Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print: Aesthetic Subjectivity, Diaspora, and the Lyric Regime

Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal has now received two generations of readings by Antillean critics, provoking impassioned responses from, among others, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Raphaël Confiant, Daniel Maximin, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Dany Laferrière. Fanon was among the first to take Césaire to task for what he considered to be the poet’s failure to model the way in which poetry can contribute to the formation of a “national culture.” In The Wretched of the Earth, he writes that Césaire’s language is too “florid,” and therefore his poetry is incapable of generating a “literature of combat” calling on “the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation.”¹ A generation later, Confiant, in his turn, would attack the language of the Cahier, but this time from a different angle: in his controversial Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle, he excoriates Césaire for neglecting to provide ethnographic descriptions in the Kreyol language of his native land.²

How should current scholars evaluate these critiques? Could it be that Fanon and Confiant were blind to the ways in which the Cahier actually does shoulder the burden to bear witness? Is it possible that the poem did end up contributing to a “national” or, at least, a regional culture after all? How might new work in postcolonial studies not only revise our reception of the Cahier but also change the very way we define the political valence of a poetic text? In order to respond to these questions, this chapter takes a closer look at discourses on the politics of poetry, both those that were extant during the period of Negritude’s emergence and those in circulation today. The political conditions and cultural context that initially governed Césaire’s reception in the 1940s have evolved such that critical assessments of the first wave differ in important respects from those of later periods. Yet the questions the Cahier raised—for poetry and for postcolonial criticism alike—are still highly pertinent and have by no means been resolved.3 Although postcolonial theory’s relationship to poetry has developed over time, poetry remains a controversial genre for postcolonial studies, demanding a constant reevaluation of what it means to represent a self, a people, or a nation in written form. For the most part, postcolonial studies’ dominant approach to poetry is still influenced by assumptions that were made during the period when Negritude first emerged, assumptions that Negritude poetry itself should place in question. By returning to the conditions of Negritude’s emergence, I hope to unearth the debates responsible for establishing a set of dichotomies that still hold sway in many areas of current scholarship and that hamper poetry’s ability to play a significant role in the evolution of postcolonial studies within the academy. My thesis is that although the early reception of Negritude was colored by this set of dichotomies—between poetry and politics, aesthetic autonomy and engagement, lyric subjectivity and historical agency—Negritude holds the key to pushing us beyond them. As I first proposed in the introduction, the poetry of Negritude is not only a product of the European literary tradition; it is also a major intervention into that tradition, one that places pressure on modes of reading that seek to define the politics of poetry in only one way.

The background of contemporary postcolonial studies (or at least one significant background) is composed of several layers or historical phases, each of which contributed to the mapping of the field that scholars of Negritude work in today. The first historical phase—the one that laid the foundation for the dichotomy between poetry and politics—took place at the beginning of the twentieth century in a young Soviet Russia; there a battle was waged between an innovative avant-garde and a suspicious rearguard (promoting socialist realism) over precisely what would constitute engaged art. The second phase began when that battle hit Europe; not incidentally, it coincided with the moment when Césaire and his contemporaries Léopold Sédar Senghor, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Étienne Léro also arrived in France. The Soviet polemic was imported to surrealist Paris in December 1930 via a set of events that have come to be known as the Affaire Aragon. Finally, the same dichotomies introduced into circulation by the Affaire Aragon (hermetic poetry versus transparently descriptive prose; elite versus proletarian literature; universal versus particular) resurface in the works of Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, pivotal figures for the emergence of postcolonial critique. In short, surrealism and the debates it ignited would come to play a large role in the development of postcolonial theory in both French and English traditions. For critics such as Fanon and Sartre (in the mid-twentieth century) and Edward Said and Robin Kelley (at the century’s close), surrealism represents the pinnacle of an anti-narrative poetics, a poetics of the nondescriptive, nonmimetic, and non-ethnographic. When Fanon states in The Wretched of the Earth that a poetry “full of images” is a “blind alley,” and when Said, forty years later, reiterates in Culture and Imperialism that poetry wields a nonteleological, “nomadic, migratory, and antinarrative energy,” the type of poetic language being singled out—either to be rejected or celebrated—is one that cannot be “exhausted” by recourse to its “literal meaning.”4 It is a surrealist language that swerves away from what Breton called “the reality of its content.”⁵

The consistent question addressed to poetry by engaged critics (whether from Russia, Paris, London, or New York) is whether a language resistant to representation—to “the reality of its content”—can still refer to a singular situation and thereby exert critical force. Crucial to the debate, however, is what one means by the verb “to refer.” Césaire’s harshest contemporary critics have been those who accuse him of evading transparent reference and practicing “elitism” by refusing to describe concrete solutions or address his compatriots in a language they can understand.⁶ In 1948 Sartre had already accused Césaire of obscurity, but he then excused him on the grounds that free association was the only way in which he could identify his “âme noire” (black soul) and overcome the ideology embedded in French.⁷ Sartre had just published in book form his influential Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, a work that argues against reading poetry as a transparent lens on reality. Prose “refers,” Sartre insists, while poetry merely gestures vaguely toward itself.⁸ According to Sartre, then, Césaire could only be retrieved for politics if his poetry were read as symptomatic of a collective predicament. For Sartre, the hallucinatory imagery of the Cahier indicates a process of introspection that is itself political insofar as the capacity for introspection is precisely what black subjects in general have historically been denied.

