*“Ridiculous” is a self-deprecatory version of the Prometheus myth, addressed to a faraway female friend who remains unidentified.
“Craters” is known only from the version published in La Poésie in 1994. Its allegorical structure, combined with its opaque allusions, renders the poem particularly impenetrable.
“Chitchat” takes its title from a key term in “Rapacious Space,” thus creating a link between the two poems. The first of two surviving typescripts began with two lines—deleted in blue ink and in a firm hand—“Quand le sec printemps brandit flave / la hampe du premier miconia” (When arid spring brandishes yellowing / the scape of the first miconia.” Had these lines remained, the poem would have been seen to develop the risk to Martinican forests by the invasive species miconia calvescens. Moreover, lines 3-5 are a negative echo to the 1946 text of “To Africa”: “on the third day the animals came out of the woods / and formed a hot belt great and powerful around the cities. . . .” (See Solar Throat Slashed.)
“Island Words” first appeared in La Poésie (1994) as a salute to the Maurician poet Édouard Maunick, who had engaged Aimé Césaire in a long conversation on the France Culture radio station in 1976. In 1990, he published Toi, laminaire: italiques pour Aimé Césaire (You, laminaria: Italics for Aimé Césaire), to which this poem is the probable reply. It is perhaps Césaire’s most ecologically commited poem; in this sense, it clarifies the thrust of “Chitchat” and “Rapacious Space.”
• “Like a Misunderstanding of Salvation” appeals to the elements—sun (solstice), blood of the flame tree, volcano—to counter the “bungle” or “blunder” that West Indian colonialism has represented since the time of the buccaneers (referenced by the “herd” of cattle whose meat they cured on the “buccan”). The “stepmothers” are presumably “France” and “Africa,” neither of which has quenched the “obsolete thirst.” It may be excessive to see in the imperative “break me” an allusion to the poet as a contemporary Osiris whose limbs were “dispersed” over the Nile delta. However that may be, the poem has been seen as “a misprision concerning salvation [and] redemption. . . . This poem . . . is the cry of expectation disappointed, of hope betrayed. Bitterness and disenchantment are expressed by a litany of depreciative and belittling images. . . .” (CTE, 85) In “Like a Misunderstanding. . .,” Césaire again eschews capital letters, as he did throughout i, laminaia. . . in 1982, suggesting a similar date of composition. By extending this title to the collection, Césaire has inflected our reading of the whole.
“Ruminations of Calderas” survived in Césaire’s home office in the form of two corrected typescripts photographed by J. Couti in July 2010 for the editors of the PTED edition. The poem captures the shudderings and reversals in nature in the hours before a volcanic eruption, which is assimilated to the euphoric (“hilarious”) humor of “deep-sea geneses” in the Caribbean islands. An attempt on the part of Dr. Hénane to date the poem to the 1950s relied in part on a dubious linking of “Phantasms” to the French colonial war in Indochina (CTE, 65), in part on a photographic image of the paper (CTE, 95). The presence of the word “miconia” (subsequently crossed out) on the ms. suggests a date closer to that of “Chitchat.”
“Through. . .” was dedicated on the undated ms. “To F.Th.” Françoise Thésée had presented the poet with a copy of her book on the botanical garden of Saint-Pierre, Martinique, in 1990 (CTE, 102-05). This is most probably the date of Césaire’s poem, which can be read as a walk through an imaginary garden that contains several of his recurrent themes. Dr. Hénane ties them to specific references in L. Thésée’s book (CTE, 106-08).
*“Rock of the Sleeping Woman or Beautiful as the Exasperation of Secession” combines the local name for Morne Larcher in the arid south of Martinique with a surrealist metaphor characteristic of André Breton, who wrote that Césaire’s poetry was “beautiful as nascent oxygen.” An early version was published in the April 1955 issue of Présence Africaine; it lacked the surrealist-inspired subtitle, added in La Poésie (1994). Other differences concern stanza division and the elimination of one line between “To cross the line. . .” and “But the dragon governs. . .”: “And comes moaning to die at her feet.” Both versions avoid the stanza break after “. . .prohibited water,” which was introduced in PTED, 736. Assuming a date of composition close to the magazine printing, Césaire appears to project onto a favorite feature of the Martinican landscape a number of his concerns as he turned his attention more resolutely toward the struggle for independence in Africa.
