The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire

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

  43 “path” had the title “Seed” (La graine) in the ms. version, which is otherwise identical to the published text. The “dark secret of numbers” relates the conclusion to that of “monsters” above.

  44 “venom version” [X] was the only one of the thirteen numbered poems to be published at some distance from its original order in i, laminaria. . . On the surviving ms., the last line was heavily crossed out, only to be restored in 1982.

  45 “abyss” was untitled in the surviving typescript. The second line alludes to the myth of Bellerophon, who killed the Chimera by melting a lump of lead in her throat. Like Bellerophon, who fell to earth as punishment for his hubris, the poet sees all nostalgia as a downward descent into the abyss.

  46 “pillage” is identical in the surviving typescript and the published text. Like “abyss,” in stanza four it anchors a meditation on life in Greek mythology. In “pillage,” the theme is avoidance of treachery and death. Sciron was a bandit who robbed travelers on the Isthmus of Corinth. Having obliged them to wash his feet, he kicked them from a cliff into the sea where they were devoured by man-eating turtles.

  47 “ibis-anubis” is another of the poems first collected in “Noria” in 1976. It can be read as a mise en abyme of i, laminaria. . . in that it uses Egyptian mythology to dramatize the plight of the disabused inventor of negritude. Much as the divine ibis created the world and invented the hieroglyph, Césaire recalls “the heart-rending signature of a bird / beneath the incomprehensible alphabets of the moment.” He glosses his use of comparative religion or mythology as drawing “lots for my ancestors for a plenary earth.” In the final distich, he imagines his own death as the moment when his poetic word shall “hover this cry to [the] anubis snout” of the sunset. Thirty years after the lyrical tragedy “And the Dogs Were Silent,” Anubis will preside over the judgment of the rebel who wrote the heroic poem of negritude (LDP, xxxvii-xxxviii).

  48 “crevasses” has no known earlier state. The epigraph is taken from the Walpurgis Night episode in part two of Faust. It recommended itself to Césaire because of his preoccupation with the “three hundred years” of colonialism in Martinique. The metaphoric chain that links elements in this poem is borrowed from mountain climbing. It suggests in conclusion that Césaire’s “writing dazzling with rage” is analogous to the fate of Sisyphus. Two terms for disgusting odors—musserie (stench) and pouacre (filthy)—are arcane (IML, 203).

  49 “ribbon” has been described as a pre-epitaph in which the poet sees his mortal remains borne by soldier ants to the traditional burial site of griots (IML, 205).

  50 “let it smoke” was lightly edited from a typescript for the 1982 collection. The poet imagines himself bound in the net of the retiarius. The knot of the torus runs through the poem as the primary metaphor of an existential dilemma.

  51 “bozal dorsal” was identified as a dance (“Danse. Dorsale. Bossale”) in the surviving ms. In Martinican Creole, a bossal(e) was an African-born slave. In geography, the dorsal line follows the crests of mountains, in this case the volcanoes that formed the islands of the Lesser Antilles.

  52 “the law of coral reefs” exists in two surviving typescripts, the first of which has the title “EXPLICITE” crossed out. The “famous chromosome” has been identified by Dr. René Hénane as chromosome 11, a variant of which causes the hereditary disease sickle-cell anaemia (drépanocytose in French) in approximately 12% of the population in Martinique (IML, 213-14). Like “bozal dorsal,” the poem connects islands of the Caribbean chain by a physical feature (volcanic action or hereditary physiology). As this cycle of poems draws to its close, Césaire situates himself as the chronicler of his Caribbean region.

  53 “the strength to face tomorrow” was first published as a preface to K. L. Walker’s Ph.D. dissertation in 1979 (WCP). Lines two and three were one line.

  “when Miguel Angel Asturias disappeared” lacked stanza breaks in the January 1976 Éthiopiques version. Most variants are typographical, but the first distich of metamorphoses (eight lines before the conclusion) was added in 1982. Césaire worked a number of allusions to Asturias’s work into this memorial: “flinging golden grain” and “glowworm sorcerer” (Men of Maize), “Strong Wind” (Strong Wind), among others. In an interview with Daniel Maximin published in 1982, Césaire elucidated his admiration for Asturias: rootedness in an American geography; revenge of the native peoples on the conquistador via the marvelous. “It’s the machine vanquished by the virgin forest; it’s reasoning vanquished by poetry” (IML, 59-60).

