Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Penguin Books Inc., 7110 Ambassador Road, Baltimore, Maryland 21207, U.S.A. Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Cahier d’ure retour au pays natal first published by Présence Africaine 1956 This translation published in Penguin Books 1969 Copyright © Présence Africaine, 1956 This translation copyright © John Berger and Anna Bostock, 1969 Made and printed in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Viney, Aylesbury, Bucks Set in Monotype Bembo This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser iTranslators’ Note This is not a free adaptation of Césaire’s work: neither, however, is it a completely literal translation. The poem is important because of its thinking content. The thinking is both political and poetic. Politically it is a poem of revolutionary passion and irony. Poetically its images have a physical and often sexual resonance. It is always in respect to this double content that we have sought and worked upon an English version. In close reading the original poem is sometimes obscure, and necessarily this obscurity remains in the translation; but in French this obscurity is only a detail in relation to the lucid passion of the whole. We hope that this balance, or the equivalent of it, has been preserved for the English-language reader. We wish to thank the following whom we consulted whilst working on this translation: Dorothy Baker, Jean-Paul Clébert, Peter Levi, Adrian Mitchell, Simone Mohr, Henri Stierlin, and Alain Tanner. Anna Bostock, John Berger October 1968Introduction by Mazisi Kunene The twentieth century will be remembered as an age in which the colonized peoples - the majority of mankind - asserted their demands for independence. To appreci- ate this statement fully one has to understand the reality of colonization in depth — its cultural, political and economic implications. One has indeed to go beyond these categories and ask the question: when is a man aman, or what is man like, devoid of his definition of himself? Frantz Fanon has faced up to this problem. His works have sought to define the whole scope of being in a colonial world, He is not only concerned with the psychology of the colonized black peoples but also the psychology of the colonizing whites. Colour becomes important here, since the criteria for the ruler and the ruled usually work themselves out neatly in colour divisions. The colonizing whites set out not only to exploit the blacks economically, but also to reshape their reality so that they become willing slaves and willing servants. To serve the white interests as, for example, the South African apartheid system demands, must not only be the cornerstone of the blackman’s reality but must 7. . constitute his fulfilment. In this way he fills the role into which the white philosophy of colonialism has moulded him. If he deviates he has been driven into this by communists and agitators. As Fanon states: “When a Negro talks of Marx the first reaction is always the same: “We have brought you up to our level and nov you turn against your benefactors: Ingrates! Obviously nothing can be expected of you”.’ In short, the black colonial subject must of necessity affirm the whiteman’s stereotypes. Not only must the whites not be questioned in their assertions (for to do so would be to question their sacrosanct authority), but each blackman must live in such a way that these assertions are affirmed. The blackman is therefore not a man in the whiteman’s eyes, but a type. As a type he can be either a ‘good nigger’, i.e. fulfil the role that white authority has assigned for him, or else be an incarnation of evil. Ay the-Jatter, the white world feels justified, indeed feels a moral imperative in the name of law and order, to lynch the blackman, to call upon all arsenals of public information at the white world’s disposal to isolate and crush him. Eldridge Cleaver, in his book Soul on Ice, | asks the question: “What provoked the assassins to murder? Did it bother them that Malcolm was elevating our struggle into the international arena?’ He goes on to demonstrate how the white world creates black ‘heroes’ who prove to be none other than their ‘hatchet men’; 8L One tactic by which rulers of America have kept the bemused millions of Negroes in optimum subjugation has been a conscious, systematic emasculation of Negro leadership. Through an elaborate system of sanctions, rewards, penalties, persecutions ... any Negro who sought leadership over the black masses and refused to become a tool of the white power structure was s either cast into prison, killed, hounded out of the country of blasted into obscurity and isolation in his own land and among his own people. Cleaver could well be talking of the black people in South Africa, Angola, Mozambique or indeed all colonial people over whom the white world has “exercised its power. ‘What is clear from all this is that the revolt of the black subject-peoples in the twentieth century demands a new definition of humanity. This is not so much the problem of the whites as the problem of the blacks. For it is blacks who have to smash the system, explode the whiteman’s racial myths that have distorted his human- ity for over three hundred years. To achieve this the blackman must redefine his reality in his own terms. It is therefore not enough to protest about the evil deeds of the whiteman against the blackman. What is more to the point is to define the role of man on the basis of a more civilized and humane ideology, to realize that what the whiteman has so long defined as the qualities of civilization are no more than his own subjective interests in maintaining white rule, What then are the 9 weelements of this new definition of man? They are the assertion of the reality of the blackman’s contribution to world civilization against the time-worn fallacy advanced by the white colonizer that: we have nothing to do in the world ‘we are the parasites of the world our job is to keep in step with the world, (Césaire) Butis this not racism? cry the whites, frightened at such an assertion of the blackman’s reality. Césaire gives the answer: ‘The peculiarity of “our place in the world”... isn’t to be confused with anybody else’s.’ When Césaire makes this statement he is referring precisely to the facial background which has been the basis of definition of the role of the blackman; the blackman has not only been colonized as a man but as a lesser species. The simple statement asserting that the conquest of peoples has from time immemorial involved the distortion of . their reality by the conquering peoples only partly applies here. Colonialism of the past three hundred years, particularly of the black peoples pf Africa, has . had more sophisticated ‘weapons — effitient methods of economic exploitation, pseudo-psychology, pseudo- anthropology, uprootment of large populations to areas © of new white settlement, cultural indoctrination. The colonization of the black people cannot therefore be classed simply as the temporary occupation of the Io\ weak man’s territory by the physically strong. The jungle law has gone deeper — it has stated that that which I have retained by my will must express my will. It must become an object to fulfil my desires and wishes. Is it any surprise therefore if the intrinsic potency of the oppressed man’s humanity cries out: On that day completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation ... (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks) Or else: My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recoloured, clad in mourning. ... The Negro is an animal, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is... cold the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger... It would indeed violate all laws of human behaviour, the blackman would have proved the whiteman’s claim that he is less than human, if he did not hate his former master, and his torturer and dehumanizer. Is a Jew expected to love the Goebbels’ and the Hitlers? Aimé Césaire has said: ‘When I turn on my radio, when I hear that Negroes have been lynched in America, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead.’ Inextricably, then, Césaire, Fanon, Cleaver represent IIa blackman’s reality which has its root in colonial his- tory and the relation between the blacks and the whites, Césaire and Frantz Fanon, both from Martinique, have emerged as the great ideologists of the third world. Both saw the need to smash racialism and all its components as the primary task of all enlightened men. Racialism is the same whether it is practised against the blacks in America, the Jews in Hitler Germany, or the blacks in South Africa. In a brilliant analysis of the colonial structure - The Wretched of the Earth - Fanon comes to the same conclusions as Aimé Césaire: ‘Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the comer of every one of their own streets, in all corners of the globe.’ The Europe they are both concerned with is the Europe which in its arrogance has condemned men because of their colour. Thus in essence Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon perform the same task, the incision of the colonial mentality, the tearing away of the white- man’s superiority complex and in its place the creation of the ideology of man in his totality as a humane and _a civilized being. ' It is in this context that we haveto study the poetry of Césaire, particularly his major poem, the Cahier. * Césaire was born.in 1913 and grew up in a small town © in the northern part of Martinique, which is one of the 12larger Windward Islands, The island was, and still remains, a French colony, an overseas territory of France. Describing his home town Césaire tells us: My far’ distant happiness which makes me aware of present misery: a lumpy road plunging into a hollow where it scatters a handful of huts: a tireless road charging at full speed towards a hill at whose top it is brutally drowned in a stagnant pool of dwarfish houses, a road madly climbing, recklessly des- cending, and the wooden frame comically hoicked up on tiny * cement legs which I call ‘our home’, its skull of galvanized iron buckling in the sun like a drying hide, the dining room, the rough floor with its glistening beads of nails, the rafters of pine and shadow which run across the ceiling, the ghostly chairs of straw, the grey light of the lamp, varnished and quick with cockroaches, the lamp Bézzing till it hurts .. The island has an interesting history. Ruled by the French, it experienced a short spell of freedom when in "3792 the French National Assembly abolished slavery without debate. Martinique, together with other French Caribbean possessions, reacted to the upheavals of the French Revolution. It was in this same period that Victor Hugues attacked neighbouring British islands © with ex-slave troops recruited from Martinique and Guadeloupe with a view to freeing the slaves. This caused alarm throughout the American region lest slaves who had staged numerous revolts might rise again against their masters. When Napoleon came to power he launched an unsuccessful attempt to reimpose 13slavery against Haitian resistance (led by Toussaint), In Martinique and Guadeloupe, however, slavery was reimposed until 1848, when it was finally abolished. Martinique and other French possessions did not come into the limelight again anti] the Vichy regime in 1940 appointed its représentatives as governors, causing serious problems of defence to the Western hemisphere. Indeed some ships were torpedoed in the harbour of the neighbouring British island of St Lucia, It was only when De Gaulle became Prime Minister of France that the Vichy remnants were finally removed. The relevance of these facts to Aimé Césaire’s poetry and life can be judged by the frequency with which he refers to them or uses their metaphorical significance in his works. ‘The topography of Martinique is one of the important sources of his imagery. For, as Césaire is greatly in- fluenced by the surrealists, imagery becomes a central clement in the analysis and understanding of his poetry. The geography of Martinique is characterized by con- trasts. On the windward side, the violent trade winds whip up the sea against the jagged coast-line. The leeward coast is calm and sheltered, with long, quiet beaches, It is only when there is a hurricane that it boils up in all its fury. In 1906 something happened to the northern part of the island which, though seven years before Césaire was born, has found vivid expression throughout his poetry. Mount Pelée suddenly blew up in a volcanic rage 14destroying all the 6,000 inhabitants of St Pierre except for one man who had been condemned to death. Speculation had it that this