The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire
Page 4
At the end of daybreak . . .
Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it, I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Beat it, evil grigri, you bedbug of a petty monk. Then I turned toward paradises lost for him and his kin, calmer than the face of a woman telling lies, and there, rocked by the flux of a never exhausted thought I nourished the wind, I unlaced the monsters and heard rise, from the other side of disaster, a river of turtledoves and savanna clover which I carry forever in my depths height-deep as the twentieth floor of the most arrogant houses and as a guard against the putrefying force of crepuscular surroundings, surveyed night and day by a cursed venereal sun.6
One can scarcely overestimate the effect of this passage, which situates the speaker personally and politically over against a society that is policed by “the flunkies of order.” Moreover, on the threshold of this new iteration of the poem, the speaker already knows the lessons revealed only in the conclusion of the 1939 text. As a frame tale, this vision worthy of Lautréamont places in a recent past the evocation of the sick colony (stanzas 1-24) that was in fact the narrative present of the poem in its two earlier versions. Finally, readers of The Miraculous Weapons, published just a year earlier, could recognize in the “other side of disaster” one of Césaire’s recurring metaphors for the slave trade and its consequences. The frame tale inaugurated by the new overture to the Cahier/Notebook was completed in the 1947 Bordas edition by four new stanzas that Césaire placed strategically just prior to the finale:
by the clinking noon sea
by the burgeoning midnight sun
listen sparrow hawk that holds the keys to the orient
by the disarmed day
by the stony spurt of the rain
listen dogfish that watches over the occident
listen white dog of the north, black serpent of the south
that cinches the sky girdle
…
and for this reason, [white-toothed] Lord, the frail-necked men
receive and perceive deadly triangular calm7
This new material contained a political allegory alien to earlier texts of the poem. In the context of the looming Cold War, images of whiteness, predatory dogs, and dogfish sharks designated clearly enough the capitalist world of the West that Césaire set over against the Soviet “sparrow hawk that holds the keys to the orient.” Political allegory was absent from the poetics of the Cahier/Notebook from 1939 to the 1947 New York edition. Still more important perhaps was the rhythmic break the new material introduced just prior to the speaker’s final revelatory vision. By redirecting the reader’s attention from the spiritual transformation of the speaker onto a political plane, the frame of reference and the conditions for producing meaning were strategically modified. The Bordas text thus represents both a denial and a reorientation of the poetics Césaire had practiced in revising his long poem between 1941 and 1943. They certainly resulted from Césaire’s frustration over the French government’s refusal to grant full political and economic rights to its West Indian citizens from 1946 to 1948.
In a clear break with his previous editorial practice of accretion and transposition, Césaire in 1956 for the first time engaged in substantive suppression of elements in the text that no longer resonated with his new political orientation. Since we have published a detailed summary (AFM), a few representative samples will suffice here:
In stanza 63 of the Brentano’s edition, maintained in Bordas at stanza 37, “Behold then the horsemen of the Apocalypse” clearly referenced the Book of Revelation (translated as Apocalypse in French). When the line was suppressed in 1956, the reference to “the apocalypse of monsters” in stanza 31 lost much of its spiritual connotation.
In the same stanza, the question “Who and what are we?” contained in the answer a clear reference to Vodun: “Hougans. Especially hougans. For we want all the demons. . . .” Present from the Brentano’s to the Bordas edition, it had to be deleted from the Présence Africaine version for the same reasons as the foregoing examples.
In stanza 75, the speaker’s “virile prayer” includes “grant me the courage of the martyr,” which was already omitted from the Brentano’s edition of 1947.
In stanza 79 of the 1939 text, the speaker, praying for preservation “from all hatred” declares “you know my catholic love”; in the Brentano’s edition we read “love” without any modifier; in the Bordas edition “my tyrannical love” accords nicely with the new orientation described above; all later editions retain this change, which represents a complete reorientation of the image from a spiritual to a political register.
Suppression of material that had reinforced a spiritual interpretation of the poem was counterbalanced in 1956 by the insertion between 87 and 88 of a dozen new stanzas that foreground the suffering of individual laborers whom Césaire named: Siméon Piquine, Grandvorka, Michel Deveine. Moreso than in the Bordas edition, politics intervened to make of the wretched of the earth the new heroes of the poem. Thus, when the reader comes to “And my special geography too. . .” in stanza 88, s/he sees the “I” as another example of these oppressed laborers. Consequently, from 1956 onward, the Cahier/Notebook would define negritude as a socio-political ideal, no longer the spiritual quest it had been in its first two iterations.
Césaire’s postwar interventions in the Cahier/Notebook also separate it from the first decade of his practice as a lyric poet. Whereas Solar Throat Slashed (1948) and Lost Body (1950) represent further elaborations of Césaire’s surrealist poetics tempered by his new political experience, the Notebook entered the realm of ideological and political discourse with the Bordas edition of 1947. It is no accident, in our view, that the Notebook should have been published after 1956 by Présence Africaine along with Césaire’s political essays, whereas his new poetry would be published by Éditions du Seuil, which was emerging as the foremost publisher of poetry in Paris. For the remainder of his career, Césaire would maintain a clear separation between his political identity—which included the Cahier/Notebook—and his identity as a modernist poet.
