306 years: In 1935, Martinique celebrated the tricentennial of the foundation of the colony; 1635 + 306 years gives 1941 as the probable date when Césaire began writing the first version of And the Dogs Were Silent (PTED, 783). Variations on “three hundred years” occur throughout the poetry as a metaphor for colonization and enslavement, frequently in conjunction with “disaster,” “shipwreck,” or “catastrophe.”
Acera(s): An orchid (Orchis anthropophora; acéra in Fr.) that produces a flower resembling a hanged man (RHG, 13).
Accuser (public): The French Revolution instituted this function in 1790; the Public Accuser figured prominently in the Terror of 1793. He was charged with surveillance of the police in the revolutionary criminal courts.
Ajoupa: The Carib word for a hut roofed with palm fronds and open at the sides; by extension, a simple hut in the French West Indies.
Albuquerque: Afonso de Albuquerque (1453-1515) served in the Portuguese army in Morocco before opening up trade routes to India and South Asia.
Aldebaran: In ancient Egyptian astronomy, this red giant star was identified with Osiris (in the constellation Taurus). The image “matutinal aldebaran” suggests a marker of an annual cycle, probably the vernal equinox, since the rising of Aldebaran was associated with the return of Horus, son of Osiris, from the nether world at the start of the new year (DGE, 75).
Almadia: A word of Arabic origin that can designate either the westernmost point of the African continent in Senegal or rafts constructed for the riverine transportation of logs.
Antilia: Early geographers placed this imagined land mass in the Azores, in Brazil, or elsewhere in the Americas. Linguistically, it is the origin of the word Antilles, the island chain that includes Martinique.
Antiochus Epiphanes: Most probably Antiochus IV Epiphanes (c. 215 BC – 164 BC), ruler of the Seleucid Empire, whose campaign against the Egyptians in 168 BC produced the expression “a line in the sand.” He is believed to have died suddenly of disease (CHA, 49-56). Associating him with Herod the Great, who sacrificed the firstborn of Israel at the birth of Christ, foregrounds his role as a persecutor of the oppressed in the biblical narrative. In this context, the line “I do not cure the possessed” suggests the gospel according to Mark 5:9,15.
Asshume: Ash Shumlul, a village in the desert north of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (RHG, 22).
Babiloine: The medieval French spelling of Babylon; it figures prominently in Joinville’s history of Louis IX and the seventh crusade (HSL, 206 and passim). Less likely here is the designation of old Cairo as “Babiloine d’Égypte.” The poet situates himself over against the Christian crusaders.
Baguirmi: A center of the slave trade in pre-colonial Chad, Baguirmi was poetically useful: thematically African and, like Batuque, poetically un-French because of its consonantal qualities. See also Sissoko.
Balisier: The flower of Canna indica, symbol of Césaire’s Parti Progressiste Martiniquais, founded in 1958 after his break with the French Communist Party two years earlier. The balisier is sometimes assimilated to a “red heart” for the color of its flower spikes.
Basuto: A Sotho people of southern Africa; before the wedding ceremony, the Sotho bride collects water at the river; in “The Irremediable,” basuto may be a reference to the rapid basuto pony, bred in the region now known as Lesotho.
Benin: Precolonial Benin, to the southwest of Sokoto (q.v.) was the heartland of the vodou religion; the state of Dahomey (q.v.) was founded in the South in the 17th century.
Bayahonde: The name of the acacia tree in Haiti; in the Dominican Republic, bayahonda.
Bombax: The mapou, ceiba, kapok, or silk-cotton tree, which in vodou is a favorite haunt of spirits.
Bombaya: An African-derived drum known from Puerto Rico to Venezuela; used for its percussive quality. No historical confirmation exists for the gloss “a Haitian rallying cry associated with Boukman’s voudou ceremony at Bois Cayman on the eve of the 1791 revolts” (LDP, 73), which has been repeated by Diop (PSD, 243) and Hénane (CTE, 223).
Bornu: Capital of the Bornu Empire from the 16th to the 19th century; now in the Central African Republic, Bornu bordered the caliphate of Sokoto, q.v.
Bothrops lanceolatus: The pit viper endemic to Martinique; Césaire sometimes uses the Linnaean scientific terminology, at other times, the common name fer-de-lance.
Bout blanc: The cane stalk with its white plume in Lesser Antillean Creole (CTE, 46).
Bozal: In Martinican French, bossal (from Spanish bozal, wild); used primarily to designate slaves born in Africa.
