The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire

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

  “A Blank to Fill on the Travel Pass of Pollen,” prior to its existence as a poem, was a passage in the new version of And the Dogs Were Silent that Césaire sent to his German translator and editor, Janheinz Jahn, in the mid-1950s (RER, 68-69). It was first published in the issue of Les Lettres nouvelles for July 15, 1959. Under the general title “Patience of Signs,” the order of the poems was “Patience of Signs,” “A Blank. . .,” “I Perseus Centuplicating Myself,” “Counting-Out Rhyme,” and “Seism.”

  “A Little Song for Crossing a Big River” has been read as Césaire’s treatment of the attributes of the Yoruba divinity Shango (DFPS, 243-45), although the connections proposed are tenuous.

  “In Truth” closes the collection on a note of mystery; the door “half-open” portends only a partial resolution of “this history.”

  i, laminaria. . . (1982) The Roman numerals in square brackets indicate the order of the poems in the Kesteloot manuscript collection now in the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris.

  1 “lagoonal calendar” was, at the poet’s request, to be inscribed on his tombstone, giving it pride of place in the collection and reinforcing its testamentary purpose. The final three lines were chosen for that purpose. The “three-hundred-year war” echoes the “306 years” in “And the Dogs Were Silent.” By way of contrast, “Dwelling I” in Solar Throat Slashed provides the most telling commentary on the fate of negritude since its heroic formulation in the 1940s.

  2 “annunciations,”—entitled “annunciation banners” in the surviving ms. (IML, 85)—deploys a string of metaphors of the natural world on an axis of references to the Roman Catholic liturgy: the Annunciation of the Virgin in the title, the “good news” of the gospels, and the “white smoke” that announces the election of a pope. Ultimately, the poem undermines the claim of spiritual transformation by reducing it to natural processes that culminate in the recuperation of memory. Although the title suggests a connection to Césaire’s collaboration with Lam, “annunciations” was published in the 1976 Désormeaux edition, prior to the Annonciation project.

  3 “epacts. . .” [I] in the ms. version (IML, 95) proposed Diabase as the title of the collection. The final line makes its association with “lagoonal calendar” obvious.

  4 “Léon G. Damas. . .” is a funerary elegy for the co-founder of the negritude movement, who died in Washington, D.C., on January 22, 1978. Since 1970, he had been Distinguished Visiting Professor at Howard University. No ms. or typescript survives. Césaire assumes a shared experience of the negritude adventure in the first stanza and, in the second, the “blow to the heart” dealt by the reality of departmentalization of the French West Indies and Guiana. The third stanza alludes to the title of Damas’s poem “Hoquet” (1937) in “his hiccup,” before describing their “stubborn negritudes” in a series of nostalgic images. As much as any other individual poem, this elegy strikes the note that resonates throughout the collection.

  5 “test. . .” [II] in two five-line stanzas opposes those poets who have sought to create a new space of language to those who would hijack language in the name of an established order.

  6 “flint warrior through all words” uses Freudian language (the id) in an undated poem to honor the Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who died in Washington, D.C., on December 6, 1961. The “high-heeled trees” suggest the species that grow in and on the banks of the mangrove (IML, 141). The conclusion bears witness to the liberating role of Fanon’s clinical work among Algerian patients during the revolution that brought an end to colonial rule shortly after his death.

  7 “in order to speak. . .” uses the archaic language of heraldry (or, orle) to suggest the poetic process.

