In August 1939 Paris readers of the avant-garde literary magazine Volontés opened issue 20, which they could not know would be its last, to find a long poem by a student who had just left the École Normale Supérieure to return to Martinique. Aimé Césaire’s “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” (“Notebook of a Return to the Native Land”) was laid out in 109 strophes of mixed prose and verse. The rhythms of the strophes recalled the long lines Paul Claudel had pioneered in his Cinq grandes Odes (Five Great Odes) at the beginning of the last century. Claudel had laid claim to a physiological grounding of his rhythms in the diastolic/systolic rhythm of the human heart. The linking devices between the strophes suggest Charles Péguy’s insistent use of repetition, anaphora, and paratactic construction in poems much longer than Césaire’s that were highly praised between the two world wars. Passages in the later sequences of the 1939 “Notebook” indicate that Césaire had taken Rimbaud’s goal of visionary poetry to heart. His reliance on “the blowtorch of humor” in denouncing the effects of colonialism on his Caribbean island home is a clear indication that Césaire had also understood the corrosive poetics of Lautréamont (Césaire 1990).
The Volontés text of the “Notebook” has a more direct and less elaborated internal structure than its successors, all of which added considerable material at strategic points. Césaire presents a speaker (“I”) who undergoes a four-part trial resulting in profound transformation. The first sequence extends to strophes 30–31, which provide a transition to the second. Strophes 63–64 divide the first from the second half of the poem. The third sequence begins the process of transformation of the speaker and involves both dramatic strain and internal contradiction. At strophe 92 the final, more rapid movement begins. The long meandering strophes that marked the early sequences give way to shorter lines divided into verse stanzas. They signal the poem’s resolution in a transcendence whose purpose has been reoriented by later modifications. A remarkable characteristic of the text is Césaire’s use of the French alexandrine line of verse. French prosody is arithmetically, rather than metrically, conventional. It does not rely on classical meter derived from Greek or Latin. The alexandrine is so culturally ingrained that the French ear picks it up unselfconsciously.1 In the 1939 text the interjection of an isolated alexandrine line of verse signals an important shift in focus through rhythmic modulation. Alexandrines can be found at strophes 37, 53, and 63 (twice in the second sequence and at the beginning of the third). We have attempted to approximate this effect by using a greater solemnity, more formal lexical choices, or unusual syntax in translating those same lines. There is no conventional meter we can use to achieve the identical effect.
In 1939 Césaire postpones identifying his speaker. The first twenty-four strophes are a panoramic presentation of the island—poor, diseased, lacking a real identity—in which personification allows the hills (mornes), the shacks, and the unsanitary conditions of the little towns that grew up around the sugar plantations to express the physical degradation and the moral ugliness resulting from three centuries of colonial neglect. The population is present in the aggregate, an undifferentiated “one” or “you” that is then disarticulated into body parts—mouths, hands, feet, buttocks, genitals—in the Christmas festivity section. Punctuation is typical of parataxis: commas, semicolons, colons, which serve to pile up effects until they overwhelm the reader’s senses (Edwards 2005, Kouassi 2006). The “I” emerges only in strophe 25, where Césaire focuses on a foul-smelling shack as a synecdoche of colonial society. Introduction of the speaker’s family at this point stresses the mother’s sacrifice for her children and the father’s moods alternating between “melancholy tenderness” and “towering flames of anger.” The transition from the first to the second sequence involves a shift of focus away from the sickness of colonial society to the speaker’s own delusions. He alludes in strophe 29 to “betrayed trusts” and “uncertain evasive duty.” He imagines his own heroic return to the island: “I would arrive sleek and young in this land of mine and I would say to this land …” In the course of the second sequence the speaker comes very gradually to a realization of his own alienation as a consequence of colonial education. Moral prostration and a diminished sense of self are related directly to the colonial process and its cultural institutions. The same strophe includes the long narrative segment devoted to the old black man on the streetcar. Césaire multiplies signifiers of blackness that clearly denote both his physical and moral self. Centuries of dehumanization have produced a “masterpiece of caricature.” Structural symmetry in the 1939 “Notebook” is important here. The streetcar scene in the second sequence calls to mind the scene representing the speaker’s family shack in the initial sequence. Both serve to bring a sharper focus to their respective themes: first physical, then moral degradation.