disaster could have been avoided had it not been election time. The politicians feared that the warning would scare the electorate away and cause them to abandon the area. The mountain, "which is very close to where Césaire was bom, still looks menacing and rough. St Pierre was never rebuilt. Instead the capital was moved to.Fort de France in the south. There is no doubt that the powerful volcanic imagery of Césaire derives partly from the event. What is even more evident is that Césaire’s concept of destructive forces that give rise to new things and new growth parallels with the effects of volcanic lava which re- generates the earth. In his poem A I’ Afrique he states, ‘Paysan frappe le sol de ta daba’. For him the breaking of earth by the peasants represents the whole process whereby new forms of life emerge (ta daba means hoe in Wolof, a West African language, and is retained as part of Martinique patois). This idea recurs over and over again in his works. * Césaire came from a poor peasant family as he states: At the end of the small hours, my father, my mother, and over them the house which is a shack splitting open with blisters like a peach-tree tormented by blight, and the roof worn thin, mended with bits of paraffin cans, this roof pisses 15swamps of rust on to the grey sordid stinking mess of straw, and when the wind blows these ill-matched properties make a strange noise, like the sputter of frying, then like a burning log plunged into water with the smoke from the twigs twisting away. . . . And the bed of planks on its legs of kerosene drums, a bed with elephantiasis, my grandmother’s bed with its goatskin and its dried banana leaves and its rags, a bed with nostalgia as a mattress and above it a bowl full of oil, a candle-end with a dancing flame and on the bowl, in golden letters, the word MERCI. A disgrace, Paille Street . . Poverty was not the only scourge of Aimé Césaire’s youth. Born in a country in which the large majority of the sugar-cane workers and peasants were black, the proletariat of Fort de France were black, while the mulatto population were accorded a higher status but just below that of the French rulers, he was bound to feel the leprosy of colour: (niggers-are-all-the-same, Ttell you they-have-every-vice-every-conceivable-vice, I’m telling you that nigger-smell- OW it’s like the old saying: beat-a-nigger-and-you-feed-a-nigger) It was French colonial policy to assimilate a colonial élite, This élite was to be culturally absorbed and made to uphold an exclusive loyalty to France. To achieve this, France nominally accorded full French status to 16whosoever of whatever colour accepted France as his political and cultural home. On this policy Frantz Fanon has stated: ‘The colonized is clevated above jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother _ country’s cultural standards’ (Black Skin, White Masks, p. 18). It is obvious that such a policy was based on the arrogant assumption that French political and cultural institutions surpassed those of any colonial peoples. They were projected’as the highest achievement of man to which all colonial peoples must aspire, at least those lucky enough to come under French rule. French rule . therefore called upon colonial peoples to discard any other identity in deference to a superior French identity. Individual educational achievement in French terms coincided with social status. But as Césaire was later. to state in his letter of resignation from the Communist Party of France, these terms were unacceptable: The peculiarity of ‘our place in the world’ which isn’t to be confused with anybody else’s. The peculiarity of our problems which aren’t to be reduced to subordinate forms ofany other problem, The peculiarity of our history, laced with terrible misfortunes which belong to no other history. The peculiarity of our culture, which we intend to live and to make live in an ever more real manner. The Martiniquans who strove towards assimilation faced a particularly acute dilemma. They had grown up in an environment of their own with residual African 17cultural expressions: close family structure, African culinary forms, African ways of interpreting phenomena and speaking patois, a mixture of French and West African languages. To be acceptable they had to shed these cultural experiences. Fanon refers to the problems created by this phenomenon. ‘The middle class in the Antilles never speak Creole except to their servants, In school, children are taught to scorn the dialect. One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid the use of Creole. ...’ Because French education alienated the average black Martiniquan from his earlier cultural experiences, he inevitably developed an aversion to his family and consequently to himself. The student who had qualified in France, spoke in perfect French, was a demigod. To survive in his acquired status he had to avoid lapsing into patois and in making this effort affirmed the success of the French colonial policy. He had become an instrument of French colonial policy and saw his reality only in the ultimate terms of the French corpus. It was in this atmosphere that Césaire as a young man went to Fort de France to further his education. The rigid class divisions between the assimilados, French civil servants, and the large, unassimilated poor black pro- letariat were factors which greatly affected Césaire. Because he came from the less industrially developed and therefore less Frenchified part of the country, he was better equipped to question the validity of the 18colonial ideology than the urban black student. He won a scholarship to go to France in 1931. He left together with another Martiniquan, Etienne Léro, who was to prove himself an outstanding poet and critic. It can be assumed that Césaire was fired with the same expecta- tions as the few colonial students who found their way to ‘the Mother Country’. As part of its colonial pro- gtamme, France did not establish a University in Martinique, hoping to achieve full assimilation of the Martiniquan intellectuals who had to go to France for their higher education. But contrary to all French official expectations the students who came to France got more and more disillusioned and began to organize groups which expressed a desire for a separate identity. It was for that reason that three years after Césaire’s arrival, he, together