We have numbered the stanzas so as to permit easy comparison with their position in the revised editions of Césaire’s long poem. Notes, signaled by a superscript ampersand (&) in the text, are identified by stanza number.
[4] the volcanoes will explode: In May 1902, Mt. Pelée exploded pyroclastically, burying the old colonial capital of Martinique, St. Pierre, which was never rebuilt. Metaphorically, volcanoes and explosions set up a network of apocalyptic images that run throughout the poem.
[8] Josephine . . . conquistador: Marie-Josephe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie (1763-1814) was born into the planter class in Trois-Islets, Martinique. Her second husband, Napoleon Bonaparte, called her Josephine. Martinicans blame her for the reinstitution of slavery in 1802. Her statue, erected by Emperor Napoleon III in 1859, has frequently been decapitated in recent years. The “liberator” is Victor Schoelcher (1804-93), who championed the second abolition of slavery in the French empire by the revolutionary government in 1848. The “conquistador” is Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc (1585-1636), who claimed Martinique for France in 1635.
[10] morne: Lafcadio Hearn defined the term as “used throughout the French West Indian colonies to designate certain altitudes of volcanic origin. . .” (HTY, 254-55). The French word was derived from Spanish morro, a hillock.
[14] Capot River: The Capot empties into the Atlantic Ocean in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, where Césaire was born. Its course runs southeast of the plantation his father managed before entering the colonial tax department.
[15] Queen-Blanche-of-Castille: Daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Louis VIII of France and mother of Louis IX, Blanche (1188-1252) figured prominently in school history books. In the poem, she is a privileged figure of whiteness. See also [87].
[21] from Trinité to Grand-Rivière: From Césaire’s childhood home, Basse-Pointe, La Trinité lies to the South, Grand-Rivière to the North, facing Africa along the wild Atlantic coast.
[26] MERCI: THANK YOU; an ex-voto for an answered prayer.
[27] rue Paille: Literally, Straw Street; the poorest shacks in the colony lacked the solid roof of more prosperous houses.
[28] sand so black: The sand is black because of its volcanic origin; images of blackness reinforce the poverty of the population.
[31] the three-souled Carib: An allusion to the three aspects of being in Carib belief: anigi (vital force); iuani (immaterial being); afurugu (astral body). The astral body is an exact copy of the physical body, located midway between materiality and spirituality.
[32] this little ellipsoidal nothing: A derisive designation for Martinique, which is finger-like in shape. At only 1,128 sq. km., it is approximately six times the size of Washington, D.C. Located at 14.40 degrees North Latitude, it would appear to lie four fingers above the equator on a medium-sized wall map.
[34] where Death scythes widely: The image evokes the invasion of Spain from Africa by Franco’s tanks. The Spanish Civil War was ongoing during the composition of the “Cahier. . .,” and the threat of fascism reinforced the probability of renewed racial violence in the United States. Haiti, the beacon of negritude, had been occupied by the USA between 1915 and 1934.
[35] Bordeaux . . . San Francisco: All but the last city participated in the triangle trade: goods from French and British ports were traded for slaves on the African coast; slave ships traded their human cargo in the West Indies and the plantation economies of Atlantic America; rum and sugar were sent back to Europe from American and Caribbean ports. San Francisco seems to have been added for euphony and rhythm.
[36] a little cell in the Jura: Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803) was the foremost military hero of the Haitian revolution, which inflicted its worst defeat on France’s imperial army prior to the retreat from Russia in 1812. In the poem, Césaire focuses on Toussaint as a tragic hero, a black man tricked by his adversaries and imprisoned in the wintry whiteness of the Jura Mountains.
the Keys: Caribbean coral reefs.
a shy patyura: According to Césaire, a variation on patira, the name of a peccary found in French Guiana. Kesteloot claimed that it was thought to accompany the dying to their final resting place (RHG, 103); in this respect, it would be a Creole equivalent to the Egyptian Anubis.
[49] Amazons . . . Mahdis: Ironic recollections of fanciful identification with African heroic figures:
Amazons of the king of Dahomey: Dahomey was a precolonial monarchic state in the southwest of contemporary Benin. Founded in the 17th century, Dahomey maintained a unit of female warriors until the 1890s.
Askia the Great: Askia Mohammed reigned in Gao from 1493 to 1528; he founded the university at Timbuktu.
Djenne: From the 15th to the 17th century, a hub of the salt and gold trade through Timbuktu; renowned for its Great Mosque.
Mahdis: In Muslim eschatology, the Mahdi is a prophet guided by Allah who is destined to save the faithful at world’s end. Muhammad Ahmad ibn al-Sayyid Abd Allah (1844-85) led a successful insurrection in the Sudan in 1881. The caliphate he founded endured until 1898, when the British Army under Lord Kitchener recaptured Khartoum and Omdurman. (The French spelling is madhi.)
Chicote: In Portuguese, a knotted whip used on slaves.
[52] I defy the craniometer: Measuring skull size with a craniometer was a means of proving European superiority. These lines recall the so-called scientific racism propounded by J. A. de Gobineau (1816-1882) in his book The Inequality of Human Races, first published in 1853.
Homo sum may be a quotation from Terence, the Roman author who was born a slave to a senator.
COMICAL AND UGLY: A quotation from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “The Albatross,” which depicts the majestic bird as pathetic when tortured on the deck of a ship by sailors.
[53] the funereal menfenil: A bird of ill omen; like the “chicken hawk,” it has been identified with a wide range of raptors common in the Caribbean; also called malfini or manfenil in Guadeloupe and Martinique (DCE, 364).
[57] the postillion of Havana: A household servant dressed in fancy livery whose job it was to tell newly arrived slaves, in flowery language, what a fine life awaited them.
[66] Eia for the royal Cailcedra: Eia is an imperative found both in ancient Greek drama and in the Latin missal; either context reinforces the solemn register of the passage. In the Wolof language of Senegal, the Cailcedra is a mahogany tree.
[67] seized: A key term in Frobenius’s morphology of cultures, in which cultural change is marked by a collective “seizure.” The “Ethiopian” characteristics Césaire attributes to diasporic peoples were explained by Suzanne Césaire in the first issue of Tropiques (April 1941) (GCD, 3-10).
[78] the time has come to gird one’s loins like a brave man: In the Book of Job (38:3) Jehovah enjoins Job: “Gird up now thy loins like a man” (King James trans. used throughout the notes). The context is God’s laying the foundations of the earth.
[82] the wounds cut in its trunk: A probable allusion to the rubber tree, which survives the cuts made in its trunk to extract the latex sap.
[87] I am only a man (no degradation, no spit perturbs him): Echoes the scourging of Christ; Matthew and Mark stress spitting; John (19:5) has the expression “Behold the man!” (Ecce Homo in the Vulgate).
I accept. . . I accept. . .: Kesteloot sees an allusion to the gospel according to Luke (22:42): “not my will, but thine, be done” (LKC, 87).
my race that no ablution of hyssop mixed with lilies could purify: Echoes Psalm 51:17 (“Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”) Irele offers a more general interpretation in which the religious references critique the Catholic church (ICR, 127).
my race ripe grapes for drunken feet: In Isaiah 63:3, Jehovah declares: “I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury. . .” (LKC, 88). Source of Steinbeck’s title The Grapes of Wrath.
(oh those queens I once loved in the remote gardens...): Quite possibly an allusion to the statues of French queens in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, one of whom is Blanche of Castille [15]. The parenthetical ejaculation is reminiscent of Saint-John Perse and should be taken ironically.
the twenty-nine legal blows of the whip: Here, and in naming instruments of torture, Césaire draws on the Code Noir (Black Code) written for Louis XIV’s minister Colbert, promulgated in 1685, and revised many times down to the abolition of slavery in 1848. Césaire documented the names of particularly cruel slaveholders in the writings of Victor Schoelcher, whose Esclavage et Colonisation (Slavery and Colonialism) he prefaced in 1948.
and the fleur de lys. . .: Branding irons bearing this symbol of the monarchy were used to mark runaway slaves under the old regime.
[89] and the determination of my biology: All the measures of racial purity down to “but measured by. . .” refer to tests used by “scientific” racism [52] and which were all too often interiorized by black and mulatto families in plantation society.
[92] the body of my country miraculously laid in the despair of my arms: A simulacrum of the Christian pietà (Luke 23:52-53).
