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

This book is a study of Negritude as an experimental, text-based poetic movement developed by diasporic authors of African descent during the interwar period in France through the means of modernist print culture. Each term in this description matters—“experimental,” “poetic,” “diasporic,” and “modernist”—but perhaps none more than “text-based,” since this is the aspect of Negritude that has been most frequently neglected and misunderstood. By “text-based” I mean a writing practice embedded in and determined by both the formal conditions of the print medium (spatial and typographic) and the practical entailments of modernist print media (selecting, editing, and publishing for a largely French audience). The Negritude poets—Léon-Gontran Damas (from French Guiana), Aimé Césaire (from Martinique), and Léopold Sédar Senghor (from Senegal)—deliberately wrote poems that explore the possibilities inherent to the printed textual support. The genres they chose to write in, the modes of address they employed, the rhythmic structures they adapted, and even the lexicon they enlarged were givens of the “typosphere,” that uniquely modern (post-Gutenberg) world in which paper and typeface are the matter of words.¹ While several critics have read Negritude poetry as dramatizing a “crisis of the subject” torn by the negativity of a historical predicament, none has sufficiently explored the part of that crisis caused by the act of writing for print.²

This is not to say that Damas, Césaire, and Senghor merely inherited traditional French poetic conventions or extended preexisting avant-garde strategies; far from it. The poets of Negritude intervened in the history of written poetry in original and generative ways, some of which, as I hope to show, should revise our approach to that history. Yet by the very act of circulating their works first in “tapuscript” (the typescript submitted to editors), then on the pages of small reviews, and later in published collections, these poets submitted to a set of conditions identical to those that reign over all authors of published poems. The Negritude poets would be read by readers of many varieties and tendencies, some of whom might not constitute the public they sought to address. Further, their poems would be interpreted by generations of professional critics according to a host of evolving paradigms that might in turn lyricize, historicize, decontextualize, depersonalize, universalize, or racialize the speaker (as well as the author) of the poem. In short, poets of Negritude are subjects of an “aesthetic regime” in Jacques Rancière’s sense: they are born into a culture that threatens to bury the living author under the disembodied architecture of his printed words.3

Accordingly, Negritude poets are just as concerned as other poets of the modernist period with the textual instantiation of their subjective “voice”—perhaps even more so, since they are attempting to address and bolster a diasporic community by textual means. Deeply invested in communicating a shared empirical experience, these writers find that the question of mediation—how expression is modified by textuality, how voice is performatively produced in print—cannot be avoided. Indeed, in their work, the question of mediation assumes particular urgency. Although Damas claims to have destroyed his early verses inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé in order to compose the fiercely direct Pigments (1937), Mallarméan concerns with the typographic instantiation of his poems are never far away from his own compositional and editorial practices. Césaire also experiments with mise en page, versification, and typography in ways that have hardly been assessed. Even Senghor, a less daring poet than the other two, sometimes takes on a typographical tone that evokes the experimental verse structures of Guillaume Apollinaire. All three understand the writing subject—as embodied in modernist print culture—to be far more than a mere inscription, yet something other than an author who directly and unproblematically speaks his own mind.

Insofar as the poets of Negritude are published writers, they express themselves neither in uniquely oral forms nor—despite what many critics have said—through the rhythms of musical genres. They participate in—and alter—a very specific literary culture, that of the European print lyric, and this culture constitutes an evolving field of rhetorical, generic, and technological possibilities that impose historically specific demands on writers of poetry.4 These demands transform a personal voice into a hybrid entity, a set of marks on the page that can be phenomenalized, given sensual and cognitive form in the mouth and mind of a reader. Theodor Adorno named this peculiarly textual entity an “aesthetic subjectivity,” a creation of craft that is neither entirely coincident with the poet’s empirical self nor an overdetermined result of the medium.⁵ An “aesthetic subjectivity” is necessarily disembodied (or, rather, it is embodied as print); it is the source from which the poem seems to be emitted, a subjectivity “suspended, lyrically, in place and time.”⁶ No matter how closely readers and critics may identify this aesthetic subjectivity, or lyric “I,” with the empirical person of the author (and such an identification has characterized readings of Negritude poetry for many years), it is not logically coherent to treat a poem circulated by the means of modernist print culture as if it were unconditioned by a history of typographic, prosodic, and generic conventions that necessarily modify, even as they transmit, the expressive impulses of the author concerned. Negritude writers as well as their readers operate within what might be called a “lyric regime,” a historical epoch dating from the Romantic period onward during which printed poems with first-person speakers generate peculiar problems for reception and interpretation.

