CALENDRIER LAGUNAIRE
j’habite une blessure sacré
j’habite des ancêtres imaginaires
j’habite un vouloir obscur
j’habite un long silence
j’habite une soif irrémédiable
j’habite un voyage de mille ans
j’habite une guerre de trois cents ans
j’habite un culte désaffecté entre bulbe et caïeu
j’habite un espace inexploité
j’habite du basalte non d’une coulée
mais de la lave le mascaret
qui remonte la valleuse à toute allure
et brûle toutes les mosquées
je m’accommode de mon mieux cet avatar
d’une version de paradis absurdement ratée
—c’est bien pire qu’un enfer—
j’habite de temps en temps une de mes plaies
chaque minute je change d’appartement
et toute paix m’effraie
tourbillon de feu
ascidie comme nulle autre pour poussières
de mondes égarés
ayant craché le volcan mes entrailles d’eau vive
je reste avec mes pains de mots et mes minerais secrets
j’habite donc une vaste pensée
mais le plus souvent je préfère me confiner
dans la plus petite de mes idées
ou bien j’habite une formule magique
les seuls premiers mots
tout le reste étant oublié
j’habite l’embâcle
j’habite le débâcle
j’habite le pan d’un grand désastre
j’habite le plus souvent le pis le plus sec
du piton le plus efflanqué—la louve de ses nuages—
j’habite l’auréole des cactacées
j’habite un troupeau de chèvres tirant sur la tétine
de l’arganier le plus désolé
à vrai dire je ne sais plus mon adresse exacte
bathyale ou abyssale
j’habite le trou des poulpes
je me bats avec un poulpe pour le trou de poulpe
frère n’insistez pas
vrac de varech
m’accrochant en cuscute ou me déployant en porana
c’est tout un
et que le flot roule
et que ventouse le soleil
et que flagelle le vent
ronde bosse de mon néant
la pression atmosphérique ou plutôt historique
agrandit démesurément mes maux
même si elle rend somptueux certains de mes mots
“Calendrier lagunaire,” situated above en exergue, is—I recently discovered—the poem printed on Aimé Césaire’s tomb. This tomb may be found in a small cemetery located in a hilly suburb overlooking Fort-de-France. The words of the poem are engraved in gold onto a slab of grey-blue marble, typographically arranged in two columns with a cameo portrait of Césaire nestled between. The tomb is no bigger than any other in the cemetery, although it does occupy the very first row of tombs to the immediate left of the cemetery gates. If the visitor didn’t know the tomb was situated at precisely this site, she might easily walk right past it without stopping. The only element that stands out, the element that marks this tomb as different from all the others, is the long and winding poem presented on the vertical tombstone jutting straight up from the grave. Several other tombstones in the cemetery also bear short lyrics, trite yet appropriate rhymes about the inevitability of death or the permanence of love. But Césaire’s is the only one to contain no less than three hundred and six words, eight of which are found almost exclusively in botanical, zoological, or geological treatises.2 Surrounded by the garden-variety sentiments of mourning in a French that is easily legible to approximately 93 percent of the population, the poem that serves as Césaire’s epitaph reads almost like a foreign language, so definitively does it belong to a different register, so clearly does it indicate radical particularity on the level of discourse and form. Césaire’s words are “sumptuous,” as the poem’s last line tells us, but they are also highly specialized, technical, ostentatiously erudite. Some phrases are indeed ambiguous in intention (“[d’un] vouloir obscur”); others belong to a recognizable, almost Baudelairean lyric discourse (“j’habite donc une vaste pensée”) or recall a now classic surrealist style (“ayant craché le volcan mes entrailles d’eau vive”). However, certain words are singularly exact in denotation: “s’accrocher en cuscute” and “se déployer en porana,” for instance, refer to two different modes of plant existence, ways of inhabiting—or, more precisely, cohabiting—in either a parasitical or symbiotic relation. “Calendrier lagunaire” can be considered daring, even avant-garde, insofar as it takes chances with diction; Césaire’s manner of juxtaposing incommensurable registers of discourse is reminiscent to some extent of surrealism, yet ultimately it remains vigorously original and comparable to nothing other than the style he himself develops in the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Just how an avant-garde epitaph (replete with terms like “en cuscute” and “en porana”) might find a home in a discursive site of communal mourning is one of the questions that will occupy me in this final chapter. My goal is to study Césaire’s oddly foreign vocabulary, to find a rationale that explains its appeal, and to demonstrate that internal self-difference, or intrinsic non-self-identity, is ultimately the model for the aesthetic subjectivity that Negritude has forged. But first: a reading of “Calendrier lagunaire.”3
Césaire himself chose this poem as an epitaph—and for reasons we can probably discern.4 Despite the difficulty of its rhetorical figures, “Calendrier lagunaire” clearly thematizes the dialectic of residence (place) and transcendence (placelessness) appropriate to a meditation on death. It was included in moi, laminaire, published in 1982, a set of poems generally considered to constitute his most mature poetic style.5 Césaire’s trademark anaphoric verse structure is here combined with a crafted system of images and an unusually personal first-person tone that may have made it a strong candidate for the status of epitaph. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, Césaire’s English translators, observe that “The ‘I’ [of the poem] … is no longer a stylized one, part of the mythopoesis as in previous collections, but a more concrete, human, and real one, reflecting on a full and difficult career.”6
There are reasons to contrast the earlier heroic voice of the Cahier and the less mythically adorned “I” of “Calendrier lagunaire.” Césaire’s heroic mode relies heavily on active verbs such as “partir,” “crier,” “refuser,” “chercher,” and “inventer,” whereas “Calendrier lagunaire” associates the speaker with an almost passive verb, “habiter,” as though merely continuing to exist in a place, to survive, constituted a heroic act. Paradoxically, however—given the insistent “j’habite” (repeated twenty times)—the speaker does not actually appear to reside, to be, in any particular place. That is, he seems to inhabit a spectacular number of places and, at the same time, to fail at being able to inhabit any single one—at least in the root sense of “habiter”: to lodge, reside, or occupy “de façon durable” (in a permanent way).7 Of course, not knowing one’s exact address (“à vrai dire je ne sais plus mon adresse exacte”)—indeed, not having an exact address (“chaque minute je change d’appartment”)—is a situation congruent with the unearthly status of death. As the dictionary tells us, in its second sense, “habiter” can mean to “animate,” “haunt,” or “possess.” It is likely, then, that “Calendrier lagunaire” was chosen to decorate the tomb because it suggests that the poet, even when deceased, continues to animate the Martiniquan landscape. His spiritual presence can still be felt.