with a few other black students like Leopold Senghor, launched a magazine called LEtudiant noir, The magazine itself did not last long, indeed it had only one issue, But what became important was its attempt to establish an ideology of Negritude. Negritude had its roots in the whole movement of revolt: against slavery and colonial subjugation. The early twenties had seen the rise of Marcus Garvey who, though born in the West Indies, went to America to become one of the great advocates of a free Africa. He had founded what was known as the “Back to Africa movement’, which argued that the black peoples of America should go back to Africa and there create with 19other people of Aftica a continental free state. This and the fact that in 1919 the first Pan African Congress was held in Paris, helped to create a basis for an alternative ideology based on African cultural institutions. It was not surprising therefore that the French policy of assimilation should provoke the black intel- lectuals’ most powerful acclamations for an identity which had been so long denied them. The word ‘Negritude’ was coined by Césaire but the formulation and development of the ideology was the collective work of the black students of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. This doctrine dominates much of the work of both Césaire and Leopold Senghor, the two out- standing poets to emerge from the group. Essentially Negritude is a doctrine which asserts the blackman as a man with his own culture, his own civi- lization and his own original contributions. At one time or other all the black peoples of Africa or of African origin have been subjected to a system which denies them their cultural and intellectual achievements. Negri- tude varies in its dimensions according to the need that each section feels is necessary to assert the doctrine’s reality. Those who came under the French colonial policy of assimilation would obviously feel the need to assert the reality of their own cultural identity more intensely. That this assertion should take the form of a racial label logically follows from the very racial categories that the colonial policy has established. The 20French claim that their system does not use the criteria of race, but the truth is that ‘France is a racist country” (Fanon), assiduously defining the blacks according to its own cultural criteria. Negritude exploded the myth - ‘Quite simply ... the educated Negro suddenly dis- covers that he is rejected by a civilization which he has nonetheless assimilated.’ Having discovered this truth the next step was to question the whole system of European values and to the chagrin of the assimilated the system was recognized to be not only imperfect but cruel. It had built its whole edifice on a racial ideology; it had gone further, it had lied and deified not man’s achieve- ments but instruments of exploitation. Man did not teally count, he was exploited, tortured, discriminated against, persecuted and used to produce profit for a few selfish men. Logically Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and others saw salvation in the creation of a new system of essentially humane values. On looking around they found that what had been ridiculed in their Negro culture were the very elements which combined with a Marxist doctrine would achieve the synthesis of a new man. Hence both Senghor and Césaire (who since then have diverged very markedly in their politics) proclaimed blackness as not only acceptable but beautiful. The fun- damental reasons for this elevation are expressed with passion in the Cahier: Heia for the royal Kailcedrate! Heia for those who have never invented anything 21those who never explored anything those who never tamed anything those who give themselves up to the essence of all things ignorant of surfaces but struck by the movement of all things free of the desire to tame but familiar with the play of the world Clearly Césaire is not claiming that there is merit in the failure to invent, as some have understood him to say. He is talking tongue in cheek against the glorification of technology by the European, the bloody conquests and destruction of peoples by colonization. For he goes on to say these peoples are: truly the eldest sons of the world open to all the breaths of the world fraternal territory of all breaths undrained bed of the waters of the world flesh of the flesh of the world pumping with the very movement of the world Negritude as a doctrine of humanism is summarized by Césaire: Heia for joy heia for love heia for the reincarnation of tears and the worst pain brought back again All these statements must be understood in the context of the dessication that Césaire experienced in Europe, resulting in a demand for an alternative ideology. 22Césaire sees the doctrine of Negritude as an ideology not of race but of all peoples who like him believe in man. Césaire is, in his own words, for all people who though conquered and subjected have a more profound social ethic: To leave. As there are hyena-men and panther-men, so I shall be a Jew man ‘ a Kaffir man a Hindu-from-Calcutta man a man-from-Harlem-who-hasn’t-got-the-vote. There are people who because of their ability ‘to give themselves up to the essence of all things’ can teach the white man ‘of the North’ how to love, how to redis- cover the essential man, and how to tame the instru- ments of technology to man’s needs. Negritude then becomes a system of values which he considers necessary for all mankind. Césaire sees Negritude, the French language, surrealism, and communism as instruments, the ‘miraculous arms’, arming the man of blood against his ruthless and efficient enslaver. The influence of surrealism on Césaire became evident during his period of stay in Paris. Surrealism was for him a logical instrument with which to smash the restric- tive forms of a language which sanctified rationalized bourgeois values. The breaking up of language patterns coincided with his own desire to smash colonialism and 23all oppressive forms. It is for that reason that Césaire saw surrealism not as an end in itself but as a means to an end. Thus the smashing of ‘normal’ patterns, the logical progression of the language, was aimed at shocking the people into a new awareness. Césaire wrote poetry whose words had no normal logical order, which had no punctuation, and had a string of images not