What remains unacknowledged in Sartre’s readings—as well as those of Fanon—is that the Cahier is far from offering a homogeneous surface of dense figuration (the “subtilités” and “raretés” that Fanon derides).9 It is constructed of more than a fabric of imagery that maintains a consistent distance from topical and political discourses of the period.¹⁰ In fact, if we examine the Cahier closely, we find that it appropriates a number of clichéd phrases tightly associated with the interwar discourses of anticolonial struggle and revolutionary combat. These discourses work to situate the poem, allowing it to refer explicitly to a precise time and place, despite the intransigently idiosyncratic nature of some of the imagery. However, at times, the way in which these appropriated discourses re-anchor and resituate the poem is through typographic and phonic means, rather than semantic or lexical means. That is, Césaire does not simply quote the extant discourses of anti-imperialist rhetoric; he also reveals their figurative nature in his own figures; he echoes the rhythm and phonic insistence of overtly political poems that are themselves echoes of specific refrains. Reference, in other words, surfaces in another guise, “turning” words back—to employ Glissant’s metaphor of the détour—toward a specificity they might otherwise elude.¹¹

When used in literary critical discourse, the verb “to refer” is generally understood to consist in an act of pointing: by convention, a written word is related to—and exhausts its meaning in—a clearly identifiable context (“a poetics of the proper name,” as I will call it, after Jacques Derrida).¹² Alternatively, however, “to refer” can also be conceived as the rule of synecdoche whereby a written word can stand for the entire people who employ it in speech. (For instance, by writing in Martiniquan Creole, a poet would be referencing the particular culture of the island, a singular history of diaspora and syncretic intermingling.) In each case, what is presupposed is that there is a fixed origin to the inscription in a circumscribed context of usage. The first wave of Césaire criticism (represented by Sartre and Fanon) generally adopts the former understanding of reference and finds Césaire wanting. (He does not use language to describe, proclaim, or state.) The second wave of criticism tends to admonish Césaire for using an erudite vocabulary and a set of rhetorical devices that cannot be traced back to Creole or African traditions. Even the more sympathetic scholars of today rescue Césaire’s poem by attempting to demonstrate how its rhythmic cadences reference—by echoing—a Caribbean soundscape.¹³

All sets of critics, from whatever generation, hope to find in the poem an evocation of a specific geopolitical context through signifiers ostensibly attached to precise historical referents. But one of the questions Césaire’s work raises is whether this critical focus on content and reference in fact ends up obscuring other ways in which poetic language works, other ways that might at first appear to be irresponsibly playful (or “florid”) but that turn out to be, if not referential in the strict sense, at least engaging in referential acts of pointing and naming in ways that only a written poem can.14 The complexities of the Cahier suggest that attending to what a poem’s language does—not just to what it seems to say—may be an important part of assessing its politics. If we read the Cahier solely to learn about conditions in Martinique or to identify a clear directive or political agenda, then we not only risk leaving the specifically poetic dimensions of the poem behind, we also neglect to consider the ways in which those poetic dimensions (the use of typography, syntactic deviations, parallelisms, and extended metaphor) actually develop the signifying force of the words in unexplored ways. While we never want to forget the immediate material conditions out of which the Cahier emerged, it is also important to accord the poem the plurality of meanings (or gaps in meaning) that critics celebrate and even politicize in the poetry of other authors, such as Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé.¹⁵ At the same time, though, we should be wary of making the poem say whatever we want it to say, of playing with internal puns and potentially irrelevant etymological roots to the point where all referential gestures—all contexts evoked by proper names or descriptions—are lost. In sum, Césaire’s Cahier raises a host of questions concerning the appropriate reception conditions for a poem written by an experimental writer self-identified as both politically engaged and militantly black. What hermeneutic limits, we must ask, does a militant politics impose on the interpretation of poetry? Conversely, what pressures does a densely figurative poem place on the content-oriented approaches of identity politics? Do overtly committed works—even highly experimental ones such as the Cahier—establish restrictive parameters of analysis? Where do we locate those parameters—within the poetry or beyond it?

Near the beginning of what I consider to be the second movement of the Cahier, there appears an extremely curious word: “tourte.”16 Neither translator nor critic has yet been able to satisfy my desire to understand what this word means. Césaire’s most recent English translators, Clayton Eshleman, Annette Smith, Mireille Rosello, and Annie Pritchard, render the word as “torte” and do not include it in their glossaries. What a “torte”—in English, a small round tart—is doing in this poem is, according to these translators, self-evident. It is not at all evident to this reader, however. Here is the passage—the only one—in which the word “tourte” appears:

The text’s grammar suggests that “tourte” is a place—one, in fact, where something grows, something inorganic, of steel and cement: “où poussent l’acier neuf et le béton vivace.” However, in most dictionaries—Le Robert, Harrap’s, Larousse—the “tourte” is defined as a patisserie, a small round bread sometimes stuffed with meat; a diminutive of “tourterelle,” or “turtledove”; and, in slang, “ninny,” or “imbecile.” However, “tourte,” like the word “pâté,” may also be a local term for a grouping of homes, an assemblage of dwellings.19 When the poet apostrophizes the “tourte,” it is hard to believe that he is calling out to a small round tart—“tourte / ô tourte”—or that he would address it at the end of the passage as “vous” (“je vous hais”). Round, flat, and fertile, arriving at harvest time (“l’effroyable automne”), “tourte” is most likely another (feminine) personification of the island of Martinique, or of the “ville plate.” Combining the different senses of the word, a reader could imagine “tourte” to be a muse apostrophized, a reminder of the “tourterelles” in the beginning and the “Colombe” at the end, or even a source of nourishment—very rich nourishment indeed—that nonetheless turns out to birth nothing more than modernity, skyscrapers, and parking lots—“le béton vivace.”

