(The Rebel collapses, face down and arms extended, as the tom-toms explode frantically, covering the speakers’ voices).
LE REBELLE
Les chenilles rampent vers l’auberge des bonnets de coton… La cuve de la terre s’est éteinte… c’est bon… mais le ciel mange du bétel… ha, ha le ciel suce des poignards… Roi de Malaisie et de la fièvre pleine d’insectes, mâche bien ton criss et ton bétel… Mon fils, mon fils une balle pourrit entre tes sourires blancs… aïe, je marche dans des piquants d’étoiles. Je marche… J’assume… J’embrasse…
(Le Rebelle s’affaisse, les bras étendus la face contre terre, à ce moment des tams-tams éclatent, frénétiques, couvrant les voix).
THE REBEL
Leaning on the parapet of fire
the clouds’ screams were not enough for me
Bark tom-toms
Bark guard dogs of the high portal
dogs of nothingness
bark from combat fatigue
LE REBELLE
Accoudé à la rampe de feu
les cris des nuages ne me suffisaient pas
Aboyez tams-tams
Aboyez chiens gardiens du haut portail
chiens du néant
aboyez de guerre lasse
bark serpent heart
bark scandal of the steamroom and the grigri
bark fury of lymphs
council of ancient terrors
bark
dismasted wrecks
even unto the abdication of centuries and stars.
aboyez cœur de serpent
aboyez scandale d’étuve et de gris-gris
aboyez furie des lymphes
concile des peurs vieilles
aboyez
épaves démâtées
jusqu’à la démission des siècles et des étoiles.
NARRATOR
Dead, he is dead
LE RÉCITANT
Mort, il est mort
NARRATRESS
Dead in a copse of perfumed clerodendrons.
LA RÉCITANTE
Mort dans un taillis de clérodendres parfumés.
NARRATOR
Dead amidst growing sisal
LE RÉCITANT
Mort en pleine poussée de sisal
NARRATRESS
Dead amidst the calabash pulp
LA RÉCITANTE
Mort en pleine pulpe de calebassier
NARRATOR
Dead in a full volley of torches, in the full fecundation of vanilla plants. . .
LE RÉCITANT
Mort en plein vol de torches, en pleine fécondation de vanilliers…
NARRATRESS
the secrets choked back by a twist of the throat rise in the tower of blood. Possessed women raise their soapy hands to the four corners of the red-hearted marsh; new thirsts flow forth, moons broken right on the water’s loaf, a stone to their forehead.
LA RÉCITANTE
les secrets enfermés sous un tour de gorge montent dans le clocher du sang. Les femmes possédées dressent leurs mains savonneuses aux quatre coins du marais au cœur rouge ; les soifs nouvelles s’écoulent, lunes cassées à même la miche d’eau, une pierre au front.
