The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire

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

  “The Oubliettes of the Sea and the Deluge” was entitled “Simouns” (a dry wind in the Sahel region of Africa) in the proposed collection “Doves and Hawk” (Colombes et Menfenil) that Césaire sent to André Breton in 1945. It was published under the revised title in Fontaine in March 1946. The text of “Simouns” contained significant variants (PTED, 346), among which was the word Baguirmi*, used as a rhythmic device rather like batuque. From 1946 onward, the text remained stable.

  “The Woman and the Knife” was first published by Fontaine in issue no. 50 with “The Oubliettes of the Sea and the Deluge.” The text was altered only in superficial details in the course of its publishing history.

  “And the Dogs Were Silent”: Césaire studded the incidents in the plot with biblical references and imagery connected with the sacrifice and resurrection of vegetation gods that Frazer, in The Golden Bough and Adonis, Attis, Osiris, considered homologous. Thus, in Césaire’s tragedy, the “dog-headed gods” suggest Anubis, who bears the souls of the dead to the Egyptian underworld. Anubis reappears in answer to the question “Where is the one who will sing for us?”—“his head [is] that of a dog.” The same speech by the Chorus invokes Osiris, whose symbol is the sparrow hawk. The uraeus, represented by the female cobra, protects the sun-god against his enemies. A later speech by the Narrator alludes to Osiris, whose body parts were “dismembered, scattered about” after his ritual murder. The Golden Bough (ch. 39) details the ritual in which the mummy of Osiris is gradually raised until it rests between the wings of Isis in a simulacrum of resurrection. In the litany “Arise o king,” the Chorus likens Césaire’s Rebel to Osiris. Césaire suggested such a reading when he told Harris that Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy permitted an imaginary link between archaic Greek tragedy and the origins of pharaonic Egypt in black Africa (HHT, 28-29).

  Afterword: “Myth” was not published prior to the original edition of The Miraculous Weapons in 1946, which supports the reading of Afterword as a heading rather than a title. This fifteen-line prose sums up Césaire’s surrealist practice in the collection and foregrounds his mythopoetic intent. The surrealist black revolution is still a project.

  Solar Throat Slashed (1948)

  We indicate the magazine publication prior to the original edition of STS wherever it is known. An asterisk after the title indicates that the poem was cut from the revised Cadastre edition in 1961.

  “Magic” was first published in the Revue internationale in May 1947. It remained relatively unchanged throughout its publishing history, except for the modification of “pis” (udder) to “plis” (folds) in line 5 from STS onward (EAC 1, 121). We have maintained the later reading.

  “The Nubian Vultures Have the Floor” had “its pomp and its armpits” cut from the first stanza during revision for Cadastre in 1961. “What horrible cocaine. Neither thumb nor screw” was cut from the second stanza. The final stanza presents a syncretic infernal scene that appears to borrow from classical sources without referencing any one in particular.

  “Lynch I”* was dropped from Césaire’s oeuvre after 1948. A string of images—“bayou,” “pirate ship,” “pampa,” “hummingbirds,” “cyclone,” “virgin forest,” “continent exploding into islands”—draws the poem into the Caribbean and western hemispheric region where lynching was inextricably linked to slavery. A competing string of images of auto-eroticism and emasculation culminates in “lynch is an orchid” (playing on the Greek assimilation of the orchid to a testicle) and “lynch is the hand of the wind bloodying a forest whose trees are Galli brandishing in their hands the living flame of their castrated phalli.” The metaphor shifts from “galls” parasitic on trees to Galli, the priests of Cybele who performed rituals of auto-emasculation. This tension between historical theme and mythic recreation of a spiritual motif is typical of the poems edited out of the collection. Our translation “murderess-hole” plays on “murder-hole” (a hole in the battlements of a castle through which defenders could throw noxious substances at attackers). Given the erotic seams in the poem, “murderess” seems quite relevant but if used alone eliminates the equally cogent “murder-hole.” We have tightened “summary” to “succinct” in our retranslation.

  “Devourer”* similarly deploys a string of typical Caribbean animal images that intersect a curious Egyptian suggestion in “phasmids and pharaoh ants,” opening up a mythographic space: images of destruction, ingestion, procreation, and birth radiate out from the term “devourer.” In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the monster Ammit devours the souls of those whose lives were judged unworthy of immortality (EBD, 155); the star Aldebaran was included in an astronomical representation of Osiris as the Hunter in a Theban tomb (PIO, 21), thus reinforcing the link to ancient Egyptian burial rituals.

  “The Law is Naked” was included in Cadastre only after a dozen lines were cut, except for “There are no more milking machines for the morning that has yet to rise,” which was distributed over two lines. The revised poem retained little of its surrealist origins.

  “Rain” was eliminated from Cadastre, except for the seventh and final iterations of “Rain”; under the title “Pluies” (Rains), it was placed considerably farther back in the collection.

  “Velocity” was reprinted in Cadastre, except for the line “mud old witch draw circles,” which suggests ritual magic. In the line “I wear the solar tiara,” the poet’s alter ego identifies himself with the sun god Ra, if one interprets the “old gods” in line 2 as referring to ancient Egypt. Some ancient texts also interpreted Osiris as the sun-god (FGB, ch. 42). See also “And the Dogs Were Silent” above.

