SOURCE: "On Ancestral Ground: Heroic Figuring in Aimé Césaire," in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, Spring 1992, pp. 16-29.

[In the following essay, Zimra discusses Césaire's treatment of the recurring textual figure of the Ancestor.]

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that contemporary Caribbean writers are obsessed with the past, an obsession made manifest by a recurring textual figure, that of the Ancestor. Both proponents and opponents of the tenets of Negritude, from Senghor to Soyinka, have tended to see the figure as heroic. In the Caribbean text, the ancestral trope plunges into an imaginary past predicated on collective history in order to gain access to a common future. Edouard Glissant calls it "a prophetic reading of the past" (preface to Monsieur Toussaint). But, as he also cautions in Le Discours antillais, this textual strategy may well elide an alienating present and prolong a self denying cultural stasis that renders political action impossible.

The sociological approach still predominates, whether among critics (I. F. Case's damning Césaire's inability to write about contemporary Martinique) or writers (Daniel Maximin condemning Glissant's unwillingness to do likewise as "evasiveness"). It would appear that the Caribbean corpus, a literature initially triggered by specific historical conditions, must always return to its ideological origins. This may account in no small part for the uneasy dance between myth and history in the Caribbean corpus, a feature particularly prominent in the Cesairean topos of the ancestral quest.

The question of the Ancestor remains a constant of Caribbean literature after Césaire as well. It took Maryse Condé a considerable African detour before she could trust herself to face her own "mangrove swamp." Her first novel stages this alienation with maximum impact when the child asks, "what were we before" and the Caribbean father refuses to entertain the notion that there may have been a past "before." Whether plaintive (in Condé's Hérémakhônon), wistful (in Léon Damas's Hoquet: "Désastre / parlez-moi du désastre / parlez-m'en"), or defiant (in Maximin's L'Isolé soleil: "Il nous faut drageonner nos pères"), the child's insistent question is the textual sign of a never-ending tug of war between the mythical and the historical dimension. From Derek Walcott's sobering words on selective amnesia in "The Muse of History,'" to Glissant's gradual evisceration of his once admirable "Negator," the question triggers an imaginery projection backward that must locate its object in an immemorial past before any move forward. Cahier d'un retour au pays natal is exemplary in this.

Admirable Question

In the wake of the Cahier, the poet had taken his stand. Fresh from the shock of his Haitian tour, Césaire delineated in the 1945 "Poesie et connaissance" his poetics of Caribbean authenticity as the weaving of the private, obsessional, self with the collective, ancestral, unconscious. But, as the whole Tropiques adventure made clear, it was a genetic unconscious nonetheless radically grounded in a specific moment:

Ce qui émerge, c'est 1e fonds individuel. Les conflits intimes, les obsessions … Tou la chiffres du message personnel …

Ce qui émerge aussi, c'est le vieux fonds ancestral. Images héreditaires, que seules peut remettre à jour, aux fins de déchiffrement, l'atmosphère poétique …

The poet starts with the retrieving of long forgotten selves buried deep within the collective memory. However, the very conditions of such a plunge are historically determined, as the Cahier finds time and again. At the time this was written, diving into the unconscious and recovering the African past seemed feasible, if not identical, projects. Thus, Suzanne Césaire in "Léo Frobénius et le problème des civilisations": "… l'Afrique ne signifie pas seulement pour nous un élargissement vers l'ailleurs, mais approfondissement de nous mêmes." The young rebels of Martinique, looking at Price-Mars's example on the next island, had every reason to be optimistic. The final movement of the Cahier, going downward and inward in order to expand outward and upward ("ailleurs"), attempts to answer the challenge it poses somewhat ironically for itself: "Qui et quels nous sommes? / Admirable question." Close to half-a-century later, in his 1982 preface to moi, laminaire Césaire would reconsider this poetic project and answer it otherwise, raising over his whole corpus the ghost of blind, self-deluded, limping Oedipus, torn between east and west, reason and imagination, past and present, myth and history: "Ainsi va toute vie. Ainsi va ce livre, entre soleil et ombre, entre montagne et mangrove, entre chien et loup, claudiquant et binaire."

