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

In the previous chapter, I suggested that Césaire was able to find a way to make his poetry matter—both in local and global contexts—despite the complexity of its figures and lexical content. “Calendrier lagunaire,” the poem inscribed on Césaire’s tomb, clearly has a meaning for the local population of Martinique, many of whose members regularly visit the grave. There exist, however, many interpretative communities for any given poem, each of which is based on a different assumption—for instance, that the poem contains a secret language available only to initiates (as Daniel Tiffany has suggested), or that it establishes an intimate relation between speaker and reader, paradoxically available to all. In the case of “Calendrier lagunaire,” the multiplicity of languages evoked and the quantity of connotative networks established seem to serve as solicitations to the reader; it is as though we were being invited to enter the poem to find our own space in which to dwell.

A number of the poem’s references may, however, always remain opaque. The language of Césaire’s poetry is rich enough to inspire a wide variety of interpretations, leading readers—as I suggested in chapters 5 and 6—toward far-flung contexts by circuitous routes. Some allusions may only be grasped by other inhabitants of the region, those who share Césaire’s landscape and who discern the rhythms of their speech in his writing or recognize a Creole proverb beneath (what appears to be) a hermetic metaphor. Yet other references in the poetry will be available uniquely to specialized scholars, those who are interested in tracing the derivations of Césaire’s words with etymological dictionaries in hand. When approached from a global perspective, a poem like “Calendrier lagunaire” seems to resonate in limitless ways. Examined through what Jessica Berman calls a “transnational optic,” it offers a revelation of the history not only of the Caribbean but also of the connection of non-Caribbeans to that history.¹ In words derived from Arabic or Norman, Greek or Arawak, we find the sedimented traces of multiple migrations, both forced and elective, that contribute to the lexical density of the poem—not to mention the cultural density of our present moment. Both as an inventory of local fauna and flora and as a register of successive invasions, expeditions, and colonial regimes, the poem can serve as the island’s memory, a verbal tomb in itself, encapsulating in fifty-four lines innumerable lives.

Literary critics often weight poetry with a mnemonic function, arguing that poetry accomplishes a cultural (even ethical) task when it commemorates important events, recalls through its meter a long national tradition, or draws attention to its language as a palimpsest of vernaculars and roots. Recently Laura Doyle has refreshed our notion of poetry as a form of cultural memory, observing as she presents a new paradigm for modernism studies that literature in general may “carry the intercultural accretions of empires past.”2 Some of these accretions, I have suggested, may be found embedded in lexemes; as “Calendrier lagunaire” makes evident, names (“dénominations”), once treated as historical objects, can index the various events that brought them to the region. Other accretions, it is worth noting, may be embedded in formal features; such is the case in the poems I have studied by Damas, poems like “Solde” or “Fragment” in which multiple traditions of poetic writing (or “rhetorical rhythms”) are referenced through prosodic and typographical features. Césaire and Damas make a particularly strong case for considering the poetic text as a heterogeneous surface, the result of accumulating and mutually informing cultural and linguistic elements. Negritude, as a movement born of multiple invasions and imperial histories (the French, British, Dutch) and migrations (Arawak, Carib, Tamil), is an exemplary “geomodernism,” Doyle’s term for a modern literature that responds to “transperipheral and international exchanges.”³ Negritude poems, like the works Doyle is discussing, may allow us—when viewed in the proper light—to reflect on “the long global history that has prepared their emergence.”⁴

Fed by tributaries from African, African American, Caribbean, and French traditions, Negritude authors “labor in the volatile space between or among contemporaneous empires.”⁵ Thus one of the (many) tasks of the reader of a Negritude poem is to grasp the history of the empire(s) that its languages and modes of fabrication may recall or “carry” (they “carry the intercultural accretions of empires past”⁶). To examine that freight is, on the part of the reader, to engage in a critical archeology, to sift through the author’s formal and lexical choices in search of the “long global history” these choices evoke. I would characterize this close attention to the marks on the page—the choice of the word but also its placement—as a variety of political work. If such attention helps to impede the erasure of imperial gestures, then the formal analysis of poetry leads us toward, not away from, the reality of the past.

But who, precisely, embeds the words in the poem that “carry the intercultural accretions of empires past”?⁷ Who is responsible for “carrying” that freight? Have we returned here to an account of writing as author-centered, an account in which an empirical subject makes conscious, intentional decisions that determine which words will be used to recall which “transperipheral and international exchanges”?⁸ Does the new modernist studies paradigm that Doyle advocates merely redirect the agency of the author from the project of self-expression (identified with the lyric) to the project of rememoration (identified now with the modernist text)?