  “Disaster” was retitled “Tangible Disaster” in 1961; in line 2, the parenthesis was deleted. “Mandragora remorse” could refer to use of the mandrake root in the bible to make a barren woman fertile (Genesis 30: 14-16), which would reinforce “ashy menses.” In line 8, “mystagogical giant” was likewise deleted. Césaire informed Eshleman that the poem was a response to the 1902 eruption of Martinique’s Montagne Pelée, which prompted the translation of éclat as “eruption.” The “presumptuous [mael]strom” evokes in conclusion the tsunami effect caused by such a cataclysm.

  “Secret Society”* opened with the idiosyncratic spelling of lagoon in the French text; we have kept it, as did the editor of PTED, 385. A string of surrealist metaphors of violence, upheaval, and catastrophe in the natural world is punctuated by clear references to the French revolution (guillotine, public accuser, beloved necks, executioner blocks). The thrust of the poem draws historical events into the realm of the imaginary at a time when the promise of socialist revolution in France was being stifled by parliamentary politics.

  “Nocturnal Crossing”* can be read as a surrealist transmutation of Césaire’s encounters with rural constituents.

  “Among Other Massacres” underwent no significant changes in its editorial history.

  “The Griffin” presents no changes apart from splitting stanza two into three lines in the 1961 and 1976 editions. Césaire associates the African and South American continents by linking the “Spitting Andes” volcanoes and the “sacred Mayumbé” mountain of the Lower Congo.

  “Redemption” presents only variant breaks between lines 6 and 7 in 1976.

  “Mississipi” uses a French colonial spelling of the name, which punctuates the poem. From the 1961 edition of Cadastre onward, the repetition of “Mississipi” in stanzas 1, 2, and 3 was deleted.

  “Blues” was retitled “Rainy Blues” (Blues de la pluie) from 1961 onward. “Aguacero” is a Spanish word for a sudden shower or downpour of the type that occurs throughout the Caribbean in the rainy season. The text of “Blues” is a Caribbean reappropriation of Psalm 137:1-3 (“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. / We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. / For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”) It is as close as Césaire
ever came to the Afro-American genre of the spiritual. In its identification of the African diaspora with Zion, “Blues” is a high modernist rendition of a theme that Rastafarian poetics treats using conventions of popular Jamaican culture.

  “The Scapegoat” was first published in Fontaine, no. 50 for March 1946; it underwent only one deletion between 1948 and 1961: the adjective “crepuscular” in line 8. We take “Arborigène” to be a typo in the 1948 text; corrected in all later editions to “Aborigène,” it designates the sea as the aboriginal element.

  “Transmutation”* disappeared from Césaire’s œuvre from 1961 until our bilingual edition reestablished it in 2011.

  “Dwelling I”* is best read in contrast to “lagoonal calendar” in i, laminaria. . . The “jailer” relates this dwelling to the island prison in which the mythographer of negritude “waited” for the spiritual upheaval of the “pensive porpoises yet to be born.”

  “The Sun’s Knife-Stab in the Back of the Surprised Cities”* is the preeminent type of surrealist poem in STS; it was doubtless for this reason that it was deleted from Cadastre. A narrative cover of apocalypse and judgment is moved forward by elements drawn from both Christian and ancient sacred texts (AMN, 193-204). If the first vision suggests the beast of Revelation 13:1-3, it also bears some resemblance to Ammit, who devoured the souls of ancient Egyptians found unworthy (See “Devourer” above). Ammit was represented with a crocodile head, a lion’s torso, and the (equine) hind-quarters of a hippopotamus. In the Egyptian underworld, the dog’s head designated Anubis, who presented souls for final judgment. Those whose hearts were devoured by Ammit were condemned to “haunt for all eternity” the world of the living. Numerous other details associate ancient judgment rituals with Martinique: hairless dogs are found in both Egypt and Martinique; Saint-Pierre was never rebuilt after the explosion of the Montagne Pelée that destroyed the “medley of colors” that made up the population in 1902. The final stanza replaces the religion of the colonizer with a symbolic representation of Vodun, the vever. The vision of black humanity in unison with nature recalls the final image of “And the Dogs Were Silent” two years earlier.

  “When in the Heat of the Day Naked Monks Descend the Himalayas”* turns on the word fofa in the fourth stanza, in which the poet’s alter ego sets his “monster”—characterized by the Caribbean caiman—against an alien “monster.” Metonymically, the Sanjie fofa miji or Buddhadharma during the Third Stage—a Chinese Buddhist text written in the 6th century CE by Xinxing—connects the Himalayan monks of the poem’s title to the Césairean theme of apocalypse, which Xinxing’s sect espoused (PTED, 1761).

  “Indecent Behavior”* prolongs the focus on the “Monster” while evoking a harmonious past “farther than forgotten cities farther than rites with forgotten meanings” from the standpoint of the present with its “little shipwrecks” (alluding metaphorically to the slave trade) and “thwarting towns”(characteristic of colonialism).