  “Mantonica Wilson. . .,” which is signed “Wifredo Lam,” makes the crucial identification of the spirits of Afro-American syncretic religions with “African” divinities, thus short-circuiting the process of creolization that all such religions underwent during and after plantation slavery. All the orishas named in this text have their Yoruba counterparts.

  “Wifredo Lam. . .” remained textually stable from “Noria” to the 1994 Seuil edition.

  “conversation with Mantonica Wilson” imagines Lam’s godmother invoking major orishas or lwas of santeria / Vodun: “trickster” and “buffoonish sylph of this selva”—Eshu; “opener of roads”—Elegua / Legba; “homes”—oumfò (temples); “high network of Death”—an apparent allusion to Baron Samedi in Haitian Vodun. Pestre de Almeida has explained “the hippotragus’s head” as a depiction of the headdress of a devotee of Eshu (PMM, 358).

  “to know, he says” was written to “illustrate” Wifredo Lam’s Annonciation portfolio. Césaire’s images interpret elements in the engraving in terms of occult knowledge. The “knife of the penis” plays on a Creole term—to cut—for the sex act. The “udder of the goat” seems to be the poet’s invention.

  “genesis for Wifredo” lacked the qualifier “for Wifredo” on the surviving ms. The interpretation of the poem as apocalyptic, possibly referencing the Spanish civil war by way of Picasso’s “Guernica,” passes the test of verisimilitude, but there is no equivalent engraving by Lam that might support it. It is more likely that Césaire seeks a renewal of life as he contemplates the failing health of Wifredo, who died on September 11, 1982, in Paris (IML, 230-31).

  “tongue fashion” may evoke, albeit allusively, elements of a Vodun ceremony. The “lozenge” is one of the hieroglyphs called vèvès (vevers), which are drawn on the sacred floor (“sacred territory”) of the oumfò. Césaire avoided naming the “directional rattle” or asson in Creole; it refers to the sacred language spoken by the officiant during the service. Although no asson appears in the equivalent engraving of the Annonciation series, it can be seen in other works by Lam (IML, 232).

  “passages” surely owes its title to the Greek root of diabase, meaning passage. The collection we know as Ferraments was, for a time, called Diabase by Césaire. By linking anabase (title of Saint-John Perse’s epic translated by T. S. Eliot) with diabase, Césaire opened a field of meditation on Caribbean society, where new human variations were created (“speciation”) in the closed world of the plantation. These “most audacious transgressions” have emerged from “the muddle” of that world in the shadow of the tutelary volcano.

  “rabordaille” was titled “Rabordaille poet in memoriam” on the surviving 1980 typescript, which suggests the original recipient was not Wifredo Lam. Comparison with the 1982 text indicates that Césaire adapted it to honor Wifredo (ILM, 235-39). In his play The Tragedy of King Christophe, Césaire glossed rabordaille as a “small cylindrical drum” and “the rapid rhythm, as for a boarding attack, played on it” (PTED, 1764).

  “let us offer our hearts to the sun” is a poetic interpretation of the engraving that bears this title in Annonciation. The claim that it references Aztec sacrifices of human hearts to the sun god does not seem to be supported by Lam’s work (ILM, 240-41).

  “incongruous builders” likewise entertains a problematic relationship with Lam’s engraving. J. E. Rivera in his novel The Vortex (1924), which focuses on the Colombian latex rubber industry, includes a scene
of invasion by tambocha ants.

  “new bounty” is the last of Césaire’s interpretations of Lam’s Annonciation portfolio. The poet rehearses the pictorial vocabulary of Lam’s œuvre while interjecting his own social preoccupations.

  Noria (1976-1994) was first used as a title in the Désormeaux edition of 1976 to designate seventeen poems, most of them recent. Four of the first five poems were not reprinted in i, laminaria. . . six years later.

