The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire

by Césaire, Aimé; Eshleman, Clayton; Arnold, A. James

  1946-1947: Césaire was co-sponsor of the law that transformed France’s Old Colonies (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, and Réunion) into overseas départements. Success in the legislature on March 13, 1946, was followed by delaying tactics, which postponed implementation of the law—freighted with amendments—for two years and resulted in colonial status under another name. As deputy, Césaire intervened regularly in debates to denounce systematic sabotage of the law he had sponsored.

  On April 19, 1946, Gallimard published Césaire’s wartime poems, collected under the title Les Armes miraculeuses (The Miraculous Weapons) to a cool reception by the Communist press.

  In January 1947, Brentano’s bookstore in New York belatedly published the Cahier/Notebook Césaire had sent to A. Breton in 1943. The markedly surrealist French text remained essentially unread and unknown until the publication of PTED in 2013. The English translation by I. Goll and L. Abel chopped up the long stanzas into more recognizably modernist American verse.

  In March, a new revision of the Cahier, published by Bordas in Paris, made concessions to sociopolitical considerations that the Brentano’s text had pointedly refused.

  A. Breton and M. Duchamp edited the catalog of the 1947 international surrealist exhibit at the Maeght Gallery in Paris, to which Césaire contributed “Couteaux midi” (Noon Knives). His continuing collaboration with the surrealists created tensions with his colleagues in the Communist party.

  1948-1949: Tensions between Césaire’s surrealist poetics of the 1940s and his commitment to decolonization increased considerably.

  On April 23, 1948, the Paris publisher known as “K” released Soleil cou coupé (Solar Throat Slashed); on the front and back cover, 60 copies were illustrated with original engravings by the German surrealist Hans Hartung. Antonin Artaud was also published by “K.”

  In July 1948, a first draft of Césaire’s “Discourse on Colonialism” was published by the conservative magazine Chemins du monde under the title “L’Impossible contact” (The Impossible Contact). The political climate was tense, and repression in the colonies severe: in Madagascar, the French army estimated that it killed 89,000 rebels in 1947; the Sétif massacre in Algeria on May 8, 1945, (V-E Day) had resulted in at least 6,000 Muslims killed, some of them lynched by French colonists.

  In April 1949, on his return from a trip to Romania, Césaire participated with Picasso, Aragon, and other communist intellectuals and artists in an international peace conference in Paris. Aragon presented Césaire as a young Communist poet and a worthy successor of Neruda and Mayakovsky. Picasso, who had met Césaire at a conference in Wroclaw (Breslau) the previous year, was then collaborating on Lost Body.

  In October, Mao Tse Tung declared China Communist.

  1950-1955: Césaire’s essays and published speeches during this period created the climate in which revised editions of his poetry would be read at the end of the decade.

  In 1950, Césaire’s collaboration with Pablo Picasso on the collection Lost Body was marked by a more relaxed syntax, less reliance on métaphore filée (free associative metaphor), and a shorter poetic line. For eleven years, however, the collection was read only by collectors because of the price of the richly illustrated volume.

  In the same year, the Discourse on Colonialism was published as a pamphlet by the Communist-affiliated Éditions Réclame.

  In 1952, Frantz Fanon published Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) in Paris.

  Présence Africaine was founded as a pan-African magazine by A. Diop in 1947. Prior to 1955, Césaire maintained a discreet distance, presumably to avoid directly confronting his Communist colleagues for whom ethnic identity had to be subsumed under the class struggle. Between 1955 and 1959, Présence Africaine published eight of Césaire’s poems collected in Ferraments in 1960.

  On July 9, 1955, Présence Africaine organized a public debate on national poetry to launch its double issue for April-June, which contained Césaire’s “Reply to Depestre Haitian Poet: Elements of an Ars Poetica.” The ensuing polemic with Louis Aragon, who in 1953 had attempted to enforce a social-realist poetics on members of the Party, made Césaire’s break with the Communists merely a matter of time. The October-November issue of Présence Africaine summed up Césaire’s contribution to the debate under the title “Sur la poésie nationale” (On National Poetry).

  Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism was reissued by Présence Africaine in preparation for the Congrès International des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs (First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists) to be held the following year.

  1956: In one year, Césaire published the remainder of the essays that would confirm the political turn of his poetry in the minds of his contemporaries.

  In its April-May issue, Présence Africaine published Césaire’s preface to D. Guérin’s book Les Antilles décolonisées (The Decolonized West Indies), in which Césaire called for the creation of nation-states in Martinique and Guadeloupe that could, sometime in the future, constitute a confederation on the model of the British West Indies. This position paper, which resembles E. Glissant’s thesis in Caribbean Discourse, remains little known today.

  Césaire’s address to the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists on September 20, “Culture et Colonisation” (Culture and Colonialism), was the high point of the four days of meetings at the Sorbonne, according to James Baldwin. Members of the black élite from the United States declared their opposition to Césaire’s claim that they were colonized within their own country; Haitian delegates objected to Césaire’s denial of the possibility of a hybridized culture. African delegates, on the other hand, thrilled to the concept of a pan-African socialist politics. The French newspaper of record, Le Monde, devoted three substantial articles to the congress, which was widely reported elsewhere in France and abroad.