As I will argue in greater detail throughout this book, Negritude writers present a challenge to both form-based (deconstructive) theories and identity-based theories of poetic representation. On the one hand, they insist on the “blackness” of their writing—that is, they express a desire for their poems to be identified by readers as having been written by black writers (although “black” is defined differently by each).7 To this extent, they affirm the continuity of the author with the poem’s speaker. Yet, on the other, they develop a highly idiosyncratic style nurtured not only by regional or native languages but also by the combinatory possibilities of modernist print, a historically specific written idiom that they share with other text-based poets, most of whom have no direct link to Africa or the Caribbean. Césaire may claim, for instance, that he racializes written French (“I have always striven to create a new language, one capable of communicating the African heritage”⁸), but it remains the case that the medium he used is a disembodied one, and that, accordingly, his blackness must be conveyed through textual rhythms, rhetorical figures, and a subject position that is performative as well as constative, animated by a reader (of whatever color, age, gender, or class) while reflective of a concrete historical being. Although it is often taken for granted that Césaire “speaks” in his poems, this speaking takes place in the form of marks in space, a circumstance of which the Martiniquan poet is well aware and to which he repeatedly draws our attention.⁹ Negritude poets in general tend to thematize the mediation of writing, most likely because mediation, or distance from one’s public or one’s fellow citizens, is a source of anguish and regret.

Studying the reception conditions of nineteenth-century French—rather than twentieth-century francophone—poetry, Jacques Rancière has maintained that the disembodiment resulting from typographical remediation has the effect in general of attenuating the author’s connection to a living public.10 By virtue of the fact that Césaire, Senghor, and Damas are writers (members of the typosphere, and thus by definition “modernist”), they risk losing a connection to the very community they claim to speak for or long to represent. They are unable to enjoy, in other words, what Rancière calls “the immediacy of the ethical regime,” a state of total communion between audience and speaker putatively available to preliterate communities in which “all bodies directly embody the sense of the common.”¹¹ Rancière’s allusion to embodiment (“all bodies directly embody the sense of the common”) is highly pertinent to the case of Negritude poetry in which references to the body—as well as communion—abound. (One need merely recall the Noël episode in the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal; or “Solde,” Damas’s famous poem on mimicry and embodiment; or Senghor’s evocation of shared song in “Que m’accompagnent kôras et balafong.”) In the Western imaginary that Rancière evokes, communion is associated with the presence of multiple bodies in a single space while embodied expressive practices such as dancing and chanting are the forms in which such communion takes place. Not surprisingly, dancing and chanting are also the figures Negritude poets evoke as analogies for their own writing, while the speaker’s body is the site upon which the drama of communion is played out. It is no accident that each of the three major poets of Negritude gravitates toward a performance genre as a model for poetic practice: Césaire hesitates between lyric and dramatic forms; Damas shapes his lines around calypso and the blues; and Senghor imagines live instrumental accompaniment for the recitation of his verses. Paradoxically, though, live performance is often associated in their works with performing—that is, with stylizing the self for an audience or even impersonating what one is not.

The more skeptical among us may suspect that the state of ethical communion, the mass embodiment of a shared understanding, that Rancière describes (and to which, at moments, our poets seem to aspire) never actually existed or could exist. The fantasy of a perfect Greek demos, or a homogeneous ritual community, is, after all, a topos of the French and German philosophical tradition.¹² Still, Rancière’s distinction between typosphere and orasphere—or a modern print society and a premodernist oral one—does bear some weight. As Édouard Glissant observes in L’intention poétique, the physical proximity created by a circle of spectators grouped around an oral poet produces a unique experience of intimacy, one that is not available to readers of the printed word (who enjoy a different variety of intimacy, as we shall see). According to Glissant, the organ of print produces an alternative “orality,” one in which a displaced “voice” is “multiplied throughout the world.”¹³ This voice is animated by readers far beyond the range of the writer’s own vocal apparatus; it is thus primarily the eye that sounds what Rancière eloquently terms a “parole muette.” And yet it is important to note that the link between reading and hearing, the poet’s body and that of his reader, is not entirely severed despite the intervention of print. The reading eye is connected to a sonorous body, just as the print on the page bears testimony to the embodied existence of a writer in time. Recalling that embodiment, even if—or more strongly, because—it has been remediated—is an important element of the practice of reading as cognition, or at least an important element for our purposes insofar as it is one upon which Negritude writers implicitly rely. Much of their innovative practice is born of a desire to render printed words percussive and palpable, to make the text into a cavity that resonates where the author’s voice cannot. While this is true to some extent for all poets, the desire to make the text resonate with a physical presence takes on a particular pathos—and political valence—in the case of Negritude.

