White man, white because he was man, white as the day, white as truth, white as virtue, lit creation like a torch and unveiled the secret and white essence of things and beings. Today, the Black look at us, and we don't dare look back; now Black Torches light the world and our white heads are nothing but fragile street lights shaking in the wind … our whiteness is becoming a strange and pale varnish which prevents our skin from breathing, a white bathing trunk which no longer fits, and under which, if we could take it off, we would find the true human flesh, a flesh which has the color of black wine.

Sartre's lyricism notwithstanding, it is a fact that the Apostle of Existentialism saw almost a quarter of a century ago the inception of the advent of Black Literature in French letters. In fact, it was in the beginning of the 1920s that two friends who had met as students at the Sorbonne, the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Antillean Aimé Césaire, coined the word négritude. Because of subsequent political developments, however, the Africans and the Antilleans have somewhat different views concerning the meaning and the importance of the idea behind the word. In the 1950s and in the 1960s the French and Belgian colonial empires became dissipated; on the contrary, the French Caribbean islands have remained French Departments overseas. All French-speaking African countries obtained their independence between 1958 and 1960. Consequently, young African writers no longer saw in négritude a fundamental value. Not being any longer oppressed as Blacks, the Africans are more concerned with the economic disadvantages to which they are now submitted vis-à-vis the Western world. For the Antilleans, though, the word négritude still hides a purity and an innocence which they oppose to the dilapidated and decomposing European continent. The American theme of Black Power, for example, appears and reappears in the writings of many natives of Martinique and Guadeloupe; on the contrary, there is no mention of it in recent African literature. In fact, at the Festival of Black Art held at Dakar in 1966, and during the Pan African Cultural Festival held at Algiers in 1969, numerous were the instances of lack of solidarity between the black Africans and the black Antilleans. Literary magazines and newspapers all over the world gave, at the time, so much coverage to the different points of view advanced, and to the conflicting lists of priorities which emerged, that both groups felt the stigma of embarrassment for several months after each of the respective meetings. The rift might seem astonishing to those who recall that Blacks all over the world share in a common culture, which their dispersion throughout the planet did not manage to annihilate.

Nevertheless, soon after independence the African societies began to place a great deal more emphasis on immediate material problems than on loftier literary productions containing racial overtones. For the Antilleans, however, literature continued to provide a needed outlet for rebellion.

In France there is a small bibliography at the disposal of students of Black Literature; there is hardly anything in the United States, and there is nothing on Antillean poets who, perhaps better than their African brothers, and certainly earlier, had displayed a beautiful, strange and violent national lyricism heretofore encountered only in the best of Western writers. The purpose of the present essay will be, then, to fill this lacuna in Black Literary Studies by analyzing some of the work of Aimé Césaire, generally considered in Europe to be the best exponent of Black Caribbean culture in the twentieth century.

It will be recalled that Césaire was born in Martinique in 1913. As a young adult he went to France and was a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris. Upon his return to Martinique he taught high school; later he was elected as the Island's representative at the National Assembly in Paris. His early adherence to the Communist Party was surely prompted more by the accidental fact that he was born in a French colony, than caused by deeply rooted political convictions. Temporarily he saw in Marxism a friendly point of view, perhaps even a solution. Later, he realized that his quarrel was not so much with a still colonizing Europe but with Whites as a whole. In 1956 he wrote to Maurice Thorez: "What I want is that Marxism and Communism be placed in the service of black people; I do not want the Black to be in the service of the Party." Specifically, he reproached the French Communist Party with the fact that it believed itself capable of solving the problems of colonized peoples. On the contrary, Césaire's idea of a black revolt and of black power implies an exclusively self-made solution. The poet's penchant for such an extreme position can be seen in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, a poem dating back to 1935, (published however in 1947), when the author returned to Martinique after years of study in France. Notice the initial praise of a simple but innocent world, his, opposed to one encumbered by and weighed under its technical inventions:

    o friendly light
    o fresh source of life
    those who invented neither gunpowder, nor the compass
    those who never knew how to conquer steam nor electricity
    those who explored neither the seas nor the heavens
    but those without whom the earth would not be the earth …
    my blackness is not a stone …
    my blackness is not a spot of dead water on the dead cornea of the earth
    my blackness is neither a tower nor a cathedral
    it plunges however into the red flesh of the soil
    it plunges into the flaming flesh of the sky
    it is a perfect circle enclosing the world in a shut concordance

followed by a scornful attack on a morally and physically decaying Europe with which the Blacks can no longer deal, but to which they can still administer a final slap, that of commiseration:

    listen to the white world
    horribly tired of its immense effort
    listen to its predatory victories
    to its grandiose alibis
    have pity on our omniscient and naïve conquerors
                  —Cahier d'un retour au pays natal