I revive ONAN: In Genesis 38:9, Onan refused to impregnate his dead brother’s widow. When Jehovah saw that Onan had disobeyed his injunction, He killed Onan. Césaire keeps the vehicle of the metaphor (the speaker will copulate with Mother Earth), but provides a new tenor (a nature religion he presents as African).
[93] the penetrance of an apocalyptic wasp: A probable allusion to the Book of Revelation (Apocalypse in French), in which the end times are announced by locust armies having the power of scorpions to cause men pain and suffering (9:3-10). Kesteloot sees the aural image as referencing the trumpet of the angel of the Last Judgment (LKC, 95).
[96] the “lance of night” of my Bambara ancestors: Kesteloot describes this image as the sutama, a spear blessed by a sorcerer who sprinkled it with the blood of a man or a black goat. Without the blessing, the spear would retract toward the haft so as to be ineffective (LKC, 96). The image is both martial and imperial, since sub-groups of the Mandé people (including the Bambaras) founded the empires of Ghana and Songai, as well as the city of Djenne.
pseudomorphosis: Frobenius had used the neologism pseudomorphosis in a discussion of the Paideuma, the mysterious force that seized cultures and transformed them. Spengler adapted the term to refer to the crippling of a young society by an older one (SDW, 197-98), elaborating on the importance of apocalyptic thought in this context.
pay no attention to my black skin: Echoes the Song of Solomon (1:6): “Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me. . .” In the context of pseudomorphosis, this is a denial of one’s blackness, which Fanon was to theorize in Black Skin, White Masks.
[109] immobile veerition: In the French text verrition is a Latinism that Césaire explained to Clayton Eshleman as coined from the verb verri: to sweep, scrape a surface, to scan. Kesteloot, who had also consulted Césaire, claimed the root was vertere, to turn. André Claverie was given the same derivation. Hénane found verrition as a culinary term in Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût (1825) and interpreted the image as the tongue sweeping bits of food in the mouth (RHG, 138-39). Kesteloot’s interpretation has the virtue of suggesting an arrested turning motion or vortex. We have settled on “immobile veerition” to render the paradox of the final passage, at once upward-sweeping and fixed.
“Gunnery Warning” remains quite stable throughout its publishing history.
“The Thoroughbreds” was first published as a “Fragment of a Poem” in Tropiques (1941), preceded by this epigraph – “I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer” (Rimbaud). Césaire’s poem uses plant imagery in the final section to draw “The Thoroughbreds” into the orbit of Frobenius’s theory of “Ethiopian” African civilization, the locus of his vision: “I grow, like a plant. . . .” (See notes on Notebook. . ., stanza 67 above.) The quasi-biblical diction and syntax in the 1946 text were weakened by the replacement of six stanzas that had in 1941 contained references to Enos, son of Seth; to the cities Ninevah and Babylon; as well as to Taodenni, a city in precolonial Mali which the poet invokes to free himself from the biblical Enos. The 1941 text included twelve lines following “flash of absolute snows” that suggested the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The use of falun in the poem is typical of Césaire’s play on the vehicle (a sedimentary rock) and the tenor (the Dharma-wheel of Buddism) of the metaphor (PTED, 334, 349).
“Have No Mercy for Me” was entitled “Have No Mercy” from the 1970 re-edition of The Miraculous Weapons onward (PTED, 335).
“Serpent Sun” was entitled “A Rustling of Doves in the Blood. . .” when it was published in the Chilean magazine Leitmotiv in December 1943. The title “Serpent Sun” appears for the first time in the New York magazine Hémisphères the following year in a group of poems called “Doves and Hawk,” which doubtless echoes wartime conditions (PTED, 335).
“Phrase” remained remarkably stable throughout its publishing history (PTED, 335).
“Poem for the Dawn” displayed stanza breaks in early magazine printings that Césaire dispensed with in the 1946 and later editions (PTED, 352).
“Visitation” remained quite stable throughout its publishing history (PTED, 352).
“Bateke,” which originated in the last part of the manuscript of “The Virgin Forest,” became “Mythology” from 1970 onward. The original title referred to the Bateke people, who inhabited the site of the French trading post that P. Savorgnan de Brazza set up in 1880, creating the French Congo colony. The first seven lines were cut from the revised text of “Mythology,” giving it a less specific and less erotic context after Congolese independence. Brazza discussed the Bateke people in the same context as the Pahouins, whom Césaire mentions in the Cahier / Notebook (SBE, 4-23).
“Perdition” remains quite stable, apart from stanza breaks present in the Tropiques text in 1941.
“Survival” and “Beyond” present the same general profile as “Perdition.”
“The Miraculous Weapons” was entitled “Poem” on the manuscript sold by André Breton’s estate in 2004. Three lines were pruned from the third stanza after 1946; parentheses were placed around the second stanza only in the 1976 edition (PTED, 337, 353-355).
“The Irremediable” was entitled “Poem” on the typescript sent to André Breton on April 2, 1945. It first appeared in the original edition of The Miraculous Weapons the following year. The biblical monster Behemoth (Job 40:15-24) probably alludes to eschatology. “The Levee” is a cemetery in Fort-de-France, Martinique. When Césaire revised the collection for the 1970 edition, he replaced “The Irremediable” with “Prophecy,” which had been the first section of “To Africa” in the magazine printing of 1946. Here is the text of “Prophecy” in a slightly modified version of the Eshleman and Smith translation of 1983: “there where adventure remains clear-sighted / where women radiate language / where death in the hand is beautiful as a milk-season bird / where the tunnel gathers from its own genuflexion a profusion of wild plums fiercer than caterpillars / where the agile wonder leaves no stone nor fire unturned // there where the vigorous night bleeds a speed of pure vegetation // where the bees of the stars sting the sky with a hive more ardent than the night / where the noise of my heels fills space and raises the face of time backwards / where the rainbow of my speech is charged to unite tomorrow with hope and the infant with the queen, // for having insulted my masters bitten the sultan’s men / for having cried in the wilderness / for having screamed at my jailers / for having begged from the jackals and the hyenas shepherds of caravans // I watch / the smoke rushes like a mustang to the front of the stage briefly hems its lava with its fragile peacock tail then tearing its shirt suddenly opens its chest and I watch it dissolve little by little into British isles into islets into jagged rocks in the limpid sea of the air / where my mug / my revolt / my name / prophetically bathe” (CCP, 121). See “To Africa” in Solar Throat Slashed below.
“Night Tom-Tom” remained very stable from its magazine publication in Tropiques (1943) down to the 1976 Oeuvres complètes edition except for the word “fever,” which began the fourth line after 1970 (PTED, 355).
The title of “Water Woman” remained unchanged through two magazine publications in 1944 and 1945 and in the original edition of The Miraculous Weapons. It was changed to “Nostalgic” only in the 1970 Gallimard re-edition of the collection (PTED, 338).
“Automatic Crystal Set” has a play in the title typical of Césaire in the 1940s. Both before and after the war years, Cristal Grandin was the name of a well-known French radio manufacturer. Thus the title suggests the reception of a distant signal, with “automatic” referring to assumptions about surrealist poetry.
“Conquest of Dawn” had a complicated early history, which Pierre Laforgue has described in detail (PTED, 339). An early draft was published in VVV’s first issue in New York in 1942. In August 1945, at war’s end, Césaire sent a later draft to André Breton that substituted a new text for the last three pages of the VVV version. We have translated the version that revealed Césaire’s poetry to a larger audience in France in 1946. For the 1970 re-edition of the collection, Césaire cut the poem in two parts, entitling the shorter of the two “Debris,” which begins at “And shit. . . .”
The earliest known manuscript of “Investiture” has “city” where “Saint-Pierre” appears in the seventh line of the 1946 edition. From the 1970 re-edition onward, Césaire returned to his original, less specific, designation. The line “my Saint-Pierre eyes defying the assassins from under the dead ash” suggests the one known survivor of the May 1902 volcanic eruption that destroyed the city, a black prisoner in the local jail (PTED, 341-42, 356).
“The Virgin Forest” was entitled “Poem” in a manuscript sent to André Breton in 1945; its publishing history is characteristic of Césaire’s treatment of blocks of text. He divided the poem into thirds for the 1976 Oeuvres complètes edition: “The Virgin Forest” (to “unmuzzled since nothingness”), “Another Season” (from “Where are you going. . .” to “when the horsemen of sperm and thunder pass”), and “Day and Night” (from “the sun the executioner” to the end), having cut the four lines between “From starboard to port” to “At noon guarded by fetish euphorbia.” Césaire cut another six lines from “Day and Night” between “my wounded beast cry” and “until death intervenes.” The general thrust of these cuts is clear: the creation of shorter, more coherent units. The early manuscript sent to Breton concluded with a further 24-line passage with markedly stronger sexual and religious imagery (PTED, 342-43).