My contention here is simple: it is against Césaire's definitions of the ancestral ground that much of subsequent Caribbean literature measures itself, whether deliberately or not. To give but one example, Condé's paradigmatic "what were we before" destabilizes the solid ground of Césaire's earlier "who and what we are." To his glorious African depth sounding, she opposes a version of Walcott's radical amnesia, the surface of a blank Caribbean wall. Césaire's last work, laminaire, moves away from a unified, collective mythical dimension into a fragmented, tentative, historical consciousness, halfway between his glorious past soundings and Condé's radical negation. A clear understanding of the ancestral permutations in the Cesairean corpus, in turn, gives us a clearer sense of the writers who have followed in his footsteps.

For the Negritude generation, Caribbean history consisted of a before and after, a reading often modeled after the paradigmatic metaphor of western intervention in the Caribbean, Shakespeare's Tempest, turned upside down. It was a frankly oppositional move, whose binary dance of difference was not always stable. Within this world, Césaire's Ancestor has remained a cipher of polarization both from within and from without, the trope of the Other's otherness. It represents the black self as non-white invading and engaging the white discourse; yet, it is also polarized within itself in a kind of mirroring effect oscillating between Caliban, the primal autonomous being, wild and free, and Toussaint, the all too willing victim of white cunning sacrificed on the altar of nationalism. In the Cesairean corpus, Caliban and Toussaint are sometimes figures of opposition and sometimes of complementarity, the Rebel borrowing from each. Toussaint, the ghost erased from white history books spitting up his lungs in Napoleon's dank cell, is a figure that the 1930s Cahier seeks simultaneously to reclaim for history, as the origin of black historical consciousness in the Caribbean, and turn into tragic myth, a dead hero greater than any one of his living descendants. As original presence on the primeval shore, Shakespeare's imaginary cannibal who at the end of Une Tempête sings his African freedom is a figure of myth too; for Césaire's 1969 play pointedly ends before the test of history begins. Or rather, with Prospero's final descent into lifeless impotence, colonial history has ended but post-colonial liberation has yet to begin. Conversely, from the 1946 oratorio to the 1956 play, the symbolic trajectory of Et les chiens se taisaient seems to move away from myth into more factual history. Yet, the successive versions of Chiens, down to the latest one in 1974, show clearly that neither dimension is relinquished. Trying to connect the corpus's fluctuations to the writer's own, critics have spent an inordinate amount of ink on the relationship between the poet and the politician. Given Césaire's highly oblique, deliberately opaque, style and the complexity of the issue itself, it is impossible to separate the strands neatly, even when the poet leaves the realm of openly creative writing for the more sobering arena of the political essay. In their biblical echoes, with their eternal present tense, the famous concluding words of Toussaint Louverture: "Au commencement est Toussaint Louverture," do indicate how hard it is for the Caribbean imagination to separate history from myth in excavating the ancestral ground.

In the Caribbean text, the absence of the Ancestor is everywhere. It represents simultaneously the inheritance and the eviscerating of a particularly obsessive sentimental reading of European Romanticism, from Bug-Jargal onward. The inversion of the false white father who refuses to acknowledge his mulatto progeny (from Sejour to Fanon, Capecia to Manicom), that of the defeated black father who could not protect his (from Thouret to Lacrosil, Condé to Schwarz-Bart), subtend Negritude's vision of an individual liberation that must precede the collective one at the risk of death—to follow Césaire's rough unfolding in the Cahier. What Ronnie Scharfman sees through Lacanian categories as the salient feature in the Cahier, "the binding of desire with violence," signals the inadequation of the child-self to the intended father-Ancestor, perhaps because of the inadequacy of the model. The temptation—or the trap—is to posit a Negritude self as a phallic father indeed, but a better one. The famous, defiant passage on those who have invented nothing, a "how to" for black self-refashioning, briefly gives in to that urge, before transcending it in an epistemological shift. Among other things, the Cahier is also a warning on the simplistic danger of a binary oppositional vision.

