The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire

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

  the Keys: Caribbean coral reefs.

  a shy patyura: According to Césaire, a variation on patira, the name of a peccary found in French Guiana. Kesteloot claimed that it was thought to accompany the dying to their final resting place (RHG, 103); in this respect, it would be a Creole equivalent to the Egyptian Anubis.

  [49] Amazons . . . Mahdis: Ironic recollections of fanciful identification with African heroic figures:

  Amazons of the king of Dahomey: Dahomey was a precolonial monarchic state in the southwest of contemporary Benin. Founded in the 17th century, Dahomey maintained a unit of female warriors until the 1890s.

  Askia the Great: Askia Mohammed reigned in Gao from 1493 to 1528; he founded the university at Timbuktu.

  Djenne: From the 15th to the 17th century, a hub of the salt and gold trade through Timbuktu; renowned for its Great Mosque.

  Mahdis: In Muslim eschatology, the Mahdi is a prophet guided by Allah who is destined to save the faithful at world’s end. Muhammad Ahmad ibn al-Sayyid Abd Allah (1844-85) led a successful insurrection in the Sudan in 1881. The caliphate he founded endured until 1898, when the British Army under Lord Kitchener recaptured Khartoum and Omdurman. (The French spelling is madhi.)

  Chicote: In Portuguese, a knotted whip used on slaves.

  [52] I defy the craniometer: Measuring skull size with a craniometer was a means of proving European superiority. These lines recall the so-called scientific racism propounded by J. A. de Gobineau (1816-1882) in his book The Inequality of Human Races, first published in 1853.

  Homo sum may be a quotation from Terence, the Roman author who was born a slave to a senator.

  COMICAL AND UGLY: A quotation from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “The Albatross,” which depicts the majestic bird as pathetic when tortured on the deck of a ship by sailors.

  [53] the funereal menfenil: A bird of ill omen; like the “chicken hawk,” it has been identified with a wide range of raptors common in the Caribbean; also called malfini or manfenil in Guadeloupe and Martinique (DCE, 364).

  [57] the postillion of Havana: A household servant dressed in fancy livery whose job it was to tell newly arrived slaves, in flowery language, what a fine life awaited them.

  [66] Eia for the royal Cailcedra: Eia is an imperative found both in ancient Greek drama and in the Latin missal; either context reinforces the solemn register of the passage. In the Wolof language of Senegal, the Cailcedra is a mahogany tree.

  [67] seized: A key term in Frobenius’s morphology of cultures, in which cultural change is marked by a collective “seizure.” The “Ethiopian” characteristics Césaire attributes to diasporic peoples were explained by Suzanne Césaire in the first issue of Tropiques (April 1941) (GCD, 3-10).

  [78] the time has come to gird one’s loins like a brave man: In the Book of Job (38:3) Jehovah enjoins Job: “Gird up now thy loins like a man” (King James trans. used throughout the notes). The context is God’s laying the foundations of the earth.

  [82] the wounds cut in its trunk: A probable allusion to the rubber tree, which survives the cuts made in its trunk to extract the latex sap.

  [87] I am only a man (no degradation, no spit perturbs him): Echoes the scourging of Christ; Matthew and Mark stress spitting; John (19:5) has the expression “Behold the man!” (Ecce Homo in the Vulgate).

  I accept. . . I accept. . .: Kesteloot sees an allusion to the gospel according to Luke (22:42): “not my will, but thine, be done” (LKC, 87).

  my race that no ablution of hyssop mixed with lilies could purify: Echoes Psalm 51:17 (“Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”) Irele offers a more general interpretation in which the religious references critique the Catholic church (ICR, 127).

  my race ripe grapes for drunken feet: In Isaiah 63:3, Jehovah declares: “I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury. . .” (LKC, 88). Source of Steinbeck’s title The Grapes of Wrath.

  (oh those queens I once loved in the remote gardens...): Quite possibly an allusion to the statues of French queens in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, one of whom is Blanche of Castille [15]. The parenthetical ejaculation is reminiscent of Saint-John Perse and should be taken ironically.

  the twenty-nine legal blows of the whip: Here, and in naming instruments of torture, Césaire draws on the Code Noir (Black Code) written for Louis XIV’s minister Colbert, promulgated in 1685, and revised many times down to the abolition of slavery in 1848. Césaire documented the names of particularly cruel slaveholders in the writings of Victor Schoelcher, whose Esclavage et Colonisation (Slavery and Colonialism) he prefaced in 1948.

  and the fleur de lys. . .: Branding irons bearing this symbol of the monarchy were used to mark runaway slaves under the old regime.