I have checked multiple annotated scholarly editions and glossaries and have found no reference to the word “tourte.” I have, however, found the word in the Dictionnaire français-créole by Jules Fairie. Here we are told that “tourte” is synonymous with “gros pâté rond au nânnan là-dans”—or a large round pastry with something yummy inside, a “pie” in English. If we look up “pâté,” we also find the definition “block” of houses.²⁰ So it is likely, as I suggested earlier, that Césaire is playing with at least these two meanings, if not more. The critical silence around the word is surprising, given that “tourte” holds such an important and ambiguous place in the sequence of the poem. At the point when the word appears in the definitive edition, the speaker has just arrested the momentum of the chant “voom rooh oh” and its accompanying figurative evocations of hope with a set of central questions. These questions—and their enigmatic answers—are parsed out dramatically and set off against the white of the page:

Here the beginning of one world and the end of another are linked, presented as simultaneous, colliding apocalyptically. The work of ending the colonial situation, it is implied, must begin, and yet no means of beginning are proposed. As if to further undermine or at least complicate the directive to begin the end of the world (“La Fin du monde”), Césaire adds the antiquated colloquialism “parbleu” (most translators settle for the English “of course”).21 Here, apocalyptic transformation meets subtle self-irony, a combination that is typical of the volume’s tonal hybridity as a whole. This same complex of resolve and disillusionment, rendered by means of mixed discursive registers in the section cited above, is reiterated in the following “tourte” passage, but this time through figures of dashed hopes and contaminated renewal. The two passages combined seem to lead ineluctably to the typographically and discursively foregrounded exclamation that ends the sequence:

How does “tourte” function as a phonically and graphemically motivated figure? The various phonemes involved—/t/, /u/, /r/—return repeatedly throughout the poem, embedded in words that both anticipate and perpetuate the sounds of the word “tourte.” The noun “tour” contained in “tourte” appears in many guises on the preceding pages, most notably in the verb “tourner.” Cesaire’s question “Qui tourne ma voix?” (PA, 31) associates “tour” with deviation (Eshleman translates it as “Who misleads my voice?”). A few pages earlier (PA, 24) “tourner” appears to indicate the senseless gyration of the island’s inhabitants, their inability to move forward or escape a recursive pattern: “Ce qui est à moi, ces quelques milliers de mortiférés qui tournent en rond dans la calebasse d’une île” (What is mine, these few thousand deathbearers who mill in the calabash of an island [PA, 15]). Again, a few pages later (PA, 35), the action of turning is associated with other forms of pointless movement, the ceaseless rocking back and forth of rocking chairs and the nonadvancing, frustrated circling of a young mare: “autour des rocking-chairs méditant la volupté / des rigoises / je tourne, inapaisée pouliche” (PA, 35) (among rocking chairs contemplating the voluptuousness of quirts / I circle about, an unappeased filly [PA, 25]). Finally, we might add to our list the repetitive turning of the wheel that makes the needle of the mother’s Singer sewing machine advance along hem or seam. In the description of the young boy’s home, the Poet-as-Singer is ironically personified as a machine that turns round and round without moving and yet simultaneously manages to propel something forward.

On one level, this constant turning of the wheel of language might appear fruitless, misleading. Perhaps the momentum is beyond the poet’s control, a force internal to language that “turns” his own voice away from its explicit intention. And perhaps the cry “ASSEZ DE CE SCANDALE” refers as much to the turning of the “tourte”-trope as it does to the colonial fabrication of an exotic isle. In other words, the scandal might be poetic turning itself. However, Césaire intimates that the very existence of a space for the self in language is dependent upon such turning, such force, insofar as “turning” is a rhetorical movement disguised here thematically as a physical action. That is, writing requires a coup de force, an intentional turning of the self toward language and a turning of the reader’s attention to that self fabricated in language. The new opening Césaire wrote for the 1947 Bordas edition begins with such a gesture of turning on the speaker’s part: “Puis je me tournais vers des paradis pour lui et les siens perdus” (PA, 7) (Then I turned toward paradises lost for him and his kin [1]). But toward what, precisely, is the speaker turning? Toward a river of “tourterelles,” those peace-loving aviary inhabitants (doves) of a poetic imaginary (7). In one sense, then, the speaker begins by turning toward turning; to write poetry is, after all, to turn toward, to subject oneself to words that turn, words that deviate, words that take a detour, words that lead elsewhere than where one thought one would go.

The final lines of the Cahier throw this seminal construction, “tourner vers,” into relief. As we know, the last lines of the poem provide an image of a “je,” a poetic subject, who searches for the “malevolent tongue” or “language” of the night (“la langue maléfique de la nuit”) in this tongue’s “verrition.” Although “verrition” refers, as I have argued, to many things, it is possible to understand the neologism as a self-reflexive allusion to the condition of being a verse, a “vers.” Here the tongue’s status as verse would imply both immobility and gyration; “verrition” would evoke a language/tongue that turns toward, that becomes verse (“je me tournais vers”) without striking out in any direction in particular. On this reading, what the speaker would be “fishing for” (“pêcher ma langue”) would be a language/tongue that tropes, turns, even as it remains fixed in place on the page. Highlighted in the Cahier’s enigmatic conclusion, both “tourte” and “vers” are obviously part of a larger network of semantic and phonic interconnections undergirding the entire poem. On the one hand, “tourte” and “vers” are elements of the poem’s phonic texture; on the other, they are the poem’s thematic kernel, a compressed way of evoking the great problematic of the poem: how is it possible both to trope (turn) and to move forward (make progress in the political struggle) at the same time?