In the justly famous and always moving shift, the shackled poetic self frees itself in a series of powerful kinetic images, starting with the simple standing up hand in hand with the beloved island; or rather hand in fist. For the child's tiny open hand, the gesture of trust, is engulfed by the giant knotted fist, a gesture of protection that triggers the total immersion downward into "la négraille," the nigger-scum, a plunge into a historically anchored collective self that prepares the illimited, unanchored self-hurtling upward of ritual rebirth. Reversing the initial roles, this now gigantic self leads, the tiny "mote-dust" of a country follows, each led ever upward by the ascending Dove: "monte, / Colombe / monte / monte / monte / Je te suis …"

The very intensity of this final prayer courts a realization ever deferred. Although it seeks to inscribe the autonomous black self in the text by establishing a clear line to an authentic Ancestor, the Cahier fails to maintain a stable ancestral figuring, as does Césaire's next dramatization of the question, Et les chiens se toisaient. The Rebel attempting to sound his deeper African self must choose something or someone other than the false historical fathers, whose judgment he refuses by appealing to the African gods, primitive Greece dovetailing primeval Africa: "Pourquoi aurais-je peur du jugement de mes dieux? qui a dit que j'ai trahi?" As Suzanne Césaire had implied, the only way into the authentic self is through myth, a choice that signals a characteristic turning away from contemporary reality. The blood shed is called "communiel" and the emphasis kept firmly on the collective outcome. At the end of Les Chiens, the redoubling of motifs marks the fully mythical dimension: as the Ancestor of a new people, the Rebel becomes his own ancestor as well. But such outcome is still far in the future, as implied by the subjunctive mode, a vision rather than a fact: "que de mon sang oui, de mon sang / je fonde ce peuple."

The ideological gap between the two versions has usually been attributed to Césaire's own ideological fluctuations at the time. In this case, the autobiographical does not satisfactorily account for the fact that neither version chooses either mythical or historical dimension clearly. It might be more fruitful to look at the successive versions as modulating an ancestral question that has no fixed answer, given Césaire's habitually constant (rather than consistent) refiguring of symbols.

Ce qui est à moi

A precise scene connects the Cahier to Les Chiens, matrix whence all ancestral figuring flows. It is that of the blood baptism, the first step toward a Caribbean definition of self. In Les Chiens, the execution of the cockroach-eyed master, who, given the realities of plantation life, could well be the executioner's father, is claimed as the moment that ushers in the authentic self: "Que de sang au fond de ma mémoire (…) Je frappai, le sang gicla. C'est le seul baptême dont je me souvienne aujourd'hui." The execution that occurs out of the frame, off camera, before the beginning of Les Chiens, makes its symbolic significance possible. In Le Cahier, the phrase had appeared but had been undercut by a failure of nerve, the memory of rebellions eventually drowned in the master's liquor that made betrayal possible (as, we are told, Mackandal's was):

Que de sang dans ma mémoire. Dans ma mémoire sont des lagunes, elles sont couvertes de têtes de morts …

Ma mémoire est entourée de sang. Ma mémoire a sa ceinture de cadavres! et mitrailles de barils de rhum génialement arrosant nos révoltes ignobles …

Of course, the Rebel, too, has been betrayed by his own. However, Le Cahier reworks otherwise the theme of betrayal that is historically intertwined with the theme of constant uprisings, offering a historical ancestor that makes positive self-refiguring possible. To the dishonorable betrayal of Mackandal by his own people, his inebriated coconspirators, to the dishonorable betrayal of the Rebel by his own people, cowards afraid of white revenge, Le Cahier opposes an honorable counter-example, that of Toussaint kidnapped under the flag of truce by a dishonorable enemy:

      Ce qui est à moi
      c'est un homme seul emprisonné de blanc
      c'est un homme seul qui défie la cris
      blancs de la mort blanche
      (TOUSSAINT, TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE)
 
      C'est un homme que fascine
      l'épervier blanc de la mort blanche …
      La splendeur de ce sang n'éclatera-t-elle point.