  [89] and the determination of my biology: All the measures of racial purity down to “but measured by. . .” refer to tests used by “scientific” racism [52] and which were all too often interiorized by black and mulatto families in plantation society.

  [92] the body of my country miraculously laid in the despair of my arms: A simulacrum of the Christian pietà (Luke 23:52-53).

  I revive ONAN: In Genesis 38:9, Onan refused to impregnate his dead brother’s widow. When Jehovah saw that Onan had disobeyed his injunction, He killed Onan. Césaire keeps the vehicle of the metaphor (the speaker will copulate with Mother Earth), but provides a new tenor (a nature religion he presents as African).

  [93] the penetrance of an apocalyptic wasp: A probable allusion to the Book of Revelation (Apocalypse in French), in which the end times are announced by locust armies having the power of scorpions to cause men pain and suffering (9:3-10). Kesteloot sees the aural image as referencing the trumpet of the angel of the Last Judgment (LKC, 95).

  [96] the “lance of night” of my Bambara ancestors: Kesteloot describes this image as the sutama, a spear blessed by a sorcerer who sprinkled it with the blood of a man or a black goat. Without the blessing, the spear would retract toward the haft so as to be ineffective (LKC, 96). The image is both martial and imperial, since sub-groups of the Mandé people (including the Bambaras) founded the empires of Ghana and Songai, as well as the city of Djenne.

  pseudomorphosis: Frobenius had used the neologism pseudomorphosis in a discussion of the Paideuma, the mysterious force that seized cultures and transformed them. Spengler adapted the term to refer to the crippling of a young society by an older one (SDW, 197-98), elaborating on the importance of apocalyptic thought in this context.

  pay no attention to my black skin: Echoes the Song of Solomon (1:6): “Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me. . .” In the context of pseudomorphosis, this is a denial of one’s blackness, which Fanon was to theorize in Black Skin, White Masks.

  [109] immobile veerition: In the French text verrition is a Latinism that Césaire explained to Clayton Eshleman as coined from the verb verri: to sweep, scrape a surface, to scan. Kesteloot, who had also consulted Césaire, claimed the root was vertere, to turn. André Claverie was given the same derivation. Hénane found verrition as a culinary term in Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût (1825) and interpreted the image as the tongue sweeping bits of food in the mouth (RHG, 138-39). Kesteloot’s interpretation has the virtue of suggesting an arrested turning motion or vortex. We have settled on “immobile veerition” to render the paradox of the final passage, at once upward-sweeping and fixed.

  The Miraculous Weapons (1946)

  “Gunnery Warning” remains quite stable throughout its publishing history.

  “The Thoroughbreds” was first published as a “Fragment of a Poem” in Tropiques (1941), preceded by this epigraph – “I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer” (Rimbaud). Césaire’s poem uses plant imagery in the final section to draw “The Thoroughbreds” into the orbit of Frobenius’s theory of “Ethiopian” African civilization, the locus of his vision: “I grow, l
ike a plant. . . .” (See notes on Notebook. . ., stanza 67 above.) The quasi-biblical diction and syntax in the 1946 text were weakened by the replacement of six stanzas that had in 1941 contained references to Enos, son of Seth; to the cities Ninevah and Babylon; as well as to Taodenni, a city in precolonial Mali which the poet invokes to free himself from the biblical Enos. The 1941 text included twelve lines following “flash of absolute snows” that suggested the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The use of falun in the poem is typical of Césaire’s play on the vehicle (a sedimentary rock) and the tenor (the Dharma-wheel of Buddism) of the metaphor (PTED, 334, 349).

  “Have No Mercy for Me” was entitled “Have No Mercy” from the 1970 re-edition of The Miraculous Weapons onward (PTED, 335).

  “Serpent Sun” was entitled “A Rustling of Doves in the Blood. . .” when it was published in the Chilean magazine Leitmotiv in December 1943. The title “Serpent Sun” appears for the first time in the New York magazine Hémisphères the following year in a group of poems called “Doves and Hawk,” which doubtless echoes wartime conditions (PTED, 335).

  “Phrase” remained remarkably stable throughout its publishing history (PTED, 335).