The first understanding is shared by lyric theorists invested in the possibility—no matter how slim—of subjective expression, those who believe that a real voice, real emotions, and real intentions lie behind and can be discerned in the words on the page. In the field of comparative poetics, Susan Stewart has offered the most recent and, I believe, most compelling case for considering the lyric poem as at once an act of intersubjective communication and a highly formal affair.16 Similar to other theorists who have reacted against the hypostatization of literary language (or the “personification” of the text), Stewart reinvokes “voice” as a salient category, arguing that the lyric relation—in which an embodied reader confronts an alphabetic “I”—should be treated as a “face-to-face encounter” and that poetry (hardly a “mute word”) may be “encountered with and through our entire sensuous being.”¹⁷ Likewise, Jahan Ramazani, in A Transnational Poetics, keeps “one eye on poetry’s luminous singularities and the other on global flows and circuits” with the presumption that the poem conveys the (“transnational”) experience of a situated author to a reader able to feel between the lines.¹⁸

In France a parallel development has occurred in the area of poetry criticism. The linguistic-deconstructive turn of the 1960s and 1970s perhaps inevitably ushered in a “return” to the “lyric,” a genre that represented to many poets and poetry scholars something other than a failed or diverted communication (or a field of unauthored signifying play). Over the past thirty years, French poetry studies has become an immensely rich field (although it remains practically unknown to poetry scholars in the American academy and receives scant attention from scholars of francophone literature). Rather than attempt to summarize that field here, I will instead evoke a few relevant points concerning the nature of the first-person, subject-centered poem that have been made in the course of what might be called “the lyric wars” of the past decades. Defining the “lyric” in ways that should resonate with the qualities of the poetry we will be studying in this book, proponents of the nouveau lyrisme identify the lyric genre with a specific form of enunciation (the first person); a specific way of organizing words on a page (in verses or versets of whatever length); and a specific type of rhetorical content (most often comparison, metaphor, and prosopopeia). The French critic Laurent Jenny, much like Stewart, has suggested in his rehearsal of recent debates in France that the lyric poem is consistently defined as “an act of communication between the poet and his reader.”19 But the assumption here—not just that the “poet” is male but also that “he” speaks in the lyric poem—may be understood in a variety of ways. The “I” in the poem may be read as the “autobiographical I,” the “figure of the empirical author”; as the poet engaged in articulating the self’s “alterity,” its difference from that empirical identity; or as a universal or general subject, a “nous inclusif” (an inclusive we).²⁰ Reluctant to jettison the cogent critique of authorial intention (and lyric expressivity) advanced in the latter half of the twentieth century, proponents of the nouveau lyrisme nonetheless tend to cling to the notion of “voice.” Extending a voice in print represents for these critics an ethical gesture; print promises phatic contact. To write “I,” then, is implicitly to search for relation, even across the barrier of the page.

Approaching the issue of authorial voice from a different angle, recent work in francophone postcolonial studies has also tended to reject the most extreme of deconstruction’s formulations (the “death of the author”), indicating instead the ways in which the poem’s speaker remains proximate to an empirical person or, in some cases, an ethnic collective, regional population, or language group. Scholars focusing on the francophone world have accomplished a good deal: they have opened up the canon; questioned the putative universality of “theory”; and shifted the frame from national literatures to regional networks. However, one thing they have not done is present a compelling poetics, a theory and method for reading poems. (Conversely, French poetry criticism has neglected to provide a poetics of the raced lyric subject.) What remains to be explored is the impact of racial identification on lyric production and the impact of modernist textuality on the representation of race.21 Negritude authors demand that we attend to many contexts at once (colonialism and modernism; the Black Atlantic and the Parisian avant-garde; racial identity and the lyric construction of the self) while never letting our eyes stray from the page. To do their work justice, we must integrate a wide variety of approaches, some of which might seem incompatible at first. As Simon Gikandi has cogently argued, Caribbean writers respond to conditions utterly different from those encountered by their Anglo-European modernist peers, practicing a “contramodernity” that forces us to redefine what modernity in literature might be.²² Yet it is also clear that Caribbean writers are full-fledged members of the typosphere, and that, accordingly, they confront as a primary condition of authorship their engagement in a print culture shared—in real material terms—with their Anglo-European modernist peers. By placing critics of the lyric in conversation with theorists of the Black Atlantic, and by juxtaposing scholarship on transnational (or “global”) modernism with scholarship on French poetry, I hope to contribute to a more robust account of how poetics and politics, word craft and representation, intertwine.