The aesthetic subjectivity of the work is thus not equivalent to the “lyric I” who seems to speak in the poem; it is closer to the overall tone the reader thinks she hears when she reads. Aesthetic subjectivity is an entity far more vast than the localized empirical subject or author, who is traversed by forces of which she may be unaware. All writing is to some extent a form of ventriloquism, a lending of one’s voice to historical, technological, and psychic forces. To Adorno’s eyes, what makes a poem political is not so much its ostensive message, then, but the fact that it embeds deeper agencies in a way that can only be revealed by readers over time.

If we follow Adorno in distinguishing between the empirical person and the aesthetic subject, and between the intention of the author and the labor of craft, then we must be wary of any paradigm that neglects to consider the impact of craft-related decisions strictly internal to textual dynamics. The productive demands of the print media apparatus (the dispositif of the typosphere) as well as the sensual potentials of inscription—from graphemic and syllabic patterning to typographic layout, or mise en page—all impose their own restrictions and offer their own resources. The responsibility for what we judge to be the sedimented history or “intercultural accretions” embedded in the poem must be shared among three partners: the empirical author and her intentionality; the “ears” and “eyes” of the text, animated by a writer at a particular moment in the history of the genre and the medium; and the contemporary reader who lends the poem her own voice. Without an author there would be no writing, but without generic conventions, medium-specific restrictions, and readers in search of meanings, there would be no aesthetic subjectivity, no trace of history or technology—and thus: no poem at all.

“Although art in its innermost essence is a comportment,” writes Adorno, “it cannot be isolated from expression, and there is no expression without a subject.”10 Negritude, to be sure, begins with the subject. The “sphere” of the individual is ultimately the space that must be preserved if any freedom is to be won. As long as the particular individual remains excluded from the “universal”—that is, as long as being black, subaltern, diasporic, queer, or resistant means that one’s full rights are denied—then that particular individual becomes the bearer of society’s (un)truth: “in this age of universal social repression, the picture of freedom against society lives in the crushed, abused individual’s features alone.”¹¹ Or, in the words of Aesthetic Theory: “As long as the particular and the universal diverge there is no freedom. Rather, freedom would secure for the subject the right that today manifests itself exclusively in the idiosyncratic compulsions that artists must obey.”¹²

What Adorno means to say, I believe, is that writing—and creativity more generally—models a form of comportment that valorizes the “idiosyncratic compulsion,” the urge (or motivation) that fails to conform to whatever appears rational, predetermined, and normative in a given case. Recast in Nathaniel Mackey’s terms, we might say that writing reveals “the discrepancy between presumed norms and qualities of experience that such norms fail to accommodate.”¹³ It is these “qualities of experience” that the experimental poem attempts to voice not by describing them but by capturing their rhythm, their tone, with the means—inscriptive, typographic, syllabic, alphabetic—at hand.

The living subject does not have to disappear in this materialist account. Her implication in the aesthetic subjectivity of the artwork can still be assumed: “Whoever resists the overwhelming collective force in order to insist on the passage of art through the subject, need on no account at the same time think underneath the veil of subjectivism,” Adorno reassures us.¹⁴ It isn’t necessary, in other words, to fall back on the intentional fallacy, on the theory of an expressive lyric subject (“the veil of subjectivism”), to acknowledge that a living subject is indeed the agent that “comports” herself in an aesthetic manner. It is a living agent who passes the materials of art through her very being and thereby redirects them toward new functions. “Aesthetic autonomy”—Adorno might just as well have written “aesthetic subjectivity”—“encompasses what is collectively most advanced, what has escaped the spell.”¹⁵ Paradoxically, the poem captures what is most “advanced” or progressive in the collective means and technologies of the time in order to turn those means and technologies against that which is most mystified and regressive in the “overwhelming collective force,” the compulsion of the norm.¹⁶