“Annunciation,” along with “Tom-Tom I” and “Tom-Tom II,” was first published in Tropiques in March 1943. Dedicated to André Breton, “Annunciation” evokes the porteuses or “porter girls” whom Lafcadio Hearn had made an erotic focus of Martinican exoticism (HTY). Breton in his Martinique: Snake Charmer (BMS) turned them into esthetic objects exemplifying Baudelaire’s “Even When She Walks” (R. Howard’s title for poem 28 of Flowers of Evil). Césaire locates “Annunciation” between these two intertexts while appropriating the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary.
“Tom-Tom I” is dedicated to Benjamin Péret, who prefaced the Havana edition of Retorno al país natal (1943), Lidia Cabrera’s translation of the 1939 text of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.
“Tom-Tom II” is dedicated to Wifredo Lam, who illustrated the Havana edition of the Notebook. He had recommended Césaire’s long poem to his friends in the Cuban capital.
“Great Noon” first appeared in Tropiques no. 2 (1941) as “Fragments of a Poem: Great Noon (conclusion).” The beginning of the poem underwent multiple revisions in the version sent to André Breton in 1945 as part of a planned collection then called “Tombeau du soleil / Memorial of the sun.” The text published in the The Miraculous Weapons was essentially the same as the Tropiques version; in 1946, the title still referred to a longer poem, although the association with “The Thoroughbreds” was attenuated. In the 1976 edition, the subtitle was dropped. (PTED, 344) We have translated as dazzled the Ardennes dialect word darne, which Césaire presumably borrowed from Rimbaud’s poems “Accroupissements” and “Les Poètes de sept ans.” The first book of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra concludes with a page in which Zarathustra stands at an existential crossroad: “And that is the great noon when man stands in the middle of his way between beast and overman and celebrates his way to the evening as his highest hope: for it is the way to a new morning” (NPN, 190).
“Batuque” remained unchanged, apart from minor punctuation marks, between its first magazine printing in VVV no. 4 (1944) and the first edition of Les Armes miraculeuses two years later. Among the names of African diasporic dances found throughout the Americas, “Batuque” (in French batouque) recommended itself to Césaire for its un-French combination of harsh consonants (b, t, k) that he could use percussively to beat out the rhythm of a poem that proposes to magically transform the geography of the colonial world. His author’s footnote reads “tom-tom rhythm in Brazil.” The 1970 re-edition replaced five lines between “knotted cities” and “And the ship. . .” and omitted but did not replace eighteen lines between “an army of parabolas” and “batuque / when the world shall be. . . .” These modifications diminish both the erotic and the prophetic force of the original published text. Another thirteen lines of surrealist metaphor suggesting a pirate attack by “the ship” were cut between “from the flesh of sleep” and “batuque of hands.” For these, Césaire substituted five lines lacking in aggressivity. By replacing “Caracas” with “Casamance,” Césaire gave the poem a new Africanist orientation, whereas he had focused in the 1940s on the Caribbean and the Americas. “Basse-Pointe, Diamant, Tartane, and Caravelle” are all Martinique toponyms. Another fourteen lines that had extended the focus on the “black princess” were cut between “Caracas” and “batuque of night. . . .” Finally, three series of cuts of one or two lines each were made between “my thirst-for-branches-minarets-exil” and “batuque of pregnant lands.” In rewriting “Batuque,” Césaire was motivated by the same need to align poetry with politics that had governed the rewriting of Solar Throat Slashed prior to the publication of Cadastre (1961).
“The Oubliettes of the Sea and the Deluge” was entitled “Simouns” (a dry wind in the Sahel region of Africa) in the proposed collection “Doves and Hawk” (Colombes et Menfenil) that Césaire sent to André Breton in 1945. It was published under the revised title in Fontaine in March 1946. The text of “Simouns” contained significant variants (PTED, 346), among which was the word Baguirmi*, used as a rhythmic device rather like batuque. From 1946 onward, the text remained stable.
“The Woman and the Knife” was first published by Fontaine in issue no. 50 with “The Oubliettes of the Sea and the Deluge.” The text was altered only in superficial details in the course of its publishing history.
“And the Dogs Were Silent”: Césaire studded the incidents in the plot with biblical references and imagery connected with the sacrifice and resurrection of vegetation gods that Frazer, in The Golden Bough and Adonis, Attis, Osiris, considered homologous. Thus, in Césaire’s tragedy, the “dog-headed gods” suggest Anubis, who bears the souls of the dead to the Egyptian underworld. Anubis reappears in answer to the question “Where is the one who will sing for us?”—“his head [is] that of a dog.” The same speech by the Chorus invokes Osiris, whose symbol is the sparrow hawk. The uraeus, represented by the female cobra, protects the sun-god against his enemies. A later speech by the Narrator alludes to Osiris, whose body parts were “dismembered, scattered about” after his ritual murder. The Golden Bough (ch. 39) details the ritual in which the mummy of Osiris is gradually raised until it rests between the wings of Isis in a simulacrum of resurrection. In the litany “Arise o king,” the Chorus likens Césaire’s Rebel to Osiris. Césaire suggested such a reading when he told Harris that Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy permitted an imaginary link between archaic Greek tragedy and the origins of pharaonic Egypt in black Africa (HHT, 28-29).
Afterword: “Myth” was not published prior to the original edition of The Miraculous Weapons in 1946, which supports the reading of Afterword as a heading rather than a title. This fifteen-line prose sums up Césaire’s surrealist practice in the collection and foregrounds his mythopoetic intent. The surrealist black revolution is still a project.
We indicate the magazine publication prior to the original edition of STS wherever it is known. An asterisk after the title indicates that the poem was cut from the revised Cadastre edition in 1961.
“Magic” was first published in the Revue internationale in May 1947. It remained relatively unchanged throughout its publishing history, except for the modification of “pis” (udder) to “plis” (folds) in line 5 from STS onward (EAC 1, 121). We have maintained the later reading.
“The Nubian Vultures Have the Floor” had “its pomp and its armpits” cut from the first stanza during revision for Cadastre in 1961. “What horrible cocaine. Neither thumb nor screw” was cut from the second stanza. The final stanza presents a syncretic infernal scene that appears to borrow from classical sources without referencing any one in particular.
“Lynch I”* was dropped from Césaire’s oeuvre after 1948. A string of images—“bayou,” “pirate ship,” “pampa,” “hummingbirds,” “cyclone,” “virgin forest,” “continent exploding into islands”—draws the poem into the Caribbean and western hemispheric region where lynching was inextricably linked to slavery. A competing string of images of auto-eroticism and emasculation culminates in “lynch is an orchid” (playing on the Greek assimilation of the orchid to a testicle) and “lynch is the hand of the wind bloodying a forest whose trees are Galli brandishing in their hands the living flame of their castrated phalli.” The metaphor shifts from “galls” parasitic on trees to Galli, the priests of Cybele who performed rituals of auto-emasculation. This tension between historical theme and mythic recreation of a spiritual motif is typical of the poems edited out of the collection. Our translation “murderess-hole” plays on “murder-hole” (a hole in the battlements of a castle through which defenders could throw noxious substances at attackers). Given the erotic seams in the poem, “murderess” seems quite relevant but if used alone eliminates the equally cogent “murder-hole.” We have tightened “summary” to “succinct” in our retranslation.
“Devourer”* similarly deploys a string of typical Caribbean animal images that intersect a curious Egyptian suggestion in “phasmids and pharaoh ants,” opening up a mythographic space: images of destruction, ingestion, procreation, and birth radiate out from the term “devourer.” In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the monster Ammit devours the souls of those whose lives were judged unworthy of immortality (EBD, 155); the star Aldebaran was included in an astronomical representation of Osiris as the Hunter in a Theban tomb (PIO, 21), thus reinforcing the link to ancient Egyptian burial rituals.
“The Law is Naked” was included in Cadastre only after a dozen lines were cut, except for “There are no more milking machines for the morning that has yet to rise,” which was distributed over two lines. The revised poem retained little of its surrealist origins.
“Rain” was eliminated from Cadastre, except for the seventh and final iterations of “Rain”; under the title “Pluies” (Rains), it was placed considerably farther back in the collection.