We must not be misled, however, by the funereal and memorial context in which the poem now resides. “Calendrier lagunaire” was composed when the poet was still very much alive, and it is also in this context that the poem must be read. During the decade of the 1960s Césaire was at the height of his efforts as a leader to foster a greater sense of Martiniquan identity. He struggled with the French president, Charles de Gaulle, to establish political and economic autonomy for Martinique, gaining a reputation in Paris for being “un dangereux indépendentiste.”8 He increasingly placed in question the cultural politics of assimilation that he had earlier, in part, embraced by attempting to develop the island’s fragile infrastructure according to the rhythms and customs of its citizens. By 1975 he had taken the dramatic step of inaugurating the Service Martiniquais d’Action Culturelle (locally known as “SERMAC”), a state-funded center charged with identifying and protecting what he considered to be the indigenous cultural legacy of Martinique’s African descendants.9 When Césaire wrote “Calendrier lagunaire,” then, his major preoccupation was how to inhabit a specifically Martiniquan space, not how to figure the placenessness of death, or how to remain spiritually once gone. The “habitation” Césaire seeks is not a “dernière demeure,” a final resting place; nor does he hope to build a “Habitation,” with a capital H, the French term for the colonial plantation. Césaire’s repeated use of the verb “habiter” evokes obliquely these contexts, but he is clearly gesturing toward a different way of being, a way of inhabiting a particular place that has little to do with either the monocultural cultivation of the Habitation or the perfect homogeneity of transcendent space.
I believe it would be a mistake, then, to interpret the word “paradis” in line 15 as referencing the afterlife to which the poet might have aspired. Instead, it reads as an ironic allusion to the “tropical paradise” that Martinique—at least according to the French imaginary—was supposed to be. The lines “je m’accommode de mon mieux cet avatar / d’une version de paradis absurdement ratée,” followed by the parenthetical “c’est bien pire qu’un enfer,” can be read in the vein of the Cahier, that is, as a lament for the failure of Martinique to realize itself, to be what it could be. The poem tells us that the embodiment of paradise has been so falsified, the “avatar” so tragically degraded, that any comparison of the island with its possibilities is simply “absurd.” As in the Cahier, the speaker experiences his “native land” not as whole and sheltering but rather as broken and afflicted. Yet, at the same time, the affliction in which he dwells is “sacred,” perhaps because it harbors a collective past (“une guerre de trois cents ans”), a history of suffering. To shuffle off that earthly mantle, that shared history of pain, would be to deny the possibility of any consecration whatsoever. “Calendrier lagunaire” is emphatically a poem about dwelling on the physical earth and in the physical body. It is a poem about dwelling in suffering, and suffering, as we learn in the Cahier, is the only site upon which brotherhood might be established and unity achieved.
Throughout the course of the poem we learn that habitation can take place not merely in architectural structures but also in a variety of other, more abstract types of shelter. The pairing of “habiter” with an abstract as well as a concrete noun (a “vaste pensée” as well as an “appartement”) is actually a fairly common poetic practice and not a jarring agrammaticality. Poets frequently use the verb “habiter” to figure interior states in spatial terms. In fact, the first line of “Calendrier lagunaire” recalls a similar poem by René Char titled “J’habite une douleur” (I inhabit suffering). Although it would be difficult to prove a direct connection between the two poems, it is worth noting that they both employ the verb “habiter” to explore how one might reside—or, to evoke Heidegger more directly, how one might “dwell”—not only in houses and temples but also in moods and metaphysical states: “J’habite une douleur” (Char); “j’habite une soif irrémédiable” (Césaire). In both poems, a metaphysical or affective state—such as being in pain or feeling an unrelieved yearning—is figured in physical, bodily terms: thirst and wounding in Césaire; the weight of the body and its submission to time in Char.10 Further, “Calendrier lagunaire” implicitly equates habitable spaces, such as the “appartement” of line 18, with physical wounds, of which there are many: “I inhabit from time to time one of my wounds / every moment I change apartment.” Curiously, the speaker intimates that agitation is to be preferred to stasis: “all peace scares me,” he writes, perhaps because, as in the poem by Char, “il n’y pas de siège pur,” there is no place out of time, out of history, out of suffering—except the pure nonspace of death. And yet it is clear that the speaker is seeking some kind of resolution, some way out of the “tourbillon de feu” (“whirlwind of fire”) that we also encounter at the end of the Cahier. As in the earlier poem, the speaker adopts a restless turning around and around; he accepts residence in a barely tolerable “disaster,” gaining meager nourishment from the breast of the hardest, least accommodating landscape: “le pis le plus sec du piton le plus efflanqué”; “la tétine de l’arganier le plus désolé” (the driest udder of the skinniest peak; the tit of the most desolate argan tree).
Finally, in order to achieve even the loneliest shelter, he tells us, he must wage battle: “je me bats avec un poulpe pour le trou de poulpe.” This octopus hole, “ronde bosse de mon néant” (the round [hump] of my nothingness), is ultimately the wound where he dwells—alone with his nourishing words and his secrets: “je reste avec mes pains de mots et mes minerais secrets.”11 The poem thus associates the speaker’s specific act of dwelling with the possession of words and buried treasure—or with words as buried treasure. The image of buried treasure (or “ore”) refers us to a local intertext: “Calendrier lagunaire” was published for the first time in the same volume as Césaire’s ode to René Depestre, the Haitian author of the 1956 volume Minerai noir (Black ore).12 When Césaire depicts the speaker of “Calendrier lagunaire” as seeking shelter in the greatest depths of the ocean, as constructing his abode with the aid of words and hidden jewels, he is reiterating his pledge in “Le verbe marronner / à René Depestre” to “marronner” (to escape like a slave into the hills), to outwit the colonial power and its “atmospheric or rather historical pressure”—and to do so by using a language as esoteric as it is explosive. Against the critique that his hermetic style serves poorly to found a revolution of the masses (a critique launched first by Frantz Fanon), Césaire defends himself in “Le verbe marronner” by insisting that only a language forged in the depths, a language growing out of pain and emerging from the wounds of loss, can preserve the hope of something new. It is as though he were searching for some “espace inexploité” not only in geographical terms (a “morne” for the “marron” to cultivate beyond the precinct of the Habitation) but also in verbal terms. The speaker seeks the possibility of vocalizing something volcanic that has not erupted into the landscape of language before. This new vocalization would be situated in a very unique space, one “entre bulbe et caïeu,” that is, in a space on the stem between the large offshoot and the smaller one. Translating vegetal into verbal terms, one could say that the “unexploited space” between “bulbe” and “caïeu” is situated in the imaginary interval between two alphabetic letters: we have to imagine a site between the “b” and the “c.” The words with which the poet “remains” would be miraculous words indeed; they would exist like secrets, the beginning of a magic formula that has not yet produced its miraculous material results (“j’habite une formule magique / les seuls premiers mots …”)—either as language (possibility of utterance) or as place (possibility of being).
