The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire

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

  “Ex-Voto for a Shipwreck” was first printed in the Communist weekly Action in April 1947. “Shipwreck,” which Césaire usually reserves for the slave trade, here evokes colonialism in Africa with a focus on South Africa. Prior to inclusion in Cadastre, several lines were cut from the middle of the text; others were reworked (PTED, 474). These cuts increased the poem’s political potential by minimizing the percussive tom-tom beat and the associative metaphors.

  “All the Way from Akkad from Elam from Sumer” was printed in the same issue of Action with “Ex-Voto. . .”; these are Césaire’s first contributions to the Communist publication. Two new lines preceded the original beginning of the poem from the Cadastre edition in 1961 onward. Allusions to ancient Egypt that could be read in terms of the sacred ibis were cut, as was the adverb “supernaturally”. The thrust of these revisions was to highlight the role of slavery from ancient Mesopotamia to its aftermath in the postwar colonial world. “Master of the three roads” is in all probability an invocation to Legba—in Fon culture, the preeminent god; in Vodun, the master of crossroads whose sacred number is three—by the pilgrim who seeks his protection. In the Roman world, this responsibility fell to Hermes or Mercury whose symbolic column marked both the crossroads called trivius and the quadrivius.

  “To the Serpent”* makes the search for syncretic religious symbols the theme of the poem. Frazer’s Golden Bough had shown similar functions of totemic and royal serpents from Africa south of the Sahara, through ancient Egypt, to Mesopotamia and Greece (FDM, 67-75). In restoring the biblical serpent to his pagan preeminence, Césaire in 1948 intended to undermine the Christian narrative. The poem no longer fit the world view of Cadastre in 1961. In the final stanza of the 1948 text, the article “un(e)” preceding “main” lacked the final marker of the feminine (PTED, 422).

  “Torture”* prolongs the presence of the initiatory serpent into the African diaspora through dense images of blackness (“inkblot,” “dark sperm”).

  “Pennant”* opens with a mysterious image that may suggest the Mithraic solar cult in the Roman Empire by way of the bull ring in Seville; it concludes with praise for Samory Touré, whose opposition to French colonialism was the “final hiccup” before the nearly complete subjection of the continent.

  “To Africa” was preceded by a dense prose passage constructed on a series of anaphoras when it was first published in the magazine Poésie 46 (1946). Césaire excised this block of text from the poem in 1948, then reset it as lines of verse and, under the title “Prophecy,” substituted it for “The Irremediable” in the 1970 edition of The Miraculous Weapons. Approximately two-thirds of this same text was published in 1979, again in prose, as Césaire’s contribution to the Wifredo Lam issue of an arts magazine (Société Internationale d’Art XXe Siècle). In revising “To Africa” for Cadastre, Césaire systematically erased the mythic blending of its verb tenses. Consequently, from 1961 onward, the “peasant” represented subsistence agriculture in a newly independent country, rather than the agent of spiritual transformation he had been in 1948. Twenty-two lines containing erotic and religious imagery centered on the Ishtar myth were cut from the middle of the poem (PTED, 475-76). In the 1948 text “isthmes” was printed as “ithsmes.”

  “Delicacy of a Mummy”* calls attention to Egyptian burial rituals by making the speaker the embalmer of his own head. The “great bird” in this context would be ibis-headed Thoth, who recorded the sentence rendered on souls in the book of the dead. If Thoth overturned the sentence, the poet-mummy would escape being devoured by Ammit. See “Devourer” above.

  “Demons” recalls Lautréamont’s style.

  “Marsh” was retitled “Nocturnal Marsh” in 1961. The first stanza was deleted after “. . .navel.” In the third, the phrase “the victims of” was deleted, and the break between the third and fourth stanzas was eliminated.