“Velocity” was reprinted in Cadastre, except for the line “mud old witch draw circles,” which suggests ritual magic. In the line “I wear the solar tiara,” the poet’s alter ego identifies himself with the sun god Ra, if one interprets the “old gods” in line 2 as referring to ancient Egypt. Some ancient texts also interpreted Osiris as the sun-god (FGB, ch. 42). See also “And the Dogs Were Silent” above.
“Disaster” was retitled “Tangible Disaster” in 1961; in line 2, the parenthesis was deleted. “Mandragora remorse” could refer to use of the mandrake root in the bible to make a barren woman fertile (Genesis 30: 14-16), which would reinforce “ashy menses.” In line 8, “mystagogical giant” was likewise deleted. Césaire informed Eshleman that the poem was a response to the 1902 eruption of Martinique’s Montagne Pelée, which prompted the translation of éclat as “eruption.” The “presumptuous [mael]strom” evokes in conclusion the tsunami effect caused by such a cataclysm.
“Secret Society”* opened with the idiosyncratic spelling of lagoon in the French text; we have kept it, as did the editor of PTED, 385. A string of surrealist metaphors of violence, upheaval, and catastrophe in the natural world is punctuated by clear references to the French revolution (guillotine, public accuser, beloved necks, executioner blocks). The thrust of the poem draws historical events into the realm of the imaginary at a time when the promise of socialist revolution in France was being stifled by parliamentary politics.
“Nocturnal Crossing”* can be read as a surrealist transmutation of Césaire’s encounters with rural constituents.
“Among Other Massacres” underwent no significant changes in its editorial history.
“The Griffin” presents no changes apart from splitting stanza two into three lines in the 1961 and 1976 editions. Césaire associates the African and South American continents by linking the “Spitting Andes” volcanoes and the “sacred Mayumbé” mountain of the Lower Congo.
“Redemption” presents only variant breaks between lines 6 and 7 in 1976.
“Mississipi” uses a French colonial spelling of the name, which punctuates the poem. From the 1961 edition of Cadastre onward, the repetition of “Mississipi” in stanzas 1, 2, and 3 was deleted.
“Blues” was retitled “Rainy Blues” (Blues de la pluie) from 1961 onward. “Aguacero” is a Spanish word for a sudden shower or downpour of the type that occurs throughout the Caribbean in the rainy season. The text of “Blues” is a Caribbean reappropriation of Psalm 137:1-3 (“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. / We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. / For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”) It is as close as Césaire ever came to the Afro-American genre of the spiritual. In its identification of the African diaspora with Zion, “Blues” is a high modernist rendition of a theme that Rastafarian poetics treats using conventions of popular Jamaican culture.
“The Scapegoat” was first published in Fontaine, no. 50 for March 1946; it underwent only one deletion between 1948 and 1961: the adjective “crepuscular” in line 8. We take “Arborigène” to be a typo in the 1948 text; corrected in all later editions to “Aborigène,” it designates the sea as the aboriginal element.
“Transmutation”* disappeared from Césaire’s œuvre from 1961 until our bilingual edition reestablished it in 2011.
“Dwelling I”* is best read in contrast to “lagoonal calendar” in i, laminaria. . . The “jailer” relates this dwelling to the island prison in which the mythographer of negritude “waited” for the spiritual upheaval of the “pensive porpoises yet to be born.”
“The Sun’s Knife-Stab in the Back of the Surprised Cities”* is the preeminent type of surrealist poem in STS; it was doubtless for this reason that it was deleted from Cadastre. A narrative cover of apocalypse and judgment is moved forward by elements drawn from both Christian and ancient sacred texts (AMN, 193-204). If the first vision suggests the beast of Revelation 13:1-3, it also bears some resemblance to Ammit, who devoured the souls of ancient Egyptians found unworthy (See “Devourer” above). Ammit was represented with a crocodile head, a lion’s torso, and the (equine) hind-quarters of a hippopotamus. In the Egyptian underworld, the dog’s head designated Anubis, who presented souls for final judgment. Those whose hearts were devoured by Ammit were condemned to “haunt for all eternity” the world of the living. Numerous other details associate ancient judgment rituals with Martinique: hairless dogs are found in both Egypt and Martinique; Saint-Pierre was never rebuilt after the explosion of the Montagne Pelée that destroyed the “medley of colors” that made up the population in 1902. The final stanza replaces the religion of the colonizer with a symbolic representation of Vodun, the vever. The vision of black humanity in unison with nature recalls the final image of “And the Dogs Were Silent” two years earlier.
“When in the Heat of the Day Naked Monks Descend the Himalayas”* turns on the word fofa in the fourth stanza, in which the poet’s alter ego sets his “monster”—characterized by the Caribbean caiman—against an alien “monster.” Metonymically, the Sanjie fofa miji or Buddhadharma during the Third Stage—a Chinese Buddhist text written in the 6th century CE by Xinxing—connects the Himalayan monks of the poem’s title to the Césairean theme of apocalypse, which Xinxing’s sect espoused (PTED, 1761).
“Indecent Behavior”* prolongs the focus on the “Monster” while evoking a harmonious past “farther than forgotten cities farther than rites with forgotten meanings” from the standpoint of the present with its “little shipwrecks” (alluding metaphorically to the slave trade) and “thwarting towns”(characteristic of colonialism).
“Son of Thunder” in line 3, from 1948 through the 1976 edition, had the spelling “attolls” for “atolls,” a correction made only in 1994.
“Permit”* concludes with a clear statement of Césaire’s vision of negritude in 1948: “I attend powerlessly the wilding of my mind the air brings me the Zambezi.” It had no place in the 1961 edition.
“Solid”* is a particularly dense succession of associative metaphors into which are interjected an allusion to World War II—“the war in the Pacific”—and one to the Allies’ agreement on the goals of the postwar world—“the Atlantic Charter” (1941).
“The Woman and the Flame”* can be read in parallel with “The Woman and the Knife” in The Miraculous Weapons. Its evocation of a woman’s features in terms of extreme weather conditions (hurricane, brush fires), mythical animals (dragon), and “insinuating [herself] from another world” is typical of André Breton’s use of métaphore filée.
“Millibars of the Storm” remained stable except for the deletion of line 5—which foregrounded the poem’s erotic implications—from 1961 onward.
“Gallantry of History”* intends to shock with its blend of prayer to the Vodun lwa Ogou—who presides over iron-working (blunderbuss), fire (volcanoes), and war (bombs)—and the “three wise men” of the Christian tradition; an ironic allusion to the great powers who emerged victorious from World War II (Hyde Park, Place de la République); and derisive images of “a customs officer” uniting Christianity (“a chaplet of piasters”) with profit and the debasement of “the salver of justice.” The “Virgins of Ogou” are presumably the hounsi who serve him in the Vodun oumfò.
“Several Miles from the Surface”* was translated into German as “Several Miles toward the Sun” in J. Jahn’s German edition of 1956. Jahn otherwise modified the poem only in terms of line breaks and indentations. In “the long coitus of a tree with a sailboat,” Césaire pays homage to Lautréamont’s line “beautiful as . . . the fortuitous encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella,” which André Breton praised as the preeminent surrealist image.
“Chevelure” is one of the poems that underwent extensive cuts (stanza 2; 10 lines in stanza 3) prior to inclusion in the 1961 and later editions.
“Scalp”* is typical of the poems appealing to magic and eroticism that were sacrificed to Césaire’s political turn in the mid-1950s.
“The Tornado,” on the other hand, in its evocation of racial segregation and violence in the postwar United States, fit nicely into the political vision of the 1961 edition. The poem’s eroticism was reduced by cutting lines 3-5, “into a whore’s vagina” in line 11, and the phrase “of the executed”. Blasphemous metaphors were cut between “In the time it took. . .” and “. . .from the sky” to create a semblance of realism.
“Lynch II” was titled “Lynch” from 1961 onward, since “Lynch I” had been cut from the revised edition. In the 1948 text, a redundant “phos-” was printed before the break at the end of line 7. The typo was corrected in 1961, when the poem was placed considerably closer to the end of the collection.
“Apotheosis”* develops a blasphemous litany of images of the sort attributed to the bishops in “And the Dogs Were Silent” (1946). It no longer fit the tone of the revised 1961 edition. The penultimate stanza riffs on Blake’s “Tiger, tiger, burning bright. . .,” ironically undercutting the prophetic discourse of apotheosis.