  “Letter from Bahia-of-All-Saints” was first published under the title “Prose for Bahia-of-All-Saints” in a volume of testimonials to the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (simultaneous editions in Stuttgart, Paris, and London) in 1966. The title “Letter. . .” was first used in the “Noria” section of the Désormeaux edition in 1976. Césaire had traveled to Salvador de Bahia in 1963 with the Beninois ethnographer A. S. Anandé, who was studying the syncretic Brazilian developments of Vodun. It is probable that Césaire first encountered the trickster divinity Eshu, who was to figure prominently in his adaption of Shakespeare’s Tempest, in Bahia. Césaire’s poem is a series of ethnographic incidents and folkways that struck his imagination, punctuated by calling out the name of the city. The “Saints” of the title are both those of the Catholic calendar and those of candomblé—the santos derived from the Yoruba tradition and creolized in the Bahia region of Northeast Brazil—as in “whether Ogou or Saint George. . . .” Cachaça is used to make libation to Exu (Eshu); the “daughters of saints” serve a specific santo. In the Campo Grande neighborhood of Salvador de Bahia, a terreiro (candomblé sanctuary) is dedicated to an African healer who practiced exorcism. Ogu in candomblé corresponds, grosso modo, to Ogun in Haitian Vodun. Pink cauries are used in divination. Churches in Bahia are often decorated with picturesque Portuguese azulejo tiles.

  “Ethiopia. . .” was first published under the title “Addis-Ababa 1963” in issue 47 of Présence Africaine toward the end of that year. In 1964, the poem appeared as the afterword to a collected volume of addresses by heads of the thirty-two independent states who had convened in the Ethiopian capital in May 1963 to found the Organization of African Unity (PTED, 756-57). The title change in 1976 severed the poem from its historical origins. “Ethiopia. . .” has been read since the publication of “Noria” as an evocation of eternal African values. In “Ethiopia. . .,” Césaire links the emperor Haile Selassie (1892-1975) to the Queen of Sheba (Belkis Makeda) and King Solomon, as does Ethiopian tradition. The line “from the utmost scrupulous depth of my vegetal heart” expresses Césaire’s allegiance to the “Ethiopian” civilization propounded by Frobenius. (See “The Thoroughbreds” in The Miraculous Weapons above.) By naming the Blue Nile, which rises in Ethiopia’s Lake Tana, Césaire links Ethiopia to ancient Egypt. A series of questions put to the mythical bird Simorgh-Anka, borrowed from pre-Islamic Persia, links the poem metaphorically to the myth of rebirth that runs through Césaire’s poetry. (See note to “Tomb of Paul Eluard” under Ferraments above.) Numerous other local and regional references work to establish cultural density: Entoto is the highest peak overlooking Addis Ababa, where the Abba Dina military college is located; Harar was long a multiethnic cultural center in the East; tedj is a mead drink; ingera is unleavened bread. Saint Giyorgis may refer either to the monolithic Coptic church at Lalibela or to the cathedral in Addis Ababa that commemorates the defeat of the Italians at Adwa in 1896. Baata Menelik is the local name of the Church of the Trinity, where Ethiopia’s emperors are buried. Galla is the deprecatory name given to the Oromo minority by the dominant Amharic ethnic group. The Kraal is a synecdoche for South Africa under apartheid. Myriam Makeba, born in South Africa, addressed a song to the emperor, known as the Conquering Lion of Juda. In the penultimate stanza, “the bitter tide” is a 1976 correction of what we take to be a typo in the earlier texts: “the tidal year.”

  “Reply to Depestre Haitian Poet. . .” was first published in the April-July 1955 issue of Présence Africaine. Césaire organized his poem around two events crucial to the Haitian revolution: the Oath of the Caiman Woods (August, 1791), sworn by the Jamaican-born leader of the slave revolt, Boukman(n); and J.-J. Dessalines’s successful battle against the French general Rochambeau at the fort of Vertières on November 18, 1803. Césaire’s concern is that a true Caribbean ars poetica should reflect the language and mores of Caribbean peoples. His use of the verb marronner (to maroon or free from bondage) is thus a synecdoche of the poetic process Césaire holds up against Communist orthodoxy, which consisted of stripping away or burying ethnic specificity. In October 1956, Césaire would leave the Communist Party because it subordinated these same concerns to the interests of the European proletariat.