NARRATOR
Langourless khol the empty door blasé atmosphere is like a miracle a sneer of precious annatto. A compass dies of convulsion on a moor, a jug of milk at the end of the world
LE RÉCITANT
Kohol sans langueur l’atmosphère blasée de porte vide tient du miracle un ricanement de roucou précieux. Une boussole meurt de convulsion dans une lande, jatte de lait à la fin du monde
NARRATRESS
in the forest the murderesses* flow with fountain laughter and rivers without signals plot the fleshy adventure of virulent voyages
nomadic blood coquettish with death and geneses
wastes at the bottom of pitted stones and the night of the ages
the mortal laughter of cavernous mummies
LA RÉCITANTE
dans la forêt les meurtrières coulent avec des rires de fontaine et les fleuves sans signaux trament l’aventure charnue des voyages virulents
sang nomade en coquetterie de mort et de genèses
gaspille du fond des pierres trouées et de la nuit des âges
le rire mortel des momies caverneuses
NARRATOR
Watchtower, crumble
LE RÉCITANT
Tour des veilles, écroulez-vous
NARRATRESS
Vengeance tower, crumble lower than the word
LA RÉCITANTE
Tour des vengeances, écroulez-vous plus bas que la parole
NARRATOR
Parasitic plants, venomous plants, burning plants, cannibal plants, incendiary plants, true plants, weave your unforeseen curves in great droplets
LE RÉCITANT
Plantes parasites, plantes vénéneuses, plantes brûlantes, plantes cannibales, plantes incendiaires, vraies plantes, filez vos courbes imprévues à grosses gouttes
NARRATRESS
Decomposed light in each avaricious splendor
cargo of golden fish, foundered fruit
river to my lightning-struck lips
LA RÉCITANTE
Lumière décomposée en chaque splendeur avare
cargaison de poisson d’or, fruits fourbus
fleuve à mes lèvres foudroyées
NARRATOR
Orgy, orgy, divine water, star of luxurious flesh, vertigo
islands cool rings in the ears of plunging sirens
islands coins fallen from the purse of the stars
LE RÉCITANT
Orgie, orgie, eau divine, astre de chairs luxueuses, vertige
îles anneaux frais aux oreilles des sirènes plongées
îles pièces tombées de la bourse aux étoiles
CHORUS
swarm of larvae, worthless talismans
islands
silent lands
truncated islands
LE CHŒUR
grouillement de larves, talismans sans valeur
îles
terres silencieuses
îles tronquées
NARRATOR
I come to you
LE RÉCITANT
Je viens à vous
NARRATRESS
I am one with you, Islands
(The Narrator and Narratress go weak in the knees before collapsing, the chorus exits backwards).
(A vision of the blue Caribbean sown with gold and silver stars in the scintillation of the dawn).
LA RÉCITANTE
Je suis une de vous, Îles
(Le Récitant et la Récitante vacillent sur leurs jambes puis s’effondrent, le chœur sort à reculons).
(Vision de la Caraïbe bleue semée d’îles d’or et d’argent dans la scintillation de l’aube).
* * *
1. The 1946 edition had THIRD PEASANT here; we have corrected the obvious typographical error.
2. As in the poem “Mississipi” (Solar Throat Slashed), the archaic spelling connotes colonial status.
*1. The 1946 edition spelled Maurice Martenot’s name Mortenot ; the 1970 reprint deleted the reference.
Afterword
Postface
MYTH
MYTHE
The sirens sucking in their nonfunctional moustaches the yellow and red lights of the evening and the night form in broad daylight a sieve of edible stars. Awaiting one knows not what geldings and harvests the farms are not burning. One is astonished not to see the worker beasts of fire and velvet in the colocasia meadows of walls and roofs, but already the secret tendernesses ideally located in the heart of meteor-haired words are crackling. Backs in the rain spare the juice of the landscape. Farther on the landscape itself hide-and-seeking with itself in a fragile game of corridors of swing doors and coats of arms. Clearly my booty—no dog, no grandmother. What’s fixed, the hour grass-snaking across friezes across paintings but at the top dominating the antiquities the red-blue dread of Absence
and our eyes fascinated by the thought of an avenging doll with raven wings. Men? On a terrible holiday. Women? Leashless. Ringless. Oarsmen? Chauffeurs? The beast won’t whistle. Let the skyscrapers pay out in a fishy off-beat the faulty genealogy of space. Their eyes covered with melia azedarach the blacks without path or pagne make the lantana gesture of complicity to you with their hands and their waiting. Where will the verdict fall? An awful idleness resists in the city and threatens. Meanwhile the primogenital earth yawns tepidly in the solemn wombs of the convolvuli.
