seuls en ces climats nous sommes les barbares.
Alzire, I, 1

Savage, primitive, brutal, and cruel are extended depreciative synonyms of the original cultural definitions of barbare and connote the now-human inhuman instincts of the barbarian. In the conflict between nature and culture in which nature has been debased by the higher pretensions of culture, Césaire's "Barbare" denies the status quo and asserts the power of the Word to restore value to natural forces and revitalize the realm of nature.

As a title, "Barbare" commands our attention and brings to mind the dictionary definitions and cultural connotations that flow logically from the word. Unquestionably, they are all pejorative but paradoxically, the first line of the poem states the meliorative value of "le mot" and anticipates the conversion of the word's negative meanings into positive ones as the text unfolds. Through the power of its multiple meanings, Barbare as title, key word, and organizing element of the poem calls forth images which reflect semantic oppositions that the poem must resolve. In the poetic process Barbare is transformed from a term of insult to one of inspiration.

From the first line the poem is clearly focused upon le mot. Both syntactic and metrical structures combine to emphasize it in its terminal position in the short monosyllabic independent clause. The peculiarly French turn of phrase c'est … qui⁸ places stress upon le mot and its functions (me soutient/ et frappe) and sets forth the paradoxical effects of the word that both "supports" and "strikes" the speaker (me) who is intimately connected to mot by alliteration and symmetrical placement on either side of the relative. By a striking example of what Roman Jakobson has called "Poetry of Grammar," referring to the poetic resources of grammatical tropes,⁹mot and speaker are placed in a subject-object relationship with mot, the antecedent of qui, as protagonist acting upon a moi which has been reduced by syntax to an object. The grammatical pattern inverts common usage of animate agent → transitive verb → inanimate goal and, by reversing animate and inanimate classes of nouns, endows mot with dynamic vitality even as it characterizes the speaker as its passive recipient. This passivity becomes flagrant in the synecdoche of 1. 2 which substitutes a lifeless carcass for the live speaker.

Heavily charged with associations of death and decay, carcasse injects a note of sordid realism into the poem and at the same time actualizes the "non-human human" connotation of barbare. Literally, carcasse denotes the skeleton of a dead animal; figuratively, it refers contemptuously to the dead body of a human and by extension describes a lifeless impotent being, devoid of human dignity and unworthy of the human species. Because of its literal and figurative meanings, carcasse unites different semantic categories of animation/inanimation and animality/humanity within one signifier and engenders parallel descriptive systems—both with pejorative meanings—of dead animality on a literal level and degraded humanity on a moral level.

However, because of the genitive link (de) with cuivre jaune, carcasse does not function independently. It is part of a compound expression which transforms the realistic carcasse into a metaphor recalling similar clichés of language and literature in which semantic oppositions are united oxymoronically:¹⁰coeur de bronze (popular), coeur d'airain (Racine, Esther), corde d'airain (Hugo, Feuilles d'automne xl). Fragility (coeur, corde) and hardness (bronze, airain) are linked inseparably in tropes which have long since lost their shock value and the semantic value of their component parts. Coeur de bronze and coeur d'airain have lost their concreteness to metaphors for cruelty. Corde d'airain which Hugo promised to add to his lyre is a metaphor for the virile-sounding poetry of political engagement. The lexical substitution of carcasse, a pejorative metonym of coeur, and cuivre jaune within the same syntactic structure recalls the worn-out stereo-types through repetition of the initial phoneme [k] to the point of cacophony, but concrete language transforms the cliché into a new effective image. Cuivre jaune transmits its vibrant (corde d'airain) strength (coeur de bronze, d'airain) to the inert carcass and initiates the conversion of negative into positive values within the poem. Carcasse de cuivre jaune is a verbal paradox which exemplifies the paradox of le mot that both "uplifts" and "beats down" (1. 1). The oxymoron unifies negative values implicit in carcasse with positive meanings associated with cuivre jaune, a valuable metal in the paradigm of metals. By replacing the poetic airain or the prosaic bronze, cuivre jaune introduces a new alloy into a stereotyped expression but novelty or realism would be equally satisfied by laiton, the common word for brass. Cuivre jaune has the advantage over laiton of not only alliteration but more importantly, its use as a generic term (cuivre) for a brass instrument. As a synecdoche for orchestral brass, cuivre jaune transforms carcasse into a musical instrument. Like Victor Hugo's corde d'airain, Césaire's carcasse de cuivre jaune will resonate forcefully, producing sounds and images under the pressure of the word that is now an active force. Even its phonetic shape with three c's, a sibilant, and at least two pronounced mute e's (carcasse de cuivre jaune) gives aural prominence to the image. Overdetermined by intertextual associations and formal stylistic devices, the image tends toward symbolic interpretation and becomes an emblem of the poet.

