The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire

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

  “Spirals” may refer to the cassia tree, as Césaire told Ngal (NAC, 143-44). At all events, the poem initially depicts a hike into the rain forest (“we ascend . . . we descend”) with a focus on metaphors designating specific plants, trees, and their fruit: cassias, cannas (balisiers), cecropias. The underside of the cecropia or trumpetwood leaf is, like the black man’s palm, whitish (DFPS, 51). We have used the Middle English forbeten to render the archaic French rôlés (CCP, 405). The poem’s conclusion is a downward spiral motion in which “the grudges of mankind” and “the rancor of races” leads to “the end of hell.”

  “Hail to Guinea” was published in a special issue of Présence Africaine devoted to Guinea (Conakry) in mid-1959, less than a year after Ahmed Sékou Touré led the colony to reject the new French constitution. Over 95% of the voters opted for effective and immediate independence, the only one of France’s African colonies to do so. Césaire depicted the new nation heroically in this poem, which is organized geographically: Dalaba, Pita, Labé, and Mali are laid out on the map from South to North, the direction of the rivers’ flow. The Tinkisso River is an affluent of the Niger that rises in the escarpment of the Fouta Djalon. In the eighteenth century, the capital of the Imamate of Fouta Djalon was Timbo, which Césaire wrote as “Timbé.” Timbo is often omitted from maps today.

  “Realm” replicates images (“the knife stab,” directed against a natural element, “the wind”) found in “The Sun’s Knife-Stab in the Back of the Surprised Cities.” However, “Realm” dispenses with the surrealist narrative cover used in Solar Throat Slashed. The word wind can be read as a metonym for the Windward Islands, which include Martinique (DFPS, 61).

  “Monsoon-Mansion” stages a dialogue with the beloved in a vaguely African (“marabou”) but timeless landscape. We translate brusquée as “strange” following the definition of the archaic adjective by von Wartburg (DFPS, 65).

  “For Ina” is the only published poem by Césaire dedicated to one of his children. It was first published in the “Liminal Vampire” series in Les Lettres nouvelles in mid-1955. It is also one of the most positive in the collection, since it focuses on pleasant associations with the natural world. Césaire is believed to have composed it the very day his daughter requested it.

  “Birds” develops in its four lines a gnomic evocation of the “exile” experienced by African slaves and their descendants. The “manger of the stars” suggests the “bird feeder” and the “cord of stars” in “Gunnery Warning,” which opens the collection The Miraculous Weapons.

  “Nocturne of a Nostalgia” reveals in its penultimate stanza the point of departure for this meditation on the slave trade. Assinie, on the coast of present-day Côte d’Ivoire in the Gulf of Guinea, was a French slave-trading post that flourished from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

  “To Know Ourselves. . .” uses anaphora to develop images of Disaster, a term Césaire frequently used as a synecdoche for the slave trade and its aftermath.

  “Merciless Great Blood” was first published in Beauvoir and Sartre’s magazine Les Temps modernes in mid-1955, alongside “Beat It Night Dog” with which it forms a diptych. “Merciless Great Blood” is a meditation on the slave trade from the Arabian peninsula (Kamsin, Asshume), to the “strange bayous” of the Americas where slaves are condemned “to moan to twist / to scream.”

  “Beat It Night Dog” evokes in a tone of despair the slavers’ “caravans,” the slave-hunters’ dogs, their “fangs bleeding,” and the flesh of their victims.

  “. . .but there is this hurt” reverses the legend of Prometheus and the eagle, with the iconic Martinican raptor (menfenil) serving as the poet’s agent of vengeance. In a second reversal, the poet becomes “prey for the beak of the wind.” Césaire wrote in a letter to his German translator that the menfenil was “a little sparrowhawk. . . its fat is used in making spells” (PTED, 1763).

  “Viscera of the Poem” can be read as a meditation on the composition of this collection. Its publication in 1955 under the collective title “Liminal Vampire” places it at the heart of the creative process at this date. “Viscera. . .” announces the mood, the focus, and the intensely visceral nature of the poems that immediately follow it in the ordering of the collection.