Imaginary as they may be, the speaker nonetheless clings to these words (he is “laminaire”), to inhabit the depths where such words are found, perhaps for the very reason that they are connected to something that has been lost (“tout le reste étant oublié”). Like the remainders of only half-understood African languages, half-heard rhythms, and half-remembered belief systems with which slave-descendants must make a life, these words constitute the holy wound, the “blessure sacrée,” that hurts but preserves. The speaker is attempting to inhabit a space that is both there and not there (“entre bulbe et caïeu”), just as one might entertain a memory that recalls only that the memory has been lost. Césaire, like other intellectuals of his generation, believed that large gaps existed in the chronological self-awareness of Caribbeans. The opening line, “j’habite une blessure sacrée,” obviously references the Middle Passage and the subsequent impossibility of belonging to a culture anchored in the ecology from which it emerged.
Returning to the title of Césaire’s poem, “Calendrier lagunaire,” we can begin to understand why a habitation in a “blessure sacrée” would be so traumatic. We can also grasp why such a habitation might accurately be evoked by the image of a constant tossing and turning, a buffeting by waves. A “calendrier lagunaire,” or “lagoonal calendar” (as Eshleman and Smith translate it), suggests a register of temporality appropriate to a shallow body of water separated from the sea by sandy dunes. In Martinique, this lagoonal landscape is typically inhabited by the mangrove, a tropical tree growing in clusters in marshes near the sea. A lagoonal calendar would chart the cycles of a marshy landscape rather than the cycles of the moon (a “calendrier lunaire”); it would provide an organization of time consistent with the strange temporality associated with living in a region of lagoons—or, to force a word-play, a regions of lacunes (gaps). The word-play is not so forced, actually, for the two words, “lagoon” and “lacuna,” share a common root in the Latin “lacuna.” A “calendrier lacunaire” is another name one could give to a temporality rendered spatially as a paper calendar filled with gaps.
The Caribbean archipelago is a lagoonal space consisting of a series of straits that connect a “repeating island” (in the lovely phrase of Antonio Benítez-Rojo).13 But the Caribbean archipelago is also lacunaire: it is filled with absences, forgettings, breaks with the past. Lagoons are associated in the poet’s mind with death, with the ghostly presences of slaves who drowned in bodies of water. In the Cahier, Césaire alludes to lagoons as tombs filled with blood: “Que de sang dans ma mémoire! Dans ma mémoire sont des lagunes. Elles sont couvertes de têtes de morts” (So much blood in my memory! In my memory there are lagoons. They are covered with the skulls of the dead).14 No wonder the poet is unsure whether or not he wants to fill in these gaps. To do so would be to cover up the blood, to suture the “blessure sacrée.” Accordingly, he contents himself with magical half-formulas, placing faith in just the promise of a more harmonious world: “ou bien j’habite une formule magique/ les seuls premiers mots / tout le reste étant oublié.” Césaire chooses to reside, then, in potentia, opting to respect rather than repair the loss. His poetry is difficult and resistant to immediate understanding in part because he aims to preserve some mystery, a few “minerais secrets,” as an homage to what can never be recuperated, what can never be healed by memory, what can never provide stable ground.
Lines 31–32 provide the sharpest depiction of the poet’s ambivalent attitude toward the production of continuities in a landscape and history riddled with holes. He tells us that he resides in both the “embâcle” and the “débâcle,” the freezing and the loosening up of the obstructing ice. An “embâcle” obstructs the flow of water, as in the case of ice that blocks the passage of water in a narrow strait. Conversely, a “débâcle” is the rupture of the ice layer caused by a sudden thaw, permitting the water to flow smoothly again. Here, Césaire situates himself in two landscapes at once, an “embâcle” in which connection is prevented and a “débâcle” in which connection is restored. The challenge he confronts is to dwell in the violent space of their irreducible différend. If all he has left is words, then these words must allow him to withstand the rough buffeting of the waves (“et que le flot roule”), the aspiration of the sun (“et que ventouse le soleil”), and the erosion by wind (“et que flagelle le vent”). He will cling like a “moi, laminaire”—the algae on the rock—even while spinning round and round on a stalk, a “vrac de varech,” a cluster of kelp like a vibrating mess of branches and roots.15 With this magnificent image of turmoil in splendor, the poem leaves us wondering how a dwelling in such a vertiginous space could possibly be sustained. What would it mean to dwell in the pregnant abyss, and what kind of language could provide shelter there?
A HOMELESS DWELLING IN LANGUAGE
Before helping us to communicate,
language helps us to live.
Arguably, the thinker most responsible for associating language with shelter, poetic words with spatial abode, is Martin Heidegger. I have resisted the perhaps inevitable recourse to his poetics as long as possible in order first to explore some of the unique connections between language and shelter established in Césaire’s poem. The translators of “Calendrier lagunaire,” Eshleman and Smith, also resist the pull toward Heidegger, choosing the word “inhabit” (as opposed to “dwell”) to translate the French verb “habiter.” Now it is time, however, to examine Heidegger’s essays on dwelling a bit more closely and to ask what they might add to our reading (as well as what they might obscure). The evocation of Heidegger is on some level counter-intuitive—as Eshleman and Smith must have recognized—given the context, both political and aesthetic, in which he developed his theories. As is well known, between 1935 and 1951, the period during which his essays on “dwelling” were written, Heidegger was concerned with identifying a poetic language capable of building a world for a supposedly unified, or at least a homogeneous people. His vision of poetry as “dwelling”—a dwelling underlying and making possible real shelters—is nothing like Césaire’s portrait of life in the depths. Heidegger’s vision presupposes a totalizing language, less hermetic than “authentic,” a language of “true meanings” that “stays with things,” “lets things be” (rather than “enframing” them for exploitation).17 It also presupposes and is addressed to a totalized population, an autochthonous “Volk,” in intimate and continuing contact with their own soil.
Nothing, of course, could be further from the Martiniquan truth. Here, as elsewhere in the Caribbean, a group of heterogeneous, displaced peoples, brought together as a result of centuries of forced migration, struggle to find a home in a land they do not own. They speak a language imposed by a colonial power that exists in tandem, and in conflict, with yet another language derived from the colonial situation—Creole (or Kreyol), itself a testimony to the way languages recombine elements rather than spring from one consistent root. Nevertheless, it is worth retaining at least one idea from essays such as “The Origin of the Work of Art,” “Building Dwelling Thinking,” “Language,” and “… Poetically Man Dwells …,” namely, that dwelling is a metaphysical state. It can be generated by language and therefore does not depend on the construction of actual edifices. Connected to this idea is the notion that dwelling, as a metaphysical state, hinges upon acts of naming. In other words, one can only dwell if one makes a shelter of names that call out, that produce an intimacy between mortals and their surroundings.18 In “Language,” for instance, Heidegger asks: “What is this naming? Does it merely deck out the imaginable familiar objects and events—snow, bell, window, falling, ringing—with words of a language?” He then responds: “No. … The naming calls. Calling brings closer what it calls. … Thus it brings the presence of what was previously uncalled into a nearness.”19 Language—particularly poetic language, that which is most purified of “foreground meanings”20—is thus not mere decoration, but instead a necessary intermediary that listens and waits.