* * *
1. An ampersand in the text of the Notebook. . . refers the reader to the Notes document rather than the Glossary.
2. Translations in the headnotes are by AJA unless otherwise indicated.
3. The edited typescript and the letter to the editor of Volontés can be consulted in the library of the French National Assembly. The letter is dated May 28, 1939.
4. Aimé Césaire, “Maintenir la poésie,” Tropiques, nos. 8-9 (October 1943): 7-8. André Breton received the revised version of the Cahier/Notebook in New York earlier that year. It is unclear whether a quarrel between Breton and Yvan Goll or a restriction on the number of foreign books that could be published during the war was ultimately responsible for delaying publication of Memorandum on My Martinique, translated by Goll and Lionel Abel, until January 1947. At all events, the result was that the Brentano’s edition, published in New York, remained unread and unknown in France. Had its unique poetics been known earlier, it would have been impossible to maintain that he never practiced surrealist poetry.
5. For the details of this long interpolated passage and its change of place in the 1947 Paris edition, see PTED, 146-48.
6. Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, translated and edited by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001): 1; Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Bordas, 1947), 25-26. Both the text and the pagination are unchanged in the 1956 edition published in Paris by Présence Africaine.
7. Aimé Césaire, Notebook. . ., 2001 ed., 48-49. The image in square brackets was dropped from 1956 onward; four stanzas were reduced to two. We have omitted from the quotation fifteen lines that, from the 1947 Bordas to the 1994 Poésie edition, attempt to meld the new political discourse into the surrealist imagery that predominated in earlier texts.
CAHIER D’UN RETOUR
AU PAYS NATAL
1
>
At the end of the small hours burgeoning with frail coves the hungry Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dust of this town sinisterly stranded.
1
Au bout du petit matin bourgeonnant d’anses frêles les Antilles qui ont faim, les Antilles grêlées de petite vérole, les Antilles dynamitées d’alcool, échouées dans la boue de cette baie, dans la poussière de cette ville sinistrement échouées.
2
At the end of the small hours, the extreme, deceptive desolate eschar on the wound of the waters; the martyrs who do not bear witness; the flowers of blood that fade and scatter in the empty wind like the cries of babbling parrots; an aged life mendaciously smiling, its lips opened by vacated agonies; an aged poverty rotting under the sun, silently; an aged silence bursting with tepid pustules
2
Au bout du petit matin, l’extrême, trompeuse désolée eschare sur la blessure des eaux ; les martyrs qui ne témoignent pas ; les fleurs du sang qui se fanent et s’éparpillent dans le vent inutile comme des cris de perroquets babillards ; une vieille vie menteusement souriante, ses lèvres ouvertes d’angoisses désaffectées ; une vieille misère pourrissant sous le soleil, silencieusement ; un vieux silence crevant de pustules tièdes
3
the dreadful inanity of our raison d’être.
3
l’affreuse inanité de notre raison d’être.
4
At the end of the small hours, on this very fragile earth thickness exceeded in a humiliating way by its grandiose future—the volcanoes will explode,& the naked water will bear away the ripe sun stains and nothing will be left but a tepid bubbling pecked at by sea birds—the beach of dreams and the insane awakening.
4
Au bout du petit matin, sur cette plus fragile épaisseur de terre que dépasse de façon humiliante son grandiose avenir – les volcans éclateront, l’eau nue emportera les taches mûres du soleil et il ne restera plus qu’un bouillonnement tiède picoré d’oiseaux marins – la plage des songes et l’insensé réveil.
5
At the end of the small hours, this town sprawled—flat, toppled from its common sense, inert, winded under its geometric weight of an eternally renewed cross, indocile to its fate, mute, vexed no matter what, incapable of growing according to the juice of this earth, encumbered, clipped, reduced, in breach of its fauna and flora.
5
Au bout du petit matin, cette ville plate – étalée, trébuchée de son bon sens, inerte, essoufflée sous son fardeau géométrique de croix éternellement recommençante, indocile à son sort, muette, contrariée de toutes façons, incapable de croître selon le suc de cette terre, embarrassée, rognée, réduite, en rupture de faune et de flore.
6
At the end of the small hours, this town sprawled—flat. . .
And in this inert town, this squalling throng so astonishingly detoured from its cry like this town from its movement, from its meaning, not even worried, detoured from its true cry, the only cry one would have wanted to hear because it alone feels at home in this town; because one feels that it inhabits some deep refuge of shadow and of pride, in this inert town, this throng detoured from its cry of hunger, of poverty, of revolt, of hatred, this throng so strangely chattering and mute.
6
Au bout du petit matin, cette ville plate – étalée…
Et dans cette ville inerte, cette foule criarde si étonnamment passée à côté de son cri comme cette ville à côté de son mouvement, de son sens, sans inquiétude, à côté de son vrai cri, le seul qu’on eût voulu l’entendre crier parce qu’on le sent sien lui seul ; parce qu’on le sent habiter en elle dans quelque refuge profond d’ombre et d’orgueil, dans cette ville inerte, cette foule à côté de son cri de faim, de misère, de révolte, de haine, cette foule si étrangement bavarde et muette.