Bulls of Bashan: Echoes Psalms (22:12): “Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round”; and, in verse 16: “For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.” The tribulations of King David, considered by many Christians an anticipation of the passion of the Christ, serve as an analog to the sufferings of Césaire’s Caribbean Rebel.
Cachaça: A Brazilian spirit distilled from cane juice in pot stills.
Cassias: The pudding-pipe tree (cassia acutifolia) or its fruit, called canéfice or casse in Martinique; its fruit turns from yellow to black in color.
Cecropias: The white underside of the trumpetwood leaf is a metaphor of the black man’s palm (RHG, 36).
Ceiba: See Bombax.
Center pole: See lwa (loa).
Chamulcus: According to the Roman military historian Ammianus Marcellinus, a heavy chariot used for hauling freight; term found in a military poem inscribed in the Roman province of Tripolitania during the reign of Elagabalus (Heliogabalus). The connotation is thus African.
Cimarron(ne): A play on the Spanish cimmarón, which also produced marron (runaway or maroon) in Caribbean French.
Ciruela: A plum (cirouelle) in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Clairin: A strong spirit, also called tafia, distilled traditionally from cane since colonial times.
Compitalia: In ancient Rome, the Compitalia were celebrated annually in honor of the Lares compitales, household deities of the crossroads. It is also possible that Césaire intends an allusion to the sacred crossroads in vodou.
Cornularia: A coral polyp that protects its living tissues inside a covering called the stolon.
Corvo Miguel Terceira: Three of the islands in the Azores group. See Antilia above.
Couresse(s): A grass snake (Liophis cursor) endemic to Martinique that may have been extinct in Césaire’s lifetime; known to hide from the slightest danger.
Crane: In “Lay of Errantry,” Césaire plays on the name of a bird and the technical term grue à bras, which we have translated as jib crane because of the image of grating metal that precedes it.
Crocus: According to Frazer (AAO, 99), the golden crocus was associated with the resurrection of a fertility god. (See Violets and anemones.)
Dahomey: Although the historical origins of the female warriors of Dahomey are still debated, they were known to be ferocious fighters from the 18th through the 19th centuries. Known as wives of the king, Europeans called them “Amazons” because of their counterparts in Greek mythology. A song reputed to be their war chant was recorded at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition.
Devourer: A possible allusion to Ammit (also Ammut, Amhemit, Amemet) in the Egyptian Book of the Dead—a female divinity with the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion or wild cat, and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus—who devoured the hearts of those found to be impure during the soul’s judgment in the Hall of Two Truths where “life and death face off.”
Djenne: From the 15th to the 17th century, a hub of the salt and gold trade through Timbuktu; renowned for its Great Mosque.
Dyali: A griot in the Mandingo language (PSD, 305).
Ecbatana: A precious stone of seven colors used in the construction of this city in central Asia. In the year 1141, the Persian sultan Sanjar was conquered at Ecbatana by a prince from the East who was thought to be Prester John in one version of his legend.
Ehô: In Middle French, an ejaculation expressing surprise or astonishment; equivalent to Heigh-Ho.
Enos: The grandson of Adam and Eve; an idolator in the Hebrew tradition, a righteous servant of God in the Christian tradition; therefore an ambiguous figure.
Eshu (Exu): A family of wood spirits in the Yoruba pantheon; syncretized in Afro-American religions as a trickster figure.
Falun: An ambivalent image; in geology, an underlying limestone sediment; in Buddhism, falun is the Dharma (truth) wheel, which represents the universe in its movement.
Fer-de-lance: See Bothrops lanceolatus.
Filao: A tree (Casuarina equisetifolia) used as a windbreak; its wood was used for tool handles and weapons; called casuarina in the Anglophone Caribbean (DCE, 140-41).
Flame tree: The flamboyant (Delonix poinciana regia) of the French West Indies; called flame tree or flame of the forest in Trinidad.
Fouta: A native of the Fouta Djallon region of Guinea.
Galli (galls): Eunuch priests of Cybele, who at the Sanguinaria festival renewed the self-mutilation of Attis (FGB, ch. 34). In two poems (“Lynch I” and “pirate”) published thirty-four years apart, Césaire played on the metaphorical vehicle “galls” to reveal the tenor “Galli.”
Goli mask: A Baoule mask in the shape of a helmet with buffalo horns. Goli is the son of the sky god; his mask promises benevolence and protection (PSD, 342).
Guachamaca: A South American tree (genus Malouetia) the bark of which is a source of curare.