Occasionally in these famous essays Heidegger intimates that the language of naming is not, in fact, a stable one, established by the poet once and for all. In “Building Dwelling Thinking” we read: “The real dwelling plight” is not the lack of adequate homes but rather “that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.”21 If we are to take Heidegger’s emphasis seriously, then the most authentic, the most healing and beneficial act is not to establish an authentic language composed of purified, nontechnical, noninstrumental names; rather, the most healing and beneficial act is to search for—rather than to purport to find—the names that listen to the strange and unfamiliar landscape in which we are always, to some extent, “homeless.” Heidegger’s moment of radical negativity occurs, then, when he suggests that “dwelling” in and through language is more problematic than it at first seems: dwelling might in fact have to do with a “concentrated perception,” a “taking-in” that leaves something more to be discovered, something more—and other—to be said.22 And herein lies an incipient postmodern, even avant-garde Heidegger, the Heidegger whose thinking leads him toward a critique of finality and an embrace of the negativity inherent in the concepts of “listening,” remaining “ready for the unforeseen,” “the reservoir of the not-yet-uncovered,” and “strife.”23
Surprisingly, however, it is Heidegger’s least persuasive propositions that have retained purchase in Martinique’s contemporary discourses on the relation of language to place. The legacy of what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe calls his “nostalgia for presence” has been handed down in some unexpected ways.24 For instance—and perhaps paradoxically—the movement known as “Créolité” proves a fertile ground for unearthing old Heideggerianisms, albeit in a different guise. Advocates of Créolité such as Raphaël Confiant, Jean Bernabé, and (with more qualifications) Patrick Chamoiseau have stated that French should be eclipsed as a literary language in favor of the indigenous Creole spoken by almost the entirety of the Martiniquan population. Stressing the need to provide a unique language for a unique people, the créolistes have insisted on the widespread use of Creole as an academic and diplomatic language, even while celebrating the values of hybridization and métissage—the “créolisation” of culture in general—that defines the Caribbean past. As Éloge de la créolité demonstrates, the ideology of Créolité contains some unpleasant remainders of Heideggerian thought insofar as it promotes one language above all others as singularly capable of preserving the identity of a people (often depicted in barely disguised folkloric terms).25 To be sure, the analogy is not exact: Heidegger promoted one kind of language (“natural” language as opposed to distorted language, for example, or Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry as opposed to “the clever talking” of radio broadcasting), and not a single language tout court. However, his belief that there could exist a writing consistent with the history and values of a people—in short, a writing consistent with and constitutive of their world—resembles the belief that underlies the créoliste project. When créolistes argue that Creole takes the adequate measure of Caribbean reality, when they seek to establish it as the national language, and when they excoriate authors who do not write in Creole, they slip into an identity thinking that unintentionally echoes the conceptual errors of Heidegger’s language politics.26 To be sure, Creole is hardly a monoglossic language composed of words boasting etymologies that can be traced back to pure meanings “lost to us” in the present, fallen age.27 Creole is saturated with a history of oppression and invention peculiar to the lands where it is spoken; its authenticity does not reside in its ability to reveal an a-historical phusis, Nature as “the pristine ground, because it is the ground of those beings that we ourselves are.”28 A close examination of Creole—and a close examination of French or High German, for that matter—unearths the history of the relations between peoples and places, cultures and cultivations, that contribute to making language and nature what they are now.
I do not mean, then, to maintain a neat opposition between the créoliste’s position and that of Césaire. Césaire does not represent some absolute alternative to the totalizing moments in either Heidegger or Créolité. His desire to recapture a link with Africa, expressed with periodic urgency in the Cahier, recalls in an odd way Heidegger’s nostalgic yearning for a former, more authentic world. In addition, Césaire’s attraction to archaic terms and his advanced studies in Greek and Latin all point to a tendency to honor what he calls the “primitivism” of ancient systems of thought.29 In contrast to the theorists of Créolité, who draw attention to the richness of the recent past, Césaire mourns the break with the past, the absence of roots caused by the Middle Passage. He does not reject the culture of the present as irrelevant or superficial, but he does thematize its fragility, its lack of historical depth. The poem renders well the groundless ground of his native Martinique with its juxtaposition of “bathyale” (from the Greek bathus, meaning “profound”), and “abyssale” (from the Greek abyssos, meaning limitless, or without bottom [“sans fond”], like the “grand trou noir” of the endlessly unknown). To this extent, he shares with Heidegger an understanding of modernity as loss (rather than exultant, compensatory creativity). His desire to forge a poetic language is not so different from Hölderlin’s; similar to the German poet (as least in Heidegger’s version), Césaire too dreams of repairing the wound inflicted by industrial “Enframing” (“the commandering everything into assumed availability”).30
However—and this is a crucial difference—Césaire targets a very particular instance of “enframing,” namely, the reduction of human beings to commodities in a slave economy. Further, he also identifies a very particular instance of ungrounding: the temporal and spatial ungrounding of the Middle Passage. Finally, however, it is not clear that repairing the wound (to forge some seamless identity) is really his poetic goal. Césaire can be said to practice a poetics of “dwelling” only insofar as he seeks a language able to name (to draw him closer to his surroundings); yet this language, albeit “sumptuous,” is born of—even coincident with—the experience of suffering (“mes maux”). No doubt, Césaire enjoys the “sumptuous” result of historical pressures, the words rendered iridescent, like jewels, by the “historical” burden they bear: “la pression atmosphérique ou plutôt historique / agrandit démesurément mes maux / même si elle rend somptueux certains de mes mots” (The atmospheric or rather historic pressure / even if it makes certain of my words more sumptuous / immeasurably increases my plight). But these words do not point back to some essential, primordial language in which the poet might dwell. Instead, Césaire’s words—and, as we shall see, predominately his names—register historical suffering and displacement; they reflect centuries of conquest and thus an intermingling and layering of languages rather than the purity or authenticity of a single one. The last line of “Calendrier lagunaire” suggests, through homophonic play, that the Middle Passage is responsible for creating both the pains the poet feels (“mes maux”) and the words the poet makes (“mes mots”). In this way, Césaire intimates that there is ultimately no language he can fabricate that would afford a comfortable abode, a place in which to “dwell.” “To inhabit a sacred wound” is to render a tangle of branching seaweed (“vrac de varech”) “sumptuous,” to cling to the depths of language (like an algae, or verbal “laminaire”) because it is only in those linguistic depths (“mes mots”) that one finds the history of current pain (“mes maux”).31 And it is only by writing with a language shot through with history that one can “search anew for the nature of dwelling.”32
CALLING THINGS BY THEIR NAMES
We translate our Latin texts together. We build the world anew.
The first thing one notices when approaching the poetry of Césaire is the immensity of his vocabulary and the diversity of its origins. René Hénane, glossing the Poésies complètes, compiles an alphabetical list of no less than 671 terms drawn from the specialized discourses of botany, geology, zoology, pathology, mineralogy, psychiatry, and biology.34 Much attention has been paid to Césaire’s surrealist imagery; indeed, his inventive juxtapositions were the first aspect of his style to receive commentary by Sartre and Breton. But few critics have faced the challenge presented by Césaire’s vocabulary, and no one, to my knowledge, has adequately explained either the purpose or the effects of its diversity.
