SOURCE: "Beyond Négritude: The Love Poems," Critical Perspectives on Léon-Gontran Damas, edited by Keith Q. Warner, Three Continents Press, 1988, pp. 119-45.

[Hodge is a Trinidadian educator, novelist, and critic. The following excerpt was drawn from her unpublished thesis, "The Writings of Léon Damas and Their Connection with the Négritude Movement in Literature," completed in 1967 at the University of London. Below, she examines the themes and tone of Damas's poetry, focusing on his work in Graffiti, Black-Label, and Névralgies, and remarks on the similarities between Damas and the French poet Jacques Prévert.]

[Graffiti] at first disconcerts because it is all but racially anonymous—the burning preoccupations of Pigments are totally absent. A few years later in Black-Label, which had been in preparation all the while, the theme of race returns, but much of the work is strongly personal. His latest work, Névralgies, is also composed of personal poetry.

If we take the works Pigments, Black-Label and Névralgies (which incorporates Graffiti) as a trilogy, the three works show the poet progressively recoiling into himself. Although the poems of Pigments are intensely 'first hand' and are therefore poetry rather than standard-bearing, yet the angry 'moi' of these poems is often meant as a collective voice, a cry from the poet assuming the fate of his whole race. A few of the poems of Pigments which are outside the field of race are hermetic poems. Some of the personal poetry of Black-Label is also quite private. A large proportion of Névralgies, which is entirely personal, remains in a tantalizing half-light.

The progression towards completely personal poetry reminds one of Sartre's prediction that the racial revolt and self-assertiveness of the Negritude movement would be but a necessary stage in the development of modern literature in the French ex-colonies. Damas, having vented his racial rage and asserted his identity (the latter being as much for his own benefit as in a gesture of revolt), moves towards poetry which has a wider human reference for delving deeper into the experience and feelings of one man. So that paradoxically his poetry opens out by becoming more egocentric. In Pigments he is vehemently black, proclaiming with all his might his racial identification and solidarity; in Black-Label, considerably mellowed, he takes up his narrower identity of a West Indian. In his love-poetry he is first and foremost a man.

The note of personal affliction which in Pigments remains a part of his racial awareness merges in his later works with a more general sadness and disillusionment with life….

His love-poetry reveals a cause of his unhappiness. Damas is a poet of loss, deprivation, unfulfilment. His lament for his lost self, the loss of his 'black dolls', gives way to a lament on the loss of love. The happier aspects of love are totally absent from his love-poetry. It is almost in its entirety on the death or the absence of love. A poem in Graffiti is perhaps meant to explain the title of the volume, and might be the title-poem for all of Damas' love-poetry:

      Tandis qu'il agonise
      sans peur
      sans prêtre
      plus blanc que drap
      plus essoufflé qu'un train qui entre en gare
      d'un fabuleux parcours
      l'amour râle un poème
      comme d'autres
      confient un dernier acte
 
      Et
      d'eux-mêmes
      les vers
      s'inscrivent
      au fronton du mausolée marmoréen
      debout à l'image agrandi
      de ce qui fut
      au rythme d'une nuit
      afro-cubaine
 
      (On its very death-bed
      without fear
      without priest
      whiter than a sheet
      more breathless than a train coming in
      from a fabulous run
      love rattles a poem
      as others
      commit a final act
 
      And
      of themselves
      the lines
      are inscribed
      on the fronton of the marmoreal mausoleum
      erect in the enlarged image
      of that which was
      to the rhythm of
      an Afro-Cuban night)

The incident of the 'Afro-Cuban night' is presumably what is described in the beautiful third section of Black-Label. In the refrain repeated twice in this passage, an ominous note is sounded:

       IL A ETE PENDU CE MATIN
       A L'AUBE UN NEGRE COUPABLE
       D'AVOIR VOULU FRANCHIR
       LA LIGNE
 
       (HANGED THIS MORNING
       AT DAWN WAS A NEGRO
       GUILTY OF WANTING TO
       CROSS THE LINE)

In fact, the theme of the sexual taboo between the races does not loom very large in Damas' love-poetry….