  On October 24, Césaire wrote a letter to Maurice Thorez, First Secretary of the French Communist Party, announcing his resignation in the name of pan-African solidarity: “There will never be an African or Malagasy or West Indian variant of Communism because French Communism considers it more convenient (commode) to impose its own on us.” France-Observateur published extensive sections of the letter the following day; Présence Africaine issued it as a pamphlet at the end of the year.

  The version of Et les chiens se taisaient (And the Dogs Were Silent), rewritten for the stage and published by Présence Africaine, would be read in the context of Césaire’s aggressive anticolonialism, which effectively buried the mythological allusions present in the 1946 text.

  1957-1959: From the French Communist Party to independent socialism in Martinique.

  In July 1957, Césaire joined the group of African federalists in the National Assembly. Three days later, he voted against ratification of the European Economic Union on the grounds that it would damage the economy of Martinique.

  On September 22, 1957, Dr. François Duvalier was elected president of Haiti.

  On January 3, 1958, the West Indies Federation united British colonies in the Caribbean; the federation collapsed four years later because of tensions between independent Jamaica and Trinidad.

  In late March 1958, the Parti Progressiste Martinique (P.P.M.) was formed as an independent socialist party with Césaire at its head. In April, the P.P.M. published as a brochure Césaire’s speech calling for the transformation of Martinique into a region within the federal French Union (Union Française Fédérée).

  In the April 1958 local elections, the new P.P.M. surged ahead of the Communist Party and the traditional socialists (S.F.I.O.).

  In September 1958, after André Malraux’s visit to Martinique as representative of de Gaulle, Césaire called on the P.P.M. to vote in favor of the referendum that established the Fifth Republic and a new presidential system under Charles de Gaulle.

  From March 26 to April 1, 1959, the Second International Congress of Black Writers and Artists was held in Rome. Césaire’s address “L’Homme de culture et ses respo
nsabilités” (The Responsibilities of the Man of Culture) resonated with a passion for total commitment to the decolonization process. Whereas his focus at the first congress was on individual responsibility, on the eve of decolonization of France’s African colonies, he stressed the necessity to “hasten the maturation of collective consciousness, without which there will never be decolonization” (PTED, 1553).

  In December 1959, Césaire published in Présence Africaine “La Pensée politique de Sékou Touré” (The Political Thought of Sékou Touré); Touré was the only African leader to refuse the 1958 French referendum, choosing immediate independence for Guinea (Conakry) instead. Césaire’s Rousseauist interpretation of African socialism was soon belied by Sékou Touré’s repressive dictatorship. At the time, Césaire said he had visited Guinea in preparation for his essay; in 1971, he claimed to have visited Africa only once, in 1966.

  1960-1961: During these two years, Césaire published the collections that were to confirm him as the poet of decolonization. In 1960, Togo, Madagascar, Benin, Niger, Upper Volta, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, the Central African Republic, Congo (Brazzaville), Gabon, Senegal, Mali, and Mauritania acceded to independence.

  In February 1960, Seuil published Ferrements (Ferraments), which collected the best of his production of the previous decade. To an interviewer for Afrique Action he replied in November that, whereas Africa was sure of its independence, the French West Indies may have already lost their soul (CAA).

  In his preface to B. Juminer’s novel Les Bâtards (The Bastards), Césaire wrote that “more atrocious still than the colonial massacres or the grand, spectacular punishments is the spectacle of mediocrity slowly but surely devirilizing a people” (CBB). The people in question are the French Guianese of Juminer’s novel and those of the French West Indies more generally; “genocide by substitution” enters the language.

  On January 17, 1961, Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in the newly independent Congo (Kinshasa).

  In April, the Seuil publishing house released Césaire’s Cadastre, which combined a revised edition of Lost Body with a severely reduced and politically correct version of Solar Throat Slashed. It was to be his last new collection for twenty-one years.

  In its final issue for 1961, Présence Africaine published the first act of Césaire’s new play The Tragedy of King Christophe. In Act 1, Scene 5, the character Métellus represented the idealistic, universalizing, and spiritual version of negritude; he was condemned to death by Christophe in the name of political realities (CTC, 26-27).

  On December 6, Frantz Fanon died of leukemia in Bethesda Naval Hospital.

  1962-1965: Césaire’s poetry was refocused during these years as a sociopolitical enterprise, both through his own published statements and the efforts of Lilyan Kesteloot and Janheinz Jahn.

  In his preface to Anna Vizioli and Franco de Poli’s Italian translation of twenty-four poems from Miraculous Weapons and an extract of the Notebook, Césaire declared that the reader “will learn everything worth knowing about me and certainly more than I myself know” (EAC1, 343).

  In October 1962, Césaire made his acceptance speech at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich; he had been elected a corresponding member in 1960.