  “It Is Myself, Terror, It Is Myself” was first published in the Journal des poètes, Brussels, in September 1954. The legend of Prester John focuses the poet’s sense of belonging to the island with which he identifies in the title.

  “Fangs” was published in Présence Africaine in mid-1955. The poem condenses into a single stanza the unbearable pain of a flayed consciousness that experiences in the body both the “bloody map map of blood” and the “shackle weight” of the collective past.

  “Liminal Vampire” gave its title to the six poems published by Les Lettres nouvelles in May 1955.

  “My Profound Day’s Clear Passage” develops metaphorically from a vision of the conquistador’s sword to evoke a howling consciousness before the self’s awakening as “a great serpent of the bogs . . . avid for a tenuous milk.”

  “Corpse of a Frenzy” begins with the poet’s reminiscences of walks through the sugar estate where he was born and entered primary school; the distich in the middle of the poem shifts the focus to the eruption of Mt. Pelée in May 1902, which Césaire’s mother referred to as the “catastrophe.” The final stanza assimilates the poet’s heart to the sole black prisoner who survived the volcano’s eruption.

  “Patience of Signs” is a meditation on nature in the Caribbean, concluding with a heavily ironic allusion to the “sweet manchineels” whose parts (bark, sap, fruit) are toxic. Usually called a “little apple” (in Spanish, manzanilla de la muerte or apple of death), its fruit is assimilated by Césaire to “berries” and “rich oranges.” He may have had in mind the planting of manchineels along the island’s coast to serve as a line of defense against invaders.

  “Phantoms” develops around discrete sensory images of decomposition, a vision of “forbidden cities” in the tropics. It continues the mood of “Patience of Signs” while preparing that of “Mobile Flail of Strange Dreams.”

  “Mobile Flail of Strange Dreams” is an oneiric dreamscape with nightmarish overtones. The French lines approximate the octosyllable used in narrative poetry. The “flail” could refer to the threshing tool, to the medieval weapon, or even to the balance beam of a primitive scale. Joseph Cornell created a collage on fiberboard using Césaire’s French title; only its oneiric quality seems to relate it to Césaire’s poem (Smithsonian American Art Museum).

  “Harsh Season” was published in Les Temps modernes in August 1955. Its stark opposition between black and white, along with the appeal to the judgment of nature, connotes the urgency of decolonization in the “deserts.” Hénane hears an echo of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King in the final line (DFPS, 129).

  “Statue of Lafcadio Hearn” memorializes the Greco-Irish folklorist (1850-1904) who wrote Two Years in the French West Indies, Youma, and other titles that have become reference works in Martinique. The urban culture of the old colonial capital, Saint-Pierre, was destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Pelée on May 2, 1902. In the January 1942 issue of Tropiques, Césaire collaborated with René Ménil on an introduction to Martinican folklore, citing as examples of the “cycle of hunger” Hearn’s versions of the stories of Yé and Nanie-Rosette. Between the magazine publication of the poem in Présence Africaine in mid-1955 and the revision for Ferraments, Césaire added to the first stanza the lines placed in quotation marks, which he adapted from Marc Logé’s edition of Youma (HY) (PTED, 554).

  “Beautiful Spurted Blood” takes as its pretext the folkloric theme of Césaire’s “Statue of Lafcadio Hearn” in order to retell the story of Yé in dense, modernist verse (AMN, 253). “The last two lines . . . draw upon the consequences of Yé having killed and shared the totem bird with his family. The enchanted bird revives and demands that the family restore it to its very last feather” (CCP, 406
).