  “Noon Knives” was first published in Le Surréalisme en 1947, a catalog edited by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp for the Aimé Maeght gallery in Paris, which hosted the international surrealist exhibition that year. The text of Antonin Artaud’s radio play “To Have Done with the Judgment of God,” which appeared in the same volume, was published separately by the surrealist poetry magazine “K” in 1948, as was STS. “Noon Knives” underwent numerous modifications intended to minimize its surrealist origins and its allusions to animist religion prior to inclusion in Cadastre. The second stanza was deleted completely. In 1961 the third stanza began at “I spit” with the ejaculation “Good God!” replacing the repeated invocation of the filao tree (PTED, 476-77). In its original context, the poem embraced a vision of the marvelous that coincided with the surrealist notion of a spiritual revolution. The Champ de Mars has multiple revolutionary connotations: the Campus Martius in ancient Rome, where military exercises were held after the revolution that brought in the Republic; the Champ de Mars in Paris was the scene of a massacre on July 17, 1791; the Champ de Mars in front of the national palace in Port-au-Prince commemorates the Haitian revolution with statues of the heroes of independence, including the Unknown Maroon*. Numerous commentators have noted the strong black/white binary opposition that structures the poem around the sun’s apogee, which allows it to look both backward and forward in time. The best summary of these interpretations relates the “Ethiopian” values Césaire found in Frobenius to the plant imagery in the second stanza (KTP, 93-98). The presence of “paraschists,” ancient Egyptian ritual embalmers, connects the sun with Ra.

  “Idyll”* was first published by Albert Skira in the February 1946 issue of Labyrinthe (Geneva), which specialized in surrealist art and poetry. The initial image (“the night of the world”) suggests a common French expression for a colonial uprising (“le grand soir”), which conditions our reading of the surrealist associative metaphors that follow. Images of violence (blood, wounded, chopping block) are held in semantic suspension by the string of apparently gratuitous images on which they are threaded. A binary opposition between “black” and “white” runs through the text. In this reading, the “house nigger” is an Uncle Tom whose days are numbered. The “hanged man” then suggests lynching, which in turn generates the image of the mandrake—reputed to grow from the semen of a hanged man. A typo (“blance” for “blanche”) in the French text of “the blank page” was corrected in PTED, 432).

  “Password” was retitled “Antipode” in 1961, after deletion of all the lines beginning with the anaphora “Zealand,” which introduced a sequence of fourteen associative metaphors and sybilline phrases. The 1948 text is typical of the surrealist poetics that Césaire edited out of Cadastre.

  “Turn of Events”* met the same fate as did the associative metaphors in “Password.”

  “Preliminary Question”* did not survive the rewriting of STS for Cadastre, doubtless for its commingling of blasphemy and hyperbole.

  “Tattooing Gazes”* is a blasphemous surrealist pastiche of the crucifixion of Christ.

  “At the Locks of the Void” had many lines and phrases cut during revision for Cadastre. The first prose stanza ended at “I am no longer thirsty.” In the second stanza “it is a skein of iron for reinforced concrete,” “it is the graphic representation of a seismic floodtide,” “I await the baptism of sperm,” and “I await in the depths of my pores the sacred intrusion of the benediction” were cut. Stanza 4 was reduced by half. In the last stanza “Europe” was replaced by “Ancient Name,” and the last three lines of the poem were reduced to a single phrase, “considerable hiccup,” significantly lessening the poem’s original attack on European civilization. The cuts focused primarily on religious, erotic, and scatological imagery.

  “Forfeiture”* was sacrificed to the political turn of Cadastre for the same reasons as the preceding poems.

  “To the Night”* in its associative metaphors resembles other poems cut from Cadastre.

  “Commonplace” was reworked for inclusion in Cadastre by cutting away half of the first stanza and deleting entirely stanza
s 2-5. We have translated the archaic French word araigne by “arain,” an old English word for spider.

  “Ode to Guinea” was revised along the same lines as the preceding poems. Lines 9-21 and 26-39 were cut.

  “Horse” was originally published in the May 1947 issue of La Revue internationale. Cuts were made in the revision for Cadastre as follows: “and sentiments” from line 3; six lines between “my horse rears. . .” and “. . .mushroom spittle”; “to be spilled in public squares” in the next line; the four lines through “. . .has ever soiled”; the line “my blood that no paid off judge has ever heard”; and “of the furrow” four lines from the end. Pierre Loeb founded the art gallery Pierre in 1924. In the 1930s, he was perhaps the foremost proponent of surrealist painters in Paris. Escaping occupied France in 1941 on the same boat as Breton, Lam, and other artists and intellectuals who disembarked in Fort-de-France, Pierre Loeb spent the war years in Havana, contributing an article to the final issue of Tropiques in 1945.