Guajiro: (Spanish), a peasant.
Hernandia sonora: A tropical tree whose floral calyx vibrates in the wind, producing a characteristic sound.
Hougan: Priest of vodou who officiates in the oumfò; see lwa.
Human-faced lion: Frazer cites among the anthropomorphic deities the “strange colossal figure . . . at Boghaz-Keui with its human head and its body composed of lions . . . their god was a lion, or rather a lion-man, a being in whom the bestial and human natures mysteriously co-existed” (AAO, 57). Hercules was such a lion-man god in Lydia (AAO, 96).
Ife: Ile-Ife in Yoruba cosmology was the sacred place where the world was created; it remains the center of traditional Yoruba religion. Ife was known to the ancient Greeks as Ouphas (PSD, 451).
Ishtar: The Babylonian mother-goddess whose young lover Tammuz “was believed to die [every year], passing away from the cheerful earth to the . . . subterranean world, and . . . every year his divine mistress journeyed in quest of him. . .” (AAO, 6-7). For Frazer, the myths of Ishtar/Tammuz and Isis/Osiris were homologous.
Isis: The story of Isis and Osiris is an Egyptian version of the ancient myths of vegetation gods who must die in order to be reborn. Isis, his sister-queen (in some variants, his mother), found and reassembled the dismembered corpse of Osiris, except for his missing phallus (AAO, 212-15).
Jericho rose: The common name given to Anastatica hierochuntica, Selaginilla lepidophylla, and Pallenis hierochuntica, all of which are known as resurrection plants for their ability to regenerate.
Kamsin: A desert wind that blows for fifty days around the vernal equinox (RHG, 77).
Kananga: Known as Luluabourg under Belgian rule, Kananga is located on the Lulua River in the western Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Kino: Eusebio Francisco Kino or Francesco Chini (1645-1711) was a Jesuit missionary in what is now Sonora, Mexico, and Arizona. He opposed the enslavement of the Amerindians. A cheap wine (red and white varieties) labeled Padre Kino is widely available in Mexico.
Kolikombo: Probably a homophonic play on Kolikongbo, either the distant village of the dead (RMB, 100, 108) or a mischievous hairless dwarf, legendary among the Banda people (RMB, 146-50). The “papaw trees of the shadow” suggest the realm of the dead.
Lailaps (Laelaps): Word transliterated from the Greek λαι῁λαψ, λαίλαπος (lailaps, lailapos), meaning storm, vortex, or whirlwind (PTSD, 1762); in Greek mythology, Laelaps was one of Acteon’s dogs who devoured his master, metamorphosed as a stag.
Lamido: In the Fula language, a ruler over vassal states; the title of Usuman dan Fodio. (See also Sokoto.)
Lampornis: The white-necked jacobin (Florisuga melivora), native to Martinique, is listed under the genus Lampornis in Lesson’s Histoire naturelle des oiseaux-mouches (HNO, xxiii).
Levee, The: A cemetery in Fort-de-France, Martinique; founded in the 17th century, it is still known as the cemetery of the wealthy.
Lwa (loas): The forces or spirits of vodou. The poteau-mitan (center pole) in a vodou temple (oumfò or houmfor) is the passage between the visible and the invisible worlds; the lwa descend via the center pole to mount their servants. The vever (q.v.) serves to invoke the lwa.
Macumba: A syncretic Afro-American religion of Brazil; by extension, a ritual ceremony analogous to vodou.
Malfini: See Menfinil.
Malicorne: Presumably a neologism for the bête à cornes, an insect of the cerambycidae family whose antennae are called horns (cornes) in French; mali derives from French mal (evil), as in maléfique (maleficent) (RH, 84-85).
Maroon: The noun Maroon (fr. marron, sp. cimmarón) designates those runaways who set up autonomous communities in the Antilles and Suriname. In his “Reply to Depestre,” Césaire extends the verb to signify escape from constraints imposed by European poetic forms.
Martenot waves: An ancestor of the electronic keyboard, invented by Maurice Martenot in 1918 and perfected a decade later. The 1946 edition of Miraculous Weapons mistakenly printed Mortenot; the 1970 edition deleted the allusion to Martenot waves entirely.
Mea-culpa-crab: The fiddler crab (Uca pugilator) is called in Martinican French “crabe-c’est-ma- faute” because of the male’s apparent gesture of contrition in striking itself with its one outsized pincer. Apart from its mating behavior, it is a timid creature of the mangrove.
