[In the following essay, Irele discusses Césaire's preoccupation with post-colonial politics in The Tragedy of King Christophe and A Season in the Congo.]

For some time Aimé Césaire's work has been devoted entirely to a cause; it represents in fact the most sustained effort so far to explore in literary terms the realities of the black man's experience in modern times as well as his intimate responses to his historical condition. The colonial situation has imposed a certain limitation upon Césaire's angle of vision upon the world, resulting in a simplification of his themes which obscured the less immediate but more profound significance of the issues with which he is concerned—the moral and spiritual implications of the Negro's collective experience, and their universal relevance.

The ending of the colonial era presently taking place has now permitted a certain broadening of Césaire's area of reference. The publication of his play, La Tragédie du roi Christophe, which has had a remarkable success on the stage in Europe and was a central attraction at the Dakar festival last year, marked this new trend in his work. Césaire has now followed up with another play, Une Saison au Congo, which confirms this evolution and indicates that if his attitude to the Negro condition in general and the African situation in particular remains unchanged, political changes and events in Africa have diverted his attention towards new concerns and dictated a new approach. For the common theme of these two plays is decolonisation, that is, the specific problems that beset newly freed men in their hopes and endeavours to create for themselves a new and acceptable collective life.

La Tragédie du Roi Christophe is set in the Haiti of the early nineteenth century, in the years immediately following Toussaint Louverture's revolution and the war of independence under Dessalines, who founded the state but died before he could consolidate it. His mantle fell upon General Christophe, a former slave and lieutenant successively of the two illustrious men. All the major characters depicted, as well as the principal events recalled in this play are strictly historical. Césaire reconstructs Christophe's subsequent career with all the fidelity that his personal research and the demands of his dramatic medium permit, the more firmly to underline his moral purpose in evoking this crucial phase of Negro history.

Christophe's conscious aspiration, upon assuming the direction of the new republic, is to be an effective leader and not the figurehead of the Haitian middle class, constituted mainly by the mulattoes, whose contribution to the struggle for freedom, though considerable, had been inspired more by their reaction against the aristocratic white settlers than by a feeling of a common destiny with the black slaves. To break the "hold on Haiti of the mulattoes" with whom the republican ideal is associated, Christophe sweeps aside the constitution which they had drawn up to limit his powers, and sets up a monarchy with himself as king whereupon the mulattoes, under their leader Pétion, withdrew to the southern part where they set up a rival republican state. Thus, in less than a decade after independence, there comes civil war.

Christophe's intention in establishing a monarchy, however, is not so much to identify himself with the aspirations of his own people as to justify them, with the outer forms that contemporary "respectable" manners and opinions both offered and approved, in the eyes of the world, especially the former colonial master. In the same misguided spirit, he embarks upon an ambitious programme of national construction, symbolised by the erection of a citadel, to stand upon a promontory outside the capital as a monumental image of the national will. To vindicate his black subjects in their claim to their status as men, the new king chooses for them foreign models of action to channel their creative energies, models which bear no relation to their profound needs nor make a meaningful appeal to their real potential. Christophe's enterprise turns out to be a misdirection of his people's collective effort, not only because his objectives were grossly inappropriate and superficial, but also because these were inspired by an apologetic passion that previous domination and humiliation had bred in the Haitian leaders. His failure is thus significant in the way his slavish reference to foreign norms reveals both the real dilemmas that he faces in choosing a direction of purpose and his psychological handicaps.

The tragedy of Christophe unfolds itself at more than one level, running its course both in the deterioration that an impossible combination of objective factors create in his kingdom, and in the corruption of his noble purpose which is paralleled by his decline from a determined visionary to a sanguinary despot, a spiritual decline which bears close relation to the situation in which he is involved and is accentuated by his egocentric refusal to see Haiti as anything but a projection of himself. This finally dissociates him from his own people and leads to his fall.