The third sequence introduces a series of interrogations about the meaning of blackness or negritude in the context of the speaker’s alienation from those values he will posit as African. From this point onward the speaker adopts a prayerful attitude that is signaled formally by ritual language: “O” (twice in strophe 64) and “Eia” (twice in strophe 66). Numerous commentators have located “Eia” in Greek tragedy, but it occurs in the Latin missal as well. In both instances these are formal devices that lend gravity to the litany of characteristics Césaire enumerates in strophes 64–66 by means of the anaphora “those who” (7 times), “my Negritude” (3 times), “it takes root / breaks through” (3 times, further extending the litany of “my Negritude”). These three strophes and the one that follows immediately (67) afford a positive response to the negative characteristics of colonized peoples in strophe 61. In this new sequence Césaire evokes the “Ethiopian” peoples of Africa, whose fundamental difference from Hamitic peoples he learned from Leo Frobenius’s book on African civilization. Suzanne Césaire described these traits in Tropiques:
Ethiopian civilization is tied to the plant, to the vegetative cycle. // It is dreamlike, mystical and turned inward. The Ethiopian does not seek to understand phenomena, to seize and dominate exterior reality. It gives itself over to living a life identical to that of the plant, confident in life’s continuity: germinate, grow, flower, fruit, and the cycle begins again (S. Césaire 1941).
In the third sequence Césaire sets up a contrapuntal structure in which the Ethiopian characteristics of sub-Saharan Africans, as the Césaires understood them, are set over against a Splengerian evocation of European decadence in strophes 39 and 70. This structure brings about a reversal of attitude on the part of the speaker, who in strophe 61 could see only the negative connotations of these same characteristics. The beginning of his own personal transformation shows him that these peoples are “truly the eldest sons of the world” and, indeed, the “flesh of the world’s flesh pulsating with the very motion of the world.”
A dozen strophes, from 80 to 91, detail the sufferings of African slaves ripped from their home cultures to toil, suffer, and die in the plantations of the Americas from Brazil through the West Indies to the southern United States. Names of diseases are enumerated like rosary beads, in strophe 87, before the speaker intones a litany of the punishments permitted by the Black Code that governed slaves’ lives until abolition in 1848. The network of religious allusion in which his denunciation of slavery is couched has gone largely unnoticed. Kesteloot, in a monograph intended for student readers of the poem, saw in “I accept … I accept … totally, without reservation …” a textual allusion to Christ on the cross speaking to God the Father (Luke 22:42). In the phrase “Look, now I am only a man …” she heard a satirical echo of Pontius Pilate giving Jesus over to rabbinical judgment (John 19:5). Whether or not one accepts these specific interpretations, the phrase “my race that no ablution of hyssop mixed with lilies could purify” clearly recalls the text of Psalm 51:7. In “my race ripe grapes for drunken feet” Kesteloot heard an echo of Isaiah 63:3, and in “my queen of spittle and leprosy …” one of Mathew 27:30 (Kesteloot 1983). What matters here is not the precise intertext but rather the spiritual tone of supplication and prayer by which the speaker takes upon himself the sins of the past and prepares to expiate them. His intention is messianic rather than specifically christic. To put it in terms of I. A. Richards’s theory of metaphor, the vehicle here is biblical, but the tenor relates to spiritual renewal of the race (Richards 1936). It is probable that Césaire used this technique to give voice to Du Bois’s double consciousness. His goal is to create for colonized blacks in the French empire a version of Alain Locke’s New Negro. Like many modernists in the English-speaking world, he used the language of religion—or, more accurately, a comparative mythology that includes the Bible—to elaborate a vocabulary and syntax of spiritual renewal. In this sense, his relationship to Catholicism is an aspect of countermodernism (Walker 1999). As the penultimate sequence of the “Notebook” comes to its climax, the speaker prepares to undergo a profound transformation. Stanzas 88 and 89 present the geography of suffering black humanity, the latter strophe replying directly to the claims made by “scientific” racism in strophe 52 in the context of the speaker’s assimilationist delirium. His infernal descent hits bottom in strophe 90: “and the Negro every day more base, more cowardly, more sterile, less profound, more spilled out of himself, more separated from himself, more wily with himself, less immediate to himself.” The isolated line that constitutes strophe 91 reiterates the spiritual motif of sacrifice: “I accept, I accept it all.” This is the goal of the process of anagnorisis. With self-awareness comes a new knowledge of what is at stake. The speaker must, in conclusion, reach a position that transcends the colonial deadend.