  8 “sentiments and resentments of words” harks back to the sacred time of mythic creation and recreation (the Great Time), as opposed to the profane time of human history. Césaire’s home office, photographed by Jacqueline Couti, contained a 1937 edition of Mircea Eliade’s Mythes, Rêves et Mystères, in which the poet underlined and marked passages devoted to the Great Time: “One should not lose sight of the fact that one of the essential functions of myth is this very opening onto the Great Time, the periodic recovery of a primordial Time” (EMR, 31). The three pages that follow detail activities characterized by “concentrated time” by which modern humanity strives to reconnect with the sacred. Césaire underlined the passage stressing that “poetic creation . . . implies the abolition of time, of history concentrated in language—and tends toward the recovery of the primordial paradisiacal situation. . .” (p. 33). In conclusion, Eliade gives a definition of poetic creation in which Césaire, who marked the margin heavily, undoubtedly recognized his poetics of the 1940s: “From a certain point of view, one can say that every great poet remakes the world, for he strives to see it as if Time and History did not exist. This activity recalls uncannily the behavior of the ‘primitive’ and of traditional human societies” (p. 34). (Our translation.) The poems that immediately follow challenge the mythic vision of any such spiritual paradise. The name of the Marquis de Sade in our translation approximates the homophonic play on Old French mal sade, which is the root of maussade, “dismal” (IML, 148).

  9 “mangrove” [VII] plays on the reductive and restrictive nature of contemplating one’s West Indianness; “the mornes” are the synecdoche of “torpor” and the enemies of creativity. The musical game Maré Maré involved the elimination of the slave contestants: the last man standing won (PSD, 410).

  10 “song of the seahorse” praises the tiny marine creature that represents a dead end of evolution; it is also, by its diminutive stature, the reduced version of “The Thoroughbreds” who symbolized the dream of negritude in the early 1940s.

  11 “flotsam” is a discreet critique of the grand mythic constructs of negritude, including “The Thoroughbreds”: “The very structures that established the narrativity of writing (myths-rituals-memory) have clashed with and have been shattered by reality” (IML, 153-54).

  12 “ordinary. . .” [III] may well be a reminiscence of Césaire’s travels in the northeast of Brazil in 1963 (IML, 104). (See “Letter from Bahia-of-All-Saints” under Noria below.) Among the disagreeable details, the “obsessive kiss of cockroaches” contains a pun on labial herpes, which in Martinican Creole is called the kiss of the cockroach.

  13 “smell” [V] is an ironic evocation of the process of cane sugar production in all its primal olfactory aspects.

  14 “the mangrove condition” [IV] began as a quatrain evoking the nameless quality of despair. Its later elaboration for the 1982 collection relates that despair to the fate of the laborers in “smell” by way of the characteristics of the mangrove. The result is the mangrove condition.

  15 “rivers are not impassive” extends the mood of “the mangrove condition” with a focus on an individual. The line “Calabar poto-poto” links the Caribbean mangrove to the originary mud of the Slave Coast, where Calabar is located.

  16 “banal” reiterates the theme of torpor in relation to alienated physical labor, while questioning the meanders of inherited blood; “wrecks” harks back to numerous other evocations of the original disaster or catastrophe.

  17 “subsidence,” called “travel notebook” on the ms. in the Doucet library, which is dated September 1978, prolongs the poet’s rumination on “genetic drift” initiated by “banal.” The collapse of the dream of negritude leaves only a profound sense of loss.

  18 “link of the chained” belongs to the same thematic preoccupation as “a day”: “to build” a city out of the flotsam and jetsam of a neo-colony. The “chain” suggests groups of slaves chained together, each one of whom could be seen as a “link.”

  19 “i guided the long transhumance of the herd” was first published in the Désormeaux edition of “Noria” in 1976. The French title is a perfect alexandrine (twelve-syllable) line. The figure of the poet-shepherd guiding the destiny of his people has a long history that Césaire treats ironically in the parenthesis: “no
use . . . in inspecting all the crossbreeding” for “from one relative to another one link is always missing.” (See “Bucolic” in Ferraments above.)

  20 “a day” [VI] extends the disabused reflections of the poet-mayor of Fort-de-France on his infrastructure projects that brought the city into the twentieth century.

  21 “zaffer sun” is another poem from Noria that Césaire incorporated in his new collection. The title is polysemic, suggesting the roasted ore used to produce cobalt blue (“zaffer”) or the heraldic sea eaglet, wings displayed (IML, 88). The poet’s alter ego imagines himself first as the horologer of a court built upon bat guano who has deceived himself with African charms (grigris). In the second stanza, he becomes the parakimomene or Grand Vizir of the emperor of “lofty bitter realms.” In the French text, amers can be read as “landmarks” echoing the title of Saint-John Perse’s 1957 poem Amers (IML, 88-89). A parodic use of the heraldic term safre is suggested by the vehicles of the metaphoric chain (horologer, parakimomene).