This vocabulary can properly be considered global. It contains words from at least fifteen different languages (thereby linking his poetic language to four continents): Greek; Latin; Arabic; French; Martiniquan Creole, or Kreyol; Arawak; Carib; Portuguese; Spanish; Italian; Egyptian; Celtic; Malaysian; Norman; and Guyanese. Yet, in his interviews, Césaire always claims a regional basis for his word choices, especially for those words designating species of flora and fauna endemic to Martinique. In an interview accorded to Jacqueline Leiner to commemorate the reprinting of his wartime review, Tropiques, Césaire explains that the desire to anchor his poetry in a specific place was particularly urgent during the Vichy occupation of Martinique (1939–1943):
We did not want to put together a journal of abstract culture; rather, we wanted as much as possible to apprehend Martiniquan reality in its Martiniquan context—to situate it precisely. We wanted this journal to be a tool that would help Martinique to re-center itself [se recentrer]. We had realized that there was nothing else in this area. Absolutely nothing! So, we decided to study, systematically, the flora and fauna and so on. Even a very repressive regime [Vichy] couldn’t stop us from doing that!35
Césaire’s wager is that by foregrounding in the pages of Tropiques the specific identity of the Caribbean landscape, authors would be able surreptitiously to invoke the unique identity of the people who inhabit it. The flora and fauna (and the unique culture emerging from it) could be better comprehended if they were evoked not through vague allusions to tropical foliage but rather by means of discriminating designations, the exacting scientific lexicon of genii and species. As he suggests in another interview, calling things “by their name” establishes the specific identity of both the place and the person naming:
I am an Antillean. I want a poetry that is concrete, very Antillean, Martinican. I must name Martinican things, must call them by their names. The canafistula [canéfices, the botanical term in the French] mentioned in “Spirals” [Spirales] is a tree; it is also called the drumstick tree [cassier in the colloquial French]. It has large yellow leaves and its fruit are those big purplish bluish black pods, used here also as a purgative. The balisier [a French term] resembles a plantain, but it has a red heart, a red florescence at its center that is really shaped like a heart. The cecropias [the botanical term] are shaped like silvery hands, yes, like the interior of a black’s hand. All of these astonishing words are absolutely necessary, they are never gratuitous.36
Césaire is making a semiotic rather than a Heideggerian point here. He is insisting on the power of reference, affirming that a class of nouns (the generic and species designations of flora and fauna) can provide an intimate relationship with the Caribbean landscape that they are intended to systematize. In yet another testimonial, this time a letter to Lilyan Kesteloot from the 1970s, Césaire reiterates the same idea: “If I name with precision (what people call my exoticism), it is because by naming with precision I believe I am recovering for the object its singular value.”37 Interestingly, he associates the word “exoticism” with his own writing, not that of a Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, for instance, an explorer describing the fauna of a tropical island. That is, he accepts (but revalues) the charge of “exoticism,” acknowledging that to defamiliarize the landscape, to remove it from the discourse of tourist pamphlets and restore it to science, is a way to establish its singularity so that it might be seized and valued anew.38 The scientific lexicon of botany, although it certainly seizes or “enframes” the plant in a rationalizing system, does not necessarily prepare it for exploitation (“commandeering it into assured availability”).39 In a startling reversal of circumstances, it is the scientific (and, previously, the colonial) discourse that accomplishes this revaluation; the botanical lexicon remains more closely allied to the local or, as we shall see, to the global history hidden beneath the local.
Of course, Césaire cannot be sure that a Martiniquan would recognize the curious botanical terms that he embeds in the poem, such as “en cuscute” or “en porana.” Neither is it clear that an inhabitant of Martinique would be able to identify an “arganier.” Césaire’s explanation of his use of “precise” names is illuminating to a certain extent, but there is difference he does not register between calling a plant a “canéfice” (canafistula) and calling it a “cassier” or “casse” (drumstick tree). In the first case, the poet names a “Martiniquan thing” with its generic botanical name; in the second, a more colloquial designation conjures up a history of recent observation and cultural use. Similarly, in “Calendrier lagunaire,” Césaire could have employed the local term “bois-fer” or “bois fè” rather than the more technical “arganier,” thereby reducing the exoticism of the allusion. But the poet seems purposely to seek out the exotic, “the astonishing.” He opts for the term that would be as unfamiliar to Martiniquans as it would be to the French. Therefore, choosing the designation “arganier” can have little to do with a desire to evoke a Martiniquan’s intimacy with her own island. The “value” of which Césaire speaks is an equivocal one (“I believe I am recovering for the object its singular value”). What does Césaire mean by “singular value” and what does it have to do with dwelling in a Martiniquan landscape? How do his technical, erudite, and sometimes archaic names bring Martiniquans “nearer” to their environment? How does his poetry help them “listen”? “Listen” to what?
There are at least two ways in which Césaire’s allusion to “value” can be interpreted in this context. First, “value” can be understood as the generic value accorded to an element of landscape from the perspective of a botanist. A precise botanical vocabulary determines the “value” of the plant by finding a place for it in a binomial taxonomy of genetic inheritance and relation. “Binomial nomenclature” is a product of the eighteenth-century rationalization of nature, an Ur-case of what Michel Foucault describes in Les mots et les choses as a shift from the episteme of “Représenter” to the episteme of “Classer.”40 In this shift, the science of natural history replaces a descriptive language saturated with opinion, anecdote, and observation with designations that have nothing to do with the plant itself and thus are (supposedly) neutral and timeless. In binomial nomenclature, the first term of the name is the generic name of the plant; it names this plant forever, and is forever applicable to it, no matter what new properties—chemical, medicinal, or ritual—are attributed to it over time.41 Paramount in the classificatory system devised by the Swedish botanist and physician Carl Linnaeus (in Systema naturae of 1735) is the attribution to the plant of a class identified by means of visual discrimination.42 Eschewing the cultural history of plants—at least for the sake of designation—Linnaeus’s system imposes a two-word name “consisting of a generic name followed by a one-word specific epithet.”43 In this case, the “singular value” of the plant would be, quite simply, its discovery as a genetic variant, its differentiation as a species to be set aside from any other by an act of trained discrimination.44 The gaze that discriminates one plant species from another, that classifies it, names it, and enters it into a taxonomy, is one that renders the plant available not for quotidian use but rather for scientific understanding.