The speaker’s spiritual renewal opens with a pietà. The body of his country, its bones broken, is placed in his despairing arms. In strophe 92 the life force overwhelms him like some cosmic bull that lends its regenerative power. The initially bizarre image of the speaker spilling his seed upon the ground like the biblical Onan invites the reader to consider a far more primitive scene of the fecund earth being impregnated by the speaker’s sperm. The round shape of the mornes, which early on had assumed a symbolic role in the geography of the island, now becomes the breast whose nipple is surrounded by a new life-giving force. The entire island becomes a living, sexualized being that responds to the speaker’s firm embrace. Cyclones are its great breath, and volcanoes contain the seismic pulse of this mother goddess with whom the speaker breaks the taboo of incest. The consequences of this life-giving embrace are immediate and profoundly transformative. Already in strophe 93 the island is standing erect, side by side with her lover-son who through strophe 96 will denounce the centuries-old process of pseudomorphosis.
A parenthesis is in order here. Pseudomorphosis was readily identifiable in 1939 as a key word in the lexicon of Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West was much discussed between the two world wars. After 1945 Spengler was denounced as a forerunner of Nazi ideology and quickly forgotten. To our knowledge no critic of Césaire has ever seen its crucial function in the “Notebook.” By including this technical term toward the end of the third sequence of his long poem, Césaire named the process by which the speaker and his island society had come to be physically ill, morally prostrate, and ideologically deluded. In Césaire’s view colonial society had been impeded from developing its own original forms and institutions by the imposition of French cultural norms on a population transported from Africa. Négritude as it is presented in the poem did not yet exist in 1939, still less was it the harbinger of any movement, as readers of the post-1956 text would have it. Négritude is posited in the poem as the ideal result of a dramatic transformative process that must overthrow the old behaviors (la vieille négritude) so that a new black humanity (negritude in its positive sense) could emerge. Consequently the meanings attaching to nègre and its compounds in the “Notebook” run the gamut from extremely negative to supremely positive. To render meaningfully the dialectical process that the speaker undergoes in the third and fourth sequences of the poem we have had to use words that are not acceptable today in civil discourse in English.
Césaire will finally exorcise the memory of the slave ship in strophes 103–105. He first announces its death throes: “The ghastly tapeworm of its cargo gnaws the fetid guts of the strange suckling of the sea!” He then details the horrors inflicted upon slaves carried on ships surprised on the high seas after the abolition of the trade. The images of horizontality that signaled the sick colonial society at the beginning of the poem are abruptly countered by a new vertical imagery. The adverb “debout” is repeated seventeen times in strophes 107–108. We shall never know what the original conclusion of the poem was. The sole surviving edited typescript is accompanied by a manuscript conclusion that begins with the last five lines of strophe 108. In an accompanying letter to the editor of Volontés, Césaire called his new ending “more conclusive” than the one he had originally submitted for publication.2 In the penultimate strophe the speaker identifies with the mauvais nègre who calls all of nature into play during his transformation. He enjoins the spirit of the air to take over from an unreliable sun: “encoil yourself,” “devour,” “embrace,” and especially “bind me.” The images of binding by the wind (7 repetitions) complete the series begun by “devour” and “encoil.” The speaker is to be bound to his people in a sacrificial act that sanctifies the transition from individual to collective identity. If the reader has followed the multiple biblical allusions that have sustained the vehicle of this transformation, it becomes clear in the final dramatic strophe that the Holy Spirit of Christianity has been supplanted by an ancient divinity resident in the natural world. This is particularly apparent in the final image of a celestial Dove that, after ritually strangling the speaker with its lasso of stars, bears him up to the heavens. After expressing an earlier desire to drown himself in despair, the speaker utters a final sybilline phrase that brings the poem to its abrupt conclusion: “It is there I will now fish / the malevolent tongue of the night in its still verticity!”