Menfenil (also Malfini): A raptor, analogous to the North American “chicken hawk,” that has an evil reputation. Césaire informed his German translator J. Jahn that its fat was used in casting spells (PTED, 1763).
Morne(s): Lafcadio Hearn defined the term as “used throughout the French West Indian colonies to designate certain altitudes of volcanic origin. . .” (HTY, 254-55). The Creole French term was derived from Spanish morro, a hillock.
Moudang: A tribal group in Chad; in Martinique, slaves of this ethnicity were reputed to be especially formidable; as an adjective, and by extension, terrifying.
Mumbo-Jumbo: A Mandingo deity noted by Mungo Park (PSD, 429); Frazer interpreted its role to be the sacrifice of children prior to the substitution of animal sacrifice (FDM, 152).
Murderesses: In French, meurtrières denote arrow slits or loopholes in medieval defensive architecture; Césaire extends their poetic signification to the feminine plural of murderer.
Nenia: An archaic Roman goddess of funerary lamentation; term used by Apollinaire in two poems (RHG, 94).
Ogou: See Ogun-Ferraille.
Ogun-Ferraille: Warrior, first orisha to descend to earth (in Yorubaland), patron of smiths (in Dahomey), and powerful political leader (in Haiti). In Cuban santeria, he is said to live deep in the woods as a hunter. Ogun-Ferraille is the Haitian French spelling of his name.
Olorun: In Yoruba tradition, Olorun is the supreme orisha, associated with the sun. In Cuban santeria, he is one of three manifestations of the godhead, the other two being Olodumare and Olofi.
Omphale: The verb is a neologism formed on the Greek ὀμφαλός (omphalos), the navel of the universe at Delphi; secondarily, the name of the Lydian queen who enslaved Hercules.
Ophir: The biblical land where King Solomon acquired gold, ivory and precious woods (PSD, 445-46).
Pachira: Pachira aquatica, a tree, the Malabar or Guiana chestnut, whose red-tipped flowers resemble plumes.
Parakimomene: Defined by Césaire as the Grand Vizir in the Byzantine or Ottoman court; frequently a eunuch, he slept on the floor at the entrance to the chamber of the emperor (IML, 88).
Paraschist(s): In ancient Egypt, paraschists removed the viscera, before another category of priests called taricheutes washed the abdominal cavity of the cadaver to be embalmed, then filled it with myrrh and aromatic herbs. Introduced into French by Champollion, these terms are found in archeological treatises and specialized dictionaries.
Petal of fire: The red petal of Hibiscus sabdariffa, called groseiller pays in Martinique, is reduced to a syrup mixed with rum in the Christmas season.
Plumaria: Possibly the sickle-beard (Plumaria falcata), one of several coralline polyps.
Poto-poto: A Wolof word for mud (RHG, 107).
Poui: See Tabebuia.
Prester John: A legendary medieval figure said to rule a Christian kingdom surrounded by Moslem states somewhere in Asia or Africa. Portuguese explorers convinced themselves that the legend referred to Ethiopia; another version made him the hero of the battle of Ecbatana.
Pringamosa vine: The fuzz of the malignant Liana pringamosa blinds animals and inflames the skin.
Recado: In French récade, from Portuguese recado, a message; in colonial Dahomey, the ceremonial scepter of the king and the message it signified.
Rhagades: A medical term dating from the XIVth century; designates a split at the angles of the mouth (RHG, 113).
Rhamphorhynchi: Long-tailed pterosaurs of the Jurassic period.
Rhizulate: A homophonic play on rhizule, which designates the rootlet of a mushroom (PSD, 487).
Roto: In Latin America, the word designates, sometimes pejoratively, a member of the lowest social class; “ahí” specifies “there.”
Roucou: The achiote tree (Bixa orellana), whose reddish pigment the Caribs used to paint their bodies.
Samory (Almamy): The imam (“Almamy” in Arabic) Samory Touré (c. 1837-1900) governed the Upper Niger region in 1880. For nearly twenty years, he opposed French colonial troops in the region, gradually losing ground to their superior armament. Captured by the French in 1898, he was deported to Gabon where he died (PSD, 206).
Shabeen: A person of mixed African and European ancestry with brown skin, reddish hair, sometimes with freckles and greyish eyes. We have used the St. Lucia spelling (DCE, 145).
Shaka: A great Zulu king (1787-1828), military strategist and consolidator of power in South-East Africa.
Shango: The Yoruba thunder god who is found throughout the Caribbean and Brazil in several syncretic religions.