Les sirènes rentrant leurs moustaches inopérantes les lumières jaunes et rouges du soir et de la nuit font en plein jour un van d’étoiles comestibles. Attendant on ne sait quels hongres et quelles moissons les fermes ne brûlent pas. On n’en revient pas de ne pas voir les bêtes travailleuses du feu et du velours dans les prairies à colocases des parois et des toits, mais déjà crépitent les secrètes tendresses idéalement situées dans le cœur des mots aux cheveux de météores. Des dos sous la pluie épargnent le suc du paysage. Plus loin le paysage lui-même à cache-cache avec lui-même dans un jeu fragile de corridors de portes battantes et d’armoiries. C’est bien mon butin – pas de chien, pas de grand’mère. De fixe, l’heure couleuvre aux frises aux tableaux mais au haut dominant les antiques l’effroi rouge-bleu de l’Absence et nos yeux fascinés par la pensée d’une poupée vengeresse aux ailes de corbeau. Les hommes ? En un congé terrible. Les femmes ? Sans laisse. Sans bague. Des rameurs ? Des chauffeurs ? Sifflera pas la bête. Que les gratte-ciel filent à contre-temps de poisson la généalogie fautive de l’espace. Leurs yeux peuplés de mélias azédarach les nègres sans piste sans pagne vous font de la main et de l’attente le geste lantane de la complicité. Où tombera le verdict ? Une terrible inoccupation résiste dans la ville et menace. Cependant que la terre aînesse bâille tièdement aux matrices solennelles des convolvulus.
SOLAR THROAT
SLASHED
SOLEIL COU
COUPÉ
Solar Throat Slashed may well be Césaire’s most important collection, since it brought to fruition in 1948 the poetics he used to subvert the imperial literary canon from 1941 onward. It is certainly the least known and understood aspect of his corpus because 27 of its 72 poems were cut from the revised edition published under the title Cadastre in 1961. Of the 43 poems published in Cadastre, only 20 underwent little or no significant modification. Readers of the severely truncated 1961 version could not know that Césaire originally published many of its poems in surrealist magazines between 1946 and 1947 or that “Noon Knives” was his contribution to the 1947 international surrealist exhibition at the Maeght gallery in Paris. Although Césaire was a Communist deputy from Martinique in the French Chamber of Deputies from 1946 to 1956, his poetic contributions to party publications were few prior to 1950. These details can be found in the notes to the poems. We have marked with an asterisk following the title those poems that Césaire sacrificed to his political turn in the mid-1950s. Clayton Eshleman has said of Césaire’s regrettable self-censorship in Cadastre that he effectively destroyed “his most fulgurating collection of poetry. Animistically dense, charged with eroticism and blasphemy, and imbued with African and Vodun spirituality, this book takes the French surrealist adventure to new heights and depths. A Césaire poem is a crisscrossing intersection in which metaphoric traceries create historically aware nexuses of thought and experience, jagged solidarity, apocalyptic surgery, and solar dynamite. Facing the locks of the void, Césaire proclaims:
What have I to discard? Everything by god everything. I am stark naked. I have discarded everything. My genealogy. My widow. My companions. I await the boiling, I await the baptism of sperm. I await the wingbeat of the great seminal albatross supposed to make a new man of me. I await the immense tap, the vertiginous slap that shall consecrate me as a knight of a plutonian order.” (CST, 175)
In order to readjust his collection to a vision consonant with the immediate post-colonial period, especially with regard to African independence, Césaire chose in 1961 to delete the great majority of poems that were permeated by mythological and sexual imagery. The prophetic stance of the poetic “I” in 1948 was minimized through the same process and replaced with a more resolute political posture.