Retrieved from the silence of white history, the dying man is made to belong to black (rather than white) depth consciousness in a movement that answers violence with murder. "Ce qui est a mod" has been triggered by the gory sequence of the Middle Passage ("Et je me dis Bordeaux et Nantes et Liverpool et New York et San Francisco … / terres rouges, terres sanguines, terres consanguines," a sequence that is but the prelude to the Cesairean leitmotiv that connects several works ("que de sang dans ma mémoire"). This leitmotiv, in turn, introduces the sequence of the father-master's execution by the son-slave and signals the birthing of the true Caribbean now free, as in Les Chiens, to claim the Ancestor of his choice: himself. Thus, Le Cahier and Les Chiens present what looks like a joint version of positive self-birthing.

Critics have abundantly commented on the fact that, in the description of Toussaint's white death, Césaire operates an epistemological reversal. Deconstructing western values, the upending of color categories gives a heightened emotional impact to this scene of remembering that, in turn, makes the execution of the master possible. But it is, as well, a remembering of the contingency of defeat. In self-defeated Haiti, the fulgurant splendor of this sacrificial blood has yet to explode. Toussaint remains here trapped and his death in exile is further mocked by Christophe's own failure soon to come—as Césaire's next play was to explore, a political failure triggered by his people's failure of imagination (or, one might say more gently, their human frailties). By analogy, a pall is thrown over the true outcome of the Rebel's sacrifice (it, too, happens off camera and cannot be witnessed by us). Thus, the exaltation of the future tense, subtly undermined by the negative-interrogative form ("La splendeur de ce sang n'éclatera-t-elle point"), as in the final subjunctive wish of the Rebel ("que de mon sang … je fonde ce peuple"), remains the sign of "a dream deferred." To wish it to happen is to acknowledge that it has not and, simultaneously, to fear that it may not.

Yet again myth seems to surge through the palimpsest of history, since the self-birthing voice who acknowledges Toussaint as Ancestor in a baptism of blood is, so nakedly, that of Caliban. The "ce qui est à moi" of Le Cahier is Caliban's response to Shakespearean Prospero's boast: "this thing of darkness is mine." The claim of common humanity makes Prospero unable or unwilling to relinquish moral responsibility for his acts, a position of liberal humanism that may hide the darker imperialist urge upon which Césaire's 1969 Une Tempête will eventually "signify" (to use Gates's fashionable term).

Une Tempête: Adaptation de 'La Tempête;' de Shakespeare pour un theatre noir may well hark back to a more ancient mode; that of Les Chiens. It is as if the limitations of history, as confronted in the intervening plays, Christophe and Une Saison au Congo, were to be replayed as myth, but a postlapsarian myth now put through the process of degradation by the recent "years of African independence." If we hear Caliban distinctly proclaiming "U'huru," at the beginning of the play, we can no longer see him at the end. The son of Sycorax sings himself in the Other's language ("la liberté, ohé, la liberté"), and we can barely make it out. Is it feebly heard because Caliban's own resolve—and, therefore, its exemplary quality—has weakened? Or is it feebly heard because we hear it through Prospero's own weakening physical and spiritual condition? Césaire leaves us with this ambivalence.

It is likewise with the white death, Toussaint's trope. Presented as the silenced collective history that must be reclaimed through the power of the imagination, it is immediately absorbed as a potentially mythical figuring of the past in Le Cahier—albeit one trailing historical contingencies in its turbulent wake. The famous "what is mine" sequence constructs an analogue between Haiti and Martinique, the past and the present, the humiliated nigger-scum and the emerging black self eager to inscribe otherwise the very past the white memory has appropriated. The binary temptation persists, a hint that the poetic self has a hard time moving out of the subject/object, myth/history trap when excavating the ancestral ground.