In the first stanza carcasse de cuivre jaune generates only negative markers. Gleaming brass is countered by rust—the rust of a garret (soupente) beneath a tin roof which recalls the dilapidated native shacks of the Caribbean. Physical decay prevails (la lune dévore … les os). Against the lunar landscape of 1. 3 which functions as a metaphor for spiritual death in Césaire's solar universe, beneath a devouring moon instead of life-giving sun, barbares makes its first appearance within the text of the poem. A plural descriptive adjective linked to lifeless, dry, skeletal remains (os carcasse) and linked by alliteration to bêtes whose transferred epithet it is in fact (les os … des bêtes [barbares]), barbares is subsumed into the long grammatically complex sentence which carries over the entire first stanza. Together with lâches which precedes bêtes for emphasis, barbares brings a moral dimension to bêtes and activates its figurative meaning. Like carcasse, bêtes (beasts/beast-like humans) unites different semantic categories of animality/humanity and repeats the non-human connotations of the title. Moral decadence becomes the equivalent of death and physical decay in the final word of the stanza. Mensonge sums up the immoral "hypocrisie collective," the "mensonge principal à partir duquel prolifèrent tous les autres" that Césaire condemned in his Discours sur le Colonialisme.¹¹ By alliteration with mot and me, mensonge clearly stands in an antithetical relationship to both the purity of the word and the integrity of the moi. In its prominent position at the end of the sentence and stanza, mensonge completes the chain of negative meanings and associations which connote the rotten beast-like, dehumanized state of the black man in colonial "civilization."¹²

In reply to mensonge, Barbare resounds like a trumpet call to arms at the beginning of stanza 2, filling out the short first line with its two syllables, one echoing the other and contrasting with the polysyllabic lines of stanza 1. Metrically and syntactically independent and capitalized as in the title, the title word becomes an energizing force within the poem and dominates the three remaining stanzas through anaphora. As in the first stanza, le mot focuses upon itself, calling forth du langage sommaire which cuts through the obfuscations of complex grammatical structure to declare le vrai pouvoir opératoire/de la négation. By a systematic negation of the language, syntax, and rhythms of stanza 1, Barbare reverses its own negative connotations. Du langage sommaire is one of two paratactic nominal phrases in the shortest stanza of the poem. The syntactic and metrical changes signal semantic change with Barbare now linked to belles by alliteration, thus reversing its shameful alliance with bêtes. Through summary language, the vehicle of true communication, the solitary lifeless moi becomes solidary with the community of nous: ma carcasse > nos faces. Together they oppose the paralyzing mensonge of stanza 1 with a new and original image of physical beauty that is allied to truth (vrai) and resembles the abstract power of negation. The unconventional simile, comme le vrai pouvoir opératoire/ de la négation, has been segmented for emphasis, producing an effect similar to enjambment by giving prominence to the phrase in 1. 9. The first part of the simile is remarkable for its phonetic patterning. Comme le vrai pouvoir opératoire reinforces its verbal power through alliteration ([v] [r] [p]), assonance ([ …] [wa]), and internal rhyme (pouvoir/ opératoire) which repeat vocalic and consonantal features of the stanza as well as the phonetic shape of the key word. Related phonemes prolong the sounds of Barbare into the stanza: [b>p] and [ar>Ér>er>war] producing sommaire, belles, pouvoir opératoire. The strong phonetic patterning of 1. 8 and approximate end-rhymes of 11. 6, 7, and 8—the only example of sustained rhyming in the poem—set off the contrasting non-rhyming négation in 1. 9 and underline, together with meter and syntax, the importance of negation to black revolt. By negating the truth and value of the dominant white culture, the black man denies both his master and the master-slave relationship that has reduced him to a "bestial being."¹³ Underlying the racial consciousness of négritude is the defiant refusal of the white man's world. On a symbolic level, it is the negation of illegitimate power by the true power of the Word.