In Pigments there is a handful of poems in [a] … tender strain, revealing a side of his nature perhaps more fundamental than the intransigent anger which characterizes the book as a whole….

This streak of tenderness comes into its own in Damas' love-poetry, where the grim combatant gives way to the quite gentle and sensitive man. Harshness, violent flashing anger subside into quiet sadness. In Pigments the effect of these few poems is heightened by the surrounding ones—they are pools of shade in a merciless light. And in the same way one perhaps appreciates Damas' love-poetry all the more when it is seen against his militant poetry. Against the fierce defiance of some of the poems of Pigments, a poem such as this has an even greater appeal—it is as though, divested of his armour and of his thunderbolts, he were left naked and vulnerable:

        Désir d'enfant malade
        d'avoir été
        trop tôt sevré du lait pur
        de la seule vraie tendresse
        j'aurais donné
        une pleine vie d'homme
        pour te sentir
        te sentir près
        près de moi
        de moi
        seul …
 
        (Longing of a sick child
        for having been
        too soon weaned from the pure milk
        of the only true tenderness
        I would have given
        a whole life-time
        to feel you
        feel you near
        near to me
        to me
        alone.)

But the spirit of the combatant never leaves him to fall, like the 'bâton qui soutient les vieux corps' (stick that holds up old bodies). Damas' poetry drifts into a claustrophobic nightmare of loneliness, regret, insomnia—'névralgies', yet a certain stoicism remains to bolster up the tone. Never does he slip into self-pity. Much of the beauty of these poems lies in their restraint, the wistfulness born of resignation in sadness. Over-sentimentality finds no place in even the most melancholy of poems. It is outraged stoicism which accounts for the irritation of poems such as this:

       Je ne sais rien en vérité
       rien de plus triste
       de plus odieux
       de plus affreux
       de plus lugubre au monde
       que d'entendre l'amour
       à longueur de journée
       se répétant à messe basse …
       (I know of nothing in truth
       nothing more dreary
       more hateful
       more hideous
       more lugubrious in the world
       than to hear love
       the live long day
       repeating itself
       in low mass …)

But in this poem and many others in the same strain Damas' irritation could well be directed at himself. His stoicism is by no means facile. It is achieved at the cost of constant effort and sometimes even betrays a hint of bravado. But his poems would be less moving if they betrayed a superman riding above his griefs, and in that case they would probably never have been written—many of these poems are his effort at rallying:

      Il n'est pas de midi qui tienne
      et parce qu'il n'a plus vingt ans
      mon coeur
      ni la dent dure
      de petite vieille
      pas de midi qui tienne
      je l'ouvrirai
      pas de midi qui tienne
      je l'ouvrirai
      pas de midi qui tienne
      j'ouvrirai
      pas de midi qui tienne
      j'ouvrirai la fenêtre
      pas de midi qui tienne
      j'ouvrirai la fenêtre au printemps
      pas de midi qui tienne
      j'ouvrirai la fenêtre au printemps que je veux éternel
      pas de midi qui tienne
 
      (Noon can never keep
      and because it's no longer twenty
      my heart
      nor sharp-toothed
      like a little granny
 
      noon can never keep
      I will open it
      noon can never keep
      I will open it
      noon can never keep
      I will open
      noon can never keep
      I will open the window
      noon can never keep
      I will open the window to the spring
      noon can never keep
      I will open the window to the spring that I want eternal
      noon can never keep)

There are other poems [like 'Il n'est pas de midi qui tienne' (quoted above)] where 'midday' and 'midnight' represent an elusive, precariously beautiful fulfilment. It is an image which often strikes his imagination, the noon of his childhood when the sun would hover for a moment at the highest point in the sky and all but abolish shadow….