related to each other, throwing many reflected meanings on the subject. He felt that by breaking up the patterns whose logical order had affirmed racialism he had given surrealism a purpose. * In 1939 Césaire faced the prospect of having to return to his native land. The decision itself was fraught with dangers. Other students from the colonies had either lingered on in Europe and become armchair theoreti- cians, or if they returned had become absorbed into the civil service which their whole education had been pre- paring them for. Those who returned despised and felt ashamed of their semi-literate or illiterate parents who spoke inelegant patois. It was for that reason at the be- ginning of 1939 that Césaire went to stay with his friend Peter Guberina (now Professor in Yugoslavia) on the Adriatic coast. His purpose was to write Cahier d’un retour au pays natal which he did in a few weeks. In the poem he imagines the effect of his return on him and evolves an attendant system of values based on that 24imagined experience. Although the magazine L’Esprit devoted a whole issue to the Cahier, the poem itself received very little attention from the critics. On his return, Césaire became a teacher at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort de France. Considering that Césaire had by this time become a member of the Communist Party of France and the fact that the country was in the hands of the Vichy elements, these were dangerous times for him. The courage with which he maintained his beliefs illustrates how seriously he had taken his decision to be a man of action. In 1942 André Breton, the leader of the French surrealist movement, in flight from the Nazis came to Martinique and there met Aimé Césaire. These two poets developed a strong friendship. It was an important event in Césaire’s life. André Breton brought Césaire to the notice of important literary circles in France. By 1944 Aimé Césaire was back in Paris and received with great fanfare. In 1956 Présence Africaine, a literary maga~ zine founded in 1947 by Alioune Diop, reissued the Cahier, Présence Africaine served as a forum for some of the most outstanding African and West Indian writers and intellectuals like Alioune Diop, Leopold Senghor, Césaire, Damas and many others who later played an important role in the African Independence movement. In 1946 Césaire fought and won the election as Deputy to the French National Assembly for Martinique. He also became Mayor of Fort de France, a position he has RMD AZ 25occupied to this day. Martinique is a constituency of the French National Assembly and is represented by three deputies. Most of the deputies have always advocated association with France as the cornerstone of their politics. Césaire’s election meant that for the first time a man who identified with the economic and political realities of Martinique was to become a voice in the French National Assembly. For Césaire, the scope for expressing his intense hostility against French domina- tion and assimilation was widened. He was now not only the ideologist of the oppressed but their representative. Indeed he could rightly claim that he understood their needs and their demands because he was one of them. In spite of his educational achievements, he had refused to be assimilated. His position as Deputy demonstrated the extent to which Césaire had embraced his beliefs in active participation. He had realized that only by the exercise of power could what he considered better political and cultural values be implemented. He saw the position he occupied as Deputy as a power base from which he could effect the desired change. The man of action was symbolized to Césaire by Rimbaud who left Paris and Europe for adventures abroad. The fact that Rimbaud was enamoured with Aftica further endeared him to Césaire, for was he not like Rimbaud keen to deepen his sensitivity by African experiences? This point must not be carried too far. Césaire was not and is not the man to surrender his initiative either to systems 26or to heroes. It was for that reason that he resigned from the French Communist Party in 1956 stating that «+. we cannot delegate anyone to think for us; to do our searching, to make our discoveries; that we cannot henceforth accept that anyone at all, be he our best friend, answer for us. If the aim of all progressive politics is someday to restore their freedom to colonial peoples, then the day by day activities of progressive parties must at least not contradict the supposed objective and not every day wreck the very bases, the organi- zational as well as the psychological bases, of this future freedom; and those bases boil down to one postulate: the right to take the initiative. It was for that same reason that Césaire broke with the surrealists whilst maintaining his indebtedness to them. For Césaire, all things must bend to the needs of change: I want to say storm. I want to say river. I want to say tornado. I want to say leaf, I want to say tree. I want to be soaked by every rainfall, moistened by every dew. As frenetic blood rolls on the slow current of the eye, I want to roll words like mad- dened horses... Césaire has continued to experiment not only with language but with different forms of literature. He has written theoretical essays, prose works, Discours sur le colonialisme (1950), plays, Et les chiens se taisaient, Le Roi Christophe, Une Saison au Congo (a play based on Lumumba, 1967) and other works such as Les Armes 27miraculeuses, Soleil cov-coupé (both written in 1940), Cadastre, Ferrements (1959). The latter works represent a petiod of high surrealism, * Return to my Native Land roughly divides into three sections. It opens with the line that lifts the curtain onto the scene of the great drama: At the end of the small hours This is the time just before dawn when the grey light spreads across the skies. The poem opens with a scene of desolation. There are no people, only the open wounds of their suffering. They suffer not as individuals but area whole mass of dissipated beings. The town, the crowd, ‘the malarial blood of the Heights’, are infested with “fumaroles of anguish’. The whole Island seems like a _ huge hell on earth where all conceivable evils and corruptions abound. Never has colonialism and its effects on human life been described so forcefully and so dramatically. Césaire ceases to be concerned merely