  “Poem for the Dawn” displayed stanza breaks in early magazine printings that Césaire dispensed with in the 1946 and later editions (PTED, 352).

  “Visitation” remained quite stable throughout its publishing history (PTED, 352).

  “Bateke,” which originated in the last part of the manuscript of “The Virgin Forest,” became “Mythology” from 1970 onward. The original title referred to the Bateke people, who inhabited the site of the French trading post that P. Savorgnan de Brazza set up in 1880, creating the French Congo colony. The first seven lines were cut from the revised text of “Mythology,” giving it a less specific and less erotic context after Congolese independence. Brazza discussed the Bateke people in the same context as the Pahouins, whom Césaire mentions in the Cahier / Notebook (SBE, 4-23).

  “Perdition” remains quite stable, apart from stanza breaks present in the Tropiques text in 1941.

  “Survival” and “Beyond” present the same general profile as “Perdition.”

  “The Miraculous Weapons” was entitled “Poem” on the manuscript sold by André Breton’s estate in 2004. Three lines were pruned from the third stanza after 1946; parentheses were placed around the second stanza only in the 1976 edition (PTED, 337, 353-355).

  “The Irremediable” was entitled “Poem” on the typescript sent to André Breton on April 2, 1945. It first appeared in the original edition of The Miraculous Weapons the following year. The biblical monster Behemoth (Job 40:15-24) probably alludes to eschatology. “The Levee” is a cemetery in Fort-de-France, Martinique. When Césaire revised the collection for the 1970 edition, he replaced “The Irremediable” with “Prophecy,” which had been the first section of “To Africa” in the magazine printing of 1946. Here is the text of “Prophecy” in a slightly modified version of the Eshleman and Smith translation of 1983: “there where adventure remains clear-sighted / where women radiate language / where death in the hand is beautiful as a milk-season bird / where the tunnel gathers from its own genuflexion a profusion of wild plums fiercer than caterpillars / where the agile wonder leaves no stone nor fire unturned // there where the vigorous night bleeds a speed of pure vegetation // where the bees of the stars sting the sky with a hive more ardent than the night / where the noise of my heels fills space and raises the face of time backwards / where the rainbow of my speech is charged to unite tomorrow with hope and the infant with the queen, // for having insulted my masters bitten the sultan’s men / for having cried in the wilderness / for having screamed at my jailers / for having begged from the jackals and the hyenas shepherds of caravans // I watch / the smoke rushes like a mustang to the front of the stage briefly hems its lava with its fragile peacock tail then tearing its shirt suddenly opens its chest and I watch it dissolve little by little into British isles into islets into jagged rocks in the limpid sea of the air / where my mug / my revolt / my name / prophetically bathe” (CCP, 121). See “To Africa” in Solar Throat Slashed below.

  “Night Tom-Tom” remained very stable from its magazine publication in Tropiques (1943) down to the 1976 Oeuvres complètes edition except for the word “fever,” which began the fourth line after 1970 (PTED, 355).

  The title of “Water Woman” remained unchanged through two magazine publications in 1944 and 1945 and in the original edition of The Miraculous Weapons. It was changed to “Nostalgic” only in the 1970 Gallimard re-edition of the collection (PTED, 338).

  “Automatic Crystal Set” has a play in the title typical of Césaire in the 1940s. Both before and after the war years, Cristal Grandin was the name of a well-known French radio manufacturer. Thus the title suggests the reception of a distant signal, with “automatic” referring to assumptions about surrealist poetry.

  “Conquest of Dawn” had a complicated early history, which Pierre Laforgue has described in detail (PTED, 339). An early draft was published in VVV’s first issue in New York in 1942. In August 1945, at war’s end, Césaire sent a later draft to André Breton that substituted a new text for the last three pages of the VVV version. We have translated the version that revealed Césaire’s poetry to a larger audience in France in 1946. For the 1970 re-edition of the collection, Césaire cut the poem in two parts, entitling the shorter of the two “Debris,” which begins at “And shit. . . .”

  The earliest known manuscript of “Investiture” has “city” where “Saint-Pierre” appears in the seventh line of the 1946 edition. From the 1970 re-edition onward, Césaire returned to his original, less specific, designation. The line “my Saint-Pierre eyes defying the assassins from under the dead ash” suggests the one known survivor of the May 1902 volcanic eruption that destroyed the city, a black prisoner in the local jail (PTED, 341-42, 356).

