A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  Some five years after his return to Martinique at the start of the war, Césaire became actively involved in Martinican politics and public affairs. From that point on, his political career closely shadowed, yet never completely overshadowed, his work as one of the Caribbean’s foremost authors and intellectuals (in any language), work for which his formal education might be thought to have prepared him rather more fully than for a career as a statesman. The son of a tax inspector father and a dressmaker mother, Césaire had followed a prestigious academic trajectory in his studies. He attended the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France (the capital of Martinique) alongside Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guyana, who would later become a renowned poet also. Césaire subsequently studied at the famous Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and thereafter at the even more renowned Ecole Normale Supérieure, where he crowned his literary studies with a thesis on the theme of the South in the “littérature négro-africaine” of the United States (the writings of Richard Wright, Claude MacKay, et al.). On his return to Martinique in 1939, he taught in the Lycée Schoelcher. It is often alleged that Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant, two of the most influential Caribbean writers and thinkers of their generation, were his pupils. This claim has been contested, but there seems little doubt that Césaire’s work influenced both authors.

  Césaire’s public career as an administrator and politician quickly superseded his teaching vocation. In 1945, he was elected—on the Communist ticket—as mayor of Fort-de-France. He continued in this role for nearly sixty years, until 2001. The same year saw him take a seat in the French parliament, where he represented Martinique for more than forty-eight years, until 1993. In this latter role, Césaire was, if not instrumental, then at the very least fully cooperative, in negotiating in 1946 France’s official recognition of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guyana as “overseas départements,” or direct administrative units of France rather than as less fully integrated entities.

  Césaire’s politics were leftist; he was, after all, for some considerable time a member of the French Communist Party. However, in the wake of the invasion of Hungary and in the face of that party’s refusal clearly to denounce Stalinism—but also, and more critically, given the contradictions between the universalist class-based agenda of French communism and Césaire’s more specific antiracist and anticolonialist agenda—he made a vocal exit in 1956, explaining his resignation in a published open letter to the then Party Secretary, Maurice Thorez. In the same year, disillusioned with the (neocolonial) realities of départementalisation as opposed to its political promises (of equality), Césaire founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais, which advocated increased autonomy—not outright independence—for France’s former Caribbean colonies. Césaire’s fraught relations with communism and their complete fracture eventually, were not, then, the only noteworthy aspects of his political profile. What was controversial both at the time and thereafter was rather the aforementioned fact that, despite being an anticolonialist intellectual of immense conviction and energy, he nonetheless supported the 1946 Act of Union. And he did so at a time when European colonies worldwide were either edging forward toward, or already involved in, movements—if not outright wars—of independence. (In 1945 there had already been rumblings of anticolonial riots and risings in Indochina and Algeria.)

  Subsequent generations of Caribbean intellectuals criticized the writer’s apparent support for anachronistic neocolonial tutelage. However, as Césaire’s wife, Suzanne Césaire, née Roussy, a Martinican whom Césaire had married in 1937, herself also a writer and co-founder of Tropiques, would later argue in an article published in the wartime journal, the Caribbean islanders had themselves opted for parity (with the citizens of metropolitan France) in preference to independence, autonomy, or sovereignty. In his published conversations with Françoise Vergès, Césaire himself explains this choice in the same terms and without any notable defensiveness. While asserting the right to independence of former colonies, he also defends their right to claim what he himself clearly regards as higher imperatives, namely, equality and fraternity.