“Favor of the Trade Winds” takes up once again the principal elements of “The Thoroughbreds,” written a half-century earlier, but gives pride of place to the trade winds (alizés) which, blowing from Africa, counter the historical weight of the sun with a revivifying breath of freedom. In the opening phrase, “losing his head” reiterates the root metaphor of Solar Throat Slashed, but in a (self-)deprecatory mode.
“For a Fiftieth Anniversary” commemorates the magazine publication of “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” in August 1939. Although first published in La Poésie (1994), one may therefore assume that it dates from 1989. Césaire dedicated the poem to Lilyan Kesteloot, whose doctoral dissertation launched the political interpretation of negritude and kept it in the public eye during and after decolonization (LKN). The first line highlights the active nature of negritude at its inception: surpassing (Excède), sweating over (Exsude), exulting in the élan of the poem’s ascensional conclusion. “Presence” (with a capital letter) gives pride of place to Présence Africaine (the publisher and the magazine), which promoted negritude politically and ideologically from the mid-1950s onward. The second half of the poem uses the trope of poetic breath to recollect Césaire’s testimony in the first version of the “Notebook. . . .”
*“Configurations” is composed of four separate parts. The magazine printing in Éthiopiques (1983) lacked the multiple indents that have characterized parts 1, 2, and 4 since the publication of “Configurations” as the liminal poem of Aimé Césaire ou l’athanor d’un alchimiste (1987). The latter volume was edited by Jacqueline Leiner, to whom “Configurations” was dedicated. The versions printed in La Poésie (1994) and PTED (2013) have minor variants in stanza breaks and the correction of one misreading in section 4: “lire” for “dire” at the end of the first quatrain. A limited edition (75 numbered copies) was published by Jean Pons in 1993.
GLOSSARY
306 years: In 1935, Martinique celebrated the tricentennial of the foundation of the colony; 1635 + 306 years gives 1941 as the probable date when Césaire began writing the first version of And the Dogs Were Silent (PTED, 783). Variations on “three hundred years” occur throughout the poetry as a metaphor for colonization and enslavement, frequently in conjunction with “disaster,” “shipwreck,” or “catastrophe.”
Acera(s): An orchid (Orchis anthropophora; acéra in Fr.) that produces a flower resembling a hanged man (RHG, 13).
Accuser (public): The French Revolution instituted this function in 1790; the Public Accuser figured prominently in the Terror of 1793. He was charged with surveillance of the police in the revolutionary criminal courts.
Ajoupa: The Carib word for a hut roofed with palm fronds and open at the sides; by extension, a simple hut in the French West Indies.
Albuquerque: Afonso de Albuquerque (1453-1515) served in the Portuguese army in Morocco before opening up trade routes to India and South Asia.
Aldebaran: In ancient Egyptian astronomy, this red giant star was identified with Osiris (in the constellation Taurus). The image “matutinal aldebaran” suggests a marker of an annual cycle, probably the vernal equinox, since the rising of Aldebaran was associated with the return of Horus, son of Osiris, from the nether world at the start of the new year (DGE, 75).
Almadia: A word of Arabic origin that can designate either the westernmost point of the African continent in Senegal or rafts constructed for the riverine transportation of logs.
Antilia: Ea
rly geographers placed this imagined land mass in the Azores, in Brazil, or elsewhere in the Americas. Linguistically, it is the origin of the word Antilles, the island chain that includes Martinique.
Antiochus Epiphanes: Most probably Antiochus IV Epiphanes (c. 215 BC – 164 BC), ruler of the Seleucid Empire, whose campaign against the Egyptians in 168 BC produced the expression “a line in the sand.” He is believed to have died suddenly of disease (CHA, 49-56). Associating him with Herod the Great, who sacrificed the firstborn of Israel at the birth of Christ, foregrounds his role as a persecutor of the oppressed in the biblical narrative. In this context, the line “I do not cure the possessed” suggests the gospel according to Mark 5:9,15.
Asshume: Ash Shumlul, a village in the desert north of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (RHG, 22).
Babiloine: The medieval French spelling of Babylon; it figures prominently in Joinville’s history of Louis IX and the seventh crusade (HSL, 206 and passim). Less likely here is the designation of old Cairo as “Babiloine d’Égypte.” The poet situates himself over against the Christian crusaders.
