[In the following essay, Breton briefly recounts his relationship with Césaire, also expressing his admiration for the poet as a truly significant and powerful black poet.]

April 1941. The view was blocked by the hulk of a ship, sealed with madrepore to the sand of the beach and probed by the waves (at least the little children could not have dreamed of a better place to frolic all day long), which by its very fixity gave no respite to the exasperation of only being able to move a few measured paces, between two bayonets: the Lazaret concentration camp, in Fort-de-France harbour. Released after a few days, with what avidity did I plunge into the streets, in search of all the never-before-seen things they had to offer, the dazzle of the markets, the humming-bird accents, the women Paul Eluard, on his return from a trip around the world, had told me were more beautiful than anywhere else. Soon, however, I discerned a discovery that threatened to take everything over once more: this city itself was coming apart, seemingly deprived of its essential organs. Its trade, all on display, assumed a disturbingly theoretical character. All movement was a little slower than might have been necessary, all sound too distinct, as if something had run aground. In the delicate air the continuous, distant tolling of an alarm bell could be heard.

It was in these circumstances that, chancing to buy a ribbon for my daughter, I happened to leaf through a publication on display in the haberdashery. Very modestly presented, it was the first issue of a journal that had just been published in Fort-de-France, entitled Tropiques. Needless to say, knowing what a year of intellectual degradation had led to, and having experienced the lack of any discretion characteristic of police reactions in Martinique, I approached this collection with extreme suspicion … I could not believe my eyes: what was being said was exactly what needed to be said, not just in the best way but with the greatest force! All those mocking shadows were torn aside and dispersed; all the lies and derision fell in tatters. It was proof that, far from being broken or stifled, here the human voice rose up like the very shaft of light. Aimé Césaire was the name of the one speaking.

I make no apology for an immediate feeling of some pride: what he was expressing was far from foreign to me, the names of the poets and authors cited alone would have been firm collateral, but above all the tone of these pages of the sort that does not deceive, attesting to the fact that here was someone wholeheartedly committed to the adventure who at the same time possessed all the means for the foundation, not only on an aesthetic but also on a moral and social level … (what am I getting at?) to make his intervention necessary and inevitable. The accompanying texts revealed people who clearly had the same attitude, whose ideas were truly one with his. In complete contrast with what had been published in France during the preceding months, all bearing the stamp of masochism if not servility, Tropiques was continuing to carve out the regal pathway. ‘We are the kind’, Césaire announced, ‘who refuse the shadow.’

This land he was revealing and which his friends were helping to explore, yes, it was my land too, it was our land which I had wrongly allowed myself to fear was fading into darkness. And one sensed his revolt and, even before gaining a deeper understanding of his message, one realized that, how can one say it, all the words he uttered, from the simplest to the most unusual, were laid bare. This resulted in his work culminating in concrete realization, in that endlessly superior quality of tone that allows such easy distinction between great and minor poets. What that day taught me was that the instrument of speech had not even gone out of tune in the turmoil. The world must not have been sinking after all: it would regain consciousness.

The Martiniquan haberdasher, by one of those additional acts of chance that indicate propitious moments, lost no time in introducing herself as the sister of René Ménil, the principal animator of Tropiques with Césaire. Her mediation would ensure the quickest conveyance of the few words I hurriedly scribbled on her counter; and in fact less than an hour later, having searched the streets for me, she gave me the arrangements for a meeting on her brother's behalf. Ménil: the height of culture in its least ostentatious sense and impeccable correctness, but in spite of that also vigorous and full of nervous excitement.

And the next day, Césaire. I can recall my quite basic initial reaction at finding him such a pure black in colour, masked all the more at first sight by his smile. In him (I already know, and see what everything will subsequently confirm) is mankind's crucible at its greatest point of fermentation, where knowledge, here moreover of the highest order, interferes with magical powers. For me—and I don't just mean on that day—his appearance, coloured by the countenance he has, assumed the value of a sign of the times. Thus it is that, single-handedly challenging an age in which one might think we witness the general abdication of the mind, when everything being created seems to aim at perfecting death's victory, when art itself threatens to solidify into outdated notions, the first fresh, revitalizing breath of air, fit to reassure us, comes from a black man. And it is a black man who handles the French language as no white man today can. And it is a black man who is our guide today through unexplored territory, establishing as he goes, as if it was a game, the ignition points that permit our advance, spark by spark. And it is a black man who is not only a black but a total man, who expresses all his questioning, all his fears, all his hopes and raptures, and who will assert himself ever more in my mind as the prototype of dignity.