“Crusade of Silence” was published in Cadastre as “Crusades of Silence” after extensive cuts: the first stanza ended at “bric-a-brac”; the second stanza was rewritten as a meditation on blackness and the memory of slavery, with no reference to colonial Timbuktu or Cuba, Mali and Cuba being independent after 1960.
“Totem” was first published in the issue of Le Point for March 1946. Only minor changes in capitalization and line breaks intervened prior to reprinting in STS two years later. The poem remained stable thereafter (PTED, 463, 473).
“Unmaking and Remaking the Sun”* is a surrealist litany on the theme of home, conceived in violence and absence, interspersed with images of imprisonment (jailer, keys), and ending in an apocalyptic explosion of renewal. In the third stanza from the end, the 1948 text printed the verb “nais” (I am born) with an ungrammatical circumflex accent on the letter “i”; this typo was corrected in PTED, 412.
“Samba” is a love poem that associates erotic and psychic power with images drawn from tropical nature. It remained stable throughout its publishing history.
“Intercessor” was retitled “Interlude” in 1961 to reduce its spiritual implications. Correcting the spelling of “entrelacs,” which lacked the final “s” in 1948, was the only other modification of the text.
“The Wheel” remained stable throughout its publishing history except for a line break after “weep” in line 4, which was introduced in the 1961 edition.
“Calm” was first published in the May 1947 issue of La Revue internationale. Except for line and stanza breaks, the text remained stable from 1947 to 1976.
“New Year” was subtitled “Poem for the Centennial of the 1848 Revolution” in Jahn’s bilingual edition of 1956, although the subtitle never appeared in French editions of the poem. After 1961, “New Year” ended at “for the first time,” deleting both “those wounded on the pavement” and “the tender approach of a new heart,” which alludes to the abolition of slavery in France and its colonies.
“Ex-Voto for a Shipwreck” was first printed in the Communist weekly Action in April 1947. “Shipwreck,” which Césaire usually reserves for the slave trade, here evokes colonialism in Africa with a focus on South Africa. Prior to inclusion in Cadastre, several lines were cut from the middle of the text; others were reworked (PTED, 474). These cuts increased the poem’s political potential by minimizing the percussive tom-tom beat and the associative metaphors.
“All the Way from Akkad from Elam from Sumer” was printed in the same issue of Action with “Ex-Voto. . .”; these are Césaire’s first contributions to the Communist publication. Two new lines preceded the original beginning of the poem from the Cadastre edition in 1961 onward. Allusions to ancient Egypt that could be read in terms of the sacred ibis were cut, as was the adverb “supernaturally”. The thrust of these revisions was to highlight the role of slavery from ancient Mesopotamia to its aftermath in the postwar colonial world. “Master of the three roads” is in all probability an invocation to Legba—in Fon culture, the preeminent god; in Vodun, the master of crossroads whose sacred number is three—by the pilgrim who seeks his protection. In the Roman world, this responsibility fell to Hermes or Mercury whose symbolic column marked both the crossroads called trivius and the quadrivius.
“To the Serpent”* makes the search for syncretic religious symbols the theme of the poem. Frazer’s Golden Bough had shown similar functions of totemic and royal serpents from Africa south of the Sahara, through ancient Egypt, to Mesopotamia and Greece (FDM, 67-75). In restoring the biblical serpent to his pagan preeminence, Césaire in 1948 intended to undermine the Christian narrative. The poem no longer fit the world view of Cadastre in 1961. In the final stanza of the 1948 text, the article “un(e)” preceding “main” lacked the final marker of the feminine (PTED, 422).
“Torture”* prolongs the presence of the initiatory serpent into the African diaspora through dense images of blackness (“inkblot,” “dark sperm”).
“Pennant”* opens with a mysterious image that may suggest the Mithraic solar cult in the Roman Empire by way of the bull ring in Seville; it concludes with praise for Samory Touré, whose opposition to French colonialism was the “final hiccup” before the nearly complete subjection of the continent.
“To Africa” was preceded by a dense prose passage constructed on a series of anaphoras when it was first published in the magazine Poésie 46 (1946). Césaire excised this block of text from the poem in 1948, then reset it as lines of verse and, under the title “Prophecy,” substituted it for “The Irremediable” in the 1970 edition of The Miraculous Weapons. Approximately two-thirds of this same text was published in 1979, again in prose, as Césaire’s contribution to the Wifredo Lam issue of an arts magazine (Société Internationale d’Art XXe Siècle). In revising “To Africa” for Cadastre, Césaire systematically erased the mythic blending of its verb tenses. Consequently, from 1961 onward, the “peasant” represented subsistence agriculture in a newly independent country, rather than the agent of spiritual transformation he had been in 1948. Twenty-two lines containing erotic and religious imagery centered on the Ishtar myth were cut from the middle of the poem (PTED, 475-76). In the 1948 text “isthmes” was printed as “ithsmes.”
“Delicacy of a Mummy”* calls attention to Egyptian burial rituals by making the speaker the embalmer of his own head. The “great bird” in this context would be ibis-headed Thoth, who recorded the sentence rendered on souls in the book of the dead. If Thoth overturned the sentence, the poet-mummy would escape being devoured by Ammit. See “Devourer” above.
“Demons” recalls Lautréamont’s style.
“Marsh” was retitled “Nocturnal Marsh” in 1961. The first stanza was deleted after “. . .navel.” In the third, the phrase “the victims of” was deleted, and the break between the third and fourth stanzas was eliminated.
“Noon Knives” was first published in Le Surréalisme en 1947, a catalog edited by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp for the Aimé Maeght gallery in Paris, which hosted the international surrealist exhibition that year. The text of Antonin Artaud’s radio play “To Have Done with the Judgment of God,” which appeared in the same volume, was published separately by the surrealist poetry magazine “K” in 1948, as was STS. “Noon Knives” underwent numerous modifications intended to minimize its surrealist origins and its allusions to animist religion prior to inclusion in Cadastre. The second stanza was deleted completely. In 1961 the third stanza began at “I spit” with the ejaculation “Good God!” replacing the repeated invocation of the filao tree (PTED, 476-77). In its original context, the poem embraced a vision of the marvelous that coincided with the surrealist notion of a spiritual revolution. The Champ de Mars has multiple revolutionary connotations: the Campus Martius in ancient Rome, where military exercises were held after the revolution that brought in the Republic; the Champ de Mars in Paris was the scene of a massacre on July 17, 1791; the Champ de Mars in front of the national palace in Port-au-Prince commemorates the Haitian revolution with statues of the heroes of independence, including the Unknown Maroon*. Numerous commentators have noted the strong black/white binary opposition that structures the poem around the sun’s apogee, which allows it to look both backward and forward in time. The best summary of these interpretations relates the “Ethiopian” values Césaire found in Frobenius to the plant imagery in the second stanza (KTP, 93-98). The presence of “paraschists,” ancient Egyptian ritual embalmers, connects the sun with Ra.
“Idyll”* was first published by Albert Skira in the February 1946 issue of Labyrinthe (Geneva), which specialized in surrealist art and poetry. The initial image (“the night of the world”) suggests a common French expression for a colonial uprising (“le grand soir”), which conditions our reading of the surrealist associative metaphors that follow. Images of violence (blood, wounded, chopping block) are held in semantic suspension by the string of apparently gratuitous images on which they are threaded. A binary opposition between “black” and “white” runs through the text. In this reading, the “house nigger” is an Uncle Tom whose days are numbered. The “hanged man” then suggests lynching, which in turn generates the image of the mandrake—reputed to grow from the semen of a hanged man. A typo (“blance” for “blanche”) in the French text of “the blank page” was corrected in PTED, 432).
“Password” was retitled “Antipode” in 1961, after deletion of all the lines beginning with the anaphora “Zealand,” which introduced a sequence of fourteen associative metaphors and sybilline phrases. The 1948 text is typical of the surrealist poetics that Césaire edited out of Cadastre.
“Turn of Events”* met the same fate as did the associative metaphors in “Password.”
“Preliminary Question”* did not survive the rewriting of STS for Cadastre, doubtless for its commingling of blasphemy and hyperbole.
“Tattooing Gazes”* is a blasphemous surrealist pastiche of the crucifixion of Christ.