Césaire’s major concern is that not only will the voices of his people “tournent en rond,” revolve endlessly upon a fixed axis, but also that his own poetry might do nothing but turn round and round within its own hollow, reverberating cavity (or “calebasse”). This fear is justified to the extent that poetry in general resists the form of statement or assertion, and thus ostensibly cannot do the work of logical argument in a public sphere (or the work of incitement in a political one). In the specific case of Césaire, the concern might be even more urgent. How, for instance, can he prevent the passage on the “tourte” from influencing our way of reading the line: “ASSEZ DE CE SCANDALE”? On the one hand, the exclamation clearly refers to the scandal of poverty, abuse, alienation—and their disguise—on the island of Martinique. The demonstrative pronoun “ce” impresses us as referring directly to the description that preceded it. And yet, as is the case with any deictic construction one finds in a poem—“here,” “now,” “this,” “that”—there is more than one referent to be found. “Ce” could, in fact, refer to the act of describing itself. The scandal might be writing, writing of misery instead of taking up arms to eliminate it. As formalist readers, we might pounce on (and get caught up in and derailed by our appreciation of) the alliteration of “ce” and “scandale” and “assez.” In other words, Césaire can present us with two different types of discourse, the slogan and the figure, the protest and the pattern, but he cannot prevent one from influencing our reading of the other.

Perhaps it is precisely Césaire’s apprehension of the recuperative (and leveling) effects of poetic form that motivates him to isolate “ASSEZ DE CE SCANDALE” as a unit of discourse by placing it in uppercase letters and presenting it as a single line.23 The effect of the capitalization is to transform the song (or chant) into a shout (an exclamation). But that is to imagine the poem in oral terms. As a unit of text, “ASSEZ DE CE SCANDALE” imitates typographically and evokes visually the newspaper headline (le gros titre); it places the poetic line in the same journalistic context as “Debout les nègres!,” the slogan displayed (often in uppercase letters) on the front pages of news organs associated with black anti-imperialist and workers movements of the 1930s such as La Race Nègre.²⁴

Not incidentally, this slogan, “Debout les nègres!” resounds throughout the Cahier, first as the reiterated “Au bout” (of “Au bout du petit matin”) and then as the crucial “Debout” of the concluding passages. As a piece of text, the capitalized phrase “ASSEZ DE CE SCANDALE,” similar to “Debout á la barre,” evokes journalistic discourse. The typography of “ASSEZ DE CE SCANDALE” seems, then, to set up a kind of visual block, as if Césaire wished to create a check on the turning motion of metaphor and the vertiginous detours of paronomasia. Drawn to but also wary of the effects of surrealism, Césaire is imitating in 1947 not only the language of Éluard and le Comte de Lautréamont but also the historical discourse of anti-imperialist, anticapitalist propaganda. A tension is thus revealed within the poem between a language of direct command and a language of detour. Which takes precedence—“Debout les nègres,” the headline we find in La Race Nègre (see http://faculty.sites.uci.edu/aestheticsubjectivity/), or “Tourte/ ô tourte,” the call made by the poet that seems to begin and end with itself?

How can poetry, Césaire asks, assume the responsibility of contestation, the burden of the constative (of witnessing), and yet keep faith with the poetic function? Or, put differently: how can poetry be “in service” to the teleology of revolution yet remain “in service” to the nonnarrative, troping forces of poetry? These questions enjoy a considerable genealogy, as I have noted, but I will begin my own investigation at a particular point in their elaboration. In the winter of 1931–32 a debate concerning the political valence of poetic language took place as a result of what was to become known as the Affaire Aragon. Arriving in Paris in the fall of 1931, Césaire might very well have heard news of the Affaire. As a reader of L’Humanité, and as a schoolmate of Jules Monnerot (who responded to the Affaire at the time), it is unlikely that he would have been ignorant of the debates the Affaire had ignited.²⁵ The issue of poetry’s relation to politics was, to say the least, in the air.²⁶ I am prone, then, to believe that the Affaire left an imprint on Césaire’s poetry and poetics; further through Sartre’s investment in the debate, it also left an imprint on postcolonial theory and its broader approach to the cultural politics of literature.

Although familiar to many scholars, the details of the Affaire Aragon are worth repeating. First, in October 1930 Louis Aragon was sent along with Georges Sadoul to Kharkhov, in Soviet Russia, to represent the surrealist movement at the Second International Congress of Revolutionary Writers. Troubled by the French Communist Party’s agenda for proletarian literature, an agenda advanced by Henri Barbusse (the literary editor of L’Humanité) that appeared to exclude surrealism, Breton had charged Aragon and Sadoul with the mission of arguing against Barbusse’s notion of socialist realism in favor of surrealism’s doctrine of absolute imaginative freedom. During the course of their stay, Aragon and Sadoul apparently had a change of heart and opted to adhere to the party line. At the beginning of December they signed a letter addressed to the Union internationale des écrivains in which they denounced the petit-bourgeois “idéalisme” and “freudisme” of the surrealist movement and proclaimed their full commitment to “la littérature prolétarienne.”27 In a move that would later seem incomprehensible to Breton, Aragon and Sadoul agreed to submit all their future literary activity to the approval and control of the French Communist Party headquarters in Paris.²⁸ Meanwhile, however, Aragon continued to write letters to Breton confirming his allegiance to surrealism and celebrating the triumphs he indicated had been enjoyed by the surrealists during the course of the union’s proceedings.