The Word blares forth at the beginning of stanza 3 and sustains the high rhetorical tone which marks Césaire's verse. Like the trumpet on the Day of Judgment, Barbare resounds and summons the dead to stand together with the living in the struggle against oppression. Called up by the Word, the dead become animated through active verbs of motion (circulent, viennent se briser) and through regular rhythmic patterns which are icons of movement. Three of the stanza's six lines are approximate alexandrines with prescribed stresses and almost parallel hemistichs which contrast with the irregular verse lines of the poem and especially with 1. 12.¹⁴

11 des morts qui circulent // dans les veines de la terre 5 // 7

13 et les cris de révolte // jamais entendus 6 // 5

14 qui tournent à mesure // et à timbres de musique 6 // 7

The even metrical pattern and musical vocabulary of 11. 13 and 14 beat out steady rhythms of revolt but movement is blocked (viennent is counteracted by se briser) or circular. Circulent and tournent evoke the endless rounds of past generations of rebels and their frustration in making themselves heard: les cris de révolte jamais entendus. Literally their cries fall upon deaf ears. Césaire renews the well-established cliché of frustration, la tête contre les murs,¹⁵ by adding a physical precision—de nos oreilles—to the worn-out image making it literal once again. De nos oreilles restores vigor to the metaphor at the same time that it adds another concrete notation to a text that includes ma carcasse and nos faces. The renewed cliché is emphasized by meter in the distended twelfth line of at least seventeen syllables. Clashing rhythmically with the well-proportioned, almost classical alexandrines of the stanza, line 12 underlines the anguish and frustration of past generations that must be remembered and redressed. Césaire brings the powerful memory of humiliated slaves to the present struggle and gains strength from identity with all blacks, past and present, in the cause of freedom.

The incantatory power of Barbare increases in the last stanza with four repetitions in five lines. While the first two lines repeat the metrical pattern of stanzas 2 and 3 with Barbare isolated on the first line from the conjured nouns, lines 17-19 conjoin epithet and noun and impose a metrical pattern of ascending rhythm through syllable gradation: 1. 15, 2 syllables; 1. 16, 4 syllables; 1. 17, 6 syllables; 1. 18, 7 syllables; 1. 19, 8 syllables. The expanding rhythms and insistent, frequent repetitions of Barbare create a tone of urgency as one exotic animal after another is called into being through the magic of incantation. Grammatical parallelism, which underlies the litanical structure of invocation, draws all conjured nouns into a semantic relationship.¹⁶L 'article unique signals a return to the singular number of stanza 1 but stands in contrast with that stanza's negative imagery. Singularity is not just a grammatical category: it is a logical notion of individuality as well as a value judgment. Unusual, extraordinary, superior, l'article unique stands in positional equivalence with le tapaya, l'amphisbène blanche and moi le serpent cracheur and confers its positive connotations upon the exotic fauna of the Antilles. But exoticism for its own sake holds no interest for Césaire:

… disons que si je nomme avec précision (ce qui fait parler de mon exotisme), c'est qu'en nommant avec précision, je crois que l'on restitue à l'objet sa valeur personnelle (comme quand on appelle quelqu'un par son nom); on le suscite dans sa valeur unique et singulière; on salue sa valeur de force, sa valeur-force.

… En les nommant, flore, faune, dans leur étrangeté, je participe à leur force; je participe de leur force.¹⁷

Summoning, invoking, convoking à l'africaine, the poet (moi) participates in the animal force that revitalizes, restores, and renews. Wedged in between the incantatory Word and le serpent cracheur, moi is transformed by apposition into the serpent that Césaire has made his personal emblem in his poetry.¹⁸ As the only dangerous animal in Martinique, the serpent represents the poet's aggression; by its molting, it embodies the process of renewal so vital to the defeated black man of stanza 1. Signifying resurrection, the serpent and its reptilian variants—le tapaya and l'amphisbène—become symbols of the moi and vehicles of black revolt. Invoked by repeated calls of Barbare, reptiles, which are universal archetypes of pure energy, dominate stanza 4 and assert the primacy of the elemental primitive forces of nature.