As soon as one begins to read Césaire, it becomes obvious that for him, unlike prose, poetry begins with extreme positions and espouses easily the most unexpected exaggerations. Giving himself entirely to the ancestral appeal of mother Africa, the poet often views négritude as virtue and whiteness as evil. His lyrical confrontation between white technology and black innocence has a quality of spontaneity about it, at once conquering and destructive. Moreover, his verbal incandescence appears to evoke a surrealistic language saluted by André Breton himself, who saw in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal "the greatest lyrical monument of our time … transcending with every line the fear that the Black have for the Black who are imprisoned in a white society, identifying with this fear and becoming one with it, causing all poets to become one with it, all artists and all thinkers, by furnishing to them the bait of his verbal genius, and by making them all aware that the condition at the basis of this fear is as intolerable as it is changeable."

"Europe is indefensible," Césaire boasted once, at a time when he was closer to the tenets of the Communist Party. His quarrel with the old Continent stemmed, then, from the fact that he equated it with Christianity, which he considered at the source of the White's mania for colonization. "What is most responsible for the situation is Christian pedantry," he stated in his now famous Discours sur le colonialisme: for "it advanced the dishonest equations: Christianity = civilization; paganism = savagery." While admitting that exchanges between continents and rapports between different civilizations constitute the very oxygen of progress, Césaire denies that colonization did any good for the Black. Instead of human contact, what had happened, Césaire maintains, were simple liaisons of domination and of submission. To the White's statistics on roads, canals and railroads, he responds with lyrical pleas concerning the thousands of men sacrificed to the Congo-Océan and to the harbor of Abidjan dug by hand by generations of Blacks. But it is especially when he uses the device of causticity that his rebellion appears particularly effective. Such sentences as: "Neither Deterding, nor Royal Dutch, nor Standard Oil will ever console me for the loss of the Aztecs nor of the Incas," are effective precisely because they tend to distract the listener and the reader from content: how can it be proven that Royal Dutch or Standard Oil had anything to do with the disappearance of ancient civilizations?

But the Discours sur le colonialisme is not always dubious in content, nor sarcastic in style. When violent rebellion gives way to a more sedate approach, Césaire does manage to make some very good points. For example, in answer to some detractors, such as Roger Caillois, Emile Faguet and Jules Romains, he counters with a number of indisputable facts. To the often-made charge that "The black race has not yet yielded nor will ever give us an Einstein, nor a Stravinsky, nor a Gershwin," he lists a number of achievements attributable more or less directly to men of his heritage: "For example, the invention of arithmetic and of geometry by the Egyptians. For example, the discovery of astronomy by the Assyrians. For example, the appearance of Rationalism in the bosom of Islam at the time when western thought was furiously pre-logical."

Nevertheless, if in the past the Blacks constituted a proud and productive race, in more recent times it bent and submitted cowardly to foreign interventions and assimilation efforts. This is a theme which constantly lards the Discours sur le colonialisme and which reappears in a number of recent plays by Aimé Césaire. It should be noted immediately, however, that the poet's switch to the theatre did not really constitute an unusual metamorphosis. In writing for the stage he conserved intact the vigor of his poetry, his predilection for lyrical outbursts, and the use of Claudelian verset. Yet, in an unusual combination at which probably the Catholic poet would shiver, Claudel joins Brecht in Césaire's theatre. Let us mention for example La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1964), which takes place in Haiti at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which seizes poignantly the aspirations of a Negro leader at first hailed by his people, then abandoned by them when it becomes obvious that freedom can only be secured at the cost of blood and tears. An even more striking example of the unusual fusion between Claudel's vocabulary and Brecht's propagandistic exhortations occurs in Une Saison au Congo, a play which follows closely the events which tore apart the Congo in 1960, and which lead to the assassination of its prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. The dominating figure of the African leader captures the imagination of spectators and readers to whom he is depicted as a misunderstood and solitary savior. Listen for example to Lumumba's lyrical hymn which evokes the birth of the Congo out of the ashes of an enslaved past:

Congolese, today is a great day because for the first time in a long time we see daylight! It is the day when the world receives, among other nations, the Congo, our mother, and especially the Congo, our child. The child of our waiting, of our suffering, of our struggle. Comrades and fellow soldiers, may each of our wounds become a breast, may each of our thoughts, each of our hopes turn into a whip … I should like to be a toucan, the beautiful bird, in order to fly across the skies, and to announce, to races and languages, that our Congo has been born.