Cesaire’s fascination with botanical nomenclatures suggests that he privileges the scientific designations of Martiniquan flora and fauna over popular names. In the context of neocolonial Martinique, these designations (“canafistula” and “cecropias,” for instance) serve a purpose beyond that of drawing attention to laws of vegetal heredity, for instance. When used in a poem, they lend a particular value to the Martiniquan biosphere by placing it in the larger context of scientific rationalization, which is charged with integrating all systems of life regardless of their geographical or cultural (or “racial”) context. Paradoxically, it is only by naming the specific in a universal language that a thing may be celebrated for its unique qualities, its “singular value.” The “recentering” Césaire is interested in, then, has to do with the recentering of the island of Martinique in the global imaginary; he wants Martinique to be revealed not as periphery but as center—that is, as the origin of an ecosystem acknowledged throughout the world for its richness and diversity. “Gratitude is due to Henri Stéhlé,” writes Césaire in an unpublished homage to the botanist who centered his research on the Caribbean—the botanist he published in Tropiques—“for having contributed more than any other scholar to making our small country [notre très petit pays] known throughout the entire world”; “We thank him for helping us to take the full measure of our humanity.”45
Insofar as Césaire intends the botanical terms he employs to evoke in the reader’s mind a particular landscape, he can be considered to rely on a traditional poetics of reference. Césaire wants us to see through the word to a “Martiniquan thing.” However, at other times, he asks us to appreciate names not as referents but rather as clusters of phonemes; he thereby releases them from their referential obligations so they can engender sound patterns in verse (as in “un culte désaffécté entre bulbe et caïeu”). For the most part, though, whether he designates his local surroundings with contemporary French, Creole, or Latin terms, his basic premise is that names remain legible as classifications, not as proper names for singular entities. And this emphasis on generic phenomena in particular—the general class of Cecropia not that particular Cecropia peltata growing on that spot—is important to note. He clearly prefers generic names and therefore could be said to be speaking—despite his assertion to the contrary—in “abstract” terms about a concrete place. (“We did not want to put together a journal of abstract culture; rather, we wanted as much as possible to apprehend Martiniquan reality in its Martiniquan context—to situate it precisely.”46) Or, to put it differently, the concretion he seeks is not the concretion of the thing in itself, that “arganier,” the deictic particular. In fact, Césaire is perhaps the least “deictic” poet of the Caribbean. Even Saint-John Perse hopes we will see in the botanical term “abutilons” the decorative plant growing right there beside his veranda.47 Césaire, in contrast, reaches for the regional, not the autobiographical. He wishes to employ names—whether descended from béké Creole or Linneas’s Greek—to refer to species and formations peculiar to the island on which he was born (“the Martiniquan context”). What matters first and foremost is that the name, with its specificity, helps to build the sense a Martiniquan might have of being at the center of her own world (“se recentrer”)—or, quite simply, of having a world. In the interview with Jacqueline Leiner, Césaire acknowledges the connection in his mind between the emergence of a Martiniquan self-consciousness and a greater appreciation for the specificity—through naming—of the place where one lives:
We thought such a program [undertaken by Tropiques] might help Martiniquans to acquire a certain consciousness of themselves [une certaine conscience d’eux-mêmes]. To produce articles on local flora and fauna we called on people we had close at hand—and they were by no means surrealists. From a noted scholar, Father Pinchon, I requested a study on fauna, and from another, Sthélé [sic], a study of flora.48
We have been taught by earlier critics that the early “prise de conscience” promoted by Negritude relied upon the emergence of black internationalism, Pan-African solidarity, and a diasporic sense of displacement that focused entirely on what had been lost (Africa), not on what was already there. But it is clear that in 1941, when Tropiques published Stéhlé’s “La végétation des Antilles françaises,” the poet was already resolved to consider identity intimately intertwined with an ecological as well as a social milieu. If, in the mind of the colonial imaginary, Martinique was associated with monocultural sugarcane or banana production, it would be liberating to contradict that imaginary and to assert the richness and diversity with which the Martiniquan people were already, at least in part, familiar. Poetic naming would be a way to see, to take note of, and to celebrate the immense diversity hidden under the mantle of monocultural production. Moreover, discerning an even greater number of species and learning their generic names would be part of the epistemological and political project of recapturing the lost history of exploration and occupation, displacement and cultivation, singular to the region. Césaire instinctually seized this possibility: that a story of the Martiniquan people and their island was lodged within these names.49
A CRITICAL REGIONALISM
There was, in fact, very little in Césaire’s literary background—except, perhaps, his knowledge of Lautréamont—that could have inspired his interest in the technical, generic designations of things.50 Why, then, did he believe that such designations might lead to a greater consciousness, a recentering of the Martiniquan self?
To answer this question it is necessary to consider the context for Césaire’s appreciation of Stéhlé’s work. Earlier critics have observed Césaire’s predilection for complex plant imagery, his mapping of a vegetal order onto the order of the human; however, the presence of Henri Stéhlé in Tropiques and the import of ethnobotany elsewhere in his work have largely been ignored. Césaire’s exposure to ethnobotany as a potentially subversive discipline began early on, during his years at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France. Up until the 1960s Martinique’s primary and secondary schools employed textbooks produced exclusively in France for French schoolchildren.51 As is well known, young blacks in the colonies were required to recite the same absurd platitudes as students in the métropole (such as the infamous “Nos ancêtres les gaulois”). Official history books as well as geography and science texts all focused on Europe, thereby limiting the student’s awareness of plants and climates to those of different and far-off continents. But Césaire was privileged to have at the Lycée Schoelcher a professor of natural sciences, Eugène Révert, who was at the time compiling evidence for his doctoral thesis on the flora and fauna of the Antilles, La Martinique: Étude géographique (published in 1947). As Eshleman and Smith underscore in their introduction, Révert’s intervention was crucial: “The abundance of Martinican fauna and flora” appearing in Césaire’s poetry “probably has as its first cause” the influence of Révert; “he taught geography and attempted to interest his students in the peculiar geographical characteristics of Martinique at a time when standard examination questions were based on mainland French history and geography.”52
To teach local geography and regional botany was at the time a revolutionary gesture—and Césaire seized this fact right away. It was a stab in the back of the colonial regime that wished Martinique to exist only in the form in which the rulers had defined it: as a territory to be made, not known. Any reminder of the specificity of the Caribbean ecosystem worked against the policy of “assimilation,” which was intended to transform blacks, mulattos, Indians, Chinese, and Syrians into universal Frenchmen, sharing a single culture and, paradoxically, a single geography. The last thing the assimilationist project aimed to provide was an “authentic” language through which to inhabit a specifically Caribbean space. Césaire’s interest in botany—introduced first in Révert’s classroom—grew from his apprehension that something radical and contestatory was contained in the project of identifying, studying, naming, and classifying the genii and species of Martinique.