with the suffering of the victim but describes vividly the corruptions wrought on those who have debased human life with their greed and material egoism. There can be no easy solution to this situation, nor is ‘foggy tender- ness’ enough to assuage the suffering. Those who have suffered have been destroyed, the only remedy now is the volcanic destruction of the old order. Time passes 28quickly, the year is a whole cycle of suffering but within that lies the seeds of life. Counter-forces are evident in the very struggles to celebrate Christmas. This first section of the poem is heavily loaded with violence. The violence is the violence of colonial history, the same violence that had tensed every part of the poet’s anger. The anger is concrete since it derives not from a detached sympathy but from a real and degrading experience of poverty and humiliationsuffered by Césaire. As such he is an integral part of the situation he des- cribes. Césaire has become the voice of rebellion and outrage not only against the experiences of his youth but also against the Western values which he sees as ‘responsible for his own destruction, and that of others. Having given this background of the violence and cruelty of the colonial system, Césaire moves on to the realities of the psychology of revolution: T accept, I accept it all... And now suddenly strength and life attack me like a bull the wave of life streams over the nipple of the Morne, veins and veinlets throng with new blood, the enormous lung of cyclones breathing, the fire hoarded in volcanoes, and the gigantic seismic pulse beats the measure of a living body within my blaze. Upright now, my country and I, hair in the wind, my hand small in its enormous fist and our strength not inside us but 29above in a voice that bores through the night and its listeners like the sting of an apocalyptic wasp. And the voice declares that for centuries Europe has stuffed us with lies... The lies are the very ones which made him laugh at a “perfectly hideous Negro. ... A Negro shrouded in an old, threadbare jacket.’ Women laughed at him and so did he. But he realized that be had laughed at himself. For was the Negro not ugly because of the amputations of poverty, because of the heap of prejudice and stupidity which had condemned men for their physical appearance? ‘His nose was like a peninsula off its moor- ings.’ The ugliness of the Negro, Césaire observes, was the ugliness wrought on him by all the attitudes that had relegated him to a position of a beast. Indeed he has become a beast not only because others have made him a beast but also because he has himself accepted being a beast; his gestures, his movements are those of a beast, When Césaire thus detaches himself from himself and laughs, he allies himself with those forces that have destroyed him. The realization comes as a shock. When herediscovers his identity, he is no longer a defeated man. Indeed he stares his enemies, the enemies of mankind, in the face and says: ‘There are those who never get over being made in the likeness of the devil.’ As for his grandfather who was a ‘good nigger’, he is dead and to that Césaire says ‘Hurrah’. Because he was a ‘good nigger’, subservient and obsequious, ‘misery beat him front and back, they shoved into his poor 30 t 4brain the idea that he could never trick his own oppres- sive fate, that he had no power over his destiny. ...” * And it did not occur to him that he might ever hoe and dig and cut anything except the insipid cane.’ ‘And they threw stones at him, bits of scrap iron, broken ends but neither these stones nor this iron nor these bottles. ...’ The ‘good nigger’ did not fight back and in failing he betrayed the highest aspirations of mankind. Césaire is not going to be like that but finds identification with those who fight, those who remain unbeaten ‘who are on their feet’. They are everywhere because they are all the men of the earth whose ‘ship advances fearless upon the carving waters’. They are the madmen fired with a new sense of outrage and revolt. They are the new growth, the hurricane that consumes ‘the Intourist of the triangular circuit’. The second section of the poem leads naturally to the final philosophical statement writing large the unselfish love for mankind. Speaking now with a single voice, Césaire celebrates the very qualities which have been held up for ridicule - love, laughter, idleness and dance. The kiss for the chain gang, the kiss for all those whose suffering shall create a new ethic based on the ‘furious ‘We’, those who can bite, those who are bound by the bond of human brotherhood. bind me, bind me without remorse bind me with your vast arms to the luminous day bind my black resonance to the very navel of the world 31bind me, bind me, bitter fraternity strangle me with your lasso of stars, The boiling images and dramatic language makes Césaire’s call for humanity and change more than a sentimental fantasy. His tone is prophetic as the Nigerian scholar Abiola Irele says in Introduction to African Litera- ture (ed, Ulli Beier): In Césaire’s poetry, his picture of destruction is reinforced by images drawn from the natural world of fire and its many variations, of serpents, and poisonous plants and dangerous animals, and from the human world, bullets, poisons, knives and the like. The poet in his revolt arms himself with all the agents of destruction, allies himself with all the violent mani- festations of the natural world so that he acquires the pri- mordial strength of an elemental force. He uses contrasts as violent as the scenery of his native Island — hurricanes, volcanoes, winds, pitted against the calm and the growth which follow their destruction, The proclamations of love, joy and generosity would have appeared naive were they not concrete outcomes of a very real and harrowing experience. Such virtues are a mockery without the power to effect them. As has been said, the morality of the oppressed issues from their fears and resignations. They imagine themselves morally superior to those who trample on them. To understand the import of Césaire’s poem as ‘glorious resignation’, as some have done, is to miss the funda- 32mental implications in his work. Césaire is a poet philosopher, prophet, whose revolutionary message is his prime strength. 