As soon as Breton heard about what Aragon and Sadoul had done, he demanded an explanation. Upon his return to Paris in December 1930 Aragon tried to convince Breton that his signature on the letter to the union had been extorted, but he also maintained that the self-criticism imposed by the Communist Party would ultimately not be harmful to the surrealist cause. While steadily growing further apart, Aragon and Breton nonetheless managed to collaborate on a series of non-Communist-Party-affiliated projects, such as the two protest tracts against the Colonial Exposition of 1931 and the third and fourth issues of Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, published in November 1931.29 This uneasy entente was not destined to last, however. In this same month of November, all hell broke loose: the French police seized an edition of Littérature de la Révolution Mondiale (an organ of the Union international des écrivains) in which Aragon’s pro-Soviet poem “Front rouge” (Red front) had appeared at the end of 1930.³⁰ Written while Aragon was in still Russia and inspired by the work of Mayakovsky, “Front rouge” contained several lines advocating militant aggression against the liberal government of Léon Blum. “Front rouge” clearly echoed the rhetoric and exclamatory tone of Mayakovsky’s 1918 “Left March” (“La marche à gauche”) in which the Russian poet calls upon his comrades to take up arms, move forward—“Allons, en marche … !” (Aragon’s translation)—and employs the conventional revolutionary syntagm, “Assez de,” as in “Assez de chicane bavarde! … Assez de lois, vieilles et fausses … !” (“Enough nonsense! … Enough laws, old and false”), which, of course, we find again in the Cahier.³¹ Aragon translates Mayakovsky’s revolutionary rhetoric (and imitates the heterogeneity of his discursive styles) by combining direct commands—“Feu sur Léon Blum”—with suggestive images constructed along the lines of Lautréamont’s famous extended prepositional phrases, such as “la fleur d’encre de l’infamie” (the ink flower of infamy).³² Taking the commands “Feu sur Léon Blum” (Shoot Léon Blum) and “Descendez les flics” (Kill the cops) literally as a call to arms (and extracting them from their poetic context) Blum’s department of justice accused Aragon on January 16, 1932, of attempting to incite unrest, an act punishable by a prison sentence of five years.³³

The second phase of the Affaire then began. Upon hearing the news of the accusation against Aragon, Breton immediately drafted a rebuttal. He circulated this rebuttal as a petition, acquired over three hundred signatures, and published it under the name “Misère de la poésie: ‘L’Affaire Aragon’ devant 1’opinion publique” (Poverty of Poetry: The Aragon Affair Before Public Opinion).³⁴ Breton’s act of solidarity probably saved Aragon from being brought to trial, for the Blum government, at first incensed by the poem’s treasonous call for violent insurrection, felt even more threatened by the negative publicity it would receive as a result of surrealist agitation. The Affaire initially attracted little attention; the only newspaper to contain a report was Le Populaire (in January 1932). However, by March, after Breton’s petition had been widely circulated, a number of papers—L’Humanité, Paris-Midi, Paris-Soir, any one of which Césaire might have read—contained articles on Aragon’s plight. Not wanting to be associated with dictatorial tactics of censorship, Blum’s justice department simply dropped the case. Whatever merit Breton’s argument might have had for the three hundred signatories of “Misère de la poésie,” it does not seem to have impressed Aragon. A few days after “Misère” appeared, L’Humanité published the following notice:

However, the Affaire did not. A crucial split had been introduced into the leftist literary and artistic milieux of Paris. Breton’s “Misère de la poésie” presented a set of arguments that both reflected and then shaped twentieth-century definitions of poetic language and its relation to political agency. He states, for instance, that “a poem should not be judged according to the successive images it evokes but rather on its power to incarnate an idea; freed from any need for rational sequence, these images are no more than a stepping stone.”36 Yet, as a stepping-stone to further action, the poem is not evacuated of all force. The reference made to realizable action would be only one aspect of a poem’s meaning, and, for Breton, a subordinate and even insignificant, rapidly transcended aspect. The greater meaning, he argues, is derived not from the literal sense of individual words or verses but rather from the interplay among all the poem’s words and verses: “The poem transcends [dépasse] both in signification and in significance [portée] its immediate content. It escapes, by its very nature, the reality of this content [la réalité même de ce contenu].”³⁷ “In matters of interpretation,” he continues, “the consideration of a poem’s literal meaning in no way exhausts its meaning as a poem.” It would be pointless, then, to put a poem on trial. Accordingly, “Misère de la poésie” begins by objecting to the very principle of dragging poetry before “la justice”: “We rise up against any attempt to interpret a poetic text for judicial ends [Nous nous élévons contre toute tentative d’interprétation d’un texte poètique à des fins judiciaries].”³⁸

What Breton objects to most strenuously is the notion that a reader (here, a judge) could dissect a poem, dividing it into, on the one hand, phrases or words that signify in a clearly direct, referential manner (such as “Camarades descendez les flics,” or “Assez de ce scandale,” for that matter), and, on the other, phrases or words that elude immediate comprehension and can only be read as figurative—such as “Les astres descendent familièrement sur la terre” (The stars descend familiarly to earth), the line that Breton cites from “Front rouge,” or “l’air se rouille en grandes plaques / d’allégresse mauvaise,” to draw an example from Césaire. These are both figures that distance the poem from any concrete circumstance or empirical phenomenon they might nonetheless be evoking indirectly. According to Breton, no reader, and certainly no judge, would ever be in a position to determine which phrases in a poem are figurative and which are not, for all are part of a network of associations ultimately in the service of “incarnating an idea.” Breton is forced to admit that “Front rouge” contains some fairly clear directives (not just “Camarades descendez les flics” but also “Feu sur Léon Blum … pour l’anéantissement total de cette bourgeoisie” [Shoot Leon Blum … for the total elimination of this bourgeoisie]). He alludes to the poem’s radical heterogeneity, the way it juxtaposes densely metaphorical passages (“Les fleurs de ciment et de pierre / les longues lianes du fer / les rubans bleus de l’acier” [Flowers of cement and stone / long creepers of iron/blue ribbons of steel]) with chunks of journalistic prose referring to precise current or historical situations (“L’intervention devait débuter par l’entrée en scène de la Roumanie sous le prétexte … d’un incident de frontière” [The intervention must have begun with the entrance of Romania onto the scene with the pretext … of an incident at the frontier].