It is only in a handful of poems … that Damas approaches anything in the nature of overt moralizing. What emerges by way of a philosophy is a kind of protective near-pessimism which, far from leading to despair, favours acceptance and recovery. He debunks love as inherently precarious, and ends the book Névralgies on a note of resignation:

       Citez-m'en
       citez-m'en un
       citez-m'en un
       un seul de rêve
       qui soit allé
       qui soit allé
       jusqu'au bout du sien propre
 
       (Tell me then
       tell me then of one
       tell me then of one
       one single dream
       that went
       that went
       right to the end of its very own)

But the tendency in Damas' love-poetry is not towards generalizing. His poems are wrung out of a very particular experience, and if the woman addressed is not presented in very great physical detail, largely effaced into an absent 'ELLE' often thus written in capitals, she is not idealized into an abstraction of Woman. Some of the poems are made up of details and allusions which shut us out, but for the most part the fact that the décor of a poem is a very specific one makes for a quality of familiarity and intimacy whose appeal is quite the opposite of that of the more abstract forms of love-poetry, where a couple are sublimated into Eternal Man and Eternal Woman floating free of particularities. This poetry has its own attraction, lifting us out of the circumstantial into the vaguer realms of the Ideal (occasionally leaving us mere wondering spectators, staring up at figures who, in the process of sublimation, have become lamentably disembodied).

There is on the other hand love-poetry in which we are permitted to eavesdrop on the relationship of two individuals who are decidedly corporeal, firmly grounded in time and space and in the details of their experience, but who in their very particularity share in the nature of Eternal Man and Woman. Because they are palpably alive with their own particular life, they are part of the stuff out of which Eternal Man and Woman are fashioned. Damas applies no capital letters to his experience and delivers no homilies on Love. His poems remain intimate and untheatrical, never inflated by rhetoric or by conscious generality. In one or two cases he may be said to have fallen into the opposite sin, of insignificance, where he fails to call forth a response because the poem remains tied down by the smallness of its details. But usually the effect is the exact opposite. The reader may participate because the details are on such a scale as to fall within the scope of his own possible experience—they are recognizable. And so Damas' love-poetry assumes wider dimensions by proceeding from the un-pretentious small end of the telescope. He captures transitoriness—a mood, a reflection, a touch of frivolity—so intimate and so familiar that his poems of themselves rise out of the personal and private into the human:

      Je te vois
      je te sens
      je te veux en tailleur gris
      et non plus marron comme tes yeux qui semblaient
      parfois invoquer dieu
      parfois le diable
      jusqu'à ce qu'ils eussent enfin
      soumis les miens que tu m'auras souvent dit
      toi qui incarnes le diable en diable
      être à la fois et ceux de dieu
      et ceux du diable.
 
      (I see you
      I feel you
      I want you in tailored grey
      and why the devil my god in tailored grey
      and no longer brown like your eyes that seemed
      sometimes to be invoking god
      sometimes the devil
      until at last
      they had subjected mine that you so often said
      you who incarnate the devil's own person
      were all at once god's
      and the devil's)

The sad smile in this poem is characteristic of much of his love-poetry. Throughout his personal poetry, joyless as the tale might be, his sense of humour does not desert him, and this is another factor contributing to keeping his poetry from being submerged in wearying complaint, in the same way that humour in Pigments makes bitterness palatable by tempering it into superb irony. There are still flashes of this familiar irony, but Damas' humour in his later personal poetry is, in general, not of the cutting type. It is considerably softened, subdued—it is a wry shrug rather than a whiplash. But in Pigments, from the detachment of irony he yet plunges into the occasional fit of rage. Névralgies, on the other hand, is the work of a collected man—it is on the whole consistent in its restraint, and the more bitter poems are among those reproduced from the earlier Graffiti. The overall impression of his personal poetry and of Névralgies in particular is a wry, dogged buoyancy:

       Pas d'ombres
       surtout chinoises
       j'entends
       j'entends rester seul et
       maître
       de la rade
       seul maître du navire en rade
       qui tangue et tangue et tangue
       qui danse et danse et danse au lazaret de mon coeur en quarantaine …
 
       (No shadows
       above all shadow-theatre
       I mean
       I mean to stay alone and
       master
       of the ship's course
       sole master of the laid-up ship
       that bounces bounces bounces
       that dances dances dances in the lazaret of my heart in quarantine …)

Not only does Damas withdraw into the isolation of self-reliance, but as we have noted, his tendency towards hermetic poetry grows. Damas is a believer in metempsychosis…. The theme of metempsychosis would seem to shed light on a number of his decidedly esoteric poems, although it does not by any means provide crystal clarity. On the contrary, Damas maintains an intriguing half-light of equivocality over many of these poems, like the 'clair obscur' (dim brightness) which he evokes in one poem ['Parce que la Comédie'], a light reminiscent of that grey glare which is the setting of dreams—as in this poem for example:

       Tant de vies
       Tant de vies en une seule
       gachées
       Tant d'assiettes
       tant d'assiettes
       échouées
       sous l'évier du drame
       que l'homme fut seul à porter
       à l'origine de toutes choses
       dans le faux jour
       dans le faux jour de la dernière invite.
 
       (So many lives
       so many lives in one
       squandered
 
       So many plates
       so many plates
       shattered
       under the sink of the story
       that the man carried all alone
       at the very beginning of all things
       in the false light
       in the false light of the last round)

There are other similar allusions to a point lost in the mists of time, or simply a previous age—'la nuit des temps perdus proches' (the night of the lost ages nigh); 'de temps immémoriaux' (from time immemorial); 'à l'âge amérindien du monde' (in the Amerindian age of the world); 'une vie antérieure' (a former life). Reference to a 'dream recreated' might be interpreted in the context of metempsychosis or might be taken as allusions to what seems to be an actual dream which he relates in a passage of Black-Label and certain details of which recall ['Captation' in] Pigments. There is only one overt mention of reincarnation—this poem is addressed to his twin-sister who died in babyhood:

       Qui pourrait dire
       si ce n'est mort-né
       l'autre moi-même
 
       Qui pourrait dire
       qu'en ce jour anniversaire
       j'eusse à célébrer l'absence
       de toi mon double
 
       Qui pourrait dire
       si ce n'est toi
       autre moi-même
       réincarné mon double
       mort-né …
 
       (Who could say
       if not my still-born
       other self
 
       Who could say
       that on this anniversary day
       I would have your absence to celebrate
       my double
 
       Who could say
       if not you
       my other self
       reincarnated my double
       still-born …)

There are other poems where the idea is expressed of a mystical correspondence between himself and a woman. This is the suggestion throughout the passage from the third section of Black-Label….

The theme of metempsychosis, or the repeated reincarnation of a soul until it has completed its term of transmigration, can be placed in the context of a theme which pervades all of Damas' poetry, that of fulfilment, or, more often than not, unfulfilment. His poems are full of metaphors and images of desire, of satisfaction out of reach—'Accoudés au désir de la veille insatisfait' (Brooding on yesterday's unfulfilled wanting—Pigments); there is the refrain of the section in Black-Label where he recalls the longing of his constricted childhood: 'Désirs comprimés' (Hankerings repressed); in Névralgies the theme of unfulfilment returns to dominate the book—the first poem is entitled 'Pour que tout soit en tout' ('That all be in all'), and the last poem declares this fulfilment to be unattainable (the poem 'Citez-m'en'), while the whole book abounds in images such as 'carrefour' (crossroads), 'midi' (midday), 'minuit' (midnight), 'mangue mûre' (ripe mango), 'fruit mûr' (ripe fruit) and other images of crisis of ripeness, of eating and drinking, hunger and thirst—'marron qui mange à sa faim' (marroon eating his fill), and there is also the longing for an end, an overdue climax or completion: 'le plaisir d'en finir avec un dilemme' (the satisfaction. of having done with a dilemma), 'l'autobus pressé d'en finir au passage' (the bus in a hurry to have done with the trip), and in more than one poem the termination or fulfilment he longs for is no less than death: 'la mort dont je rêve' (the death I dream of).