  22 “algae” belatedly supplied the title of the collection; it prioritizes “influx” (native and internal) over “afflux” (foreign and external) in positing a (cultural) resurgence that the poem finally identifies with the laminarian alga.

  23 “macumba word” harks back to the word magic of the glory days of negritude, concluding with a sly wink to the reader in the final line. The “Shango words” provided the title, which alludes to one of the syncretic religions of Brazil.

  24 “it, the hollow” [VII] was assigned the same ms. number as “mangrove,” which suggests more than one sequential ordering of the poems. “it. . .” already had this title before the collection was assembled with the assistance of D. Maximin. L. Kesteloot in 2012 rallied to R. Confiant’s interpretation of the poem as a riddle concerning creoleness, implying that the ça in the title should not be seen as an allusion to Jung’s theory of universal archetypes (ILM, 168). Unlike the Creole titim genre, this riddle elicits no shared cultural answer from its audience.

  25 “nights,” so titled on the Ms., is a meditation on the “catastrophe” of the slave trade and its three-century aftermath in Martinique. The vehicle of the metaphoric chain is the rapidity of nightfall and the irruption of dawn in the tropics.

  26 “don’t be taken in” sets up a parallel between the Martinican toponym Ravine (as in Ravine Vilaine, which flows through Fort-de-France) and the river Kedron, which flows through a ravine between the Mount of Olives and Mount Moriah. When A. de Lamartine visited Jerusalem in 1833 (Voyage en Orient), the Kedron was a dry river, which may explain the adjective “clandestine” in the text. The title of the poem suggests that we not mistake Fort-de-France for Jerusalem.

  27 “pirate” initially bore the title “The sun’s share” (“La part du soleil”) on the surviving ms. An earlier title, “Caprices of the sun,” is crossed out. The enigmatic first line of “pirate” was added later. Like “it, the hollow,” “pirate” takes the form of a riddle that appears to ally the pirate-poet with both the sun and the volcano. Twenty years after dropping from Cadastre the poem “Lynch I” (STS), Césaire restored in “pirate” the metaphoric play on “galls”—“Galli.” Here, we have translated the vehicle of the metaphor “galls,” whereas in “Lynch I,” we translated the tenor, “Galli.”

  28 “stone” was entitled “Shall we see him?” on the surviving ms. The two final lines offer an intertextual hint that “he” is Saint-John Perse, who died in 1975. (See “Vodun Ceremony for Saint-John Perse. . .” in “Noria” below.) In “the water soaking green leaves,” we hear the echo of “they bathed you in water-of-green-leaves” (“To Celebrate a Childhood, 1”); and in “there rained the approach of an equinox,” an echo of Perse’s 1971 poem “Song for an equinox”: “My dear, the sky’s downpour was with us. . .” (IML, 178-79).

  29 “solvitur. . .” [VIII] represents the neocolonial landscape as bird droppings and vomit. The possibilities suggested by the Latin adverb “therefore” (igitur) are negated by the Latin for “it is dissolved” (solvitur). The echo of Mallarmé’s poem “Igitur” may be coincidental; if not, it is heavily ironic.

  30 “transmission” [IX, an earlier number VIII having been crossed out], considered in sequential order, can be read as a meditation on the frustrations of the mayor whose efforts have been impeded by a mindless central government.

  31 “slowness” [XI] has been interpreted in terms of Césaire’s faith in the forces of the dormant volcano that will one day spur to action the blood of the people who live in its shadow (IML, 124).

  32 “understanding mornes,” untitled in the surviving ms., is a rhapsodic meditation on the significance of the hills that visually define the Antilles. After affirming that “i did not misunderstand,” the poet draws local geography in the direction of Africa through his use of “recado,” which suggests both the royal scepter of the kings of Dahomey and its message. By denying that mornes are “a somersault of bulls / collapsing under the thrust of Mithra’s dagger,” Césaire undercuts the heroic mythopoesis found in Solar Throat Slashed.