Yet even as Breton identifies generic, tonal, rhetorical, and diacritical inconsistencies within Aragon’s poem, he nonetheless reserves for every single word in the poem—in whatever structure it might be imbedded—the right to behave like poetic language, that is, to be meaningful with respect to a set of internal associations based on other words found in the poem (what he calls the “poetic drama”) and to be meaningful with respect to a set of external associations based on historical references, dates, proper names, and place names (what he calls the “social drama”). Poetry, for Breton, is first and foremost a language that leads away from an initial “point d’appui,” a language that steers us away from literal readings, immediate contexts, toward “autre chose,” as Breton writes in italics.39 Small wonder, then, that surrealist poetics, posed in these terms, might seem to fail as a resource for a politically engaged, anti-imperialist liberation movement—either in the 1930s or in the academy of today.

The ripples created by the passage of the Affaire through French and Franco-Caribbean cultural life can be felt in the articles and poems of this slim publication, which, however ephemeral, was nonetheless critical in establishing surrealism’s use-value for colonial subjects.⁴¹ Critics generally attribute the appropriation of Breton’s title to a desire on the part of the Caribbean students to align themselves with surrealism’s oneiric poetics. But this hardly explains the careful and nuanced prise de position executed in the pages of the review. Critics have failed to elucidate fully the cultural politics inscribed in Légitime Défense, and thus have left several of its emphases unexplained. Why, for instance, would the editors of Légitime Défense have chosen that title in 1932? Why didn’t they borrow a title from a more recent work? What did Breton’s “Légitime défense” contain that would have made it attractive to Caribbeans studying in Paris at that time?

Breton’s “Légitime défense” is an uncompromising critique of the French Communist Party’s aesthetic spokesman, Henri Barbusse, who governed the literary column in L’Humanité during the 1920s and against whom Aragon was to argue at the Congress in Kharkov. Breton’s short essay contains an unequivocal rejection of the very position Aragon came to assume during the Affaire. By appropriating the title Légitime Défense in 1932, Léro and Ménil were situating their argument at the antipodes of Aragon’s, tacitly affirming the argument against socialist realism that Breton elaborates in “Misère de la poésie.” But the story gets more complicated. Along with the indirect allusion (through the title) to the debate animating the Affaire, Léro adds a concrete reference to Breton’s position when he titles his contribution to the issue “Misère d’une poésie,” thereby troping on the title of Breton’s petition “Misère de la poésie” by changing the definite article to the indefinite “une.” Léro’s move at once produces a rapprochement between Antillean poetics and surrealist poetics and emphasizes the singularity (and distinction) of the Antillean case. His “Misère d’une poésie” contains no direct allusions to the Affaire Aragon; instead it presents an implicit argument that the “poverty” referred to in the title is not the poverty of a poetry reduced to its literal meaning (a proletarian poetry, as defined by Barbusse) but rather the poverty of a poetry that has no literal meaning whatsoever, a poetry without referents in the real world of actual black experience in the colonies.42 The poetry of Gilbert Gratiant, Léro writes, “translates neither the social iniquities of his country nor the passions of his race, nor the value of disorder and dream.”⁴³ The twist is significant. Léro is not opposing the deployment of external referents in a poem, nor is he objecting to the reduction of hermeneutics to the work of identifying these referents; instead he is lamenting Antillean poetry’s avoidance of such markers of collective memory, experience, and longing. He is execrating the lack of the type of directive and direction Aragon so famously offers in his “Front rouge.”

Read as a response to the Affaire Aragon, Légitime Défense appears to strike a balance between the two positions represented respectively by Aragon and Breton and seeks to find room within poetry for both metaphorical detour and referential advance. That is why the editors, in their preface, insist upon both the date of their adherence to surrealism and the nature of the surrealism to which they adhere: “nous acceptons également sans réserves le surréalisme auquel—en 1932—nous lions notre devenir. Et nous renvoyons nos lecteurs aux deux ‘Manifestes’ d’André Breton, à l’oeuvre tout entière d’Aragon” (we also accept, without reservation, the surrealism to which—in 1932—we bind our future. And we refer our readers to the two ‘Manifestos’ of André Breton, the oeuvre of Aragon in its entirety), and the list goes on.⁴⁴ For the editors to state, in 1932, that they support the work of Aragon “in its entirety” was to say a great deal indeed.⁴⁵ What they mean, in short, is that they intend to embrace Aragon’s call, “Feu sur Léon Blum,” and the aesthetics of reception that would allow it to be politically salient while simultaneously supporting Breton’s ideal of a revolutionary language capable at any moment of exceeding its “sens littéral.”