Since 1956 readers of Aimé Césaire’s long poem have had to wrestle with what is, in effect, a palimpsest. On three occasions after the pre-original publication in Volontés, on the eve of World War II, Césaire overwrote the carefully composed poem in a new spirit and with different aims. From 1939 to 1947 Césaire reinforced the existing structure of the 1939 text at its nodal points. In January 1947 the Paris bookseller Brentano’s, who published in New York City during the war, brought out the original French-language edition of the Cahier with an English translation by L. Abel and Y. Goll. André Breton’s preface “A Great Negro Poet” was first printed in Goll’s New York magazine Hémisphères in autumn 1943, then reprinted in Tropiques the following year. A footnote to the Tropiques printing announced the imminent publication of Césaire’s poem in New York (Breton 1944). The three-year delay in publication has been the source of considerable confusion. Moreover, the New York edition never circulated in Paris and was long thought to be identical to one published in Paris by Bordas a few weeks later. Breton’s “A Great Negro Poet” also prefaced the Bordas edition, which reinforced the false assumption of identical texts. Césaire had in fact prepared the Paris edition from a different typescript (no longer extant) that he probably worked on in 1946 as his first poetry collection Les Armes miraculeuses (The Miraculous Weapons) neared publication. Although the Paris text shares the principal characteristics of surrealist metaphor with the New York original edition, it differs significantly from it. With respect to the 1939 text Césaire proceeded in 1947 by accretion, adding new elements to heighten certain effects. At strophe 29, just as the poem is about to move into the second sequence, Césaire added a new block of text, four strophes in the Brentano’s edition and two in the Bordas that are substantially identical except for the stanza breaks. (The sense of choppiness created by division into shorter strophes is a general characteristic of the Brentano’s edition, which Césaire probably did not see prior to publication.) These additions are a clear indicator of Césaire’s desire to reinforce the sense of transition and modulation at two more strategic points in the poem, both of which follow an isolated alexandrine line. It is clear from his work on the Bordas edition that Césaire continued to work on the architectonics of the 1939 “Notebook” well into 1947.3
In October 1943, after revising the Volontés text of the “Notebook,” Césaire wrote in Tropiques that to “Maintain Poetry” one had to: “defend oneself against social concerns by creating a zone of incandescence, on the near side of which, within which there flowers in terrible security the unheard blossom of the “I”; to strip all material existence in silence and in the high glacial fires of humor; whether by the creation of a zone of fire or by the creation of a zone of frozen silence; to conquer through revolt the free part where one may summon one’s self intact, such are the exigencies which for the past century have guided every poet” (Césaire 1943b). This statement of poetic purpose harmonizes perfectly with the essay on Lautréamont that Césaire had published in February 1943: “By way of the image one goes toward the infinite. Lautréamont established this as a definitive truth” (Césaire 1943a). The Brentano’s text, completed when the outcome of World War II was still in doubt, became the most searingly surrealist version of Césaire’s poem.
During the four succeeding years Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and Communist Deputy from Central Martinique to the constituent assembly of the Fourth Republic. He co-sponsored the 1946 law that transformed his native land legally from a colony to an overseas département of France. As mayor of Fort-de-France he found himself dealing with the most troublesome infrastructure problems of the rundown colonial capital he had described in such disgusting terms a decade earlier. At home he struggled with the central government’s reluctance to honor its commitments to the new département, while it introduced a new level of French-born administrators who brought with them prejudices alien to creole society. In the Chamber of Deputies he soon found himself and his colleagues on the left overwhelmed by the Gaullist majority who would do no more than was absolutely necessary to improve conditions in the former colonies. As a member of an anti-capitalist political party that had criticized the surrealist style of his first collection of poetry, The Miraculous Weapons, in 1946, he found himself duty-bound to introduce in 1947 the social issues he had eschewed in 1943. These constraints brought about one further, and major, modification of the text of the Bordas edition of the Notebook. For the first time, the poem is framed by a new initial strophe that is counterbalanced by four short strophes introduced between 108 and 109. Few readers of the Notebook realize that the powerful strophe beginning “Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it. I detest the flunkies of order …” (Césaire 1983) did not exist prior to the first Paris edition of the poem. Who is this “I” who denounces a repressive social order? Where does he come from? The interjection of this strong first-person political statement in the initial strophe of this and all subsequent versions unbalances the equilibrium so carefully established in 1939 between the anonymous throng in the first sequence and the eventual emergence of a first-person subject in the twenty-fifth strophe. New political allusions deflect the reader’s attention away from the intensely subjective character of the speaker’s transformation in the “Notebook.” The four strophes that complete this new framing device likewise mask the spiritual nature of the speaker’s quest by orienting our reading toward a quite different context. They slow down the original rapidity of the conclusion and set up constraints on meaning, effectively blocking the quest narrative that had carried the poem forward from 1939 to the Brentano’s edition early in 1947.