  L. Kesteloot’s 1962 essay on Césaire’s poetry, published in the Seghers contemporary poets collection, denied his active collaboration with the surrealists: “It was not his encounter with Breton, as has been claimed, that drew Césaire into the ‘divagations’ of surrealism” (KAC, 30). The same essay convinced readers that the 1939 “Cahier/Notebook” constituted “fragments” of a longer poem. This misinformation died hard.

  In the 1963 edition of her Aimé Césaire, Kesteloot published an interview Césaire gave her at the 1959 Rome Congress that was to obliterate his early definition of negritude as a transcendent, spiritual quest: “. . .negritude entails neither racism, nor denial of Europe, nor exclusivity, but on the contrary a fraternity with all men. . . . Thus defined, negritude is, for the black man, a condition sine qua non of the authenticity of creation in any and every domain whatsoever” (KAC, 93). Variations on this phrasing appeared in interviews regularly thereafter.

  In 1963, the Free University of Brussels published the dissertation in literary sociology that L. Kesteloot had presented for her doctorate in April 1961. Under the title Les Écrivains noirs de langue française: Naissance d’une littérature, it presented the research that was summarized in her 1962 Seghers volume (KAC). E. C. Kennedy’s translation of The Negritude Poets disseminated her interpretation of negritude as a political ideology in the United States from 1975 onward.

  During the last week in April 1963, Césaire and Janheinz Jahn, his German translator, worked at the rococo Eschenau castle on a bilingual edition of Solar Throat Slashed and Lost Body that revised and restored some of the poems cut from the Paris edition of Cadastre. The hybrid text of An Afrika was published in 1968 by Hanser in Munich. E. Ruhe discussed its importance in detail (ROM).

  In May 1963, Césaire attended the summit of independent African nations that founded the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

  Césaire visited Salvador de Bahia in the Northeast of Brazil with A. Adandé, who was to create the ethnographic museum of Porto-Novo in Benin in 1966. The syncretic Afro-Brazilian culture of the region had a powerful effect on Césaire.

  Aimé and Suzanne Césaire were divorced in 1963; Suzanne died of a brain tumor in May 1966.

  Présence Africaine published La Tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe) in which Césaire treated Henri Christophe as a tragic figure torn between the West and Africa.

  In 1964, J.-L. Bédouin published in the anthology La Poésie surréaliste an extract from the Cahier/Notebook and the poems “Noon Knives” and “Barbarity” (from Solar Throat Slashed), thus countering Kesteloot’s thesis in KAC and LKN.

  In January 1965, Césaire told an interviewer for the Senegalese magazine Bingo that negritude was not fundamentally different from Nkrumah’s African Personality or the Harlem Renaissance. He stressed the African diaspora in defining the scope of negritude (EAC1, 376).

  1966-1969: Césaire’s oeuvre was introduced into the United States as the New Left and the Black Panthers came to the fore; its pan-African dimension dominated discussion.

  In 1966, Clayton Eshleman and Denis Kelly published State of the Union, an anthology of poems translated from The Miraculous Weapons, Cadaster and Ferraments. This was the first serious attempt to present Césaire to American readers of poetry.

  On February 21, 1966, Malcolm X was assassinated in New York City.

  In March, Une Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo) was published by Seuil. The play focused attention on the rise of Mobutu Sese Seko in the former Belgian Congo through collusion of the western powers and the United Nations; Patrice Lumumba emerged as a tragic figure. In two revisions of the text (1967 and 1972), Césaire first softened his characterization of Mobutu, then heightened the ferocity of the Congolese dictator (EAC1, 388-89).

  On March 30, Césaire traveled with André Malraux to the Casamance region of Senegal, where the traditional queen bore a strong resemblance to his paternal grandmother.

  In April, Césaire served as vice president of the First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar, Senegal. His impromptu speech on African art (“Discours sur l’art africain”) rebutted the official remarks made by A. Malraux as French Minister of Culture. Césaire stressed the necessity for art in Africa to define itself against “Euro-American civilization, the industrial civilization that covers the globe with its network and reaches . . . the most remote places on the planet” (PTED, 1562). After stressing that “no word annoys me more than the word négritude,” he acknowledged that “negritude literature has been a literature of combat” and that “negritude poetry had so much shock value only because it disrupted the image that white people held of black people” (PTED, 1564-65). In essence, he updated the argument of “Poetry and Knowledge” (1944) with
out changing its fundamental thrust.

  In October, Césaire affirmed in his homage to André Breton, who had died on 28 September, that their meeting in Fort-de-France in 1941 “decisively reoriented my life” (EAC1, 395).

  From January 4 to 11, 1968, Césaire participated in an international cultural conference in Havana; on that occasion, he met Fidel Castro and renewed his friendship with Wifredo Lam.

  On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.

  In May, Negro Digest published the interview Césaire gave E. C. Kennedy at the World Festival of Negro Arts two years earlier. He stressed the remarkable unity of the black world against M. Herskovits’s claim that Africa presented a diversity of cultures. He further declared his sympathy with grassroots movements like the Black Panthers who rejected the assimilation of the black bourgeoisie into white culture.

  In June, Césaire visited Harlem at the invitation of the Black Panther Party during a layover on his flight from Paris to Fort-de-France.