Many critics have claimed that Légitime Défense does no more than promote surrealism as a solution to the poverty of Antillean verse. Anticipating Sartre, Léro and Ménil do indeed locate the resources for constructing a properly representative Antillean poetry in the fragments of repressed experience wrested from the black unconscious by means of automatic writing (and, in Sartre’s version, by means of dense metaphor). Much of the poetry included in the volume may very well be, as Ménil later concluded, “anachronique” in the strong sense of the word—that is, disengaged from any reference to a specific historical moment or political struggle. But there is one poem that stands out, not because of its geographical or historical specificities but because of its indirect metaphorical and phonic allusions to the poetics of Aragon’s “Front rouge.” I am thinking here of Léro’s poem “S.O.S.”—the international Morse code for “emergency,” the eminently decodable signal of distress, a clear call to action if there ever was one. “S.O.S.,” I believe, draws from the hybrid poetics of Aragon’s “Front rouge” in order to sketch out a new possibility both for the composition of colonial and postcolonial poetry—a possibility realized in Césaire’s Cahier—and for this poetry’s reception and theorization. Léro’s “S.O.S.” contains no commands to rise up, such as Aragon’s “Descendez les flics” or “Sifflez sifflez SSSR SSSR” (Whistle whistle SSSR SSSR). Nor does it advocate insurrection or make reference to military initiatives (as does “Front rouge”). The contents of the poem are simultaneously anodyne and incendiary in that peculiarly surrealist way.46 “S.O.S.” evokes through an almost Pierre Reverdy–like set of “rapprochements” a scene of fire breaking out in a “salle de cinéma”; we never know whether that fire is real or on the screen, a safely confined virtual fire or a spectacle that can at any moment leap off the screen into the real. “Si l’incendie éclate / Il n’y a pas de sortie de secours” (If fire breaks out, there’s no exit), the poem warns us. The title, however, explicitly performs the pointing gesture of reference itself: “S.O.S.”—Pay attention! Look here! “ASSEZ DE CE SCANDALE!” It enacts in an exemplary manner one of poetry’s available verbal gestures: finger-pointing, alerting with concision and diacritical urgency.

At the very same time, however, the title demonstrates the way in which poetry can point not directly through naming or finger-pointing but by means of phonic resonances and metaphorical associations. A reader of the time would have had to have been deaf (or blind) not to recognize in “S.O.S.” a phonic and visual echo of the primary leitmotif of Aragon’s “Front rouge”: “L’U.R.S.S. ou comme ils disent S.S.S.R. … SS un air brulant c’est l’es / pérance c’est l’air SSSR … Sifflez sifflez SSSR SSSR … S R/S S/S R/S S. …” (L’U.R.S.S. or as they say S.S.S.R. … SS a burning melody it’s h/ope it’s air SSSR). A call to attention addressed to the French proletariat in Aragon’s poem becomes, in Léro’s poem, framed by “Misère d’une poésie,” a call to attention (S.O.S.) addressed to the Caribbean. The first few lines insist on the letter “s” (as well as the phoneme /s/, as in “sur” and “cinéma”) that appears so prominently in the title, drawing a portrait of the dark heart of a theater:

Given the intensely evocative nature of Césaire’s writing, I cannot conclude, as do many of his critics, that he fails to satisfy the demands of an engaged Antillean expressive practice. The fact is, through his juxtaposition of exclamation and metaphor, anaphora and paronomasia, uppercase and lowercase, Césaire manages to put us in a state of constant alert (S.O.S.!). That is, he forces us to attend to the multiple ways in which referential and figurative inscriptions modify and redirect one another. Determining how this poetic operation works (which words turn in which ways and why) within any given social formation or frame of reception is the task of a properly postcolonial poetics. I would like to conclude, then, by suggesting two sources from which we might draw the elements of such a postcolonial poetics. The first is a text by René Ménil, “Sur la préface de Breton au Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” (1965), that makes an argument for considering the language of description not as a faithful rendering of what exists but rather as a recreation of what exists by means of a language that may very well take us on detours through unexpected sites.47 Referring directly to Breton’s “Misère de la poésie,” Ménil asks “whether a poet can ‘treat a subject’ (for example, a political subject, as in the Cahier where Césaire treats decolonization).”⁴⁸ Ménil’s answer is that yes, a poet can “treat a subject,” but not without recreating that subject: “Reading the Cahier, we realize rather quickly that the Antilles as they are ‘in reality’, ‘for everyone,’ and ‘in real life,’ are one thing. Passing into the writing of Césaire, they become something else. Every reader from the Antilles can confirm that after reading the Cahier, the Antilles are no longer what they were before.”⁴⁹ Here Ménil anticipates one of the founding premises of (old) new historical scholarship, namely, that literature does not merely record a pregiven reality but also shapes it, brings it performatively into being for consciousness in a new way. Ménil’s comments suggest further that it is not only the ethnographic or the hortatory that can make a claim for political salience, but that certain practices of reading, encouraged by the opacity of poetry, might constitute a politics as well. That is, the discourses of both description and exhortation might, when located in a figurative context, send the reader on a detour, directing her away from the immediacy of reference toward an exploration of where the terms of description and exhortation come from, in what historical discourses they are embedded, and which ideological purposes they formally served. Ménil is not necessarily encouraging a search for origins but rather a sensitivity to the ways in which poetic making, even as it aims to represent a particular reality, nonetheless employs discursive elements with histories, affective valences, internal networks, and evocative potentials not determined by the exigencies of the “subject” being “treated.”

The second pertinent text is Kristin Ross’s “Metaphors and Slogans,” a chapter from The Emergence of Social Space, in which she identifies a set of strategies employed by Rimbaud that are displaced and reworked by Césaire. Ross dubs the kinds of figures I’ve been identifying in Césaire’s text (such as “le béton vivace”) or Léro’s (“si l’incendie éclate”) elements of a “metaphorical sociolect”; we know we have encountered such a sociolect when the author deploys a type of metaphor containing social content even as it distorts common usage.50 Through the metaphorical sociolect, reference to precise conditions is often signaled in an indirect or veiled manner. Ross’s example of the sociolect’s simultaneous distortion and directness is Césaire’s use of the term “marronnage” to designate the resistance and escape of slaves.⁵¹ As Ross points out, some metaphors in the Cahier initially marked as “surrealistic” or “nonreferential” (such as “l’arbre tire les marrons du feu” [the tree pulls chestnuts/escaped slaves from the fire] turn out to “represent a higher degree of referential truth” insofar as they belong to and reinvoke the highly metaphorical sociolects of countercultural or politically subversive movements.⁵² Metaphor, on this reading, does not function to turn the reader away from ethnographic description but rather to turn her toward a rich and diverse context for deciphering the author’s allegiances and the potential meaning of his words. The terms of the figure thus pass through a social reality (and its discursive construction) that may be reached by a detour.