Negritude poets wrote and published in French, and this fact allowed them to participate in a print culture that arguably dominated all others throughout the Western world. As Pascale Casanova has pointed out, “each author is ineluctably situated first in the global field of literary production according to the position that that author’s own national literary space occupies within it”—and for Casanova, a national literary space, like a nation, is based on a common national language.²³ “That is why,” she continues, “when we seek to characterize a writer, we must situate him twice over: according to the position his national literature holds within the global literary universe, and according to the position which the author occupies within that national literature.”²⁴ Casanova’s observation suggests that by writing in French, the Negritude poets were immediately able to assume a prominent place in the global literary field of their time—simply by virtue of writing in French—even if their status within their own national literature was precarious. This is not to say that they chose French solely in order to propel themselves into the literary limelight (although professional preoccupations would naturally play a part in any writer’s decision). Rather, given their choice of métier, writing in French would have presented itself as inevitable since French was the language (among those available to them) with the most developed tradition of poetry in print.

All this seems fairly logical, and yet the choice of French was also ideologically charged in a way that Casanova’s treatment tends to neglect. It may have been clear to Césaire, Damas, and Senghor that to write for print necessitated that one write in French, but that has not stopped them from being the target of reproach. The allegation that Negritude poets failed their people by writing in French has plagued their reception for decades; consequently, it is worth spending a moment on this prickly but fundamental issue before moving on. Why, indeed, did Negritude poets choose to write not just in French but in an impeccable French? Although they attacked French colonialism and its policy of cultural assimilation, they did not fundamentally deform the language of colonial rule.25 Despite Césaire’s claim to have “inflected” French (or to have “cannibalized” it), his poetry exhibits both a respect for and a mastery over the most complex grammatical forms and erudite vocabularies imaginable.²⁶ Not only Césaire but also Senghor, Damas, and Negritude’s successor, Édouard Glissant, all write in an impeccably elegant French only occasionally enriched by Creole words or Serer-inspired turns of phrase. As opposed to writers such as the Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o or, closer to home, the Martiniquan poet and novelist Raphaël Confiant, the Negritude poets never—even at the end of their careers—published works in the languages exclusive to their respective regions.

Arguably, the first great work of literature to emerge from a French colony (or an overseas department) could have been written in Creole; it could have advocated for a national (rather than a racial) identity; and it could have focused on regional themes. Instead, the first great work was in French; it advanced a Pan-African black (“nègre”) identity; and it focused on transcontinental connections. Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal defines its “original geography” as “la carte du monde” (the map of the world); it measures solidarity “au compas de la souffrance” (with the compass of suffering); and it unfolds its complex imagery in a beautifully modulated lyric language. In a lucid rendering, F. Abiole Irele indicates why this might have been so:

As Irele points out, the idea of Africa as a unifying concept was an invention of the diaspora belying the fact that, over those three hundred years, both Africa and the populations displaced from Africa had undergone further creolization and individuation, bringing into being communities as diverse (and culturally rich) as they were similar (rooted in a shared past of slavery and colonial rule).28 However, the post–World War I generation—the first to gain access to the resources of modernist print culture—clearly needed to privilege general affinities (rather than underscore regional particularities) for political reasons. Recent studies by Brent Hayes Edwards and Gary Wilder have confirmed that the dominant preoccupation of francophone and anglophone blacks during the interwar period (and until well into the mid-1960s) was coalition building, the weaving together of diverse orientations as opposed to the aggressive furthering of a single one.²⁹ Among diasporic and African blacks, a cultural politics—that is, the belief that cultural practices can have political consequences—very decidedly existed, giving birth to numerous reviews, presses, and colloquia that changed the face of modernism and modernity (and that continue to inform the existential conditions of millions today).³⁰ Negritude authors understood clearly that the most lasting impact they could have was to follow the path forged by Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and Jacques Roumain, respected diasporic writers who published in English or French in an attempt to reach out to a Pan-African (rather than regional) audience.³¹ Indifferent to this context, the Créolistes famously accused Césaire, in particular, of having failed to contribute to the creation of a “littérature créole d’expression créole.”³² It is true, he did not (and neither did Damas); but the accusation should strike one as anachronistic, given that the only author publishing poetry in Martiniquan Creole at the time (before it was called “Kreyol”), Gilbert Gratiant, was obliged to invent a written form to address regional themes, a practice that was hardly congruent with either the Pan-African political agenda or the aesthetic project of Negritude writers.³³