We would meet in the evening, in a bar that the outside light turned into a single crystal, after the high-school classes he was then teaching about the work of Rimbaud, or at gatherings on the terrace of his house whose enchantment was made complete by the presence of Suzanne Césaire, as beautiful as the flame on a bowl of punch. But most especially there was an excursion right into the interior of the island: I shall always recall us perched perilously high over the Gouffre d'Absalom, as if over the very materialization of the crucible in which poetic images powerful enough to move worlds are formed, with no other landmark in the tide of frantic vegetation than the great enigmatic canna flower, a triple heart quivering on the end of a spear. It was there, and under the auspices of this flower, that the mission assigned in our day to man to break violently with the ways of thinking and feeling that have led him to the point of no longer being able to tolerate his existence, truly appeared to me in its complete imprescriptibility; that once and for all I was convinced of the idea that nothing will be gained so long as a certain number of taboos have not been lifted, so long as we have not managed to purge human blood of the fatal toxins kept in circulation by the—ever more indolent—belief in a hereafter, the solidarity absurdly attached to nations and races, and the supreme abjection that we call the power of money. Nothing can change the fact that, during the past century, it has fallen to poets to crack this iron brace which stifles us, and it is significant to observe that posterity tends to sanction only those who have gone furthest in this task.

That afternoon, with all the sluice gates of vegetation sumptuously thrown open before us, I experienced all the reward of feeling in such close communion with one of these poets, of knowing him, amongst all men, to be blessed with free will, and of being unable essentially to distinguish his will from my own.

And of holding him to be, with ample evidence, a man of complete accomplishment: a few days earlier he had made me a present of his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, a limited special edition of a Parisian journal where the poem must have passed unnoticed in 1939, and this poem was nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our time. It brought me the richest certainty, that which one can never expect from oneself alone: its author had gambled on everything I believed right and, incontestably, he had won. What was at stake, taking into account Césaire's particular genius, was our common conception of life.

What one will first recognize is this most effusive animation, this exuberance from the shoot to the bouquet, this ability endlessly to rouse the emotional world from top to bottom until it is turned upside down, which is the characteristic of authentic poetry as opposed to false poetry, simulated poetry, the poisonous kind which constantly proliferates all around it. To sing or not to sing, that is the question, and there can be no hope in poetry for someone who does not sing, even if the poet must be asked to do more than just to sing. And I need hardly say that, for those who do not sing, the recourse to rhyme, fixed metre and other baggage would seduce only the ears of Midas. Aimé Césaire is above all the one who sings.

When it moves beyond this first absolutely necessary and non-sufficient state, poetry worthy of the name is evaluated by its level of abstention, by the refusal it implies, and this quality of negation demands to be seen as constitutive: it is repelled at the thought of allowing through anything that might already have been seen, understood or habitual, or at using what has been used before, unless it be to misappropriate it from its previous use. In this respect Césaire is one of the most obstinate, and not only because he is the soul of integrity but also to the extent that his knowledge is vaster, that he is at once one of the best and most widely informed.

Finally—and here, to dispel any ambiguity as to whether Notebook of a Return … is exceptionally a poem ‘with a subject’ if not ‘an argument’, I can specify that I am referring just as much to those poems (of a quite different order) published since: the poetry of Césaire, like all great poetry and all great art, is of the greatest merit due to the power of transmutation it activates, and which—starting from the most discredited of matter, amongst which must even be included monstrosities and slaveries—consists in producing what we well know to be no longer gold or the philosopher's stone, but liberty itself.¹

It would be too presumptuous to want to attribute the gift of song, the capacity for refusal and the power of particular transmutation that has just been mentioned to a certain number of technical secrets. All one can validly believe about it is that all three possess a greater common denominator which is the exceptional emotional intensity when faced with life's pageant (bringing with it the impulse to act on it in order to change it) and which, for the time being, remains irreducible. The most the critic may do is account for the most striking events in the formative years of the person in question, and shed light on what is significant about this development. It should be acknowledged that in this way, where Aimé Césaire is concerned, and for once, we shall emerge at full tilt from indifference.

Notebook of a Return to My Native Land is in this respect a unique and irreplaceable document. The understated title of the poem is alone such as to place us at the heart of the conflict which its author must feel most keenly, that conflict which he considers vitally important to overcome. In fact, he wrote this poem in Paris, when he had just left the École Normale Supérieure and he was preparing to return to Martinique. His native land: of course, how could one not be seduced by its skies, its siren sway, its all-cajoling accents? But just as quickly shadows gather: you need only put yourself in Césaire's shoes to appreciate what assaults this nostalgia might be exposed to. Behind these florid patterns lie the misery of a colonial people, their shameless exploitation by a handful of parasites who flaunt even the laws of the land they are dependent upon and yet unrepentantly dishonour, as well as the resignation of this people whose geographical disadvantage is to be sparsely planted seedlings in the middle of the sea. And even beyond that, just a few generations back, is slavery, and here the wound reopens; it reopens from all the magnificence of a lost Africa,² from the ancestral memory of suffering abominable treatment, from the consciousness of a monstrous and forever irreparable denial of justice whose victim was a whole community. A community to which the one who is leaving belongs body and soul, enriched with all that the whites could teach him and at that moment all the more torn.