  Difficult to digest as Césaire’s apparently paradoxical political moderation was for some, at least one of his natural literary heirs rejected even more strongly his adoption of a particularly rarefied register of the French language as his poetic idiom. Even a cursory glance at the Notebook and at the subsequent poetry confirms that Césaire’s poetic diction is often erudite, at times hyperbolically classical or latinate, and even abstrusely recondite. The Martinican novelist and cofounder of the Creoleness movement, Raphaël Confiant, in his diatribe Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle (A paradoxical journey through the century) argues that Césaire’s poetic style betrays the bad faith of the anticolonialist who has in reality become so assimilated as to need to show his “more French than French” mastery of the national idiom. Confiant alleges, moreover, Césaire’s rejection and/or suppression of his Creole identity, the identity championed by Confiant and his fellow-Creolists in their 1989 manifesto, In Praise of Creoleness. Confiant accuses Césaire’s poetics of reflecting at best the political naïveté, at worst the political treachery of the thoroughly assimilated neocolonial subject. Many Caribbean writers distanced themselves, of course, from this reductive reading of Césaire’s work, discredited as it was by its dogmatic policing of literary, cultural, and political authenticity and by its partial approach to Césaire’s actual writing. Confiant’s analysis overlooks in particular the unusual diversity of registers and idioms of Césaire’s protean poetics.

  A far more plausible case could be made for reading the stylistic eclecticism of Césaire’s writing as evidence of a schizoid division between the uncompromising richness and resonance of the poetic language and the pragmatics of historical analysis and political activism. Certainly, toward the end of his life, Césaire himself downplayed the significance of his political contribution to his “native land.” Indeed, in the interviews with Françoise Vergès, he confided not only that his real achievement was in the literary field, but that he was only able to be completely true to himself in his poetry. Moreover, forty years prior to that admission, and some time before his political career had even begun, the poet had explicitly stated the need to protect the inner life of selfhood from the pressures of political engagement. He thus refers (in “Maintenir la poésie,” published in the review Tropiques) to the obligation to “protect oneself from the social by the creation of an incandescent aura beyond or within which the unheard-of flower of the ‘I’ can blossom in fierce safety.” However, what is absolutely clear from the relative power of the various strata of the literary oeuvre is that the most unique, the most unforgettable, and the fiercest flower of Césaire’s “I” blooms upon the axis of articulation of the poetic and the political, of the “I” and the “we.”

  Césaire’s poetics is underwritten by a profound anticolonial animus, devoid of first-degree ressentiment. Two principal sets of issues register in all his work: first, the need to reconstruct—in the wake of the destructive losses of colonialism—a sense of collective value and voice, community and continuity, memory and belonging; and second, the risks and challenges that ensue following decolonization, as newly independent states strive to recover from the injustices and inequalities spawned by the displacements and tyrannies of colonialism and attempt to institute just democracies. The first imperative permeates all of Césaire’s writings; the second registers almost exclusively in the dramas.

  The most incisive critical or theoretical analyses published by Césaire are the two that he devotes to these questions: the 1955 Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism) and the 1960 study on Toussaint Louverture. In the Discourse, the indictment of colonialism is based on the opposition established between civilization and colonization. Blistering rhetoric links colonialism and Nazism, both underpinned by the barbaric racism through which the oppressors reify, instrumentalize, and ultimately dehumanize human beings, and in so doing decivilize a
nd dehumanize themselves. In his analysis of the figure of Toussaint Louverture, Césaire compares the political dynamics of the French and the Haitian revolutions. Yet, however powerful these two “theoretical” texts might be, Césaire’s critique of colonialism is at its most effective in his literary writing, rather than in his essays. So, unlike the two Martinican writers Edouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon (author of a definitive analysis of Caribbean racism, Peau noire, masques blancs [Black Skin, White Masks] and of the anticolonial charter Les damnés de la terre [The Wretched of the Earth]), and also unlike Albert Memmi, the Tunisian author of Portrait du colonisé, précédé par Portrait du colonisateur (The Colonizer and the Colonized), Césaire must be regarded as a poet and dramatist first and foremost and only in a secondary way as a critical analyst, theoretician, or polemicist. Although, unlike Fanon, Glissant was a poet and novelist, and while Memmi is also known as a novelist, the literary work of all three arguably serves mainly to illustrate their theories. In no way could this be said of Césaire’s writing.