Césaire's characteristic nominal style is replaced by a long relative clause (11. 20-25) which develops the moi-serpent metaphor and, gathering momentum, culminates in a final explosion of aggression. The inversion of de mes putréfiantes chairs and the unusual position of the polysyllabic putréfiantes before its noun emphasize allusions to rotting and decay in stanza 1 as well as the symbolic meaning of putréfiantes. Here, however, the accent is on me réveille which has acquired special relief at the end of the verse line and out of the nuclear subject-verb order. Indeed, the selfs awakening as a primitive aggressive force is aptly symbolized by the molting process of the serpent shedding its skin to renew its vitality. The tenor of the metaphor (moi) awakens to the aggressivity, strength, and danger of yet another frightening reptile—the gecko. Its sudden metamorphosis in two short parallel disyllabic lines (22, 23) underlines the changing frightening features of the gecko—volant, frangé—which prepare the brutal assault of the last three lines. For the first time moi>serpent>gekko confronts vous directly, and only when they are locked together (me colle) in mortal combat. An unexpectedly vague periphrasis (aux lieux mêmes de la force) instead of Césaire's usual precision suggests the totality of the attack. Incantation turns to prognostication as the future imperative announces a threat that is both an attack on the Other as well as an assault on the dominant culture. For in the last line of the poem Césaire has couched his declaration in the popular form of cliché, but a cliché that he violates for his own subversive purposes. By modifying an established linguistic syntagm, Césaire symbolically rejects both the language and the society that produced it.¹⁹ In its original form, c'est bon à jeter aux chiens is a figurative expression of condescension and contempt which would describe the scornful attitudes of the white ruling class toward blacks. In the context of this poem, its literal meaning would be activated by carcasse, a decaying worthless body and an appropriate antecedent of ce (c'est). The cliché would then describe only too well the abuse of the black race at the hands of whites who literally and figuratively throw rotten flesh (carcasse/black man) to the dogs. Since chien in Césaire's lexicon almost always refers to the watchdog (chien de garde, molosse) of the white overseer²⁰ and thus is a metonym of the slave driver, chiens would reinforce the symbolic meaning of' the expression. But, by using negation as a means to power as he promised in stanza 2, Césaire reverses the meaning of the cliché by substituting a different object for the verb jeter. Prominently placed after both verb and indirect object, la chair velue de vos poitrines has the shock value of a brutal visual image which forces a literal interpretation of the renewed expression. Repeated v's underline vous as the target of a "barbaric" act, but one that is selfinflicted. Vous, the oppressors, will destroy yourselves in the struggle—skinned men are dead men—but the gecko, a metaphor of the resurrected black man, will triumph. The cliché has been negated to signify its opposite. Articulated in strongly marked rhythms of the romantic trimeter (jeter aux chiens // la chair velue // de vos poitrines), the last line exploits resources of meter and sound to achieve effective poetic closure.²¹

Negation is fundamental to Césaire's racial aesthetic as it is inseparable from négritude. In his well-known preface, Orphée noir, Sartre points to negativity as the distinctive feature of black poetry:

Destructions, autodafé du langage, symbolisme magique, ambivalence des concepts, toute la poésie moderne est là, sous son aspect négatif. Mais il ne s'agit pas d'un jeu gratuit. La situation du noir, sa "déchirure" originelle, ('aliénation qu'une pensée étrangère lui impose sous le nom d'assimilation, le mettent dans l'obligation de reconquérir son unité existentielle de nègre…. Il s'agit donc pour le noir de mourir à la culture blanche pour renaître à l'âme noire….²²

By negation of traditional cultural definitions, Barbare reverberates across the stanzas and operates its magic transformations. Emerging from syntactic ties with dead animality in stanza 1, Barbare exercises its vocative function at the head of each stanza, calling forth the powerful forces of nature to restore inert, impotent forms to life. Like a bugle (cuivre) blowing reveille,²³Barbare awakens dying men to rebirth and revolt. The degrading identification of blacks and beasts is the very basis of the resurrection. In the final reversal of the poem, Barbare's non-human inhuman connotations become positive attributes as ferocious beasts become metaphors of the poet. Drawing vital energies from the animal kingdom, moi serpenf>gekko embodies elemental primitive power that assures the triumph of natural forces. In the conflict between nature and culture, the dominant white culture is defeated through subversion of its values: its truth is declared mensonge and Barbare connotes the highest praise. Césaire's poem "Barbare" proclaims the primacy of nature and the black man and the absolute power of the incantatory Word to liberate and transform—in the text and in the world.

Notes

¹ (Paris: K éditeur, 1948). Césaire has taken as his title Apollinaire's striking image of spiritual death in the last line of "Zone" (Alcools, 1913). For Césaire the image effectively evokes the tragedy of the black race, its enslavement and alienation.

²Du Surréalisme en ses oeuvres vives (1953) in Manifestes du Surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), pp. 181-2.

³ Lettre à Lilyan Kesteloot in Lilyan Kesteloot, Aimé Césaire (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1962), p. 198.

⁴ Janheinz Jahn, "Sur la littérature africaine," Présence Africaine, 48 (1963), pp. 151-162.

⁵ Lettre, p. 199.

⁶ Quoted in L. Kesteloot, Les Ecrivains noirs de langue française: naissance d'une littérature (Bruxelles: Université libre de Bruxelles, 1963), pp. 114-5

⁷ (Paris: Unesco, 1961), p. 11.