Consider, for instance, Césaire’s “ô tourte de l’effroyable automne / on poussent l’acier neuf et le béton vivace,” the passage with which we began. The juxtaposition of two contrasting semantic fields—the vegetal (“pousser”) and what I will call the industrial (“acier,” “béton”) is by no means solely surrealist. This juxtaposition is typical of a critical discourse on modernity from Zola onward; it is even utilized by Aragon himself in the verse from “Front rouge” I cited earlier: “les fleurs de ciment et de pierre / les longues lianes de fer / les rubans bleus de l’acier” (“the flowers of cement and stone / the long creepers of iron / the blue ribbons of steel”). When Césaire writes of a “tourte,” a village/tart/bird/island/woman from which grows “new steel and lively concrete,” he is not being oneiric or florid at all but merely taking a detour through another equally polemical rhetorical tradition—one that metaphorizes history as nature—to make a political critique. Sometimes Césaire uses détournement to return us to a historically specific context for meaning-making. He employs imagery typical of the critique of capitalist industrialization, suggesting that without that imagery even the most militant, engaged discourse couldn’t function at all. This does not mean that every metaphor in poetry (or in militant rhetoric, for that matter) can be traced back to a countercultural sociolect; further, metaphors do not point unequivocally in one direction even when they do evoke associations with extratextual phenomena. My demonstration is meant to show the many and diverse ways in which words “turn” as well as the innumerable sites toward which they turn by means, for instance, of phonetic association, as in the case of “tourte,” a figure that turns us toward the problem of figuration itself.

Figurative language is thus not a code (“S.O.S.”) to be reduced to what cryptographers call a plaintext; but neither is it simply an aleatory stream of associations, a form of free play. Marks on a page do not turn away from every “point d’appui,” from every link to a referent in the empirical or discursive universe. There is, as Césaire reminds us, a lasso binding us—and our marks—to a whirling center. Specific forces draw us in, a determinable set of interpretive frames within which the “langue maléfique de la nuit” can be heard, or the obscurity of the mark read. The poem itself provides us with these frames if we are willing to engage in intratextual, intertextual, intermedial, historical, and biographical recontextualization. One of Césaire’s gifts to poetry theory (as well as postcolonial studies) is his revelation that poetic language may have a concrete history in resistance movements but also that resistance movements may find the force of their rhetoric in poetry. Where, then, are we to locate “lyric” language? Where does lyric language end and circumstantial language begin? Who writes “ASSEZ DE CE SCANDALE!”—the lyric subject or the newspaper? Is there a discrete language of the lyric subject, or is that language already shot through with phrases, slogans, and metaphors that have been recycled any number of times in political tracts and rallying cries—and will be recycled yet again in the crucible of craft? Might the aesthetic subjectivity we associate with a “lyric I” be at once the empirical, historical subject as he is transformed through the techne, media, and conventions of writing and the voice of history, of collective struggles, as that voice enters into the language of lyric? Could this be what Adorno meant when he stated that “the artistic subject is inherently social, not private”?⁵⁴

Ultimately, it is up to us as readers to determine whether something as mobile as a word (“tourte”) or as rigid as a phrase (“ASSEZ DE CE SCANDALE!”) is or is not “a site of entanglement” (Glissant), a “necessary” or “temporary ‘break’” (Hall).55 Is the highlighted phrase (“ASSEZ DE CE SCANDALE!”) a way of returning us to the level of the letter, to its typographic display and the visual echo it sets up with other instances in which letters matter? Does a typographic decision provide us with a context for reading we might not otherwise have had? Consider the journey throughout the Cahier of the “S” of “ASSEZ,” which I have traced back to the exhortations of black nationalist newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s, Léro’s poem, “S.O.S.,” and the “Sifflez SSSR” of Aragon’s “Front rouge.” Traveling from site to site, a grapheme lights up each word in which it appears with a topical charge. On this reading, the repeated grapheme could serve, in the Cahier, as an allusion to historical context, a way of referring us back to a frame—one of many—for interpreting its language. Alternatively, the “S” could send us more deeply into the sonic “calebasse” of the written text. So too the insistent return of the word “tour” could indicate either the self-enclosed nature of the poem or, instead, its intertextual commerce with Léro’s poem (“Tourne toujours”) and the cultural politics of Légitime Défense.

The urgency of Césaire’s poetic language is indeed haunting. He wants us to wake up, to take note, to ready ourselves for action. But this same urgency does not justify a precipitous reading, one that would pick up only one signal issuing from only one site. Our responsibility to the text is to respond to its call not by determining unilaterally what it means but by patiently taking a fuller inventory of all the ways in which it might achieve meaning and agency in a complex world. The limited role that poetry has played in francophone postcolonial studies is overdetermined by a long tradition that has only barely—and sporadically—been refreshed by deconstructive and Deleuzian modes of linguistic analysis and ideology critique. These modes need to be explored to a far greater extent if francophone postcolonial studies is going to accommodate a poem as hermetic, tropological, and discursively heterogeneous as Aimé Césaire’s Cahier. At the same time, however, it is important to note that postcolonial poems themselves pose a challenge to these very same deconstructive and Deleuzian modes of analysis. The urgency of the postcolonial condition must also be acknowledged if a truly postcolonial poetics, a mode of reading responsible to both the history of suffering and the history of poiesis, is to be forged.