7
In this inert town, this strange throng that does not huddle, does not mix; clever at discovering the point of disincasement, of flight, of dodging. This throng that does not know how to throng, this throng, one realizes, so perfectly alone under the sun, like a woman one thought completely occupied with the lyric cadence of her buttocks, who abruptly challenges a hypothetical rain and enjoins it not to fall; or like a rapid sign of the cross without perceptible motive; or like the sudden grave animality of a peasant, urinating standing, her legs parted, stiff.
7
Dans cette ville inerte, cette étrange foule qui ne s’entasse pas, ne se mêle pas ; habile à découvrir le point de désencastration, de fuite, d’esquive. Cette foule qui ne sait pas faire foule, cette foule, on s’en rend compte, si parfaitement seule sous ce soleil, à la façon dont une femme, toute on eût cru à la cadence lyrique de ses fesses, interpelle brusquement une pluie hypothétique et lui intime l’ordre de ne pas tomber ; ou à un signe rapide de croix sans mobile visible ; ou à l’animalité subitement grave d’une paysanne, urinant debout, les jambes écartées, roides.
8
In this inert town, this desolate throng under the sun, not connected with anything that is expressed, asserted, released in broad earth daylight, its own. Not with Josephine&, Empress of the French, dreaming way up there above the nigger scum. Nor with the liberator& fixed in his whitewashed stone liberation. Nor with the conquistador.& Nor with this contempt, nor with this freedom, nor with this audacity.
8
Dans cette ville inerte, cette foule désolée sous le soleil, ne participant à rien de ce qui s’exprime, s’affirme, se libère au grand jour de cette terre sienne. Ni à l’Impératrice Joséphine des Français rêvant très haut au-dessus de la négraille. Ni au libérateur figé dans sa libération de pierre blanchie. Ni au conquistador. Ni à ce mépris, ni à cette liberté, ni à cette audace.
9
At the end of the small hours, this inert town and its beyond of lepers, of consumption, of famines, of fears crouched in the ravines, of fears perched in the trees, of fears dug in the ground, of fears adrift in the sky, of piled up fears and their fumeroles of anguish.
9
Au bout du petit matin, cette ville inerte et ses au-delà de lèpres, de consomption, de famines, de peurs tapies dans les ravins, de peurs juchées dans les arbres, de peurs creusées dans le sol, de peurs en dérive dans le ciel, de peurs amoncelées et ses fumerolles d’angoisse.
10
At the end of the small hours the morne& forgotten, forgetful of exploding.
10
Au bout du petit matin le morne oublié, oublieux de sauter.
11
At the end of the small hours the morne in restless, docile hooves—its malarial blood routs the sun with its overheated pulse.
11
Au bout du petit matin le morne au sabot inquiet et docile – son sang impaludé met en déroute le soleil de ses pouls surchauffés.
12
At the end of the small hours the restrained conflagration of the morne, like a sob gagged on the verge of a bloodthirsty burst, in quest of an ignition that slips away and ignores itself.
12
Au bout du petit matin l’incendie contenu du morne, comme un sanglot que l’on a bâillonné au bord de son éclatement sanguinaire, en quête d’une ignition qui se dérobe et se méconnaît.
13
At the end of the small hours, the morne crouching before bulimia on the outlook for tuns and mills, slowly vomiting out its human fatigue, the morne solitary and its blood shed, the morne bandaged in shade, the morne and its ditches of fear, the morne and its great hands of wind.
13
Au bout du petit matin, le morne accroupi devant la boulimie aux aguets de foudres et de moulins, lentement vomissant ses fatigues d’hommes, le morne seul et son sang répandu, le morne et ses pansements d’ombre, le morne et ses rigoles de peur, le morne et ses grandes mains de vent.
14
At the end of the small hours, the famished morne and no one knows better than this bast
ard morne why the suicide choked in complicity with his hypoglossal jamming his tongue backward to swallow it; why a woman seems to float belly up on the Capot River& (her luminous obscure body submissively organized at the command of her navel) but she is only a bundle of sonorous water.
14
Au bout du petit matin, le morne famélique et nul ne sait mieux que ce morne bâtard pourquoi le suicidé*1 s’est étouffé avec complicité de son hypoglosse en retournant sa langue pour l’avaler ; pourquoi une femme semble faire la planche à la rivière Capot (son corps lumineusement obscur s’organise docilement au commandement du nombril) mais elle n’est qu’un paquet d’eau sonore.
15
And neither the teacher in his classroom, nor the priest at catechism will be able to get a word out of this sleepy little picaninny, no matter how energetically they drum on his shorn skull, for starvation has quicksanded his famished voice into the swamp of hunger (a word-one-single-word and we-will-forget-about-Queen-Blanche-of-Castille, & a word-one-single-word, you-should see-this-little-savage-who-doesn’t-know-any-of-God’s-Ten-Commandments),
for his voice gets lost in the swamp of hunger,
and there is nothing, really nothing to squeeze out of this little brat,