Readers who know Césaire’s poetry only in the versions that begin with the heavily revised Notebook of a Return to the Native Land in 1956 will be surprised by the religious imagery and the pervasive climate of spirituality in Solar Throat Slashed. Césaire alludes to Vodun in “Gallantry of History,” “All the Way from Akkad, from Elam, from Sumer,” and “March of Perturbations.” He blasphemes against Christianity and its complicity with colonialism in “To Africa,” “Noon Knives,” and “From a Metamorphosis,” referring to “the commandant’s God” in “All the Way from Akkad, from Elam, from Sumer.” In the poem “Calm,” he invokes the “towers of silence” on which the ancient Zoroastrians exposed their dead, and in “To Africa,” he alludes to the Babylonian divinity Ishtar. The speaker in the poem not infrequently adopts a prayerful rhetoric that relies heavily on anaphoric devices suggestive of litany. In at least two instances (“To Africa” and “Blues”), Césaire invokes the Babylonian captivity, thus assimilating the dispersion of the African diaspora to the destruction of the kingdom of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar. “Blues” is Césaire’s modernist turn on Psalm 137 (“By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion”). Sometimes the reader can, as is the case in “Blues,” seize the spiritual intertext so as to gain a culturally informed sense of the direction in which the poem intends to take us. Césaire’s reliance on the biblical book of Revelation (in French, l’Apocalypse) is evident in the poem “The Sun’s Knife-Stab in the Back of the Surprised Cities,” which uses surrealist means to present a utopian vision as an epiphany. Poems of this type were systematically eliminated from the 1961 reframing of the collection for Cadastre. They remained lost to Césaire’s body of work until Wesleyan University Press published our bilingual edition in 2011.
Magic
Magique
with a thin slice of sky on a hunk of earth
you beasts hissing into the face of this dead woman
you ferns free amidst the murderous rocks
at the far point of the island amidst conches too vast for their destiny
when noon sticks its wicked stamps on the tempestuous teats of the she-wolf
beyond the pale of worthless science
and plugs her against the walls of the nest suffete of the islands swallowed up like a sou
avec une lèche de ciel sur un quignon de terre
vous bêtes qui sifflez sur le visage de cette morte
vous libres fougères parmi les roches assassines
à l’extrême de l’île parmi les conques trop vastes pour leur destin
lorsque midi colle ses mauvais timbres sur les plis tempétueux de la louve
hors cadre de science nulle
et la bouche aux parois du nid suffète des îles englouties comme un sou
with a thin slice of sky on a hunk of earth
prophet of the islands forgotten like a sou
without sleep without vigil without a finger without a trawl
when the tornado passes gnawer at the bread of the huts
avec une lèche de ciel sur un quignon de terre
prophète des îles oubliées comme un sou
sans sommeil sans veille sans doigt sans palancre
quand la tornade passe rongeur du pain des cases
you beasts hissing into the face of this dead woman
the beautiful snow leopard of lust and the operculated shell
languid glide of the summer grain that we were
beautiful flesh to be pierced by the macaws’ trident
when the five-branched chancelloress stars
clover in the sky like drops of fallen milk
reinstate a black god ill born of his thunder
vous bêtes qui sifflez sur le vi
sage de cette morte
la belle once de la luxure et la coquille operculée
mol glissement des grains de l’été que nous fûmes
belles chairs à transpercer du trident des aras
lorsque les étoiles chancelières de cinq branches
trèfles au ciel comme des gouttes de lait chu
réajustent un dieu noir mal né de son tonnerre
The Nubian Vultures Have The Floor
La parole aux oricous
Where when how from whence why yes why why why is it that the most villainous tongues have invented so few hooks on which to hang or suspend destiny its pomp and its armpits
Où quand comment d’où pourquoi oui pourquoi pourquoi pourquoi se peut-il que les langues les plus scélérates n’aient inventé que si peu de crocs à pendre ou suspendre le destin ses pompes et ses aisselles
Arrest this innocent man. All decoys. He carries my blood on his shoulders. He carries my blood in his shoes. Peddles my blood in his nose. Death to the smugglers. The borders are closed. What horrible cocaine. Neither thumb nor screw. Let death be instantaneous. Neither known nor unknown
all
thank god my heart is drier than the harmattan, all darkness is my prey
all darkness is my due, and every burst joy.
Arrêtez cet homme innocent. Tous de leurre. Il porte mon sang sur les épaules. Il porte mon sang dans ses souliers. Il colporte mon sang dans son nez. Mort aux contrebandiers. Les frontières sont fermées. Quelle horrible cocaïne. Ni pouce ni police. Que la mort soit immédiate. Ni su ni insu
The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire Page 29