  “It is the Courage of Men That Is Dislocated,” “From My Stud Farms,” “Marine Intimacy,” and “Bucolic” form a unit in the center of Ferraments. Césaire sent these four prose poems to Louis Guillaume, editor of the little magazine Les Lettres, in December 1953 for publication in the second issue (“Poésie Vivante II,” 1954). At the request of the editor, he offered this definition of the prose poem: “From the moment when verse became specifically lyrical, when it refused to tell a story, to describe, to moralize, when it willed itself into a probing of the depths and a coal-damp-explosion scream, then, as a reaction, the prose poem was born. . .” (DFPS, 143). More specifically, “It is the Courage of Men. . .” strings its apparently free-floating metaphors on a narrative thread that is revealed only in the final paragraph. “The vineyard of wrath. . .” refers the reader to the Book of Revelation XIV, 8-20, in which St. John predicts the overthrow of Babylon. These are the poetics of “The Sun’s Knife-Stab in the Back of the Surprised Cities” in Solar Throat Slashed as well. Ambiguity is sustained in this group of poems through terms that may refer to one or another of two chains of signifiers. The word grenade in “It is the Courage of Men. . .” can be read as “grenade” in the military chain or as “pomegranate” in the botanical chain of signifiers. Virgil’s Latin Eclogues or Bucolics are the transparent intertext of “Bucolic.” Césaire differentiated this group of prose poems from the rest of the collection by systematically indenting the first line of each new paragraph.

  “Ferment” treats the history of plantation slave labor in terms of the punishment of Prometheus on the rock.

  “I Perseus Centuplicating Myself” was first published in Les Lettres nouvelles in mid-July 1959. The poem sustains the mythographic mood by shifting the focus of the poet’s identity quest to Perseus, while pushing Mallarméan syntax to the limit.

  “Precept” was published in the August 1955 issue of Les Temps modernes. Although the three-gated arch recalls the triumphal arches erected by conquerors from the Romans to Louis XIV, and the attributes of the “I” are those of the savage pariah, the conditions requisite to establishing a “black country” remain metaphorically mysterious. Attempts to find a univocal meaning in them (DFPS, 170-71) seem to us ill-advised.

  “And Sounding the Sand with the Bamboo of My Dreams” was first published in the May 1955 issue of Les Lettres nouvelles. The final line of the second stanza was cut from the 1976 Désormeaux Collected Poetry. It is probable that Césaire intended to write back against Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis with his “dusty caravans,” “ancient witnesses of the alliance,” and “kings in the consenting coral” (DFPS, 175).

  “To the Islands of All Winds” was first published in the August 1955 issue of Les Temps modernes. The title alludes to the Caribbean islands, both Windward and Leeward, that were the destination of the slave trade and to the Trade Winds that blow from Africa. The first line of the third stanza, “O justice noon of reason,” recalls one of the most famous lines of Valéry’s “Marine Cemetery”: “Noon the just there creates out of fire. . .” (see “Marine Intimacy” above).

  “The Time of Freedom,” which memorializes the repression on February 2, 1950, of an Ivoirian political movement with Communist sympathies by the colonial authorities, was first published in L’Humanité on February 10th. As he frequently did in writing about Africa, Césaire included names of rivers, towns, and ethnic groups (Baulé) to establish a sense of authenticity. The first version of the poem contained eight lines that were still more specific in their designation of the time and place of the repression. The poem was reprinted twice in Russian translation in Moscow: in the Literaturnaya Gazeta for March 15th, and again in a volume of ethnographic studies, Narodni Afriki (Peoples of Africa), in 1954 (EAC1, 180-81).

  “Favor of Tree Saps” was first published in Présence Africaine in mid-1955. The poem deploys a series of metaphors in which tropical trees embody characteristics of the descendants of slaves who survived the “shipwrecks,” the “disaster” of the triangle trade. The red-tipped plume-like flowers of the sapodilla (Pachira aquatica), are likened to an American Indian headdress.

  “Tomb of Paul Eluard” is an ode to the French poet who died on November 26, 1952. Césaire’s poem was published in the July-August 1953 issue of Europe. Eluard was perhaps the foremost lyric poet of his generation, having begun his career as a founding member of the surrealist movement. He joined the French Communist Party in 1942, when he was active in the anti-Nazi resistance. Césaire presumably met Eluard at the Wroclaw Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in 1948. The date of composition of the poem is unknown; however, the line “the sirens of lightships have been sounding two nights” suggests the date November 28, 1952. Allusions to several of Éluard’s poems may be embedded in the text (DFPS, 195-97). Toward the end of the ode, Césaire evokes the giant rukh bird of Persian and Arabic legend, suggesting that the mysteries of poetry arise from the blinding of Reason. The rukh or roc is analagous to the Persian Simmurgh, which Césaire names in “Ethiopia” as a symbol of renaissance or rebirth (See under Noria below.)