“At the Locks of the Void” had many lines and phrases cut during revision for Cadastre. The first prose stanza ended at “I am no longer thirsty.” In the second stanza “it is a skein of iron for reinforced concrete,” “it is the graphic representation of a seismic floodtide,” “I await the baptism of sperm,” and “I await in the depths of my pores the sacred intrusion of the benediction” were cut. Stanza 4 was reduced by half. In the last stanza “Europe” was replaced by “Ancient Name,” and the last three lines of the poem were reduced to a single phrase, “considerable hiccup,” significantly lessening the poem’s original attack on European civilization. The cuts focused primarily on religious, erotic, and scatological imagery.
“Forfeiture”* was sacrificed to the political turn of Cadastre for the same reasons as the preceding poems.
“To the Night”* in its associative metaphors resembles other poems cut from Cadastre.
“Commonplace” was reworked for inclusion in Cadastre by cutting away half of the first stanza and deleting entirely stanzas 2-5. We have translated the archaic French word araigne by “arain,” an old English word for spider.
“Ode to Guinea” was revised along the same lines as the preceding poems. Lines 9-21 and 26-39 were cut.
“Horse” was originally published in the May 1947 issue of La Revue internationale. Cuts were made in the revision for Cadastre as follows: “and sentiments” from line 3; six lines between “my horse rears. . .” and “. . .mushroom spittle”; “to be spilled in public squares” in the next line; the four lines through “. . .has ever soiled”; the line “my blood that no paid off judge has ever heard”; and “of the furrow” four lines from the end. Pierre Loeb founded the art gallery Pierre in 1924. In the 1930s, he was perhaps the foremost proponent of surrealist painters in Paris. Escaping occupied France in 1941 on the same boat as Breton, Lam, and other artists and intellectuals who disembarked in Fort-de-France, Pierre Loeb spent the war years in Havana, contributing an article to the final issue of Tropiques in 1945.
“Antipodal Dwelling”* is constructed on associative metaphors of animist magic; it is best compared to “lagoonal calendar” in i, laminaria. . .
“Sun and Water” was lightly revised for Cadastre by cutting line 12.
“On a Metamorphosis”* gives a surrealist treatment to historical events of 1945-47: the 1946 famine in Shanghai; the proclamation of Indonesian independence in August 1945 and the independence of India two years later, seen as “triggering” the process of decolonization. The shift of focus to “a Chicago street” suggests a Communist solution to the oppression of labor in the capitalist world. The reference to the 4th century CE neo-Platonic philosopher Iamblichus (Jamblique in French) introduces as a rhyme the anti-Christian motif on which the poem concludes.
“March of Perturbations” remained fairly stable throughout its publishing history, apart from line and stanza breaks (PTED, 478).
“Barbarity” was first published in the October 1947 issue of Le Musée vivant, whose honorary board of directors Césaire had recently joined. Madeleine Rousseau’s presentation of the poem states that Gallimard would shortly publish the collection Soleil cou coupé. According to his contract for The Miraculous Weapons, Césaire needed Gallimard’s permission to publish his collection elsewhere. The poem has been read as a statement against racism (EAC1, 129), but it is constructed on the appeal to pre-Christian animism that runs through STS.
“Non-Vicious Circle” underwent only minor modifications from 1948 to 1976, apart from the conversion of the future tense of the verb “sink” in line 10 to the present tense. The poem has been called “a celebration of the mystic function of the poet” (DNV, 145).
“Different Horizon” remained stable from 1948 to 1976, except for the substitution of “our sun” for “another sun” in 1961. According to Homer (Iliad, 8.362-69; Odyssey, 11.623-26), when Hercules vanquished Cerberus, the poisonous saliva of the dog’s mouth caused the deadly purple monkshood (Aconitum napellus) to spring from the rock on which it fell.
“Death at Dawn” was modified for Cadastre by cutting line 7 and “by all the veins of the blood” at the end of line 9.
“Howling” was edited for Cadastre by cutting all but the first line of stanza 4 and the last line of stanza 6.
“The Light’s Judgment” remained intact throughout its publishing history
“Word” was edited for Cadastre by cutting nine lines of intimate and erotic imagery between “ultimate raving spasm” and “keep vibrating word.” Taken together with other cuts in the collection, the result is a less personal poem with a more general cultural resonance.
“Presence” was rewritten after Césaire eliminated “Longitude” from the revised text prepared for Cadastre. The third stanza became the fourth poem of the new collection under the title “Presence.” The first two stanzas of the 1950 text were eliminated entirely, following the same logic that governed the cuts in “Word.” “Who Then, Who Then. . .” became the title of the rewritten second poem in Cadastre, which was printed with fewer stanza breaks.
“Longitude” began its publishing history as the longer “Histoire de vivre: Récit” in Tropiques, no 4 (1942). Five lines below the ending of the poem in 1950, the text read “Windows of the swamp flower ah! flower / On the speechless night for Suzanne Césaire / in sonorous butterflies” (PTED, 512-13). The specifically Caribbean and Martinican geography of “Longitude” doubtless required its exclusion from Cadastre, which Césaire reoriented toward African independence in 1961.
“Elegy-Equation” saw its title shortened to “Elegy” in 1961 and its length was cut by twenty-one lines between “the gate of trembling nights” and “and do not be surprised. . . .” We have translated as “hags” the name of the vampiric creatures called souklyans or soucougnans in Martinique. In this West Indian version of old hag mythology, a mature woman sheds her skin at night in order to suck the blood of good Christians. She may also fly through the neighborhood in the form of ball lightning. References to blood and claws toward the end of the poem organize the metaphors around this figure. By cutting the part of the poem focused on “proud mulatto women,” Césaire realigned it with the two previous poems in a broader diasporic context.
“Lost Body” was moved back behind “Foreloining” in 1961. The text remained relatively stable, the modifications consisting in several cuts of one to three lines, the suppression of stanza breaks, and the introduction of full stops. The broad scope of the references suggests an imaginary retreat to original chaos. The pain and suffering of slaves and their descendants in historical time is exemplified by insistence on the word that “Word” drives home.
“Births” remained fairly stable from the original edition through Cadastre. In the 1976 Desormeaux edition, stanza breaks are suppressed; full stops followed by capital letters are introduced; lines that were originally indented are justified to the left margin.
“At Sea” was retitled “Foreloining” (“Forlonge”) in Cadastre and was positioned before “Lost Body.” Eight lines of “At Sea” were cut between “about cane cutters” and “woosh the cane cutter.” Other modifications are of the same type as in “Births.”
“Your Portrait” was nearly halved by cutting the first twenty-three lines for the Cadastre edition. The opening vision prepares the prophetic pronouncement that begins at “I say corrosive river,” much as the opening prose sequence in “To Africa” had done in Solar Throat Slashed. Other modifications are similar to those in the preceding poems.
“Summons” suffered fewer cuts than the preceding poems: the whitmanesque “I sing. . .” of the first line, and four lines between “all things more beautiful” and “including the memory of this world.” In Cadastre, several stanza breaks were suppressed, and indented lines were printed flush left, sometimes compressing two lines into one.
“Lay of Errantry” underwent the same types of rewriting for Cadastre as did “Births”: the line “o grapefruit” was eliminated; “a jib crane” was removed as subject of “grew emptily hoarse”; three lines were cut between “my sun is the one always awaited” and “the fairest of suns. . .”; one line between “nocturnal bodies vital with lineage” and “faithful trees spouting wine”; two lines between “millions of birds of my childhoods” and “where ever was the fragrant island”; two lines that expanded upon the mythical identification with the ancients: “or than Corvo Miguel Terceira” and “I am sultan of Babiloine.” Finally, the name Isis was replaced by “She” so as to render the focus on the Osiris myth more problematical.
Poems that were published in magazines or reviews are so indicated below. Variants are not noted here; they may be found in PTED and DFPS.
“Ferraments,” which ultimately provided the title of the collection, was published in Les Lettres nouvelles with five other poems under the working title “Liminal Vampire” in May 1955. The others are “Viscera of the Poem,” “. . .but there is this hurt,” “for Ina,” “And Sounding the Sand with the Bamboo of My Dreams,” and “Liminal Vampire.” Maurice Nadeau, co-founder of Les Lettres nouvelles in 1953, was excluded from the French Communist Party in 1932; he frequented the Surrealists during the pre-war years and chronicled the movement in a reference work published in 1945. The political orientation of Les Lettres nouvelles was close to that of Les Temps modernes at a time when both reviews published Césaire’s poems. “Ferraments” treats intimately the originary disaster of the voyage in the slave ship, while avoiding melodramatic treatment of its horror.