The impact of Césaire's play derives mainly from the extraordinary scope of the central character, whose many facets are revealed and whose contradictions are plumbed at different levels. Christophe emerges not as a uniform character, and even less as some absurd villain—comparable for instance to Eugene O'Neill's "Emperor Jones" in the American's treatment of the same subject—but as a truly impressive figure whose hold on our imagination and on our emotions is made relentless by a poetic evocation of tremendous power. In language shorn of his former Surrealistic luxuriance to lay bare its stark, granite edge, Césaire has created an epic hero, at once warmly delineated and integrally realised:

      I would hold in hate my victory if it held for you respite.
      For who then will call to life your black rock,
      Ring clear your human note?
 
      Africa, my source of strength …
      The Kingfisher catching glint after glint of oriflame
      Inventing itself a fresh morning of drunken sunshine.

Indeed, the most striking thing about the whole play is its ambiguity, which reflects a more meditative consciousness on the part of Césaire of the complex nature of any human reality, and of the welter of impulses, rooted in men's minds, that determine human actions. This is what gives to his reconstruction of Christophe's career and of Haiti's early destiny, its quality of truth.

It is precisely this complexity which is missing in his evocation of Patrice Lumumba in Une Saison au Congo. Lumumba appears as a hero contemplated from the outside, but left unexplored, a mythical figure whose vital adhesion to his personal destiny is only summarily registered. He stands indeed for a passion, born out of a critical conjecture of events, but the driving force of this passion and its location in a human heart are not as much probed as rhetorically expressed. In other words, Césaire's Lumumba represents an ideal, but does not fully incarnate its reality. This is a pity, for the real situation in the Congo offered more than enough material for a fuller, more rounded treatment. The very title of the play, echoing as it does Rimbaud's Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), suggests in fact the nature of the highly dramatic situation that produced Lumumba—a Congo caught in a moment of stress, in which events, in their bewildering, tormenting pressure upon individuals, whipping up their minds to a turbulent pitch, shatter their wills in confused directions.

In Césaire's favour, however, it might be said that these events are too near us in time to permit a more detached and more profound appraisal: and even some of the major protagonists are still too much with us. Besides, Césaire is here making a statement that can only appear as supplementary to the essential message of the previous play. If the drama of the Congo loses some of its acuity in Césaire's representation, it is perhaps because his emphasis has, from one play to the other, shifted from a critical awareness of the problems he is tackling to an expression of the actual human tragedy played out in the Congo: the dreadful waste of lives sacrificed in futile conflicts, the intrigues of outside enemies sparking off or simply profiting from the ambitions of selfish politicians, and, in particular, the terrible helplessness of the masses, raised one moment to heights of hope, plunged the next to depths of suffering, of disillusionment and despair.

Further, the highly problematic situation which erupted into chaos in the Congo did produce characters who hardly seemed real men as much as stock types, and Lumumba himself ended up indeed as an archetype, whose fate stands as a symbol of the Congo's long season of distress and of the dreary prostration of the continent of which she is the heart.

In Une Saison au Congo, Césaire writes less as a committed observer than as a poet agonisingly aware that a drama of elemental intensity is here being enacted, the reversal of an old order prolonging itself in a disruption of the universal order, but out of which new life is created. Of this hope, Lumumba is the prophet:

"As for Africa, I know that, for all her weakness and her divisions, she shall not fail us! For after all, here, of sift, sun and water—of their solemn mating—here man was born."

Thus is the parallel that Césaire overtly draws in La Tragédie du roi Christophe between the Haitian precedent some 150 years ago and the African situation today, driven home, as it were, in Une Saison au Congo. The identification between the Caribbean Negro and the African which is a prominent theme in Césaire's poetry, the bridge of feeling between them in his mind, today acquires a new edge.

These two plays represent then a capital turning point in Césaire's commitment to the Negro cause, but not in any sense a departure from the basic concerns he has demonstrated all along in his writings. Their topical relevance to the present situation in Africa give them an immediate significance that does not need to be emphasised, but they are far from indicating, as has been suggested, any change of attitude on his part. Rather, they cast a new light upon his work which now reveals itself more clearly as being not so much a finished statement upon the destiny of the black man, as an anxious interrogation of his historical experience, and ultimately, that of humanity.

Aimé Césaire does not renounce his négritude, he is quite simply pointing out its implications in the post-colonial era, exhorting us, at the same time, to brace ourselves up to meet their challenge.