Baguirmi: A center of the slave trade in pre-colonial Chad, Baguirmi was poetically useful: thematically African and, like Batuque, poetically un-French because of its consonantal qualities. See also Sissoko.
Balisier: The flower of Canna indica, symbol of Césaire’s Parti Progressiste Martiniquais, founded in 1958 after his break with the French Communist Party two years earlier. The balisier is sometimes assimilated to a “red heart” for the color of its flower spikes.
Basuto: A Sotho people of southern Africa; before the wedding ceremony, the Sotho bride collects water at the river; in “The Irremediable,” basuto may be a reference to the rapid basuto pony, bred in the region now known as Lesotho.
Benin: Precolonial Benin, to the southwest of Sokoto (q.v.) was the heartland of the vodou religion; the state of Dahomey (q.v.) was founded in the South in the 17th century.
Bayahonde: The name of the acacia tree in Haiti; in the Dominican Republic, bayahonda.
Bombax: The mapou, ceiba, kapok, or silk-cotton tree, which in vodou is a favorite haunt of spirits.
Bombaya: An African-derived drum known from Puerto Rico to Venezuela; used for its percussive quality. No historical confirmation exists for the gloss “a Haitian rallying cry associated with Boukman’s voudou ceremony at Bois Cayman on the eve of the 1791 revolts” (LDP, 73), which has been repeated by Diop (PSD, 243) and Hénane (CTE, 223).
Bornu: Capital of the Bornu Empire from the 16th to the 19th century; now in the Central African Republic, Bornu bordered the caliphate of Sokoto, q.v.
Bothrops lanceolatus: The pit viper endemic to Martinique; Césaire sometimes uses the Linnaean scientific terminology, at other times, the common name fer-de-lance.
Bout blanc: The cane stalk with its white plume in Lesser Antillean Creole (CTE, 46).
Bozal: In Martinican French, bossal (from Spanish bozal, wild); used primarily to designate slaves born in Africa.
Bulls of Bashan: Echoes Psalms (22:12): “Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round”; and, in verse 16: “For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.” The tribulations of King David, considered by many Christians an anticipation of the passion of the Christ, serve as an analog to the sufferings of Césaire’s Caribbean Rebel.
Cachaça: A Brazilian spirit distilled from cane juice in pot stills.
Cassias: The pudding-pipe tree (cassia acutifolia) or its fruit, called canéfice or casse in Martinique; its fruit turns from yellow to black in color.
Cecropias: The white underside of the trumpetwood leaf is a metaphor of the black man’s palm (RHG, 36).
Ceiba: See Bombax.
Center pole: See lwa (loa).
Chamulcus: According to the Roman military historian Ammianus Marcellinus, a heavy chariot used for hauling freight; term found in a military poem inscribed in the Roman province of Tripolitania during the reign of Elagabalus (Heliogabalus). The connotation is thus African.
Cimarron(ne): A play on the Spanish cimmarón, which also produced marron (runaway or maroon) in Caribbean French.
Ciruela: A plum (cirouelle) in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Clairin: A strong spirit, also called tafia, distilled traditionally from cane since colonial times.
Compitalia: In ancient Rome, the Compitalia were celebrated annually in honor of the Lares compitales, household deities of the crossroads. It is also possible that Césaire intends an allusion to the sacred crossroads in vodou.
Cornularia: A coral polyp that protects its living tissues inside a covering called the stolon.
Corvo Miguel Terceira: Three of the islands in the Azores group. See Antilia above.
Couresse(s): A grass snake (Liophis cursor) endemic to Martinique that may have been extinct in Césaire’s lifetime; known to hide from the slightest danger.
Crane: In “Lay of Errantry,” Césaire plays on the name of a bird and the technical term grue à bras, which we have translated as jib crane because of the image of grating metal that precedes it.
Crocus: According to Frazer (AAO, 99), the golden crocus was associated with the resurrection of a fertility god. (See Violets and anemones.)
Dahomey: Although the historical origins of the female warriors of Dahomey are still debated, they were known to be ferocious fighters from the 18th through the 19th centuries. Known as wives of the king, Europeans called them “Amazons” because of their counterparts in Greek mythology. A song reputed to be their war chant was recorded at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition.