“Counting-Out Rhyme” was published in Les Lettres nouvelles in mid-July 1959. Césaire may well have had in mind the magical origins of the counting-out rhyme: in a cosmic Time, both Sun and Moon are actors. A Martinican kestrel replaces Prometheus’s eagle in the “ravishing . . . sacking . . . scraping” of “our black hearts” in the historical present.
“Seism” was published alongside “Counting-Out Rhyme.” To affirm that the poem references Césaire’s split with the French Communist Party (DFPS, 48) is reductionist. The passage in quotation marks has not been identified and is presumed to have been invented by Césaire. “To try words? Rubbing them to conjure up the unformed. . .” suggests a self-conscious reflection by the poet on the limitations of the miraculous (verbal) weapons of his earlier practice of negritude. The allusion to “our true names, our miraculous names” is consistent with a post-slavery movement to cast off one’s slave name in favor of a true one.
“Spirals” may refer to the cassia tree, as Césaire told Ngal (NAC, 143-44). At all events, the poem initially depicts a hike into the rain forest (“we ascend . . . we descend”) with a focus on metaphors designating specific plants, trees, and their fruit: cassias, cannas (balisiers), cecropias. The underside of the cecropia or trumpetwood leaf is, like the black man’s palm, whitish (DFPS, 51). We have used the Middle English forbeten to render the archaic French rôlés (CCP, 405). The poem’s conclusion is a downward spiral motion in which “the grudges of mankind” and “the rancor of races” leads to “the end of hell.”
“Hail to Guinea” was published in a special issue of Présence Africaine devoted to Guinea (Conakry) in mid-1959, less than a year after Ahmed Sékou Touré led the colony to reject the new French constitution. Over 95% of the voters opted for effective and immediate independence, the only one of France’s African colonies to do so. Césaire depicted the new nation heroically in this poem, which is organized geographically: Dalaba, Pita, Labé, and Mali are laid out on the map from South to North, the direction of the rivers’ flow. The Tinkisso River is an affluent of the Niger that rises in the escarpment of the Fouta Djalon. In the eighteenth century, the capital of the Imamate of Fouta Djalon was Timbo, which Césaire wrote as “Timbé.” Timbo is often omitted from maps today.
“Realm” replicates images (“the knife stab,” directed against a natural element, “the wind”) found in “The Sun’s Knife-Stab in the Back of the Surprised Cities.” However, “Realm” dispenses with the surrealist narrative cover used in Solar Throat Slashed. The word wind can be read as a metonym for the Windward Islands, which include Martinique (DFPS, 61).
“Monsoon-Mansion” stages a dialogue with the beloved in a vaguely African (“marabou”) but timeless landscape. We translate brusquée as “strange” following the definition of the archaic adjective by von Wartburg (DFPS, 65).
“For Ina” is the only published poem by Césaire dedicated to one of his children. It was first published in the “Liminal Vampire” series in Les Lettres nouvelles in mid-1955. It is also one of the most positive in the collection, since it focuses on pleasant associations with the natural world. Césaire is believed to have composed it the very day his daughter requested it.
“Birds” develops in its four lines a gnomic evocation of the “exile” experienced by African slaves and their descendants. The “manger of the stars” suggests the “bird feeder” and the “cord of stars” in “Gunnery Warning,” which opens the collection The Miraculous Weapons.
“Nocturne of a Nostalgia” reveals in its penultimate stanza the point of departure for this meditation on the slave trade. Assinie, on the coast of present-day Côte d’Ivoire in the Gulf of Guinea, was a French slave-trading post that flourished from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century.
“To Know Ourselves. . .” uses anaphora to develop images of Disaster, a term Césaire frequently used as a synecdoche for the slave trade and its aftermath.
“Merciless Great Blood” was first published in Beauvoir and Sartre’s magazine Les Temps modernes in mid-1955, alongside “Beat It Night Dog” with which it forms a diptych. “Merciless Great Blood” is a meditation on the slave trade from the Arabian peninsula (Kamsin, Asshume), to the “strange bayous” of the Americas where slaves are condemned “to moan to twist / to scream.”
“Beat It Night Dog” evokes in a tone of despair the slavers’ “caravans,” the slave-hunters’ dogs, their “fangs bleeding,” and the flesh of their victims.
“. . .but there is this hurt” reverses the legend of Prometheus and the eagle, with the iconic Martinican raptor (menfenil) serving as the poet’s agent of vengeance. In a second reversal, the poet becomes “prey for the beak of the wind.” Césaire wrote in a letter to his German translator that the menfenil was “a little sparrowhawk. . . its fat is used in making spells” (PTED, 1763).
“Viscera of the Poem” can be read as a meditation on the composition of this collection. Its publication in 1955 under the collective title “Liminal Vampire” places it at the heart of the creative process at this date. “Viscera. . .” announces the mood, the focus, and the intensely visceral nature of the poems that immediately follow it in the ordering of the collection.
“It Is Myself, Terror, It Is Myself” was first published in the Journal des poètes, Brussels, in September 1954. The legend of Prester John focuses the poet’s sense of belonging to the island with which he identifies in the title.
“Fangs” was published in Présence Africaine in mid-1955. The poem condenses into a single stanza the unbearable pain of a flayed consciousness that experiences in the body both the “bloody map map of blood” and the “shackle weight” of the collective past.
“Liminal Vampire” gave its title to the six poems published by Les Lettres nouvelles in May 1955.
“My Profound Day’s Clear Passage” develops metaphorically from a vision of the conquistador’s sword to evoke a howling consciousness before the self’s awakening as “a great serpent of the bogs . . . avid for a tenuous milk.”
“Corpse of a Frenzy” begins with the poet’s reminiscences of walks through the sugar estate where he was born and entered primary school; the distich in the middle of the poem shifts the focus to the eruption of Mt. Pelée in May 1902, which Césaire’s mother referred to as the “catastrophe.” The final stanza assimilates the poet’s heart to the sole black prisoner who survived the volcano’s eruption.
“Patience of Signs” is a meditation on nature in the Caribbean, concluding with a heavily ironic allusion to the “sweet manchineels” whose parts (bark, sap, fruit) are toxic. Usually called a “little apple” (in Spanish, manzanilla de la muerte or apple of death), its fruit is assimilated by Césaire to “berries” and “rich oranges.” He may have had in mind the planting of manchineels along the island’s coast to serve as a line of defense against invaders.
“Phantoms” develops around discrete sensory images of decomposition, a vision of “forbidden cities” in the tropics. It continues the mood of “Patience of Signs” while preparing that of “Mobile Flail of Strange Dreams.”
“Mobile Flail of Strange Dreams” is an oneiric dreamscape with nightmarish overtones. The French lines approximate the octosyllable used in narrative poetry. The “flail” could refer to the threshing tool, to the medieval weapon, or even to the balance beam of a primitive scale. Joseph Cornell created a collage on fiberboard using Césaire’s French title; only its oneiric quality seems to relate it to Césaire’s poem (Smithsonian American Art Museum).
“Harsh Season” was published in Les Temps modernes in August 1955. Its stark opposition between black and white, along with the appeal to the judgment of nature, connotes the urgency of decolonization in the “deserts.” Hénane hears an echo of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King in the final line (DFPS, 129).
“Statue of Lafcadio Hearn” memorializes the Greco-Irish folklorist (1850-1904) who wrote Two Years in the French West Indies, Youma, and other titles that have become reference works in Martinique. The urban culture of the old colonial capital, Saint-Pierre, was destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Pelée on May 2, 1902. In the January 1942 issue of Tropiques, Césaire collaborated with René Ménil on an introduction to Martinican folklore, citing as examples of the “cycle of hunger” Hearn’s versions of the stories of Yé and Nanie-Rosette. Between the magazine publication of the poem in Présence Africaine in mid-1955 and the revision for Ferraments, Césaire added to the first stanza the lines placed in quotation marks, which he adapted from Marc Logé’s edition of Youma (HY) (PTED, 554).
“Beautiful Spurted Blood” takes as its pretext the folkloric theme of Césaire’s “Statue of Lafcadio Hearn” in order to retell the story of Yé in dense, modernist verse (AMN, 253). “The last two lines . . . draw upon the consequences of Yé having killed and shared the totem bird with his family. The enchanted bird revives and demands that the family restore it to its very last feather” (CCP, 406).