Whereas the two 1947 editions were revised exclusively by the addition of new material to the 1939 preoriginal, inflecting and intensifying its effects, the 1956 edition excised much of that same material and substituted for it blocks of text that would align the poem with Césaire’s new political position, which embraced the immediate decolonization of Africa in militant tones. Most notably the visible traces of a spiritual discourse were obliterated: a “catholic love” in 1939 became “love” in the New York edition, then a “tyrannical love” in the Bordas text. Onan disappeared altogether, along with the most obvious markers of the spiritual network of metaphors. The sexual metaphors that characterized the most carnal passages depicting the speaker’s union with nature were replaced by new material that emphasized the appalling condition of humble laborers. A critical examination of these extensive cuts reveals the underlying purpose of Césaire’s new approach (Arnold 2008). He removed nearly all the spiritual connotations (apocalypse, last judgment), attenuated the racialist discourse as well as several strophes that were self-consciously absurdist, and the majority of the passages marked by free associative metaphor (markers of surrealism). Substantial additions near the end of the third sequence introduced an entirely new socialist perspective focused on the wretched of the earth. Three new strophes named individual laborers who were sacrificed to the machinery of cane production in Martinique, thus leading the reader away from the spiritual sacrifice of the speaker and toward a sense of collective socialist action. The result is decisive; from 1956 onward the reader is no longer oriented toward a network of metaphors that undergird a drama of personal sacrifice. Henceforth the drama is a sociopolitical one that calls for decolonization and the democratization of economic institutions.
Serious readers of this poem have for decades struggled with the palimpsest effect of these multiple rewritings. In the 1980s we concluded that the Cahier resulted in the myth of the birth of the hero of Negritude (Arnold 1981) or “a parthenogenesis in which Césaire must conceive and give birth to himself while exorcising his introjected and collective white image of the black” (Eshleman 1983). Kesteloot had earlier read the final movement as “participating in the creative power of the Cosmos,” and in a footnote she suggested a rite of possession that is “indispensable to African ceremonies and to Vodun in particular” (Kesteloot 1963). Condé, commenting on the same passage, wrote that “it’s a miracle in the strictest sense that we are dealing with here, a transformation born of Faith that Reason could not account for” (Condé 1978). Others have gone in a distinctly cosmogonic direction (Pestre de Almeida 2010) or have embraced an esoteric mysticism (Paviot 2009). Fonkoua, on the other hand, has attended exclusively to the political overtones that were added belatedly (Fonkoua 2008).
Our intention in offering the 1939 French text of the “Notebook,” translated for the first time into English (with strophe numbers added to both the French and the English), is to strip away decades of rewriting that introduced an ideological purpose absent from the original. We do not claim to reveal what the poem ultimately means but rather how it was meant to be read in 1939. Reading with the poem’s first audience, so to speak, will finally permit a new generation to judge its enduring power a century after the poet’s birth.
Notes
1. The alexandrine is a twelve-syllable line with a major division or caesura in the middle. On either side of the caesura two further rhythmic divisions are freer in form, varying from 3/3 to 5/1 (rare) with all the combinations in between at the disposal of the poet.
2. The edited typescript and the letter to the editor of Volontés can be consulted in the library of the French National Assembly. The letter is dated May 28, 1939.
3. This process will be much more apparent in the Paris edition of Césaire’s Poésie, Théâtre, Essais, scheduled for publication in the Planète Libre collection at CNRS-Éditions. The four historic editions of the poem will be printed sequentially with annotations.
Works Cited
Arnold, A. James. Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. 318 pages.
———. “Beyond Postcolonial Césaire: Reading Cahier d’un retour au pays natal Historically.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 44, no.3 (2008): 258–75. (Pages 272–75 present a table of deleted material organized by type: spiritual, sexual, racial.)
Breton, André. “Martinique charmeuse de serpents: Un grand poète noir.” Tropiques 11 (May 1944): 119–26. (A footnote assures readers that this text would preface the bilingual edition of the Cahier, which was to be published imminently by Hémisphères in New York. An announcement on page 98 of VVV, no. 4 [1944], published in New York, confirms this claim. In 1947 Breton’s preface accompanied both the Brentano’s and the Bordas editions of Césaire’s poem.)