As aspiring writers, the choice of French was clear. The question remains, however, why they chose to write at all—that is, why they elected to bend their verbal skills to the production of literature rather than orature. The answer, of course, has a great deal to do with the educational policy of the French colonial administration and the conviction that educators sought to impress upon colonial subjects (as well as the black citizens of the four Communes of Senegal) that literacy was, as Frantz Fanon put it, “the key able to open doors which, fifty years earlier, forbade access.”34 As is well known, the elementary and middle schools in the French Antilles and French Africa promulgated a hierarchy that valued writing over oral performance; French over local languages; and—last but not least—poetry over prose. This hierarchy would have inevitably predisposed the Negritude poets to make the choices they made. It might even be an exaggeration to call these “choices,” given that obtaining social distinction (and therefore the power to determine one’s own life) depended largely on accepting the terms of this cultural hierarchy as they were imposed from without.

In Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has provided a sensitive account of colonial educational conditions as they existed in British-controlled Kenya. Although Ngũgĩ writes with the British colonial system in view, his description illuminates the situation of French colonial subjects quite well. Ngũgĩ makes several points pertinent to the cases of Césaire, Damas, and Senghor.³⁵ He observes, for instance, that in the colonial environment, language choice takes on a highly charged symbolic significance. Mastery of the local language—or even of several local languages—does not count as symbolic capital, whereas an ability to manipulate the language of the colonizer is a mark of superior cognitive skills, promising successful assimilation into the imposed culture.³⁶ As Ngũgĩ notes, the colonial language policy is part of a larger campaign to belittle the local/regional culture and thus to discourage resistance: “The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance (of the oppressed and exploited) is the cultural bomb,” he writes. “The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.”³⁷ What makes it so difficult to eradicate this campaign against the indigenous culture, he adds, is that the colonial administration mobilizes the intellectual class to perpetuate the “annihilation” of the people’s belief in themselves. Convinced that English (or French) is the superior, more literary language, indigenous writers publish in that language and thus implicitly fortify its symbolic value, enriching the tradition of the colonial culture and impoverishing their own.

Léopold Senghor could be accused of falling into precisely the trap Ngũgĩ describes. Famously, the Senegalese poet privileged French over Serer and Wolof, circulating the notion that African languages were not up to the task of articulating complex concepts: “Emotion is Negro [nègre], as reason is Greek [hellène],” his motto goes.³⁸ When asked point blank in 1954 why he wrote in French, he formulated this response:

What is surprising here is not so much that Senghor considers French the language of diplomacy and good citizenship (“de gentillesse et d’honnêteté”), or even that he disparages maternal languages for lacking abstract, philosophical terms. These are sentiments typical of the time. Rather, the odd thing is that Senghor seems to believe the French language capable of articulating everything, not just the timbre of the organ but also the beat of the “tom-tom.” However, this is not a position Senghor maintained earlier. In “Le problème culturel en A.O.F.,” a speech given in 1937, the year Damas’s Pigments was published, Senghor states that French is in fact not capable of communicating all the soundscapes and experiences to which a colonial subject is exposed: “There is a certain flavor, a certain scent, accent, and dark timbre [timbre noir] inexpressible by means of European instruments.”⁴⁰ Anticipating Ngũgĩ, he advocates the composition of poems, “contes,” and dramas in the indigenous African languages but stops short of according orature the same status as the written word.