“It is the Courage of Men That Is Dislocated,” “From My Stud Farms,” “Marine Intimacy,” and “Bucolic” form a unit in the center of Ferraments. Césaire sent these four prose poems to Louis Guillaume, editor of the little magazine Les Lettres, in December 1953 for publication in the second issue (“Poésie Vivante II,” 1954). At the request of the editor, he offered this definition of the prose poem: “From the moment when verse became specifically lyrical, when it refused to tell a story, to describe, to moralize, when it willed itself into a probing of the depths and a coal-damp-explosion scream, then, as a reaction, the prose poem was born. . .” (DFPS, 143). More specifically, “It is the Courage of Men. . .” strings its apparently free-floating metaphors on a narrative thread that is revealed only in the final paragraph. “The vineyard of wrath. . .” refers the reader to the Book of Revelation XIV, 8-20, in which St. John predicts the overthrow of Babylon. These are the poetics of “The Sun’s Knife-Stab in the Back of the Surprised Cities” in Solar Throat Slashed as well. Ambiguity is sustained in this group of poems through terms that may refer to one or another of two chains of signifiers. The word grenade in “It is the Courage of Men. . .” can be read as “grenade” in the military chain or as “pomegranate” in the botanical chain of signifiers. Virgil’s Latin Eclogues or Bucolics are the transparent intertext of “Bucolic.” Césaire differentiated this group of prose poems from the rest of the collection by systematically indenting the first line of each new paragraph.
“Ferment” treats the history of plantation slave labor in terms of the punishment of Prometheus on the rock.
“I Perseus Centuplicating Myself” was first published in Les Lettres nouvelles in mid-July 1959. The poem sustains the mythographic mood by shifting the focus of the poet’s identity quest to Perseus, while pushing Mallarméan syntax to the limit.
“Precept” was published in the August 1955 issue of Les Temps modernes. Although the three-gated arch recalls the triumphal arches erected by conquerors from the Romans to Louis XIV, and the attributes of the “I” are those of the savage pariah, the conditions requisite to establishing a “black country” remain metaphorically mysterious. Attempts to find a univocal meaning in them (DFPS, 170-71) seem to us ill-advised.
“And Sounding the Sand with the Bamboo of My Dreams” was first published in the May 1955 issue of Les Lettres nouvelles. The final line of the second stanza was cut from the 1976 Désormeaux Collected Poetry. It is probable that Césaire intended to write back against Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis with his “dusty caravans,” “ancient witnesses of the alliance,” and “kings in the consenting coral” (DFPS, 175).
“To the Islands of All Winds” was first published in the August 1955 issue of Les Temps modernes. The title alludes to the Caribbean islands, both Windward and Leeward, that were the destination of the slave trade and to the Trade Winds that blow from Africa. The first line of the third stanza, “O justice noon of reason,” recalls one of the most famous lines of Valéry’s “Marine Cemetery”: “Noon the just there creates out of fire. . .” (see “Marine Intimacy” above).
“The Time of Freedom,” which memorializes the repression on February 2, 1950, of an Ivoirian political movement with Communist sympathies by the colonial authorities, was first published in L’Humanité on February 10th. As he frequently did in writing about Africa, Césaire included names of rivers, towns, and ethnic groups (Baulé) to establish a sense of authenticity. The first version of the poem contained eight lines that were still more specific in their designation of the time and place of the repression. The poem was reprinted twice in Russian translation in Moscow: in the Literaturnaya Gazeta for March 15th, and again in a volume of ethnographic studies, Narodni Afriki (Peoples of Africa), in 1954 (EAC1, 180-81).
“Favor of Tree Saps” was first published in Présence Africaine in mid-1955. The poem deploys a series of metaphors in which tropical trees embody characteristics of the descendants of slaves who survived the “shipwrecks,” the “disaster” of the triangle trade. The red-tipped plume-like flowers of the sapodilla (Pachira aquatica), are likened to an American Indian headdress.
“Tomb of Paul Eluard” is an ode to the French poet who died on November 26, 1952. Césaire’s poem was published in the July-August 1953 issue of Europe. Eluard was perhaps the foremost lyric poet of his generation, having begun his career as a founding member of the surrealist movement. He joined the French Communist Party in 1942, when he was active in the anti-Nazi resistance. Césaire presumably met Eluard at the Wroclaw Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in 1948. The date of composition of the poem is unknown; however, the line “the sirens of lightships have been sounding two nights” suggests the date November 28, 1952. Allusions to several of Éluard’s poems may be embedded in the text (DFPS, 195-97). Toward the end of the ode, Césaire evokes the giant rukh bird of Persian and Arabic legend, suggesting that the mysteries of poetry arise from the blinding of Reason. The rukh or roc is analagous to the Persian Simmurgh, which Césaire names in “Ethiopia” as a symbol of renaissance or rebirth (See under Noria below.)
“Memorial for Louis Delgrès” was first published in Le Progressiste, the newspaper of Césaire’s PPM party, on February 7, 1959, and reprinted in Présence Africaine sometime after March (issue dated December 1958 – January 1959). The poem memorializes the Martinican military hero who perished in a last-ditch stand against the reimposition of slavery in Guadeloupe in May 1802 (EACI, 298-99). The irregular sonnet Césaire placed between “I call for a song. . .” and “the pollen run-off of the fields” was obliterated by closing up the stanza breaks in the 1976 edition. Césaire told Eshleman and Smith that “fripure” was a neologism he created from “friperie,” the shed in which the cane was shredded (CCP, 406).
“In Memory of a Black Union Leader” was first published in Le Journal des poètes, Brussels, in September, 1954. The poem memorializes the political action of Albert Crétinoir (1905-1952), who was the Communist mayor of Césaire’s birthplace, Basse-Pointe, from 1945 until his death (EAC I, 236-37).
“. . .on the State of the Union” was first published as “Message on the State of the Union” in the February-March 1956 issue of Présence Africaine. It is a rare poetic treatment of the violent consequences of racial segregation in the United States, where Emmett Till was assassinated by Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam in Money, Mississippi, on August 28, 1955. The assassins, claiming the fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago had flirted with Bryant’s wife, abducted him from a relative’s house, tortured and shot him, used barbed wire to attach him to a heavy weight, and threw him into the Tallahatchie River. A jury of white men found the accused murderers not guilty. The story—sometimes with pictures of the mutilated body—was reported worldwide. Look magazine published Bryant and Milam’s confession to the details of the murder in its issue for January 1956.
“Africa” first appeared under the title “To Africa” in the September 1954 issue of the Journal des poètes, Brussels, alongside “In Memory of a Black Union Leader” and “It Is Myself, Terror, It Is Myself” under the general title “Aimé Césaire or Revolt Justified.” “Africa” encourages the anticolonialist struggle as it began in earnest; compare “To Africa” (1946) and “Hail to Guinea” (1959).
“Out of Alien Days” was first published as “2 octobre” in a chapbook sold in Martinique to aid the victims of police violence during the cantonal elections on October 2, 1949. Michel Leiris reprinted it in the February 1950 issue of Les Temps modernes. Like “The Time of Freedom,” “Out of Alien Days” was rewritten for Ferraments with numerous local references deleted (EAC1, 176-77). The isolated line “but the redness of the east in a balisier heart” is evidence of continuity of vision between Césaire’s decade as a Communist Deputy and his founding of the Martinican Progressive Party with the balisier (Canna indica) flower stalk as its symbol.
“To Salute the Third World” was written in the wake of the second Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Rome in April 1959. It was first published in the June-July 1959 issue of Présence Africaine. Césaire positioned it toward the end of Ferraments to announce the imminent birth of new nations in Mother Africa. As he did elsewhere, he mapped the colonies of France and Belgium geographically, naming in one stanza two lakes in eastern Congo (Kivu and Tanganyika) and the river (Ruzizi) that flows between them. The Belgian Congo was to gain its independence in mid-1960. In the next stanza, he named Lake Chad, four rivers (Benue, Logone, Senegal, and Niger), and one volcano (Nyiragongo). In the central stanza, he evokes the slave trade, only to move quickly to an enthusiastic evocation of the power and beauty of the continent that was soon to be free. His old friend Léopold S. Senghor was to become the first president of independent Senegal in 1960.
“Indivisible” shares with “Beautiful Spurted Blood” a poetics of quotation. In this case, the poet casts himself in the role of a Caribbean Odysseus blinding the Cyclops of the slave trade.
“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 image (“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).
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.
*“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.