But this his private mysticism, the belief in metempsychosis, does make him amenable to the mysteries of religion. The Church which in Pigments receives only the merest of amused sarcasm—in a poem about his upbringing—is suddenly the object of intermittent attacks in Graffiti and thereafter. The attention which the Church receives in his more personal works is perhaps not to be explained in the light of his bourgeois upbringing alone. Some poems suggest that he had had a more recent contact with the Church to which he was now reacting:

      Il me souvient encore
      de l'année foutue
      où j'eusse
      pu
      tout aussi bien sucer
      et le pouce
      et l'index
      du sorcier en soutane
      au lieu de l'avaler l'hostie
      ma foi mon dieu
      mains jointes
 
      (I still recall
      the rotten year
      when I
      could
      just as well suck
      both the thumb
      and the forefinger
      of the cassocked sorcerer
      instead of swallowing it the host
      oh faith my god
      hands joined)

He reduces the Church to a set of lugubrious and hypocritical forms and prohibitions, and in contrast to its 'Dieu unique et triple, implacable comme un grand prêtre due Temple de Jérusalem, et imbécilement bon comme un vieux sacristain de "La Croix"' (God who is single and triple, implacable as a High Priest of the Temple of Jerusalem, and as imbecilically good-natured as an old sexton of "The Cross"), [Retour de Guyane], invokes some animistic god of his ancestors, whom his ancestors worshipped with joy and self-abandon….

[Damas rejects] the god of Christianity as being part and parcel of Western civilization in its loss of contact with the life of the earth, its loss of humanity. His most frequent attack on the Church is the charge of hypocrisy, the accusation that worship has become largely formulae and regulation behaviour lacking in sincerity and meaningfulness. The third stanza here is obviously inspired by Etienne Léro's words in Légitime Défense:

Langston Hughes et Claude McKay, les deux poètes révolutionnaires, nous ont apporté, marinés dans l'alcool rouge, l'amour africain de la vie, la joie africaine de l'amour, le rêve africain de la mort.

(Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, the two revolutionary poets, have brought us, soaked in red alcohol, the African love of life, the African joy of love, the African dream of death.)

Damas evokes 'African' worship as being more vital and sincere than the ossified religion of Western civilization. One however hesitates to attribute to him a 'personal religion' on the strength of passages such as this. His allegiance to this god of his, one suspects, is a purely intellectual identification by reaction to Christianity, rather than a declaration of faith….

Damas' deliberately coarse irreverence is only one characteristic which recalls the work of Jacques Prévert. In a mock prayer [from Black-Label], for instance, he enquires after the state of God's hearing, and offers a possible cause of His deafness, which seems to be his own very original and blasphemous interpretation of one of the 'Madonna and Child' poses:

      … SEIGNEUR
      à moins de les avoir bien sales
      pour n'avoir plus à vos côtes Marie-l'Unique
      à la fois Vierge et Mère
      qui avait l'oeil à votre oreille
      comme au jour le jour veille
      l'homme à la ruche …
 
      (LORD
      unless they've got really dirty
      for no longer having at your side Mary-the-Unbeatable
      all at once Virgin and Mother
      who kept an eye on your ear
      like the day-to-day watch
      of the bee-keeper …)

The book Black-Label is introduced as the work of 'un Prévert africain' (an African Prévert). Damas does not acknowledge Prévert as a master—he considers that he has been influenced, among modern French poets, above all by Desnos. Damas has known Prévert, and shows an unmistakeable enthusiasm for his work, where he discovers a kindred spirit; he was acquainted with Prévert's poems, published in reviews, sometimes in reviews with which Damas was associated, before Prévert collected them into Paroles, his first book of poetry, in 1945. Damas' first book of poetry had however already been published, nine years before, so that the question of influence can certainly be overdone, and the affinities to be established in the work of the two poets are perhaps for the most part to be traced to a confluence of aims and attitudes.