  “Memorial for Louis Delgrès” was first published in Le Progressiste, the newspaper of Césaire’s PPM party, on February 7, 1959, and reprinted in Présence Africaine sometime after March (issue dated December 1958 – January 1959). The poem memorializes the Martinican military hero who perished in a last-ditch stand against the reimposition of slavery in Guadeloupe in May 1802 (EACI, 298-99). The irregular sonnet Césaire placed between “I call for a song. . .” and “the pollen run-off of the fields” was obliterated by closing up the stanza breaks in the 1976 edition. Césaire told Eshleman and Smith that “fripure” was a neologism he created from “friperie,” the shed in which the cane was shredded (CCP, 406).

  “In Memory of a Black Union Leader” was first published in Le Journal des poètes, Brussels, in September, 1954. The poem memorializes the political action of Albert Crétinoir (1905-1952), who was the Communist mayor of Césaire’s birthplace, Basse-Pointe, from 1945 until his death (EAC I, 236-37).

  “. . .on the State of the Union” was first published as “Message on the State of the Union” in the February-March 1956 issue of Présence Africaine. It is a rare poetic treatment of the violent consequences of racial segregation in the United States, where Emmett Till was assassinated by Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam in Money, Mississippi, on August 28, 1955. The assassins, claiming the fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago had flirted with Bryant’s wife, abducted him from a relative’s house, tortured and shot him, used barbed wire to attach him to a heavy weight, and threw him into the Tallahatchie River. A jury of white men found the accused murderers not guilty. The story—sometimes with pictures of the mutilated body—was reported worldwide. Look magazine published Bryant and Milam’s confession to the details of the murder in its issue for January 1956.

  “Africa” first appeared under the title “To Africa” in the September 1954 issue of the Journal des poètes, Brussels, alongside “In Memory of a Black Union Leader” and “It Is Myself, Terror, It Is Myself” under the general title “Aimé Césaire or Revolt Justified.” “Africa” encourages the anticolonialist struggle as it began in earnest; compare “To Africa” (1946) and “Hail to Guinea” (1959).

  “Out of Alien Days” was first published as “2 octobre” in a chapbook sold in Martinique to aid the victims of police violence during the cantonal elections on October 2, 1949. Michel Leiris reprinted it in the February 1950 issue of Les Temps modernes. Like “The Time of Freedom,” “Out of Alien Days” was rewritten for Ferraments with numerous local references deleted (EAC1, 176-77). The isolated line “but the redness of the east in a balisier heart” is evidence of continuity of vision between Césaire’s decade as a Communist Deputy and his founding of the Martinican Progressive Party with the balisier (Canna indica) flower stalk as its symbol.

  “To Salute the Third World” was written in the wake of the second Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in
Rome in April 1959. It was first published in the June-July 1959 issue of Présence Africaine. Césaire positioned it toward the end of Ferraments to announce the imminent birth of new nations in Mother Africa. As he did elsewhere, he mapped the colonies of France and Belgium geographically, naming in one stanza two lakes in eastern Congo (Kivu and Tanganyika) and the river (Ruzizi) that flows between them. The Belgian Congo was to gain its independence in mid-1960. In the next stanza, he named Lake Chad, four rivers (Benue, Logone, Senegal, and Niger), and one volcano (Nyiragongo). In the central stanza, he evokes the slave trade, only to move quickly to an enthusiastic evocation of the power and beauty of the continent that was soon to be free. His old friend Léopold S. Senghor was to become the first president of independent Senegal in 1960.

  “Indivisible” shares with “Beautiful Spurted Blood” a poetics of quotation. In this case, the poet casts himself in the role of a Caribbean Odysseus blinding the Cyclops of the slave trade.