One can excavate this ancestral ground otherwise, and go back to the hortatory quotation cited above: "La splendeur de ce sang n'éclatera-t-elle point?" The future tense of spurted blood expressed the wish for the moment of explosive self-baptism, hallowed by another image of spurted blood, the Master's execution ("le sang gicla," a recurrent image in the Cesairean corpus), when the slave, by taking back his rightful name, that of Rebel, is giving birth to himself. This moment of fulgurant birthing connects us to that other constant of Césaire's poetic landscape, the volcano, cipher of physical as well as spiritual liberation, and anchors us back, squarely, on Caribbean soil.

With the natural imagery of the Caribbean landscape comes a fairly consistently polarized bestiary. To give but one instance, the positive thoroughbred ("pur sang," with its punning on racial purity as well as "bad blood," including that of the Rimbaldian variety), drawing on the boundless primeval freedom in the mythical time before time, is usually opposed to the negative mangy dog, steel jaws tearing the flesh of the runaway slave, drawing on the direct experience of a recent, historical past. As we observed before in Césaire, the outside polarization is often mirrored inside, within the same image cluster. For instance, Les Chiens is able to play on both registers, master's mastiffs and cynocephalic gods. Its signifying downward dive through Ancient religions (Egyptian or Greco-Roman) retrieves the positive god of a former consciousness: the psychopomp who presides over a different poetic passage, Anubis/Cerberus. Moreover, in the expanding doubling constitutive of myth, the dog-faced god is, often, also pictured as the monkey-faced god, willing mediator between the human and the divine. As the Yoruba trickster Eshu, his pranks emphasize the unpredictable nature of the human connection to the divine but never severs it. As the flying Anuman of India, he is the harbinger of the Word, who brings knowledge, culture and, above all, writing to the human species. He is, as well, the giant laughing Monkey-God carved into the stone of pre-Columbian temples all over the Mexican peninsula. A common symbol runs through all these avatars, one that, tapping the collective memory of the folktale, fuses myth and history without contradiction within the only syncretic ancestral trope that is uniquely Caribbean.

"Beau sang giclé" is an homage to the folktales rescued from oblivion in the pages of Tropiques by way of Lafcadio Hearn. Although the poem appears in Ferrements (1960), it clearly harks back, in its elusive imagery of a beheading, to the 1948 Soleil cou coupé, the collection that is usually considered Césaire's most "surrealistic," the critics' perplexed stamp of good housekeeping in the face of a violently fragmented subject. It is also connected to the earlier collection born of the war years, Les Armes miraculeuses, through two image clusters; first, the famous machete stab of the opening, a sort of beheading, and, second, the sacred bird: "Le grand coup de machète du plaisir rouge en plein front … quand mourir avait le goût du pain et la terre et la mer un goût d'ancêtre et cet oiseau qui me crie de ne pas me rendre …" The sacred bird of nonsurrender, often depicted with phoenix-like qualities, reappears throughout the corpus; to wit, the Cahier's prayer ("pour que revienne le temps de promission/et l'oiseau qui savait mon nom"), or, in Corps perdu, "Dit d'errance" ("Par le soleil d'un nid coiffé/où phénix meurt et renait." By threading the fairly constant images of sacrificial dismemberment and/or beheading throughout Césaire's poetry, one may discern the patterns of sadistic torture that make up a universe where apocalyptic, yet primeval, beasts roam at will; a fusion of the before-time and the after-time characteristic of myth. It does not take great acumen to read the political referent in the myth, such descriptions also matching standard practices of slave torture. By connecting them to birds, one arrives at something more.

Vous connaissez le conte

"Beau sang giclé" is built on a famous folk subtext, but one probably undecipherable without some help for the non-Caribbean. The poem illustrates the story of Yé, who shot the sacred bird in order to feed his starving family: here, too, the political signifier keeps floating up to the surface on the mythical signified. Tropiques considered the AfroCaribbean folk tradition an integral element of political resistance and made little mystery of it, a fact which eventually led to its being banned:

Un tambour. Le grand rire du Vaudou descend des mornes. Combien, au cours des siècles, de révoltes ainsi surgies! Que de victoires éphemères! Mais aussi, quelles défaites! Quelles répressions! Mains coupées, corps écartelés, gibets, voila ce qui peuple les allées de l'histoire coloniale. Et rien de tout cela n'aurait passé dans le folklore? Vous connaissez le conte de Colibri.