  “The Virgin Forest” was entitled “Poem” in a manuscript sent to André Breton in 1945; its publishing history is characteristic of Césaire’s treatment of blocks of text. He divided the poem into thirds for the 1976 Oeuvres complètes edition: “The Virgin Forest” (to “unmuzzled since nothingness”), “Another Season” (from “Where are you going. . .” to “when the horsemen of sperm and thunder pass”), and “Day and Night” (from “the sun the executioner” to the end), having cut the four lines between “From starboard to port” to “At noon guarded by fetish euphorbia.” Césaire cut another six lines from “Day and Night” between “my wounded beast cry” and “until death intervenes.” The general thrust of these cuts is clear: the creation of shorter, more coherent units. The early manuscript sent to Breton concluded with a further 24-line passage with markedly stronger sexual and religious imagery (PTED, 342-43).

  “Annunciation,” along with “Tom-Tom I” and “Tom-Tom II,” was first published in Tropiques in March 1943. Dedicated to André Breton, “Annunciation” evokes the porteuses or “porter girls” whom Lafcadio Hearn had made an erotic focus of Martinican exoticism (HTY). Breton in his Martinique: Snake Charmer (BMS) turned them into esthetic objects exemplifying Baudelaire’s “Even When She Walks” (R. Howard’s title for poem 28 of Flowers of Evil). Césaire locates “Annunciation” between these two intertexts while appropriating the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary.

  “Tom-Tom I” is dedicated to Benjamin Péret, who prefaced the Havana edition of Retorno al país natal (1943), Lidia Cabrera’s translation of the 1939 text of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.

  “Tom-Tom II” is dedicated to Wifredo Lam, who illustrated the Havana edition of the Notebook. He had recommended Césaire’s long poem to his friends in the Cuban capital.

  “Great Noon” first appeared in Tropiques no. 2 (1941) as “Fragments of a Poem: Great Noon (conclusion).” The beginning of the poem underwent multiple revisions in the version sent to André Breton in 1945 as part of a planned collection then called “Tombeau du soleil / Memorial of the sun.” The text published in the The
Miraculous Weapons was essentially the same as the Tropiques version; in 1946, the title still referred to a longer poem, although the association with “The Thoroughbreds” was attenuated. In the 1976 edition, the subtitle was dropped. (PTED, 344) We have translated as dazzled the Ardennes dialect word darne, which Césaire presumably borrowed from Rimbaud’s poems “Accroupissements” and “Les Poètes de sept ans.” The first book of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra concludes with a page in which Zarathustra stands at an existential crossroad: “And that is the great noon when man stands in the middle of his way between beast and overman and celebrates his way to the evening as his highest hope: for it is the way to a new morning” (NPN, 190).

  “Batuque” remained unchanged, apart from minor punctuation marks, between its first magazine printing in VVV no. 4 (1944) and the first edition of Les Armes miraculeuses two years later. Among the names of African diasporic dances found throughout the Americas, “Batuque” (in French batouque) recommended itself to Césaire for its un-French combination of harsh consonants (b, t, k) that he could use percussively to beat out the rhythm of a poem that proposes to magically transform the geography of the colonial world. His author’s footnote reads “tom-tom rhythm in Brazil.” The 1970 re-edition replaced five lines between “knotted cities” and “And the ship. . .” and omitted but did not replace eighteen lines between “an army of parabolas” and “batuque / when the world shall be. . . .” These modifications diminish both the erotic and the prophetic force of the original published text. Another thirteen lines of surrealist metaphor suggesting a pirate attack by “the ship” were cut between “from the flesh of sleep” and “batuque of hands.” For these, Césaire substituted five lines lacking in aggressivity. By replacing “Caracas” with “Casamance,” Césaire gave the poem a new Africanist orientation, whereas he had focused in the 1940s on the Caribbean and the Americas. “Basse-Pointe, Diamant, Tartane, and Caravelle” are all Martinique toponyms. Another fourteen lines that had extended the focus on the “black princess” were cut between “Caracas” and “batuque of night. . . .” Finally, three series of cuts of one or two lines each were made between “my thirst-for-branches-minarets-exil” and “batuque of pregnant lands.” In rewriting “Batuque,” Césaire was motivated by the same need to align poetry with politics that had governed the rewriting of Solar Throat Slashed prior to the publication of Cadastre (1961).