In the Notebook it is only natural that such claims pitch him against feelings of bitterness or even of despair, and also that the author should expose himself to the most dramatic self-examinations. One cannot stress too much that these claims are the most well-founded in the world, so much so that for the sake of equity alone white people should long to see them realized. But that day is still too far off, even if it is now tentatively beginning to be put on the agenda: ‘In the former colonies, which should be submitted to a new system and whose evolution to liberty will become a matter of international concern, democracy must put an end not only to the exploitation of coloured peoples but also to the social and political “racism” of the white man.’³ It is with the same impatience that one awaits the day when, outside these colonies, the great mass of coloured peoples will cease to be kept at an outrageous distance and kennelled in employment that is at best subordinate. If the international settlements that will come into force on the conclusion of the present war fail to satisfy this expectation, one would be forced to subscribe definitively to the view, with all it implies, that the emancipation of coloured peoples can only be the work of these peoples themselves.

But if we were to be content with this more immediate aspect of his claim, no matter how deep-seated it may appear, it would be to reduce unforgivably the scope of Césaire's intervention. In my view the former is invaluable in that it constantly transcends the anguish that a black person associates with the fate of blacks in modern society and, making common cause with all poets, all artists and all thinkers worthy of the word but, providing a contribution of verbal genius, embraces everything about the conditions most generally imposed on mankind by this society that is not only intolerable but also infinitely curable. And this, writ large, is what surrealism has always made the first article of its programme: the firmly resolved will to deal a fatal blow to so-called ‘common sense’, whose impudence has been such as to claim the title of ‘reason’, and the overriding need to have done with this mortal dissociation of the human spirit, one of whose constituent parts has managed to allow itself every liberty at the expense of the other, and which moreover cannot fail to exalt the latter by dint of trying to frustrate it. If the slave traders themselves have vanished from the world's stage, one may be certain that in return they rage on in the mind, where their ‘black ivory’ is our dreams, more than the plundered half of our nature, that unripe cargo which can all too conveniently be sent to rot in the depths of the hold. ‘Because we hate you, you and your reason, we claim kinship with dementia praecox with flaming madness with tenacious cannibalism. … Accommodate yourself to me. I won't accommodate myself to you!’⁴ And suddenly comes this transfiguring stare, the blue bloom on the embers as if on the promise of a redemption that might no longer be a fraudulent one: he whom both Césaire and I hold to be the great prophet of times to come has just walked past, I mean Isidore Ducasse, the Comte de Lautréamont.

The poetry of Lautréamont, as beautiful as a warrant of expropriation. … He accumulates a pale, lyrical scattering of the death trumpets of a comedy of philosophy—as the fingers of the tropical pear tree fall off in the evening gangrene—which raises man, hands, feet and navel, to the dignity of the marvel of a hierarchical universe—a clamour of bare fists against the barrage of the sky. … The first to have understood that poetry begins with excess, immoderation, forbidden pursuits, in the great blind drumbeat right up to the incomprehensible rain of stars.⁵

The word of Aimé Césaire, as beautiful as oxygen being born.

Notes

1. To look at the reverse side of the coin, I had not expected this declaration in Lettres françaises (nos 7-8, February 1943): ‘I imagine poetry to be primarily a sort of writing which, obeying not only the constraints of prose but also those others unique to it (number, rhythm, the periodic repetition of sound) must also however surpass it in power. … In this way I require poetry to possess all the qualities sought in prose, of which the most important are nakedness, precision and clarity. … The poet must want to express entirely and solely what he desires. Ultimately there should be nothing ineffable, nothing suggestive, no evocative images, no mystery. …’, etcetera. Roger Caillois, often more inspired than this, expresses himself here like a perfect philistine.

2. Leo Frobenius, with reference to the observations of the European navigators of the late Middle Ages, writes: ‘When they arrived in the Bay of Guinea and landed at Vaïda, the captains were astonished to find well laid-out streets, flanked with a double row of trees for a distance of several leagues; for days on end they crossed a countryside covered with magnificent fields, inhabited by men wearing dazzling costumes whose cloth they had woven themselves! Further south, in the kingdom of the Congo, they found a teeming mass of people, dressed in ‘silk’ and ‘velvet’, well-ordered states, down to the smallest detail, powerful sovereigns, opulent industries. Civilized to the very marrow!’ (Quoted in Tropiques, no. 5, April 1942.)

3. Pierre Cot, ‘Les Différents Types de constitutions démocratiques’, Le Monde libre, no. 2, December 1943.

4. Editor's note: Aimé Césaire, Return to My Native Land (1969) Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 55-62.

5. Aimé Césaire, ‘Isidore Ducasse, comte de Lautréamont’, Tropiques, nos 6-7, February 1943.

   [originally published in Tropiques, no. 9 (May 1944), and then as a preface to Aimé Césaire, Memorandum On My Martinique (1947) New York: Brentano's, the first English-language edition of the Notebook of a Return to My Native Land; reprinted in André Breton, Martinique, charmeuse de serpents]