⁸ Maurice Grevisse, Le Bon Usage. 7^e éd. (Gembloux: Editions J. Duculot, 1961), pp. 162, 446-7.

⁹ "Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry," Lingua. 21 (1968), pp 597-609.

¹⁰ The important role of the cliché in literature has been analyzed as a form of intertextuality (Julia Kristeva, Sèméiotikè: Recherches pour une sémanalyse [Paris: Seuil, 1969], p. 255), as a mark of literariness (Michael Riffaterre, "Fonction du cliché dans la prose littéraire," Essais de stylistique structurale [Paris: Flammarion, 1971], p. 173), and as a sign of poeticity (M. Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry [Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978], pp. 31-42). In particular, "Fonction du cliché" examines the formal structure of the cliché, its potential for renewal, and its expressive function in literature. See also Laurent Jenny, "Structure et fonctions du cliché," Poétique 12 (1972), pp. 495-517.

¹¹ 3^e éd. (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955), p. 8.

¹³ Césaire, Discours: "Et je dis que de la colonisation à la civilisation. la distance est infinie; que de toutes les expéditions coloniales accumulées, de tous les statuts coloniaux élaborés, de toutes les circulaires ministérielles expédiées, on ne saurait réussir une seule valeur humaine" (p. 10).

¹³ Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 16. In his first chapter, "In Place of an Introduction," Kojève explicates Hegel's analysis of the master-slave relationship which is at the center of human History. Hegel distinguishes two opposed concrete-forms of Consciousness: "autonomous Consciousness for which the essentialreality is Being-for-itself [Wesen]. The other is dependent Consciousness for which the essential-reality is animal-life, i.e., given-being for an other-entity [sein]. The former is the Master, the latter—the Slave" (id).

¹⁴ Since contemporary free verse disregards traditional rules of meter as well as rhyme, metrical analysis of modern French poetry is always a problem because of the problematical value of the mute e. Meter, which is determined by the number of syllables in a line, will vary depending upon whether the mute e is counted as a syllable as in traditional verse (except, of course, before a vowel and at the end of a line) or is omitted as in the rhythms of conversational discourse. For the purpose of my analysis, I am omitting the mute e at the caesura so that the hemistich may end on a strong accent as in traditional versification.

¹⁵ The use of this cliché in poetry brings to mind Paul Eluard's "La Tête contre les murs," Les Yeux fertiles (1936) where frustration is expressed through uncharacteristic images of revolt and violence. The capital role of the cliché in Surrealism is a function of automatic writing and has its most complete expression in Eluard's 152 Proverbes mis au goût du jour written in collaboration with Benjamin Péret. Césaire may be using the "telescoping" techniques of automatic writing which fuse two or more expressions into one. Here the cliché of frustration appears to fuse with the wartime admonition of silence: "les murs ont des oreilles," thereby producing a new linguistic form.

¹⁶ Jakobson, "Poetry of Grammar": "… in poetry similarity is superimposed on contiguity, and hence 'equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence.' Hence any noticeable reiteration of the same grammatical concept becomes an effective poetic device" (p. 602).

¹⁷ Lettre, pp. 197-8.

¹⁸ Kesteloot, Aimé Césaire, p. 46.

¹⁹ Pierre Parlebas, "Le Synthème dans les Paroles de Prévert," Poétique, 28 (1976), pp. 496-510, relates Prévert's linguistic transgressions to social protest. Using the term synthème coined by André Martinet to distinguish a collocation of mots figés from a collocation οf mots libres (syntagme), Parlebas concludes: "Indiscutablement, les défigements et surfigements des synthèmes visent à contester les hiérarchies établis dans la société" (p. 510).

²⁰ Kesteloot, Aimé Césaire, p. 38.

²¹ For a comprehensive analysis of the techniques of closure, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

²² Léopold Sédar Senghor, éd., Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1969), p. xxiii.

²³ The cuivre > clairon progression may well have its intertext in Rimbaud's famous "Lettre du Voyant" (à Paul Demeny): "Si le cuivre s'éveille clairon …," Oeuvres complètes, éd. Rolland de Renéville et Jules Mouquet, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 270. Césaire shares Rimbaud's view of the poet as the instrument of occult powers: "Alors quid de la poésie? Il faut toujours y revenir: surgie du vide intérieur, comme un volcan qui émerge du chaos primitif. C'est notre lieu de force; la situation émrnente d'où l'on somme; magie; magie" (Lettre, p. 199).