Césaire (and Menil) obligingly provide the folk connection between the story of Yé and "Conte Colibri." In a multiplicity of crisscrossing references, firmly connected by the central image of a beheading, the story of Yé spills into the tale of Colibri. The drum and the drum-bird stand for the primal Maroon, Caliban's last avatar. An obvious reference to the maroon's mode of communication, the drum functions both as an ontological metaphor (for instance, the vaudou ceremony in Christophe III, 7), and the poem as sample of the counter-poetics of "marronnage"; what Césaire wittily defined for Depestre in their famous friendly quarrel, "Réponse à Depestre, poète haïtien," as a symbolic system where nothing is what it seems.

Dismemberment connects the poem to Les Chiens. It also connects the tale of Colibri to that of Yé's sacred bird:

     Beau sang giclé
 
     tête trophée membres lacérés
     dard assassin beau sang giclé
     ramages perdus rivages ravis …
                     ô assassin attardé
 
     l'oiseau aux plumes jadis plus belles que le passé exige le compte de ses plumes dispersées.

On one level, the poem can be read as a riddle on the fact of colonization, predicting a successful revolt, if not revolution. The "standing nigger-scum" ("elle est debout la négraille") force the defeated colonizer, once triumphant trophy hunter, now defeated murderer, to acknowledge its dignity ("exige le compte de ses plumes dispersées"). On another level, Yé who would feed his children the body of the fallen god is replaying both those West African rituals of which Frazer and Freud made so much; and which, in their Mediterranean transformations, René Girard sees as the non-western foundations of our western beliefs—Christ's ritual sacrifice and "flesh-and-blood" communion embracing both. Willingly shedding his own "communial blood," the Rebel of Les Chiens is, among others, a (counter)version of Christ. On yet another level, the poem stages an allegorical replay of the Rebel's betrayal by his own people. If the ignorant trophy hunter may be compared to the ignorant betrayers of the oratorio, he has nonetheless committed a sacreligious crime for which he must atone; as, by inference, must they. The criticism of the betrayal is here muted, since Yé (metonym for the poorest "nigger-scum") was trying to feed his children (take charge of the people and so continue the Rebel's task). By forcing them to reconstitute its body, the sacred bird of Negritude is leading them to the selfawareness ("ever more beautiful than before") that precedes collective action. As usual with Césaire, any close-reading eventually proceeds in "expanding rings," to use Rilke's metaphor.

For it is the image of Afro-Caribbean consciousness that brings into the poem's semantic interplay its twin folktale, that of Colibri—not so coincidentally, the other Hearn selection reproduced by Césaire and Menil. "Conte colibri" is the story of the hummingbird who fights a succession of monsters sent by a jealous god to steal the bird's magic drum. When the last monster, Poisson-Armé, presents himself, a badly-wounded Colibri, "spurting blood," knows that he must die but gallantly accepts the challenge:

—Mon dernier combat, dit Colibri qui tomba mort.

Pouesson-Armé, en toute hate, ramassa un grand coutelas qui traînait par là, coupe la tête de Colibri, la mit sous la pierre de taille dans la cour de la maison. Alors, seulement, il prit le tambour l'emporta.

In "Beau sang giclé, the "trophy head" is the clue that Colibri and the sacred bird of the past are one. Like Osiris's and Orpheus's, Cohort's head must be severed after death to prevent reincarnation. But, as with Orpheus, the head buried in the house yard is immortal, drawing a perpetual potential reincarnation from Caribbean soil/self. The connection between the chtonic forces of the soil and the Rebel (who, sprawled on the ground, anoints his nape with crumbling earth), was made rather forcefully in the 1946 version of Les Chiens. Colibri may well be the Rebel's totem. We already know that it is Christophe's.