Césaire, Aimé. “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” Volontés, no. 20 (August 1939): 23–51.
———. “En guise de manifeste littéraire.” Tropiques, no. 5 (April 1942): 7–12.
———. 1943a. “Isidore Ducasse, comte de Lautréamont.” Tropiques, nos. 6–7 (April 1943): 10–15.
———. 1943b. “Maintenir la poésie.” Tropiques, nos. 8–9 (October 1943): 7–8.
———. 1947a. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal / Memorandum on My Martinique. Translated by Lionel Abel and Yvan Goll. Preface by André Breton. New York: Brentano’s, 1947. 145 pages. (The English text followed the French. The precise date of publication was January 7, 1947.)
———. 1947b. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Preface by André Breton. Frontispiece by Wifredo Lam. Paris: Bordas, 1947. (The text of the poem runs from page 25 to page 96.)
———. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956. Preface by Petar Guberina. (The text of the poem can be found on pages 25–91. Substituting a preface by a professional linguist in a Yugoslav university for André Breton’s removed the surrealist label from the poem and oriented it toward nonaligned socialism.)
———. Poésie. Vol. 1 of Oeuvres complètes. Paris and Fort-de-France: Désormeaux, 1976. 325 pages.
———. The Collected Poetry. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.
———. “Poetry and Knowledge.” Translated by A. James Arnold, xlii-lvi. In Lyric and Dramatic Poetry (1946–82). Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. CARAF Books. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1990.
———. La Poésie. Edited by D. Maximinin and G. Carpentier. Paris: Seuil, 1994. 550 pages.
———. Solar Throat Slashed / Soleil cou coupé. Translated and edited by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. 183 pages.
Césaire, Suzanne. “Léo Frobenius et le problème des civilisations.” Tropiques 1 (April 1941): 27–36. (She underlined the link between Frobenius and the “Notebook” by ending her article on a quotation from her husband’s 1939 poem.)
Condé, Maryse. Césaire: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Profil d’une oeuvre. Paris: Hatier, 1978.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: McClurg, 1903. 264 pages. (First French edition, Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959.)
Edwards, Brent Hayes. “Aimé Césaire and the Syntax of Influence.” Research in African Literatures 36, no. 2 (2005): 1–18.
Eshleman, Clayton. “The Collections.” In Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.
Fonkoua, Romuald. Aimé Césaire. Paris: Perrin, 2008. 392 pages. (Fonkoua minimized the role of Breton and the surrealists in the Notebook. Taking the post-1956 texts as the norm, he concluded that “if Césaire’s poetics and style are free of any and all surrealist influence, it is quite simply due to the fact that surrealism had no attraction for the students preparing for the École Normale Supérieure between the two world wars” (62). Clearly the rewriting of the 1956 Cahier had achieved its goal. For this critic and many others the palimpsest was perfectly invisible.)
Kesteloot, Lilyan. Les Écrivains noirs de langue française: Naissance d’une littérature. Brussels: Disputats, 1963. (Reprinted in 1963 by the Solvay Institute of Sociology of the Free University of Brussels. Arguably the most influential reading of the Cahier / Notebook as a political poem.)
———. Comprendre le Cahier d’un retour au pays natal d’Aimé Césaire. Versailles: Les Classiques Africains, 1983. 127 pages. (Reprinted in 1990, it includes a brief glossary.) Kouassi, Germain. La Poésie de Césaire par la langue et le style: l’exemple du “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal.” Paris: Publibook, 2006. 134 pages.
Ngal, Georges (M.aM.) Aimé Césaire: Un homme à la recherche d’une patrie. Dakar and Abidjan: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1975. 293 pages. (In 1994 Présence Africaine brought out a reprint edition.)
Paviot, Christian. Césaire autrement: Le mysticisme du Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009. 79 pages. (Egyptian mythology, Old Testament allusions and tarot cards enter into this esoteric reading of the poem.)
Pestre de Almeida, Lilian. Mémoire et métamorphose: Aimé Césaire entre l’oral et l’écrit. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010. 433 pages. (The first chapter is devoted to a careful and extended analysis of the Brentano’s edition, which the author considers an anomaly. Her teleological approach sees the rewriting from the Bordas (1947) to the Présence Africaine (1956) edition as the norm.
Walker, Keith L. Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture: The Game of Slipknot. New Americanists. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. 301 pages.