  Césaire’s Cahier is an epic poem, a text of great stamina therefore, written both in prose and in verse. It appears to have been composed during an almost reclusive, introspective period of the poet’s life in Paris and is perhaps related to a trip to Yugoslavia and to a return visit to Martinique (in 1936). Certainly, it traces a return journey, apparently from Europe to the native Caribbean—from personal, voluntary exile back to a homeland that is, itself, originally, a place both of collective exile and of mass historical transportation, enslavement, and alienation. The poem moves from the betrayal, shame, and rage aroused by the abjection of the “old negritude” (vieille négritude) to a rousing call for self-affirmation of “the risen black” (le nègre debout). Sixty years after the publication in 1939 of this searing poem in the review Volontés, Césaire still boiled when recalling the worst curse of colonialism: namely, the racist underpinnings of the hollowing, expropriating agenda of European imperialism. The poem is also, however, about an imaginary return to Africa, to the homeland, and this Babylonian theme lends the text considerable added depth and imaginative resonance.

  Subsequently published by Présence Africaine in 1956, and never again out of print, the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal remains Césaire’s most celebrated work. Three related features of the text make it stand out: first, its imaginative scope, which gives a richly ambitious, dense, and vigorous sense of location in space and time; second, the dramatic shift that takes place from a first movement, all prone subjection and abjection in the paradoxical image of the exhausted, butt-end of a watery dawn (“au bout du petit matin”) to a second movement of revolt and upright self-affirmation; third, the power of its eruptive language: both the energetic—now sinuous, now jagged—syntax and a vocabulary that is extremely wide-ranging and various in modulation and color.

  On that latter account alone, it is tempting to compare the tenor of Césaire’s language with the work, written during the same period, of Saint-John Perse, the 1960 Nobel laureate also born and raised in the French Caribbean. Whereas this poet/diplomat of white Creole origin consistently wrote in the unmistakably major key of victorious conquest and colonization, Césaire’s equally encyclopedic lexical reach and daring, and the equal breath and breadth of his epic poetics, are sounded in the minor key, from the perspective of the dispossessed, the disempowered. Not only does the speaker promise to be the mouthpiece of the voiceless, but he hails those who had no part in their silencing: “Eia pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien inventé / Pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien exploré / Pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien dompté.” (Eia for those who’ve never invented anything / For those who have never explored anything / For those who have never tamed anything.) Recalling the invisible “vie prostrée” (prostrate lives) of the subordinated, not just of blacks but also of “l’homme-juif / l’homme cafre” (the Jew-Man, the Kaffir Man), Césaire’s representation of the biting humiliations of domination are extraordinarily vivid, as when he envisions the abjection of the plantation island as a “bedsore on the wounded waters” (“eschare sur la blessure des eaux”). Moreover, when the Cahier narrates the speaker’s betrayal of one of his own, it underlines the fractures undermining the strength and unity of this misbegotten, aborted community: “Cette foule qui ne sait pas faire foule” (This crowd that can’t be a proper crowd).

  Certainly, the nostalgic poetics of a colonial childhood of the Guadeloupean-born-and-raised poet, Saint-John Perse, had—as early as 1910—put Caribbean plantation culture on the French literary map in a register that was surrealist avant la lettre and that broke both with amnesiac Parnassian alienation and with cloying tropical self-exoticism. The (at least) equal pungency and potency of Césaire’s poetic imagination provoked, however, an incomparable poetic explosion given the radically disjunctive charge of its political engagement. Césaire gives voice to the silent servants of Saint-John Perse’s Eloges (Praises). Perse’s mute domestic attendants with their “faces insonores, couleur de papaya et d’ennui” (silent faces, the color of papaya and boredom) impose through Césaire their fragmented story of resurgent memories and what the poet terms, in his “Discourse on Negritude,” the “debris of murdered cultures.” Moreover, their projective, future-orientated timbre is radically disjunctive: from the “Antilles grélées de petite vérole” (West Indies scarred by smallpox), fried “nuit et jour d’un sacré soleil vénérien” (night and day by a fierce venereal sun), putrescent and starved, to the “éclaboussement d’or des instants favorisés” (gold splash of favored moments), to “la négraille assise / inattendûment debout” (the squatting nigger-nation / unexpectedly upright), “debout / et / libre,” (upright / and / free) and to “la danse brise-carcan, / la danse saute-prison” (the dungeon-busting dance, the prison-exploding dance), and “ma noire vibration au nombril même du monde” (my black vibration in the world’s very navel). What is perhaps most significant about the speaker’s sense of complete centrality and self-coincidence (“Je force la membrane vitelline qui me sépare de moi-même” [I break through the egg-yolk membrane separating me from myself]) is that it has happened through his identification with the broken of all times and places. While this contributes to a sense of universal humanism, it does not cancel the sense of place marking Césaire’s poetics.