  “Son of Thunder” in line 3, from 1948 through the 1976 edition, had the spelling “attolls” for “atolls,” a correction made only in 1994.

  “Permit”* concludes with a clear statement of Césaire’s vision of negritude in 1948: “I attend powerlessly the wilding of my mind the air brings me the Zambezi.” It had no place in the 1961 edition.

  “Solid”* is a particularly dense succession of associative metaphors into which are interjected an allusion to World War II—“the war in the Pacific”—and one to the Allies’ agreement on the goals of the postwar world—“the Atlantic Charter” (1941).

  “The Woman and the Flame”* can be read in parallel with “The Woman and the Knife” in The Miraculous Weapons. Its evocation of a woman’s features in terms of extreme weather conditions (hurricane, brush fires), mythical animals (dragon), and “insinuating [herself] from another world” is typical of André Breton’s use of métaphore filée.

  “Millibars of the Storm” remained stable except for the deletion of line 5—which foregrounded the poem’s erotic implications—from 1961 onward.

  “Gallantry of History”* intends to shock with its blend of prayer to the Vodun lwa Ogou—who presides over iron-working (blunderbuss), fire (volcanoes), and war (bombs)—and the “three wise men” of the Christian tradition; an ironic allusion to the great powers who emerged victorious from World War II (Hyde Park, Place de la République); and derisive images of “a customs officer” uniting Christianity (“a chaplet of piasters”) with profit and the debasement of “the salver of justice.” The “Virgins of Ogou” are presumably the hounsi who serve him in the Vodun oumfò.

  “Several Miles from the Surface”* was translated into German as “Several Miles toward the Sun” in J. Jahn’s German edition of 1956. Jahn otherwise modified the poem only in terms of line breaks and indentations. In “the long coitus of a tree with a sailboat,” Césaire pays homage to Lautréamont’s line “beautiful as . . . the fortuitous encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella,” which André Breton praised as the preeminent surrealist image.

  “Chevelure” is one of the poems that underwent extensive cuts (stanza 2; 10 lines in stanza 3) prior to inclusion in the 1961 and later editions.

  “Scalp”* is typical of the poems appealing to magic and eroticism that were sacrificed to Césaire’s political turn in the mid-1950s.

  “The Tornado,” on the other hand, in its evocation of racial segregation and violence in the postwar United States, fit nicely into the political vision of the 1961 edition. The poem’s eroticism was reduced by cutting lines 3-5, “into a whore’s vagina” in line 11, and the phrase “of the executed”. Blasphemous metaphors were cut between “In the time it took. . .” and “. . .from the sky” to create a semblance of realism.

  “Lynch II” was titled “Lynch” from 1961 onward, since “Lynch I” had been cut from the revised edition. In the 1948 text, a redundant “phos-” was printed before the break at the end of line 7. The typo was corrected in 1961, when the poem was placed considerably closer to the end of the collection.

  “Apotheosis”* develops a blasphemous litany of images of the sort attributed to the bishops in “And the Dogs Were Silent” (1946). It no longer fit the tone of the revised 1961 edition. The penultimate stanza riffs on Blake’s “Tiger, tiger, burning bright. . .,” ironically undercutting the prophetic discourse of apotheosis.

  “Crusade of Silence” was published in Cadastre as “Crusades of Silence” after extensive cuts: the first stanza ended at “bric-a-brac”; the second stanza was rewritten as a meditation on blackness and the memory of slavery, with no reference to colonial Timbuktu or Cuba, Mali and Cuba being independent after 1960.

  “Totem” was first published in the issue of Le Point for March 1946. Only minor changes in capitalization and line breaks intervened prior to reprinting in STS two years later. The poem remained stable thereafter (PTED, 463, 473).

  “Unmaking and Remaking the Sun”* is a surrealist litany on the theme of home, conceived in violence and absence, interspersed with images of imprisonment (jailer, keys), and ending in an apocalyptic explosion of renewal. In the third stanza from the end, the 1948 text printed the verb “nais” (I am born) with an ungrammatical circumflex accent on the letter “i”; this typo was corrected in PTED, 412.

  “Samba” is a love poem that associates erotic and psychic power with images drawn from tropical nature. It remained stable throughout its publishing history.

  “Intercessor” was retitled “Interlude” in 1961 to reduce its spiritual implications. Correcting the spelling of “entrelacs,” which lacked the final “s” in 1948, was the only other modification of the text.

  “The Wheel” remained stable throughout its publishing history except for a line break after “weep” in line 4, which was introduced in the 1961 edition.

  “Calm” was first published in the May 1947 issue of La Revue internationale. Except for line and stanza breaks, the text remained stable from 1947 to 1976.

 
“New Year” was subtitled “Poem for the Centennial of the 1848 Revolution” in Jahn’s bilingual edition of 1956, although the subtitle never appeared in French editions of the poem. After 1961, “New Year” ended at “for the first time,” deleting both “those wounded on the pavement” and “the tender approach of a new heart,” which alludes to the abolition of slavery in France and its colonies.