  “Antipodal Dwelling”* is constructed on associative metaphors of animist magic; it is best compared to “lagoonal calendar” in i, laminaria. . .

  “Sun and Water” was lightly revised for Cadastre by cutting line 12.

  “On a Metamorphosis”* gives a surrealist treatment to historical events of 1945-47: the 1946 famine in Shanghai; the proclamation of Indonesian independence in August 1945 and the independence of India two years later, seen as “triggering” the process of decolonization. The shift of focus to “a Chicago street” suggests a Communist solution to the oppression of labor in the capitalist world. The reference to the 4th century CE neo-Platonic philosopher Iamblichus (Jamblique in French) introduces as a rhyme the anti-Christian motif on which the poem concludes.

  “March of Perturbations” remained fairly stable throughout its publishing history, apart from line and stanza breaks (PTED, 478).

  “Barbarity” was first published in the October 1947 issue of Le Musée vivant, whose honorary board of directors Césaire had recently joined. Madeleine Rousseau’s presentation of the poem states that Gallimard would shortly publish the collection Soleil cou coupé. According to his contract for The Miraculous Weapons, Césaire needed Gallimard’s permission to publish his collection elsewhere. The poem has been read as a statement against racism (EAC1, 129), but it is constructed on the appeal to pre-Christian animism that runs through STS.

  “Non-Vicious Circle” underwent only minor modifications from 1948 to 1976, apart from the conversion of the future tense of the verb “sink” in line 10 to the present tense. The poem has been called “a celebration of the mystic function of the poet” (DNV, 145).

  “Different Horizon” remained stable from 1948 to 1976, except for the substitution of “our sun” for “another sun” in 1961. According to Homer (Iliad, 8.362-69; Odyssey, 11.623-26), when Hercules vanquished Cerberus, the poisonous saliva of the dog’s mouth caused the deadly purple monkshood (Aconitum napellus) to spring from the rock on which it fell.

  “Death at Dawn” was modified for Cadastre by cutting line 7 and “by all the veins of the blood” at the end of line 9.

  “Howling” was edited for Cadastre by cutting all but the first line of stanza 4 and the last line of stanza 6.

  “The Light’s Judgment” remained intact throughout its publishing history

  Lost Body (1950)

  “Word” was edited for Cadastre by cutting nine lines of intimate and erotic imagery between “ultimate raving spasm” and “keep vibrating word.” Taken together with other cuts in the collection, the result is a less personal poem with a more general cultural resonance.

  “Presence” was rewritten after Césaire eliminated “Longitude” from the revised text prepared for Cadastre. The third stanza became the fourth poem of the new collection under the title “Presence.” The first two stanzas of the 1950 text were eliminated entirely, following the same logic that governed the cuts in “Word.” “Who Then, Who Then. . .” became the title of the rewritten second poem in Cadastre, which was printed with fewer stanza breaks.

  “Longitude” began its publishing history as the longer “Histoire de vivre: Récit” in Tropiques, no 4 (1942). Five lines below the ending of the poem in 1950, the text read “Windows of the swamp flower ah! flower / On the speechless night for Suzanne Césaire / in sonorous butterflies” (PTED, 512-13). The specifically Caribbean and Martinican geography of “Longitude” doubtless required its exclusion from Cadastre, which Césaire reoriented toward African independence in 1961.

  “Elegy-Equation” saw its title shortened to “Elegy” in 1961 and its length was cut by twenty-one lines between “the gate of trembling nights” and “and do not be surprised. . . .” We have translated as “hags” the name of the vampiric creatures called souklyans or soucougnans in Martinique. In this West Indian version of old hag mythology, a mature woman sheds her skin at night in order to suck the blood of good Christians. She may also fly through the neighborhood in the form of ball lightning. References to blood and claws toward the end of the poem organize the metaphors around this figure. By cutting the part of the poem focused on “proud mulatto women,” Césaire realigned it with the two previous poems in a broader diasporic context.