  “Vodun Ceremony for Saint-John Perse” first appeared in “Noria” in 1976, one year after the death of the 1960 Nobel Laureate. In its form, it is a testimonial but in an ironic mode. The governing trope is the oxymoron, which situates Césaire uncomfortably as the praise-singer for this son of slaveholding Guadeloupean planters. The stanza in parentheses is a pastiche of the “Song” that introduces Perse’s long poem Anabasis, which is characterized by just such parenthetical developments. Anabasis recounts the founding of an empire in the East, thus justifying the salute to the “ultimate Conquistador” in the final line. The poet’s identification with Decebalus, king of the Dacians who successfully held off two Roman emperors in the first century A.D., situates Césaire in opposition to the poet of empire whose praise he sings. The penultimate stanza borrows from the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid: “Flegrian” fields echo the earlier “infernal meadows” and the “asphodels” that the ancients placed on the tombs of the dead; the “birds profound” allude to the foul emanations from Lake Avernus, over which “no flying things could wing their way scathless” (VA, 240).

  “Like a Misunderstanding of Salvation. . .” (1994) was collected by Césaire with the assistance of Daniel Maximin for the Seuil edition of La Poésie; it was never published separately during the poet’s lifetime. An asterisk preceding the title designates the eleven poems published in Poésie in 1989; an ampersand, the seven poems published in Ausculter le dédale in 1991 by Atelier Dutrou with illustrations by Mehdi Qotbi.

  * “Obsidian Stele for Alioune Diop” was first published in Présence Africaine (Paris) and Éthiopiques (Dakar) in 1983 to honor the creator of Présence Africaine (the magazine and the publishing house), with whom Césaire collaborated from 1956 onward. The 1983 text allowed us to correct two misreadings that occur in the 1994 edition of La Poésie and were repeated in our reference text: “ou dormait au revers” and “le ventre et la vague.” The African birds Césaire likens to his departed friend are small, gregarious, not showy, but resilient and efficacious in their native environment.

  *& “Passage” was titled in ms. “It is the obligatory passage” on the typescript found in the poet’s home office in 2010. The poem adopts a network of maritime and volcanic island images to prolong the disenchantment with “mistaken tracks” that haunted i, laminaria. . . .

  *& “References” was first published in a special issue of the magazine Autrement devoted to the French West Indies in October 1989. The text concludes with an apparent allusion to the pre-Columbian mummies discovered in the North of Chile—the Chincorros—that were enveloped in red clay. This detail has been offered as evidence that the poem is a tribute to Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) (CTE, 31).

  & “Supreme Mask” was first published in La Poésie (1994), where it condensed into a few telling images the initial program of negritude sixty years earlier.

  *& “Virtue of Fireflies” in the final image of “the ambient swamp” clarifies the vehicle of the metaphoric chain, suggesting the transient but essential role of the poetic word.

  & “Rumination” uses uncharacteristic chopped syntax to suggest an interior monologue involving the connectedness of words, blood (pulse), rhythm, and creativity. “Rumination” seems to offer answers to questions put in “Virtue of Fireflies” (CTE, 39).

  & “Word Owing�
�� is related—in theme, image, and lexicon—to “incongruous builders” in i, laminaria. . . (CTE, 45).

  *& “Trajectory” traces the poet’s career through easily recognizable recurrent images; his use of the Creole term bout blanc for mature cane stalks may signal a freer relationship with his mother tongue.

  *“Dyali” was presumably written for the special edition of Éthiopiques in which it first appeared in 1988 (PTED, 743). Césaire honors his friend with the title Dyali or griot, which Senghor had used in his own poetry.

  *“Rapacious Space” is a meditation on tropical nature with a focus on species that occur elsewhere in Césaire’s poetry: balisier, simarouba, tree ferns. Writing is presented as a necessary and unavoidable response to the urgings of the natural world.

  *“Phantasms” is an uncomplicated allegory of the intrusions that inhibit the poet’s attempt to start a new project. Dr. Hénane based his interpretation on the designation of the “train rafale” as an armored train used by the French Foreign Legion between Nha Trang and Saigon in the early 1950s. He read the poem as a “pamphlet against the French war in Indochina” (CTE, 65). That the war had ended thirty-five years earlier did not discourage this former inspector general of the French army’s medical corps from taking the vehicle for the tenor of the metaphor. See “Ruminations of Calderas” below.