33Macouba ~— eBasse-Pointa Lorrain => P<. Marigot he s Ngee ne-Rouge | 5 eur \ Saint-Pierre "Ff Galion ay p Carbet{-~ Gree Mop BOK we J , Pitons di Corbet EWS ca) & ms - SA % ta ° i ° FORT DE FRANCE 4 i o -§Saint-Esprit ie 1} Riviére- 4 6 w ° \de. ae sa ~\ / fauclin, Pilote ~~~ Major Roads — “~—— Rivers Sainte-Luce 4 Airport Sainte-Anne, A @ Capital arin $ ° 5 benders Scale in miles Map redrawn by kind permission of the French Embassy, New York.Return to my Native LandAt the end of the small hours... Get away, I said, you bastard of a cop, swine get away. I hate the livery of order and the fish-hooks of hope. Get away foul ju-ju, bedbug of a monk. Then I turned to dream for him and his lost ones’ paradises more calm than the face of a woman telling lies. Rocked there on the breath of inexhaustible thought, I fed the wind, set monsters free and heard a river of turtledoves and savannah clover rising on the far side of disaster: a river in my depths as deep as the brazen twentieth storey is high: a river to protect me against the corruptions of the dusk that are paced day and night by a damned venereal sun, Atthe end of the small hours delicately sprouting handles for the market: the West Indies, hungry, hail-marked with smallpox, blown to bits by alcohol, the West Indies shipwrecked in the mud of this bay, wickedly ship- wrecked in the dust of this town. At the end of the small hours: the last, deceiving sorry scab on the wound of the waters; the martyrs who 37refuse to bear witness; the fading flowers of blood scattered on the futile wind like the screeches of chatter- ing parrots; an old life’s ingratiating smile, lips apart in deserted anguish; an old wretchedness decomposing in silence beneath the sun; an old silence broken by tepid pustules, the dreadful zero of our reason for living. At the end of the small hours: the strand of dreams and the senseless awakening on this frail stratum of earth already humiliated by the greatness of its future when the volcanoes will erupt and naked waters sweep away the stains ripened by the sun till nothing is left but a tepid molten simmering pried over by sea birds. At the end of the small hours: this town, lat, displayed, brought down by its common-sense, inert, breathless under its geometric burden of crosses, forever starting again, sullen to its fate, dumb, thwarted in every degree, incapable of growing as the sap of its earth would have it grow, set upon, gnawed, reduced, cheating its own fauna and flora, At the end of the small hours: this town, flat, dis- played... And in this town a clamouring crowd, a stranger to its own cry as the town, inert, is a stranger to its own movement and meaning, a crowd without concern, 38disowning its own true cry, the cry you'd like to hear because only that cry belongs to it, because that cry you know lives deep in some lair of darkness and pride in this disowning town, in this crowd deaf to its own cry of hunger and misery, revolt and hatred, in this crowd so strangely garrulous and dumb. In this disowning town, this strange crowd which does not gather, does not mingle: this crowd that can so easily disengage itself, make off, slip away. This crowd which doesn’t know how to crowd, this crowd so perfectly alone beneath the sun: this crowd like a woman whose lyrical walk you have noticed but who suddenly calls upon a hypothetical rain and commands it not to fall; or makes the sign of the cross without visible reason; or assumes the sudden grave animality of a peasant woman urinating on her feet, stiff legs apart. In this disowning town under the sun this desolate crowd which rejects everything expressive, affirmative or free in the daylight of the earth which is its own earth. ‘Which rejects Josephine, Empress of the French, dream- ing high above the niggers. Rejects the liberator bound in his liberation of white stone. Rejects the conquistador. Rejects this contempt, this freedom, this daring. At the end of the small hours: this disowning town and its wake of leprosies, consumption, famines: its wake of 39fears crouching in the ravines, hoisted in the trees, dug out of the soil, rudderless in the sky, piled together. This disowning town and its fumaroles of anguish. At the end of the small hours, the forgotten Heights which have forgotten how to jump At the end of the small hours, the malarial blood of the Heights, wearing the shoes of worry and docility: reversing the sun of its own feverish pulse At the end of the small hours, the banked fire of the Heights, like a sob gagged before it breaks out in blood; the fire awaiting a spark that hides and denies itself At the end of the small hours, the Heights squatting in front of hunger pains, wary of thunderbolts and pot- holes, slowly vomiting their exhaustion of men, the Heights alone with their pool of blood, their bandages of shade, their gutters of fear, their great hands of wind, At the end of the small hours, the famished Heights, and no one knows better than this dismal bastard of a hill, this Morne, why the suicide abetted by his epiglottis killed himself by rolling back his tongue to swallow it; why a woman looks as if she is floating in the Capot river (her luminously dark body obedient to her navel’s command) and she is only a patch of ringing water 40, Despite the energetic way they both have of drumming on his cropped skull, neither the teacher in his classroom nor the priest at catechism can get a single word from this halfasleep nigger child because his famished voice has been sucked down into the marsh of hunger (a-word- a-single-word and you can forget about Queen Blanche of Castile, a-word-a-single-word, just look at the little savage he doesn’t know a single one of God's ten commandments) for his voice has lost its mind in the marshes of hunger and there is nothing, nothing to be got out of the little good-for-nothing nothing but a hunger which can no longer climb the tackle of his voice a heavy, flabby hunger a hunger buried in the deepest heart of the Hunger of the famished More. At the end of the small hours, this nondescript beach for wrecks, the exacerbated odour of corruption, the monstrous sodomies of the host and the slaughterer, the unscalable ship's prow of prejudice and stupidity, the prostitutions, hypocrisies, lusts, betrayals, lies, swindles, concussions — the breathlessness of petty cowardice, the wheeze of gushing enthusiasm, the greeds, hysterias, perversions, the harlequinades of misery, cripplings, _ itches, rashes, the luke-warm hammocks of degeneration. 