Senghor’s attitude in 1937 was, for the most part, shared by Césaire and Damas. That is, the young Senghor, only a few years after his arrival from Dakar, still experienced conflicts between his African upbringing and his Parisian education, the “dark timbre” of Serer and the “great organ” of French. If we are to credit the sentiments his persona expresses in early poems such as “In Memoriam,” “Neige sur Paris” (Snow in Paris), “Aux tirailleurs Sénégalais morts pour la France” (To the Senegalese soldiers who died for France), and “Je suis seul” (I am alone), the young Senghor felt both anger and alienation as he tried to come to terms with French culture and his place within it. “Seigneur,” he writes in “Neige sur Paris,” “je ne sortirai pas ma réserve de haine, je le sais, pour les diplomates qui montrent leurs canines longues / Et qui demain troqueront la chair noire” (Lord, I know I’ll never release this reserve of hatred / For diplomats who show their long canine teeth / And tomorrow trade in black flesh).41 His later embrace of universalism, as well as his association of French with that universalism (due to its supposedly superior capacity to express all “timbres”), appears somewhat at odds with his frequently stated desire to “baign[er] dans une présence africaine” (bathe in an African presence) (in his poem “Intérieur”).⁴² In fact, at times Senghor could be very clear that unique aspects of his homeland could not be seized by the French language. For instance, he added a “lexique,” or glossary, to the Seuil edition of his Oeuvre poétique, noting that African words appeared in his poems not to “faire de l’exotisme pour l’exotisme” (to be exotic for the sake of being exotic) but rather to be accurate: the African words simply could not be replaced by French ones. “I will add that I write, first of all, for my people. And my people know that a kôra is not a harp any more than a balafon is a piano.”⁴³ Senghor’s own practice thus contradicts the statements he made (perhaps for a largely French audience) in 1954; indeed, of all Negritude poets, Senghor had the most reason to distrust the claim that French is a “universal” language, having been raised, like Ngũgĩ, in a community rich with local customs, religions, and languages possessing highly developed vehicles of artistic expression.

More than thirty years before the publication of Decolonising the Mind—but in the context of a different colonial history—Frantz Fanon had already pointed out that the acquisition of the colonizer’s language could have pathological consequences. In the first chapter of Peau noire, masques blancs, titled “Le Noir et le langage,” Fanon maintains that speaking the language of the colonizer entails far more than mastering a different grammar; it entails “assuming a culture, bearing the weight of a civilization.”44 Not only the black Antillean, he says, but “all colonized peoples” suffer from a kind of “entombment” of their original culture—”la mise au tombeau de l’originalité culturelle locale.”⁴⁵ Yet the case of the black Antillean is somewhat different from that of the African, Fanon nuances; whereas the African who speaks Wolof or Peuhl may acknowledge the existence of “works” (“de véritables ouvrages”)⁴⁶—and Fanon does not specify whether these “works” are oral or written, musical or verbal—in these native languages, the Antillean is taught to believe that nothing substantial has ever been created in Creole, that the “patois” belongs to no culture (and certainly no civilization). For Fanon, this is a more severe version of the colonial pathology Ngũgĩ describes, involving as it does a denial of the existence (rather than a subordination) of any creative activity not conducted in French.

If Fanon is representing in “Le Noir et le langage” a general attitude, one shared by the educated elite of Césaire’s and Damas’s generation, then it is easy to see why their meeting with Senghor was so critical to the development of Negritude. At the very least, as a Sénégalais, Senghor had access to “works” other than those written in French; he could share with the Antilleans his pride in things African even if he could not turn them toward the culture they—as Antilleans—already had. It is no wonder, then, given Fanon’s account, that the two diasporic writers sought legitimation in African roots rather than an Antillean past, for this past provided (they thought) no previous examples of “works” in the medium they valued.⁴⁷