When Henri Stéhlé arrived in Guadeloupe from Montpellier in 1934, he immediately established himself as an important successor to Révert, holding a post at the Services Techniques et Scientifiques de l’Agriculture and publishing an exhaustive study of the flora of Guadeloupe two years later. In 1938 he was named the director of the Tivoli Experimental Garden in Fort-de-France, after which he established the first accredited schools of agriculture in the Caribbean (at Tivoli and Pointe-à-Pitre). Between 1939 and 1946 Stéhlé collected samples of over eight thousand regional species, identifying hundreds of new genii of flowering plants. If the editors of Tropiques wished to find an expert on the ecology and agricultural history of the archipelago, they could do no better than to invite the participation of Stéhlé, who, like them, continued his meticulous work of consciousness-raising during the war-time years known colloquially as the “temps Robert.”53
The first article Stéhlé contributed to Tropiques is fairly modest in its aspirations. Sandwiched between J. Chambon’s essay on the spiritual exercises of the yogi and an announcement of Breton’s passage through Fort-de-France, Stéhlé’s “La végétation des Antilles françaises” attempts to establish an account of Martinique’s multilayered history through a description of “degraded” virgin forests and complexly articulated “jardins créoles.”54 His description reads like a virtual roadmap for the approach to the Caribbean that would soon be favored by advocates of Créolité. He states, for instance, that one must “leave behind the established roads and settlements” in order to discover in the “forest paths” a world of “robust vegetation.” Once removed from the domination of a single history, a single road, one would find, he assures his reader, a multiplicity of strata, each one “rich in species of every category.”55 Presaging the interest the créolistes would take in individual inventiveness, he notes how the “jardin créole” gathers together a wide variety of heterogeneous plants, “each one as useful as the next for alimentary and medicinal purposes.”56 Stéhlé then makes three further points that were formative for Césaire. First, he underscores the diversity of species that can only be found in the region of Martinique. Next, he acknowledges the degree to which all nature in Martinique is in fact culture, arguing that the only virgin forest remaining on the island extends between the towns of Céron and Grand-Rivière (both on the northern coast). Finally, he asserts what he calls the “liens étroits,” or tight bonds, that exist between “man and vegetation,” adding that if the latter has a profound influence on the former, the opposite is true as well. The article ends with an equivocal portrait of the “enchanted islands” as an “admirable synthesis of the Metropole’s past and that of the most diverse countries found on far-off continents [Africa and India].”57 But this seemingly forced celebration of colonialism (“admirable synthesis”) is countered by frequent allusions to the destruction of “the primitive [virgin] forests of the French Antilles” by the sugar, then banana, then coffee, then coconut plantations. The “admirable synthesis” is the result, as Stéhlé puts it, of “the intensive activity of man.”58
Whatever Stéhlé’s true attitude toward Empire might have been, he provides Césaire with a starting point for seizing the Caribbean landscape as saturated with history and rich with opportunities for the anchoring of local identity not in the far-off land of the Gaules but in the proximate and nourishing diversity of “Martiniquan things.” In his next contribution to Tropiques, titled “Les dénominations génériques des végétaux aux Antilles françaises: Histoires et légendes qui s’y attachent,” Stéhlé presents a convincing case that the generic (and species) names accorded to flora and fauna embed both a folklore and a rich historical narrative of the islands. Published in February of 1944, “Les dénominations génériques” adds to Stéhlé’s earlier appreciation of the landscape an account of the process by which this landscape enters (and produces) language. His opening sentence demonstrates an awareness that the signifiers themselves tell a story as complex as the genetic constitution of the plants. “That it is necessary to identify the vegetal kingdom with names … was so evident to man from the beginning that plant designations actually meld into the language of peoples: to tell their story [the story of plant designations] is to retrace the folklore of humanity.”59 Stéhlé’s understanding of nomenclature is actually in stark conflict with that of Linnaeus, who liked to name plant species after the names of the famous white European males who “discovered” them. In fact, Linnaeus was responsible for banishing from the botanical nomenclature of the Caribbean many plant names derived from what he considered to be “barbarous” Amerindian languages.60 One might argue that the names of these European males—their botanical work facilitated by the voyages of Empire—constitute a part of the history of the island evoked through plants. But Stéhlé is more interested in the generic designations that encode local history, those few that remain despite Linnaeus’s effort to stamp them out. Lamenting that “in general, [the] replacement of [indigenous names] by ‘creole’ names has been almost complete,” he then goes on to enumerate the few cases in which names derived from African languages still designate Caribbean varieties.61 He also observes cases where Hindu names have inserted themselves into both everyday and taxonomic registers. But “the majority” of names, he insists, reflect “the science of the first European colonists to arrive on the islands.” Unfortunately, he observes, “the widespread substitution of creole names for autochthonous or other imported ones is such that the influence of European civilization masks all remainders of African or Asiatic influence.”62
One might conclude from Stéhlé’s remarks that European languages covered over any history of observation and discrimination that might have remained. The unique perspective of those who arguably lived in closest contact with the givens of the island was erased from the face of the planet. But, counter to our expectations, Stéhlé introduces a curious fact. While it is true that Europeans imposed nomenclatures that reflected their own experience of the region (rather than that of the Pre-Colombians), that is not the whole story. The first colonizers included “men of science” (savants) whose training taught them both to observe specific differences and to search for names that could capture the circumstances in which they were discovered. By a remarkable “coincidence,” as Stéhlé puts it, Linnaeas’s somewhat unfaithful follower, Jean-Baptiste Christophore Fusée Aublet, who collected a large number of samples from the Caribbean region, chose to use designations “dominated by Carib names.”63 Thus, some of the words used by Carib and Arawak peoples (and thus their observations) are actually conserved in botanical nomenclatures. Pre-Colombian names for plants of the Caribbean accordingly lend their “native flavor” to generic designations, writes Stéhlé, “infusing the discourse on this vegetation with the perfume of the archaic past.”64
It turns out, then, that instead of suppressing a pre-Colombian past, botanical designations (in this case) preserved that past more faithfully than did the local Creole names, influenced as they often were by the overlay of the Norman, Celtic, and other dialects that were spoken in the Caribbean at the time.65 As opposed to Linnaeus, who purposefully divorced plants from their local environment and conditions of use, the botanists of the Caribbean sought to recall an element of the plant’s relation to a specific ecosystem or human habitus. Stéhlé notes that “many denominations evoke a habitat or a particular adaptation to a way of life. Plants that thrive in dry regions are represented by Philoxéros (to love the dry); the amarante bord-de-mer (the amaranth beside the sea), familiar to Caribbean fisherman, as well as the amies des pierres (friends of the rock) are both known as Lithophila (rock lovers)”; finally, Philodendron (Greek for “fond of trees”) is the generic domination for plants that “grow beside trees and climb up to their highest branches.”66 Generic designations of a botanical nomenclature sometimes even evoke directly a context of human practice. To cite Stéhlé’s example: the tree called the catalpa, or the “feuille Haiti” in Creole, is accorded by botanists the designation Thespesia populnea, thereby referencing through the Greek “thespesios” the fact that in the Hindu culture the Thespesia is a sacred tree. The botanical designation allows Stéhlé to recall that this tree “is always planted around the temples … and is the object of the greatest veneration,” whereas the Creole name effaces the memory of the Hindu immigrants whose practice gave the tree its scientific name.67
The point here is not to determine which terms—Creole or Greek, colloquial or botanical—remain closer to a Caribbean way of being, or which ones safeguard more surely the specificity of a landscape and its relation to the human. No doubt there are ways in which all languages preserve—and betray—the human histories and natural properties that inspired them. Taxonomies, like poetic languages, sometimes function according to rules of relation that have little to do with the need to reference an existential condition.68 It is possible, then, that no one language has a greater purchase than any other on the lived reality of an island. It is not clear that poetic speech (pace Heidegger) helps us “listen” to the “call” of the world any better than the taxonomic, systematizing, and rationalizing lexicons of the Enlightenment pursuit. In “Calendrier lagunaire,” Césaire demonstrates his understanding that the project of naming is indeed an ambiguous one, and that “recentering” through naming might be achieved—and frustrated—in a variety of ways. He therefore employs a multiplicity of strategies to direct his readers toward the particularity of Martinique. He evokes elements of the landscape with colloquial terms, such as “piton,” for instance. The “pis du piton le plus sec” would conjure forth for an inhabitant of the island its unique geoclimate: after the eruption of Mont Pelée, a rain shadow was formed on the northeastern flank, creating arid conditions on the western side, or a “piton le plus sec.” He also mobilizes arcane terms found in botanical treatises, such as the Arab-derived “cuscute” and the Norman-derived “caïeu.” He does so not merely to show off his considerable erudition but, more important, to signal an awareness of the complex layering of languages and perspectives that have participated in the making of Martinique.69 To the extent that Césaire uses names of local plants to evoke global forces—the traversing of Europe by Moors, the presence of Normans in the Caribbean—he practices what I would call, after Michael Davidson, a “critical regionalism.” Treating Martinique as center, not periphery, Césaire takes a “microscopic look at the resilient flora and fauna” to offer “not an isolationist’s remove from [global] events but a lens to see the impact of those events on a single area.”70 Anticipating the work of Édouard Glissant, Césaire underscores “the inextricable connection between the political and the natural landscape.”71 He exposes the global underpinnings of “local color.”