  Certainly, Césaire’s literary language is no more stamped by the Creole language than is that of Saint-John Perse. And yet, while Africa is a presence in his writing, it is the Caribbean landscape and Antillean history that saturate his literary imagination as a whole. From the Cahier onward, the omnipresence of marine imagery in the poetry foregrounds the ocean that was the theater of the traumatic Middle Passage and the amniotic source—“grand’lèche hystérique” (great hysterical lick)—both of all terrestrial life and specifically of the black Caribbean population. Thus, Césaire’s ocean is at once historically resonant and also an ahistorical, universal principal of unity, a culturally undifferentiated matrix. The volcano, just as powerful and omnipresent as the sea in Césaire’s poetics (as in Caribbean space) simmers, shudders, and can unpredictably explode into a roaring magma that is an objective correlative of the rage of colonial injustice so unforgettably parsed in the Cahier: “Et ce pays cria pendant des siècles … que nous sommes un fumier ambulant hideusement prometteur de cannes” (And down through the centuries this land screamed … that we are walking manure, so wretchedly good for the sugarcane harvest).

  During the war years, Césaire published poetry in Tropiques, and it was collected in Les armes miraculeuses (Miraculous Weapons) in 1946. Significantly, this volume also included the text of Césaire’s first play, Et les chiens se taisaient (And the Dogs Were Silent). As the volume’s title indicates, this poetry is surrealist and more inward and fragmented, less epic and less political than the Cahier. It does, however, include the highly lyrical oratorio of the collective drama, centered on the figure of a “Rebel” who relives his dreams and mistakes, defeats and triumphs as he faces up to the solitude of h
eroism and to the ultimate self-confrontation that is the final stand-off with death. The Rebel’s interlocutors include two Madwomen, a Choir, a Mother, Bishops, Horsemen and a Narrator. However, despite the literary abstraction of the cast, there are references to the rape of Africa, and the play is clearly set against the historical backdrop of a generic colonial debacle: “les Blancs débarquent” (the white man is landing). In 1956, the text of the tragedy was published by Présence Africaine in a form “arranged for the theater.”

  This volume sets the tone for the fundamental post-Cahier bifurcation in Césaire’s writing. There would be, on the one hand, several further volumes of poetry published in postwar Paris: Soleil cou coupé (Solar Throat Slashed, Editions K, 1947) and Corps perdu (Lost Body, Editions Fragrance, 1950), the latter illustrated with engravings by Picasso. Both collections were completely rearranged and abridged in a volume titled Cadastre (Seuil, 1961). This substantive rewriting, revision, or reedition of previously published poetry is a recurrent feature of Césaire’s practice and especially remarkable in the case of the dramas, the several published versions of which were in most cases significantly different both among themselves and from the initial stage versions. As the poetry became in many ways more hermetic and inward after the Cahier, Césaire’s more overtly politically engaged writing was for the theater. Following almost two decades of mainly theatrical writing, there were very long gaps between the publication of the final three poetry collections: Ferrements (Irons in ferment, or Ferraments as the published translation has it, Seuil, 1960); Noria (Raid, Désormeaux, 1976); and finally Moi, laminaire … (Me, Laminary …, Seuil, 1982), after which Césaire’s literary voice fell silent.