In their own sphere (the sphere of the literary) and in their own way, the poems of Negritude bring to the fore what is most “advanced” about modernist print culture: its potential to articulate difference, to give voice to a “blackness” that is not the norm. Negritude, as Christopher Miller has suggested, may not be political or operational in the same way as overtly political organizations of the time were, but Negritude was political in its own way—a point that may require clarification. The militant syndicalist organizations that Miller champions, such as the Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre (CDRN, founded by Lamine Senghor a few years before Césaire and Damas arrived in Paris), were certainly less poetic and more direct in their anti-imperialist demands.17 The CDRN may very well have produced more measurable effects during the interwar period than the publications of Negritude writers, no matter how radical they seemed in the literary context. Miller has gone so far as to state that the advent of Negritude spelled “the demise of radicalism,” consigning to oblivion “a generation of far more radical thinkers and activists.”¹⁸ Certainly, Negritude was not the only black movement in France to advance a protest against imperialism, and authors like Miller and Philippe Dewitte have helped us to situate Negritude’s political intervention within the broader spectrum to which the CDRN belonged.¹⁹ Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that poetry circulates in a realm distinct from that of a newspaper or official party organ. That is, the discursive and mediological register in which activists like Lamine Senghor expressed themselves is quite different from that of Léon Damas’s Pigments, Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, or Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Hostie noire. As opposed to the protest declared in a news organ, the poetry volume draws attention to its own language and even to the medium (the printed word) in which that language is disseminated.²⁰ Miller bases his contention that the CDRN was a more radical expression of black revolt on his observation that the discourse of La Voix des Nègres is less diluted by complex imagery and intertextual associations. It is the “lack of literary pretension” on the part of Lamine (a distant cousin of Léopold Sédar), Miller contends, that made his “radical critique of France” possible: “writers who were less elite and less aesthetically sophisticated were less indebted to the French system.”²¹

The year 1998 was a turning point for francophone postcolonial studies: it was the year in which Miller’s highly influential Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone Literature and Culture and J. Michael Dash’s equally influential The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context both appeared. While it would be an overstatement to say that these two works alone altered our protocols of reading, it is clear that they helped produce a sea change, leading us further away from formalist and deconstructive styles of reading toward what many consider to be more contextualized, historical, and ethnographic modes. One effect of this sea change is that the locus of the political has been situated more frequently in narrative than poetic texts. In this book, I have not tried to turn back the clock, to return to modes of reading that may have tended to neglect historical context; rather, I have sought to question where that historical context should be located. I have developed strategies of reading that combine close analysis of the written text with biographical and historical scholarship. The category of the “aesthetic subject” has been deployed to preserve a distinction between the living author (and the collective he claims to represent) and the lyric “I” who claims responsibility for the language of the poem. I believe this distinction to be fundamental to critical work.

The reason I find most current accounts of Negritude (as “universalizing,” “elitist,” or colonial²⁴) to be profoundly inaccurate is that I was first exposed to Negritude at the tail end of the period we call “the ‘60s,” when poetry was the genre most closely associated with the impulse of emancipation. That is, the reception conditions that framed my first reading prepared me to interpret Negritude as a militant movement and the Cahier as a militant work. In 1976 my high school English teacher, Frank Banton, presciently assigned the senior class Césaire’s Cahier in the important—and inflammatory—1969 English translation. The translators, John Berger and Anna Bostock, had rebaptized the volume Return to My Native Land, thereby suppressing the vital term “Notebook.”²⁵ This edition contains a fiery preface by Mazisi Kunene, the South African poet who published both in Zulu and English. At the time, Kunene was a representative for the African National Congress, living in exile from South Africa and agitating against apartheid. A preface by Kunene would have placed Césaire squarely at the center of the most militant struggles against colonial oppression abroad and racist discrimination at home. The fact that Kunene makes no allusion to the Cahier’s original composition in French shows that it was taken for granted by the 1960s generation that publishing in colonial languages was an astute strategic move, necessary for the global transmission of a local (but shared) message.²⁶