4tThis is the pageant of comic scrofulous swellings, of festers begun by the strangest microbes, of poisons without known antidote, of pus from old wounds, of unforeseen fermentations in rotting bodies, At the end of the small hours, the great still night, the stars more dead than a burst balafong, the monstrous bulb of the night, germinated from all our meanness and renunciations. And our gestures, idiotic and mad, trying to bring back the golden shower of privileged moments, the umbilical cord redrawn in its frail splendour, the bread and wine of complicity, the bread, the wine, the blood of a true wedding, My far distant happiness which makes me aware of present misery: a lumpy road plunging into a hollow where it scatters a handful of huts: a tireless road charg- ing at full speed towards a hill at whose top it is brutally drowned in a stagnant pool of dwarfish houses, a road madly climbing, recklessly descending, and the wooden frame comically hoicked up on tiny cement legs which I call ‘our home’, its skull of galvanized iron buckling in the sun like a drying hide, the dining room, the rough floor with its glistening beads of nails, the rafters of pine and shadow which run across the ceiling, the ghostly 42chairs of straw, the grey light of the lamp, varnished and quick with cockroaches, the lamp buzzing tillithurts... At the end of the small hours, this most essential country restored to my greed which wants no foggy tenderness but is the twisted sensual concentration of the Morne’s fat nipple with the accidental palm tree as its hardened germ, the jerking spunk of the streams, the great hysterical tongue of the sea from Trinité to Grand- Riviére. Then time passed quickly, very quickly. August when the mango-trees sport moons: September ~ midwife of cyclones: October - burning sugar-cane, November which purrs in the stills, And now Christmas beginning. Its coming was first felt in the prickling of desires, a thirst for new tenderness, the budding of vague dreams, then suddenly it took wing in the violent silk rustle of its great wings of joy, and over the borough it plunged down and burst open the life inside the huts like an over-ripe pomegranate, Christmas was not like other holidays. It did not want to run in the streets, dance in the public squares, straddle wooden horses, take advantage of the crush to pinch women, throw fireworks in the face of tamarisks, 43Christmas had agoraphobia. What it wanted was a day of continual bustle and preparation and kitchenwork, a day of cleaning and anxiety in-case-there’s-not-enough, in-case-we-run-short, in-case-they-think-it-dull, then in the evening a small church, not intimidating, allowing itself to be filled benevolently with laughter and whispers, confidences, declarations of love, rumours, and the keen, throaty discords of the choir leader, and hearty men and tarty girls and homes with their entrails stuffed with succulence, no counting pennies today, and the town now nothing but a bouquet of songs, it is good to be inside, to eat well and drink with warmth, blood sausage two fingers thin like a twisty stalk, or blood sausage broad and thick, the mild sort tasting of wild thyme, the hot kind blazing with spice, scalding coffee sweet aniseed cordial milk punch, rums of liquid sun, and good things to eat which brand your mucous membranes or distil them to delight or weave fragrances across them, when somebody laughs, when another sings, and the refrains spread like coconut palms as far as you can see ALLELUIA EYRIE ELEISON ... LEISON ... LEISON CHRISTE ELEISON ... LEISON ... LEISON, Not only the mouths are singing, hands too, feet, 44buttocks, genitals, the whole fellow creature flowing in sound, voice and rhythm. ‘When the joy reaches the highest point of its ascent, it bursts like a cloud. The songs do not stop, but anxious and heavy they roll now along valleys of fear and tunnels of anguish, through the fires of hell. Everyone tries to tweak the tail of the nearest devil until imperceptibly fear is abolished in the fine sand of dreams, and you live truly in a dream, drinking and shouting and singing in a dream, and also you doze in a dream with eyelids like rose-petals, the daylight comes velvety like the sapodilla berry, the smell of liquid manure from the coconut palm, the turkeys picking off their red pimples in the sun, the obsession of the bells, and the rain, the bells... the rain... ringing, ringing, ringing... At the end of the small hours, this town, flat, dis- played... It crawls on its hands without the slightest wish ever to stand up and pierce the sky with its protest. The backs of the houses are afraid of the fire-truffled sky, their foundations are afraid of the drowning mud. Scraps of houses that have settled to stand between shocks and undermining. And yet this town advances. Every day it grazes further beyond the tide of its tiled corridors, shame-faced blinds, sticky courtyards, dripping paint- work. And petty suppressed scandals, petty shames kept 45quiet and petty immense hatreds knead the narrow streets into lumps and hollows where the gutter pulls a face among the excrement ... At the end of the small hours: life flat on its face, mis- carried dreams and nowhere to put them, the river of life listless in its hopeless bed, not rising nor falling, unsure of its flow, lamentably empty, the heavy im- partial shadow of boredom creeping over the equality of all things, the air stagnant, unbroken by the brightness of a single bird. At the end of the small hours: another house in a very narrow street smelling very bad, a tiny house which within its entrails of rotten wood shelters rats by the dozen and the gale of my six brothers and sisters, a cruel little house whose implacability panics us at the end of every month, and my strange father nibbled by a single misery whose name I’ve never known, my father whom an unpredictable witchcraft soothes into sad tenderness or exalts into fierce flames of anger; and my mother whose feet, daily and nightly, pedal, pedal for our never-titing hunger, I am even woken by those never-tiring feet pedalling by night and the Singer whose teeth rasp into the soft flesh of the night, the Singer which my mother pedals, pedals for our hunger night and day. At the end of the small hours, my father, my mother, and over them the house which is a shack splitting open 46 A