  “Lost Body” was moved back behind “Foreloining” in 1961. The text remained relatively stable, the modifications consisting in several cuts of one to three lines, the suppression of stanza breaks, and the introduction of full stops. The broad scope of the references suggests an imaginary retreat to original chaos. The pain and suffering of slaves and their descendants in historical time is exemplified by insistence on the word that “Word” drives home.

  “Births” remained fairly stable from the original edition through Cadastre. In the 1976 Desormeaux edition, stanza breaks are suppressed; full stops followed by capital letters are introduced; lines that were originally indented are justified to the left margin.

  “At Sea” was retitled “Foreloining” (“Forlonge”) in Cadastre and was positioned before “Lost Body.” Eight lines of “At Sea” were cut between “about cane cutters” and “woosh the cane cutter.” Other modifications are of the same type as in “Births.”

  “Your Portrait” was nearly halved by cutting the first twenty-three lines for the Cadastre edition. The opening vision prepares the prophetic pronouncement that begins at “I say corrosive river,” much as the opening prose sequence in “To Africa” had done in Solar Throat Slashed. Other modifications are similar to those in the preceding poems.

  “Summons” suffered fewer cuts than the preceding poems: the whitmanesque “I sing. . .” of the first line, and four lines between “all things more beautiful” and “including the memory of this world.” In Cadastre, several stanza breaks were suppressed, and indented lines were printed flush left, sometimes compressing two lines into one.

  “Lay of Errantry” underwent the same types of rewriting for Cadastre as did “Births”: the line “o grapefruit” was eliminated; “a jib crane” was removed as subject of “grew emptily hoarse”; three lines were cut between “my sun is the one always awaited” and “the fairest of suns. . .”; one line between “nocturnal bodies vital with lineage” and “faithful trees spouting wine”; two lines between “millions of birds of my childhoods” and “where ever was the fragrant island”; two lines that expanded upon the mythical identification with the ancients: “or than Corvo Miguel Terceira” and “I am sultan of Babiloine.” Finally, the name Isis was replaced by “She” so as to render the focus on the Osiris myth more problematical.

  Ferraments (1960)

  Poems that were published in magazines or reviews are so indicated below. Variants are not noted here; they may be found in PTED and DFPS.

  “Ferraments,” which ultimately provided the title of the collection, was published in Les Lettres nouvelles with five other poems under the working title “Liminal Vampire” in May 1955. The others are “Viscera of the Poem,” “. . .but there is this hurt,” “for Ina,” “And
Sounding the Sand with the Bamboo of My Dreams,” and “Liminal Vampire.” Maurice Nadeau, co-founder of Les Lettres nouvelles in 1953, was excluded from the French Communist Party in 1932; he frequented the Surrealists during the pre-war years and chronicled the movement in a reference work published in 1945. The political orientation of Les Lettres nouvelles was close to that of Les Temps modernes at a time when both reviews published Césaire’s poems. “Ferraments” treats intimately the originary disaster of the voyage in the slave ship, while avoiding melodramatic treatment of its horror.

  “Counting-Out Rhyme” was published in Les Lettres nouvelles in mid-July 1959. Césaire may well have had in mind the magical origins of the counting-out rhyme: in a cosmic Time, both Sun and Moon are actors. A Martinican kestrel replaces Prometheus’s eagle in the “ravishing . . . sacking . . . scraping” of “our black hearts” in the historical present.

  “Seism” was published alongside “Counting-Out Rhyme.” To affirm that the poem references Césaire’s split with the French Communist Party (DFPS, 48) is reductionist. The passage in quotation marks has not been identified and is presumed to have been invented by Césaire. “To try words? Rubbing them to conjure up the unformed. . .” suggests a self-conscious reflection by the poet on the limitations of the miraculous (verbal) weapons of his earlier practice of negritude. The allusion to “our true names, our miraculous names” is consistent with a post-slavery movement to cast off one’s slave name in favor of a true one.