Devourer: A possible allusion to Ammit (also Ammut, Amhemit, Amemet) in the Egyptian Book of the Dead—a female divinity with the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion or wild cat, and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus—who devoured the hearts of those found to be impure during the soul’s judgment in the Hall of Two Truths where “life and death face off.”
Djenne: From the 15th to the 17th century, a hub of the salt and gold trade through Timbuktu; renowned for its Great Mosque.
Dyali: A griot in the Mandingo language (PSD, 305).
Ecbatana: A precious stone of seven colors used in the construction of this city in central Asia. In the year 1141, the Persian sultan Sanjar was conquered at Ecbatana by a prince from the East who was thought to be Prester John in one version of his legend.
Ehô: In Middle French, an ejaculation expressing surprise or astonishment; equivalent to Heigh-Ho.
Enos: The grandson of Adam and Eve; an idolator in the Hebrew tradition, a righteous servant of God in the Christian tradition; therefore an ambiguous figure.
Eshu (Exu): A family of wood spirits in the Yoruba pantheon; syncretized in Afro-American religions as a trickster figure.
Falun: An ambivalent image; in geology, an underlying limestone sediment; in Buddhism, falun is the Dharma (truth) wheel, which represents the universe in its movement.
Fer-de-lance: See Bothrops lanceolatus.
Filao: A tree (Casuarina equisetifolia) used as a windbreak; its wood was used for tool handles and weapons; called casuarina in the Anglophone Caribbean (DCE, 140-41).
Flame tree: The flamboyant (Delonix poinciana regia) of the French West Indies; called flame tree or flame of the forest in Trinidad.
Fouta: A native of the Fouta Djallon region of Guinea.
Galli (galls): Eunuch priests of Cybele, who at the Sanguinaria festival renewed the self-mutilation of Attis (FGB, ch. 34). In two poems (“Lynch I” and “pirate”) published thirty-four years apart, Césaire played on the metaphorical vehicle “galls” to reveal the tenor “Galli.”
Goli mask: A Baoule mask in the shape of a helmet with buffalo horns. Goli is the son of the sky god; his mask promises benevolence and protection (PSD, 342).
Guachamaca: A South American tree (genus Malouetia) the bark of which is a source of curare.
Guajiro: (Spanish), a peasant.
Her
nandia sonora: A tropical tree whose floral calyx vibrates in the wind, producing a characteristic sound.
Hougan: Priest of vodou who officiates in the oumfò; see lwa.
Human-faced lion: Frazer cites among the anthropomorphic deities the “strange colossal figure . . . at Boghaz-Keui with its human head and its body composed of lions . . . their god was a lion, or rather a lion-man, a being in whom the bestial and human natures mysteriously co-existed” (AAO, 57). Hercules was such a lion-man god in Lydia (AAO, 96).
Ife: Ile-Ife in Yoruba cosmology was the sacred place where the world was created; it remains the center of traditional Yoruba religion. Ife was known to the ancient Greeks as Ouphas (PSD, 451).
Ishtar: The Babylonian mother-goddess whose young lover Tammuz “was believed to die [every year], passing away from the cheerful earth to the . . . subterranean world, and . . . every year his divine mistress journeyed in quest of him. . .” (AAO, 6-7). For Frazer, the myths of Ishtar/Tammuz and Isis/Osiris were homologous.
Isis: The story of Isis and Osiris is an Egyptian version of the ancient myths of vegetation gods who must die in order to be reborn. Isis, his sister-queen (in some variants, his mother), found and reassembled the dismembered corpse of Osiris, except for his missing phallus (AAO, 212-15).
Jericho rose: The common name given to Anastatica hierochuntica, Selaginilla lepidophylla, and Pallenis hierochuntica, all of which are known as resurrection plants for their ability to regenerate.
Kamsin: A desert wind that blows for fifty days around the vernal equinox (RHG, 77).
Kananga: Known as Luluabourg under Belgian rule, Kananga is located on the Lulua River in the western Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Kino: Eusebio Francisco Kino or Francesco Chini (1645-1711) was a Jesuit missionary in what is now Sonora, Mexico, and Arizona. He opposed the enslavement of the Amerindians. A cheap wine (red and white varieties) labeled Padre Kino is widely available in Mexico.
The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire Page 70