In the work of both men one finds the same impudence, the same sense of humour delighting in underlining accepted incongruities, the same rebelliousness and resentment of authority and restraint. As Prévert speaks contemptuously of 'le bon Dieu des flics' (the Heavenly Father of cops) so the uniformed defender of the established order [the police officer] figures more than once in Damas' work as the object of irritation or aversion….

Prévert's attacks on the tedium and repression of school find an echo in Damas' evocations of his own school life, with lessons (in his case even more dry and devoid of relevance from the child's point of view) contrary to his inclination. Like Prévert's school children, the boy Damas longed for freedom from the prison of the classroom and its unpalatable fare….

       … CHARLEMAGNE en pied pendu a l'un des quatre murs
       de la classe un Enfer …
                             [Black-Label]
 
       (CHARLEMAGNE in full-length hanging on one of the four walls
       of the class; a Hell)
 
       … tes nuits qu'agitaient
       des leçons anonnées en dodine….
                             [Black-Label]
 
       (your nights tossed about
       with lessons mumbled in a trance)

Damas by reaction to his upbringing shares Prévert's antibourgeois attitude, his aversion for 'le Beau Monde'. The members of the social class in which Damas grew up did not differ substantially from the bourgeois caricatures which abound in Prévert's work. One particularly delightful passage in Black-Label on Damas' childhood recalls a poem of Prévert's ['Le beau langage', in La Pluie et le beau temps, 1955] in which a misdemeanour on the part of a child scandalizes the propriety of its elders and produces painful results:

       … Les cris de joie feinte
         d'autres diraient de rage
         que tu poussais à perdre haleine
         à la toute dernière fessée recue pour t'être
         sous le regard acerbe de ta mère offusquée
         et à la gêne polie de tous
         farfouillé le nez
         d'un doigt preste et chanceux
         au goûter de Madame-La-Directrice-de-
         l'Ecole-des-Filles
 
       (The cries of feigned joy
       others might call it rage
       that you kept up fit to make you breathless
       at the very last spanking you got because
       before the reproving eyes of your scandalized mother
       and to the polite embarrassment of all
       you rummaged in your nose
       with a nimble daring finger
       at the tea-party of Missus-Headmistress-of-the-Girls'-School)

Prévert's sympathy for the poor is matched by Damas' preoccupation in his writings with the poverty of his people. And in a passage [from Black-Label] where Damas evokes the peasant misery of the French Caribbean, he almost certainly has in mind a section of Prévert's 'Dîner de têtes'….

One critic sums up Damas' work as 'resounding racism ending in an emotional cul-de-sac' [W. Feuser, 'Négritude—The Third Phase', The New African (April 1966)]. Despite this resounding inaccuracy, Damas' inspiration is at no point bounded by race, and far less by racism. His purely racial writing is as necessary and as justifiable as the whole Negritude movement, but his work follows a pattern which is the best direction that Negritude, in literary terms, could take. There is a limited number of successful works that can be written around the affirmation that one is black. Damas continues to engage himself actively in the cultural rehabilitation which has been an important aim of the Negritude movement, after his political involvement, which was another corollary of Negritude. His poetry does not end at the defense and exaltation of his 'Negritude'. It is his common humanity above all which is revealed in his love-poetry, and it is a strange racism which moves a man to declare to one of the race which is the object of his racism:

        … nous ne sommes
           qu'une même somme
           qu'un seul et même sang …
 
           (We are but
           one same sum
           one same and single blood …)