As Pestre d'Almeida has shown, parts of the pre-Columbian myth of the hummingbird correspond to aspects of the Ancient Phoenix as well as to the Aztec Hummingbird God; the latter represented the rising sun, the dawning of a new age—a particularly potent cluster in Césaire. In this overlapping of cultural traditions, Césaire has found the perfect syncretic Ancestor; and, as such, the model of the authentic Afro-Caribbean self: the eternal "bird of no surrender."

With its incredibly fast beating heart, the hummingbird is a living drum. And we remember that it is the sacred drum that Poisson-Armé stole from Colibri: in other words, along with his life, that which defined him, his self. Pushing the metaphor, one might also add, his music, his poetry, his language; or, in biblical terms, his Word. The tale of Colibri is that of an ontological murder. But it enfolds a possible rebirth. For, if Colibri did not, in the folktale, come back to life, Yé's magic bird did.

Colibri was a frame of reference in the Cesairean corpus every time the questions of ontological and historical authenticity were raised. With moi, laminaire …, whose lower capped title is significant (all poems have lower capped titles as well), Césaire operates a bitter eviscerating:

     rien de tout cela n'a la force d'aller bien loin essoufflés
     ce vent nos oiseaux tombant et retombant
     alourdis par le surcroît de cendres da volcans
                                            ("éboulis")

The once fertile, revolution-nurturing landscape is now dry ashes. We can measure the depth of despair in this image of sterility and death for a man who once described himself as volcanic, "homme peleen," and praised the other pelean giant of Caribbean history, Louis Delgres who blew himself to bits on Matouba and who, like Césaire, was born on Basse-Terre. We have passed from the gigantic realm of an all embracing, all-creating, explosive imagination birthing an all-expanding consciousness (the sorcerer's incantations that create a new world and a new people) to a contracting, almost imploding universe. The poetic self, a figure of mythical resilience, once Phoenix-like in its stubborn Colibri-courage, is now confronting historical contingency, "limping," Oedipus-like, between self-knowledge and its reverse, self doubt: "Ainsi va toute vie. Ainsi va ce livre, entre soleil et ombre, entre montagne et mangrove, entre chien et loup, claudiquant et binaire." A shrunken giant wonders about his choice of ancestors: "j'ai tiré au sort mes ancétres" ("ibisanubis"). The Ancient myths that so empowered him are now inoperative, reduced to arbitrary choices.

The heroic self has been reduced to a non-self, a modest life form that cannot stand separate from its marine environment for long, but sometimes manages self-consciousness, to "inhabit one of my wounds one minute at a time":

     j'habite de temps en temps une de mes plaies
     chaque minute je change d'appartement
     et toute paix m'effraie
             ayant creché volcan mes entrailles d'eau vive
             je reste avec mes pains de mots et mes minerais secrets
 
     j'habite donc une vaste pensée
                              ("calendrier lagunaire")

The fragmented, tentative consciousness is all too aware of its vulnerability, yet tenaciously clinging to the hope of resurgence with a serenity born of experience at the end of a long life ("algues"):

     la re lance
          se fait
             algue laminaire

This is Colibri's last incarnation: limited and modest in its acts yet keeping the epic dream alive ("une vaste pensée"). In its last reincarnation, Césaire-Colibri acknowledges that his mission has not changed, and so finally answers the "admirable question," but this time without irony:

     il n'est pas question de livrer le monde aux
     assassins d'aube …
     une nouvelle bonte ne cesse de croître à l'horizon
                                    ("nouvelle bonte")

Somehow, this last incarnation is infinitely more touching, in its limitations, and stubborn hope, than the wildest of the Rebel's visions. Until we remember that, in Césaire's syncretic pantheon, Oedipus enfolds the smiling, limping figure of Legba-Eshu, cunning messenger of the gods, the liminal deity who never gave up. And so, infinitely refracted, the iconic figure of Colibri.