I remember that what struck me most about Kunene’s preface—and colored my first experience of the poem—was his discussion of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (published in 1967). Kunene brought Césaire’s work into comparison with Cleaver’s on the grounds that both were mobilizing violence in a homeopathic manner, attempting to turn the violence of colonialism against the colonizer himself. This was the period when the Black Panthers, inspired in part by that famously faulty 1967 English translation of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, were gaining momentum for their overtly combative alternative to the ethos of Martin Luther King Jr. Black Nationalists like Cleaver advocated violence as a privileged means of activism while simultaneously promoting a cultural politics that invested heavily in the poetic genre. In Soul on Ice, Cleaver, the “minister of information” for the Black Panthers, speaks admiringly of Césaire as “the big gun from Martinique.”27 Defending the poet against the condescension shown to him by James Baldwin at the Congrès des écrivains et artistes noir (held in Paris in September of 1956), Cleaver writes that Césaire had “penetrated into the heart of the great wilderness which was Europe and stolen the sacred fire … that fire … burns.”²⁸ An ambiguous literary figure, Cleaver had helped organize the Black House in San Francisco with poets Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez during the late 1960s. Baraka, like Césaire and Cleaver, also held poetry in high esteem; experimental writing in general appeared to sustain the negativity of an anger directed against white cultural and political institutions alike. Before his arrest for carrying an illegal weapon in 1968, Baraka (LeRoi Jones until 1968) had formed the Umbra Poets Workshop along with Lorenzo Thomas and Ishmael Reed. Even as he represented one of the most militant strands of Marxist antiracism, Baraka read alongside poets like Larry Neal and Jay Wright at the St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project, founded by Paul Blackburn in 1966.

Although I was too young to participate directly in this world, I felt its impact throughout the 1970s. The bookstores on 8th Street were full of slender volumes by Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, and June Jordan. Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf was enjoying its first production as an off-Broadway play (1975). I learned subsequently that Shange herself had studied Negritude; she even wrote a paper titled “Negritude in Senghor, Césaire, & Damas” while completing her master’s degree at the University of Southern California. (It apparently ended up in Damas’s own hands.) This unpublished paper, which can be found in the Damas archives of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, captures the tenor of the time. Shange analyzes the poetry with sensitivity to alliteration and assonance (sometimes quoting the original French—which current scholars rarely do), arguing that Negritude was “essential to the development of black consciousness” because it praised the beauty of African culture while justifying the stirrings of black revolt.²⁹ When Shange was introduced to Negritude poetry in school, it was considered to be part of a violent yet literate reaction against racism, discrimination, segregation, and white supremacy.

While arguably not as militant as the members of the CDRN and the journalists of La Voix des Nègres, the Negritude poets clearly had a political impact that went well beyond the French readership of the 1930s and well beyond the walls of the academy. The Cahier did not on its own incite colonial subjects to revolt (although it was credited with stoking the fires of the African independence movements of the 1960s).31 In essence, Negritude poetry accomplished that not-so-subtle work we used to call “consciousness raising.” Thus, it could be said that Negritude constituted a “politics” in precisely the terms proposed by Jacques Rancière: the poetry of Negritude ushered in a new “distribution of the sensible” insofar as it permitted subaltern subjects, the offspring of slaves, to be “heard as speaking subjects.” Negritude made “what was unseen visible” and “what was audible as mere noise heard as speech.”³² In short, Negritude allowed black poets to be full participants in what Rancière has called the “aesthetic regime.” This “aesthetic regime” is a lyric regime, and the poetry of Negritude establishes itself solidly as a text-based (rather than oral) movement. Negritude poets not only adopted typographic innovations introduced by other writers; they also developed their own way of harnessing the resistant force that the printed word harbors in its material being. The poets of Negritude in this sense raced textuality. They drew on the complex specificities of their racialization under modern capitalism to exert pressure on thematic, lexical prosodic, typographical, and rhetorical norms.³³

Poetry in print offers a plethora of ways to subvert norms of reading and interpretation. For this reason, it offers a support that is arguably more adequate than traditional narrative genres for engendering multiple enunciations of the “I,” instantiations of subjectivity in writing that invite constant re-enunciation. Whereas all texts require “positioned” readings (we always read from some site), poems, especially experimental poems, suggest by their very hermeticism, complexity, and exuberant language use that each position we take, each meaning we find, each interpretation we develop is no more than a “contingent ‘ending’,” a “temporary ‘break,’” “the ‘cut’ of identity.”34 There is always something left unopened, a gap in our interpretation. “There is always something ‘left over’,” as Stuart Hall remarks.³⁵ If a poem is like a person, then the aesthetic subjectivity of the poem is that person unbound. The “‘cut’ of identity” is one we make whenever we take a stand or make a reading. However, the richer the language of the poem—the more fully it explores its typographic, lexical, rhetorical, and phonic resources—the more likely it is to ambiguate and thus multiply its meanings and complicate the “identity” suggested by the poem’s “I.” In this light, the Negritude poem offers the promise of an identity that can be performed but will never resolve into essence, the promise of an identity that acts like a resistant force of “materiality as it plays itself out in/as the work of art.”³⁶