Sikasso: A city in southeastern Mali founded in the late 19th century; its name increases the phonemic resonance of the series of African names in Dogs. . .
Siloam: A possible reference to Hezekiah’s tunnel (8th century BCE), which brought water from the Shiloah spring to the city of David; the images of violence suggest the role of the tunnel in ancient Hebrew ritual sacrifice or its role in Hezekiah’s war against the Assyrians.
Simarouba: In Martinique, where the Bursera simaruba is used to construct border fences, it is known as the gommier rouge. A red-barked variety is called gommier sang, “blood gum tree” (DCE, 262).
Sokoto: Capital of the caliphate founded by the Lamido Usuman dan Fodio in the 19th century; southwest of the empire of Bornu, q.v.
Soldier ant: In French, fourmi magnan (Annoma nigricans) is an equatorial ant of the Dorylus family that is known to attack in organized columns to kill small animals and occasionally sleeping humans.
Soukala: A grouping of round huts forming a patriarchal family unit among the Kabye people of Togo, called the Losso in colonial Dahomey. They cultivate the dry, rocky soil of the Sahel region, which is famous for its traditional blacksmiths. Vodou is their traditional religion.
Tabebuia(s): Tabebuia heterophylla is known locally as “pink trumpet tree” for the shape and color of its flower. Tabebuia pallida is endemic in the Lesser Antilles; in Martinique, it is known in Creole as the poïer (Fr. poirier), for the pea-like seeds in its pod. The Trinidad variety (T. pentaphylla) is called poui.
Tambocha ant: A venomous red-headed ant of tropical South America.
Tambourine player: Frazer mentions the tambourine players who accompanied the procession that closed the Roman Festival of Joy (Hilaria), which celebrated the resurrection of Attis (AAO, 170). (See also Violets below.)
Tammuz: The Sumerian name for the vegetation god called Adonis by the Greeks. Frazer relates that “every year his divine mistress journeyed in quest of him ‘to the land from which there is no returning, to the Descent of Ishtar to the nether world to recover Tammus’” (AAO, 6). See also Isis (above).
Three hundred years (also three centuries and three-hundred-year war): See 306 years above.
Tiaulé: A Creole word used familiarly to designate a great number, a swarm (IML, 91).
Tipoyeur: A bearer of the tipoye—a sort of sedan chair supported by two bamboo rods—in which notables rode in the West African colonies (PTED, 1766).
Touaou: The bridled tern (Onychoprion anaethetus) of the French West Indies.
Tower(s) of silence: An allusion to the Zoroastrian burial ritual in which bodies were exposed on isolated towers constructed above an ossuary; the vultures stripped the bones clean. With the identity of “the prey and the vulture” in the next line of “Batuque,” Césaire suggests that we are our own executioners. (See Baudelaire’s poem “L’Héautontimorouménos.”)
Trochilidae: The Linnaean name of the family that includes hummingbirds.
Turbation: Old French (from turbacion) signifying trouble, confusion, obstacle (RHG, 135).
Tur-ra-ma: A throwing stick used in New Holland, i.e., Australia; a boomerang (GDU. vol. 15, 608).
Vatapa: A sauce that is made with fresh ginger, peanuts, onion, and garlic; it is served with shrimp in northeastern Brazil.
Vever (vèvè): Analogous to the Tibetan mandala, the vever in vodou is a symbolic design formed on the ground by sprinkling cornmeal or some other powder from the hand at the beginning of a ceremony. It represents a lwa (q.v.).
Violets and anemones: Frazer associates these two flowers with the dying gods Adonis (anemones) and Attis (violets) (AAO, 166, 204; FGB, 272, 301). The death and resurrection of these divinities, like Osiris’s, assured the renewal of the cycle of vegetation. The Rebel’s soliloquy beginning “Ho ho / Their power is well anchored. . .” concludes in a paroxysm of blood-red images that suggest the Roman Day of Blood on which the sacrifice of the “blood of Attis” was celebrated (AAO, 166-68).
Vocero: A Corsican funeral dirge calling for vendetta.
Vomito Negro: A Spanish name for yellow fever, which originated in Africa and spread to the Americas aboard slave ships; literally “black vomit.”
Yema(n)ja: In the Yoruba religion, this female orisha is the supreme mother, protectress of mothers and children, guardian of the seas and, for some practitioners, of rivers and lakes as well. In Cuban santeria, she is thought by many to be the mother of Shango.