  33 “torpor of history” treats the volcano and the wind much as “understanding mornes” did the hills. Here, hope is assigned to a future wind.

  34 “this uninsistent blood” was published in “Noria” in 1976; no earlier state is known. The Latinism sans instance, which we have translated as “uninsistent” in the title, relates the poem to 31 and its “slowness of the blood.” The second stanza has been interpreted as a depiction of the mature cane stalks at the foot of the Montagne Pelée displaying their whitish plumes (IML, 82). The concentration of [s] and [z] phonemes in the final line of the original is significant.

  35 “hearth. . .” [XII] sums up in a few images the relationship between hearth (family, population) and the volcano that dominates the landscape.

  36 “Justice listens at the gates of Beauty” has been likened to Rimbaud’s “Flowers” (in Illuminations), decrypted as a meditation on the 1906 Palace of Justice in Fort-de-France (on the grounds that its columns are decorated with varans), and reduced to an allegory of Aimé’s divorce from Suzanne Césaire (IML, 184-85).

  37 “a freedom in passing” was published in “Noria” (1976). Its representation of freedom as discrete, fleeting images has encouraged critics to find in it an intertextual connection with Rimbaud (“City” in Illuminations) and Eschylus (The Eumenides) (IML, 93).

  38 “inventory of keys” [XIII] is the last of the untitled ms. poems around which Césaire and Maximin constructed i laminaria. . . In revising the ms. for his 1982 collection, Césaire added four lines between “stymphalians” and “chanson chanson” that refer to the 1502 landing by Columbus on the Isla del Drago—now Isla Colón, located in the Bocas del Toro province of Panama—while searching for a route to the Pacific. By adding these placenames to Lake Maracaibo, which was a frequent prize of freebooters in the 17th century, Césaire located the poem in the early colonial history of the Spanish Caribbean, while assimilating the islands (keys) to caged birds. The man-eating Stymphalian birds, featured in the sixth labor of Hercules, lived in a marsh in Arcadia.

  39 “deposit made. . .” is another poem that first appeared in “Noria” in 1976. Its metaphors are systematically deprecatory, except for the sudden renewal of life of the poui tree, which flowers in the dry season. The first line sets the tone with the creolized term contrefaisances stressing misshapen or deformed nature. In all probability, Césaire projected onto the natural world the process of pseudomorphosis (q.v.), which is countered by the “explosion” that announces in conclusion a revolutionary transformation.

  40 “conspiracy. . .,” titled “Late Sun” (Tard Soleil) on the surviving typescript, may have been placed after “deposit made. . .” to illustrate the “explosion” that will announce the revolution. Although “conspiracy” calls upon the natural world to join in the poet’s denunciation of “the creamy white smile,” the tone of this poem prolongs the self-deprecatory mood of its predecessors. The final imag
e (“a spurt of living water”) may be an echo of the Koran: “From what substance did He create him? From a sperm-drop. . .” (Surat 80: 18-19), in which case “the Beast” suggests the Apocalypse or Book of Revelation (IML, 190-91).

  41 “monsters” was preceded by two surviving typescripts, the first of which was titled “Exuviae” (Exuvies), whereas this title was crossed out on the second typescript. The final title resulted from the process of composition of the collection. The other major modification occurred in the conclusion: “THE CIPHER” replaced “I HAVE NOT ABDICATED,” crossed out on the first typescript, and “a cipher” in lower-case, then crossed out, on the second (IML, 191-92).

  42 “internuncio,” which was reprinted from “Noria,” takes its title from the lowest level of the papal diplomatic corps; an intermediary with powers that vary according to local conditions. The “couresse” and the “mea-culpa-crab” are both timid creatures. The “petal of fire” is an ingredient in a Creole holiday drink, whereas the “diving petrel” is a small, compact shore bird. We take “tomb saxifrage” to be a play on “rock saxifrage,” a modest plant that can cause rocks to burst over time. The Creole adjective tiaulé signifies “a great deal”; its use here anchors the poem in the popular culture of Martinique (IML, 91).