Each word Césaire uses promises either to conjure forth for the reader a precise element of the region’s landscape or to provide access to the colonial history of the region’s multiple occupations.72 But who is the ideal reader for Césaire? Who could possibly decipher all the allusions embedded in the names? Whose library would contain the scholarly tomes necessary to track down the meanings and origins of all his words?
In conclusion I would like to propose that decoding the hidden significance of the name is perhaps not the only, or even the most important, way in which that name allows readers to “inhabit” the Caribbean. Perhaps the name, even when the meaning and the context have been forgotten, does another kind of recentering work. If we return to the “Discours d’inauguration de la Rue Henri Stéhlé,” a text I have cited several times in passing, we find Césaire’s ultimate explanation for his fascination with exotic scientific lexicons and archaic terms. His comments are revealing, for they suggest that an interest in naming may have less to do with aiding our habitation in landscape than in facilitating our habitation in language as a kind of site in itself. In the “Discours d’inauguration,” after praising Stéhlé’s achievements, Césaire turns to his own personal response to the botanist who “helped us know ourselves better, to take the full measure of our humanity.”73 “I always thought that Stéhlé himself, Stéhlé the great savant, invited us to go beyond science,” writes Césaire; he had “a gift for being amazed” and was capable of “flights of lyricism.”74 Unable to “resist the pleasure of citing him,” Césaire then proceeds to enumerate some of Stéhlé’s more remarkable verbal performances:
… l’empâtement anfractueux et cloisonné de l’acomat-boucan …
… les contreforts digitiformes du gommier dacryodes …
… les racines aériennes (arc, échasses, béquilles) de telle clusiacée: la symphonia globulifera … 75
Need I translate these clotted, juicy, tongue-twisting lines? Or are we in contact here with something untranslatable and irreducible, something that has little to do with what these words might denote (the Caribbean flora and fauna) or what they might indirectly recall (the Caribbean past)? Could it be that Césaire is simply pleasuring in the sound of these words, in their percussive patterns rendered even more piquant by an awareness that they do in fact name something empirically real? Here, as elsewhere in his poetry, Césaire is exhibiting his gourmandise, his ability to savor the flavor not simply of spoken words but more precisely of the grapholect, words drawn from the repertoire of the written. His global vocabulary can be explained at least in part, then, by his taste for diversity in writing as well as diversity in the cultural and ethnic sphere. From this perspective, all terms are “necessary,” as Césaire concludes, “not gratuitous” insofar as they produce a soundscape, a verbal “mascaret,” a rushing roar. At the same time, though, the provenance of the words does matter; not any words, no matter how exotic, will do. They must still name “Martiniquan things” and they must do so with the words of the victims and the conquerors, the invaders and the migrants, following one after the other like waves.
It is this premonition that the poem contains a buried treasure in its soundscape that lends the poem its abyssal depth, its reverberating tone. Ultimately, the ideal reader is precisely the one who cannot fill in all the gaps, the reader for whom some lexical items remain empty strings of consonants and vowels. The title “Calendrier lagunaire” itself names a poem that would preserve an empty space, that would speak for the matter—the verbal matter, or the matter of blood—that can never thoroughly yield sense. Perhaps that is why Césaire thought that “Calendrier lagunaire” would be the appropriate poem to engrave on his tomb. Surrounded by more legible songs of mourning, it provides an appropriate language of absence, of letters and loss. It turns us toward that language of (potentially) empty letters as though toward a “formule magique” or “blessure sacrée.”
Césaire is thus succumbing to several impulses at once. He wants his names to be incantatory and indexical; they are meant to anchor his descriptions, to locate the speaker (and reader) at a specific spot on the globe. He also wants his names to be identifiable, even classifiable, as names; they should reference, in other words, the naming function, the circumstances of the act of naming. He selects names that tell a story of Empire, that reveal the intrusion of epistemologies, taxonomies, and discriminations coming from other shores. Finally, he multiplies the sites of obscurity in his poem, inviting us in this way to listen to the sound (and observe the shapes) of language in writing. The unyielding substance of his words provides an “espace inexploité” (“unexploited space”), serving as a block to full comprehension, forcing gaps and producing wounds. In the end, it is these wounds in the fabric of meaning that outline a place in which to dwell.
Here, lyric obscurity, as Daniel Tiffany has suggested, prefigures a community yet to come. One of the “manifold tasks of obscurity,” Tiffany writes, “is to found a community that recognizes itself in the necessity of creating a secret language.”76 In response to critics of Césaire’s hermetic exoticism one might reply: “Obscurity, rather than being the principal impediment to poetry’s social relevance, would provide the key to models of community derived specifically from the nature of lyric expression.”77 From this perspective, Césaire’s poem can be seen as an example of avant-garde mourning. It resists the temptation to define either the self or the community as linguistically, racially, or even geographically self-identical (“chaque minute je change d’appartement”), offering writing instead as the “espace inexploité” where the treasures of subjectivity may reside.