                          —Une Saison au Congo

And there are, of course, numerous other examples one could select in this and other plays by Césaire in which he combines successfully a majestic and violent lyricism which reassembles Claudelian tones, with those of the tam-tam African rhythms. Part of the attraction of this fusion, experienced even by those of different political persuasions, is in the fact that it recalls chant, mime, and dance, that is to say the traditional African culture which is essentially one based on oral and gesture communication. Moreover, this style is capable of expressing in a foreign language the divinations and the prophecies of the African temperament. The poet, synthesizing and synchronizing, manages to collect and to concretize a catching unity of great pulsations in which the I and the world are soldered into a mystical and quasi-erotic symbolism. In order to reach such an effect, Césaire's genius finds a heretofore unexplored poetical expression, namely that of Claudel and Brecht mingled into a single voice: the most patented, partisan politics explicated in terms of motherhood ("the Congo, our mother … our child"); physical and spiritual injuries ("our wounds") evoking a most intimate part of the body ("breast") which is reminiscent of motherhood and nourishment; cogitation ("our thoughts") and expectations ("our hopes") metamorphosed into an offensive weapon ("a whip").

A Communist who could not stand the orthodoxy of the Communist Party, a Marxist who shook himself lose from Hegelian mechanisms, Aimé Césaire has always managed to hold on to his lyrical exuberance. Moreover, his separation from Europe makes it possible for him to break with clarity and description, and to become intimate with the fundamental essence of things. Under his powerful, poetic eye, perception knows no limits and pierces appearances without pity. Words emerge and explode like firecrackers, catching the eye and the imagination of the reader. He makes use of the entire dictionary, of artificial and vulgar words, of elegant and forgotten ones, of technical and invented vocabulary, marrying it to Antillean and African syllables, and allowing it to play freely in a sort of flaming folly that is both a challenge and a tenacious attempt at mystification. Witness the following little poem, picked at random from among dozens which are available in his various collections of poetry;

     Another Horizon
     night devil-like stigma
     night telegraphic bushel planted in the ocean
     for the minute love of cetaceans
     night shut
     splendid atelier of maceration
     where with all of the strength of all its savage colors flexes the violet muscle of the aconitum napallus of another sun
                                —Soleil cou coupé

Its mysterious, cryptic tone notwithstanding, it is clear that the poet has communicated with Night, has identified with it, thus has managed to impart to us a most intimate and unusual experience clad in magic, powerful, and irrepressible vocabulary. Aimé Césaire's ability to convey is, therefore, not limited to topical themes, but it extends to very private and personal feelings enhanced by his genius and projected across the darkness of the world with the ease of a graceful manipulator of chiaro-oscuros. An exact accountant of his own suffering, Césaire is mysteriously aware of our own balance sheets on pain. He once stated in a collection already quoted:

     to go.
     just as there are hyena-men and cancer-men, I shall
       be a Jew-man
     a Black of austral Africa
     a man-Hindu-from-Calcutta
     a man-from-Harlem-who-does-not-vote
     the hungry man, the insulted man, the tortured man
       who can be seized at any moment and crushed
       by blows and killed—killed entirely—without
       anyone having to give an account to anybody
       or to apologize to anybody
     a Jew-man
     a pogrom-man
     a young dog
     a beggar …
     I shall find the secret of great communications and
       of great combustions. I shall tell the storm.
       I shall tell the river. I shall tell the tornado.
     I shall tell the leaf. I shall tell the tree.
     I shall be drenched by all the rains, humectant with all the dews.
                    —Cahier d'un retour au pays natal

Ambitious promises, of course, but Aimé Césaire has been able to deliver. He is a poet's poet when he stays clear of political questions, a tenacious and violent propagandist when the theme requires it. His place in contemporary French letters, already recognized by Sartre and other critics, is assured in spite of the fact that not many agree with his views on Whites in general, nor with his opinions on Europe, in particular. Some have seen a certain amount of naïveté in Césaire's choice of fighting intolerance with intolerance and hate with scorn. For example, speaking of him and of others who follow in his footsteps, Pierre de Boisdeffre remarked: "In acceding to the conquest of their national I, they continue to dream of a universal humanism of which Europe—whose grandeur they do not recognize because they have only seen its oppressive side—gave them the idea in the first place." The Everyman that he is, Césaire the Black, the Jew, the Colonized and the Freed, still uses, of course, a European language as his means of expression. That he is, at this point in history, incapable of admitting or seeing that his taste for freedom comes from the very people who have colonized and subjugated him, is of less importance than the fact that he is eminently able to become incarnated into a number of paradigms which shake the modern world and pain its conscience. Besides, unlike some Black Power advocates, Aimé Césaire sees, of course, the inadequacy of a return to what might be called the museum of African culture: the myriad languages of Africa would limit considerably the reading public of any poet, of any writer indeed. Césaire understood that African and Antillean vernaculars conserve simply an historic importance, and the only way not to have to pit one linguistic group against the other is to rely on French, which has been for so long the official administrative and scholarly language of millions of Blacks. That he does is of benefit to aficionados of literature everywhere.