There is perhaps no need to belabor the point, for Césaire has repeatedly made it himself. Yet there is one last element of the situation worth recalling. In his diagnosis of the blacks’ relation to language, Fanon alludes to the tendency of colonial writers to write in an exaggeratedly elaborate French: “We often find that Antillians, when entering the upper echelons we’ve been describing, tend to search out linguistic subtleties, rare words [des subtilités, des raretés du langage]; these are so many ways of proving themselves adequate.”48 Fanon is obviously thinking of Césaire here, a poet whose attraction to le mot rare has been noted by many. Jean-Jacques Thomas, for instance, has suggested along the same lines that recourse to an erudite vocabulary was Césaire’s way to prove himself a better master of the French language than the French master himself. I believe, however, that there is a good deal more involved. All the explanations that have been offered for the adoption of French—from Senghor’s contention that French offers “abstractions” where “maternal” languages do not, to Ngũgĩ’s and Fanon’s contention that using French is a symptom of colonial oppression—implicitly define the indigenous, maternal, or Creole language as a more immediate, accurate, and intimate vehicle for lived experience. For Senghor, the indigenous languages of Africa have a “halo of sap and blood”; they are languages consecrated by flesh, capable of relaying embodied experience. Likewise, for Fanon, the Martiniquan “Umwelt” is more readily accessible when shared in Creole.⁴⁹ From their perspective, the search for “des subtilités, des raretés du langage” can have nothing to do with the expressive potential of these “raretés.”⁵⁰ Rather, for them, an author’s verbal pyrotechnics must be a sign of his colonial subjection, his desire to prove that he is “adequate” to the foreign culture he bears.

But what if the “raretés du langage” introduced by the poet are valued precisely because they are not part of the everyday, supposedly more immediate discourse? Without displacing Ngũgĩ’s and Fanon’s accounts—which clearly possess explanatory power and historical pertinence—I still hope to qualify them, for it seems to me that the dichotomy they maintain between original and imposed, immediate and alienating, may not be entirely adequate to the writer’s experience of colonial bilingualism. It is with this in mind that I want to return to Ngũgĩ’s biographical narrative of language acquisition in Kenya—and to his general claims concerning the native language—before moving on to the case of Césaire in particular.

Although describing different contexts, Fanon and Ngũgĩ both provide insight into the psychic schism created by early exposure to two linguistic lifeworlds. Fanon is relatively silent on the issue of childhood and maternal language acquisition, but Ngũgĩ makes clear that the division between the two linguistic spheres corresponds to the division between two spaces: the domestic and the institutional. So strict are the boundaries between linguistic worlds that each one becomes a distinct epistemology, a way of knowing, a conduit to—and an index of—a specific order of psychic experience. In an autobiographical moment, Ngũgĩ describes this epistemological predicament, one brought on by the system of imposed (and hierarchical) bilingualism. I summarize his account below because it illustrates perfectly an assumption shared by many critics and writers, namely, that a colonial subject’s apprehension of the world is not only divided between two languages but also between two levels of mediation. According to this account, the first language (the “maternal” language) is the concrete, sensual language in immediate contact with lived experience (full of “sap”), while the other (the language of the colonizer) is abstract and cerebral, forever divorced from the deepest, most visceral content of psychic existence. Ngũgĩ’s example concerns his introduction to the subject of anatomy and reveals in succinct form the dichotomies between immediate and mediated, sensual and cerebral, oral and written that I would like to address.

At grammar school, Ngũgĩ recounts, he learned about anatomy by studying the organs of large mammals in science class and reading the English names for each one in a book. Around the same age, he also became acquainted with animal anatomy by observing the slaughter and dissection of sacrificial goats in preparation for a seasonal ritual. Here he heard the Gikuyu names as he handled the animal’s liver, kidneys, and intestines; thus, these names were fused with tactile, olfactory, and visual sensations rendered sharper and more memorable by their novelty. In contrast, the understanding he gained in school was schematic and disembodied; the substantives he memorized were abstract, each one referring to entire categories of phenomena rather than specific, sensually experienced organs of a still warm body. In the first case, words were embedded in a stream of personal existence; in the second, they were introduced as written signs.51

Ngũgĩ’s description of a doubled experience of reality, a kind of psycholinguistic schism, has been treated at length by Maghrebian writers as well; in fact, the crisis caused by colonial bilingualism is a theme frequently found in the works of Abdelkebir Khatibi, Assia Djebar, and others. What stands out in Ngũgĩ’s account—and what makes the African and Caribbean diasporic experience somewhat different from the North African—is that, during the period with which we are concerned, neither Gikuyu nor Martiniquan Creole possessed a stable scribal form.⁵² In contrast, the Arabic language has a textual tradition reaching back to at least the seventh century. This point goes a long way toward explaining the supposed “choice” of the Negritude writer (although there were several more factors involved). For black writers of sub-Saharan Africa and the Antilles, it must have seemed as though the language of the colonizer were the only one that offered a script (not to mention an entire dispositif of editors, presses, reviews, and readerships) with which to indulge their love of writing. In interviews, whenever Césaire was asked why he chose French over Creole, he would reply that the absence of a formalized writing system for the Creole language was, for him, decisive. In a famous interview with Jacqueline Leiner in 1978, for instance, he explains again—with no small measure of exasperation—that for him, writing equals French. Writing in Creole was simply never an option:

To a certain extent, Césaire’s comments simply invert the terms of Ngũgĩ’s account. For Ngũgĩ, the putative immediacy of the “langue maternelle” makes it an appropriate vehicle for the expression of authentic, grounded experience; for Césaire that same immediacy makes it “incapable of rising to the level of abstraction” (an idea he probably borrowed from Senghor). In both cases the “indigenous” language represents immediacy; the colonial language, mediation. Yet two points distinguish one author from the other. First of all, Césaire embraces what he believes to be the nonimmediacy, or “abstraction,” of French. For reasons not unlike those motivating Khatibi (or Samuel Beckett, for that matter) Césaire cherishes the distance that writing—and writing in French—affords. That is, he seems to seek a different relationship to the language in which he writes, one that results in a heightened sensitivity to language as object, as aural, graphemic, and rhetorical phenomenon, rather than language as transparent vehicle, capable of “properly reflect[ing] or imitat[ing] the real life of this community.”⁵⁴ If Césaire uses an unusual number of what Fanon calls “des raretés du langage,” it is not simply to impress upon others his erudition but also—and, I believe, more symptomatically—to sound the full range of his instrument. For Ngũgĩ (and increasingly for Fanon), contributing to a national literature is paramount, for such a literature might function as a form of political representation in the cultural realm. For Césaire, in contrast, representation is not necessarily the goal. In fact, whenever he feels called upon to serve as a representative for others, Césaire expresses a good deal of ambivalence by raising the specter of an ineradicable gulf between the life of the people—“à côté de son cri”—and the experience of the poet, similarly alienated but assimilé.

Such a note of ambivalence is clearly sounded in a preface Césaire wrote to the 1996 reprint of Gilbert Gratiant’s Fables créoles et autres écrits, a work explicitly concerned with the poet’s role as representative or spokesperson for “the folk.” At first, Gratiant earns Césaire’s praise. As the first poet to create a scribal complement for Creole, he is to be commended for his effort to capture the spirit of Creole, for communing with its “Stimmung,” its “génie,” its “sève” (sap—Senghor’s word).55 But then Césaire intimates that this Heideggerian Stimmung may be in part an invention, a fantasy projected by the intellectual, who knows the “petit peuple” from a distance and therefore cannot, despite his good intentions, become one with a community he has left behind: “Curious, in truth, is the relation between Gilbert Gratiant and the Creole language. Gilbert Gratiant,” Césaire clarifies, “was certainly not a Creole-speaker as one might imagine. Actually, he had little occasion to use it.” Finally, Césaire adds (somewhat impishly) that Gratiant, having left Martinique at the age of ten to study in Vendôme, spoke Creole “à la française, and yet, he wrote it superbly. … Gratiant was less a Creole user than a Creole inventor.”⁵⁶

What Césaire suggests here is worth underscoring, for it introduces a distinction that will be crucial to his work. Gratiant writes Creole, he does not speak it, and writing Creole places him in a category all his own—somewhere between being a writer (and belonging to a community of writers) and being a Martiniquan (belonging to a community exposed to Creole). Gratiant’s position, as Césaire recognizes, is a somewhat perverse one, for while claiming to capture the Creole Stimmung, he ends up isolating himself completely, writing a language that he alone knows how to read and write. This is what Césaire means by a “curious” relation to Creole, a relation that he obviously does not emulate. Without saying so directly, Césaire intimates that Gratiant was laboring under an illusion when he imagined the possibility of maintaining complete harmony with “the people,” just as it was impossible, as Fanon himself recognized, for any assimilé to deassimilate himself (or herself). Not only had years of advanced education removed Gratiant and the Negritude writers from the Umwelt of their birthplace, but the act of writing itself would have introduced a new way of being toward and with the community. The fact that writing is a unique way of being in the world is true to some extent for any writer, but it is even more so for a diasporic writer whose original community—or at least many members of it—cannot read the words he places on the page. This brings us to the second point that differentiates Ngũgĩ from the Negritude poets. Whereas Ngũgĩ learned to write in Gikuyu at an early age and a readership for books in Gikuyu (at least the Christian Bible) existed when he began writing, the parallel case cannot be made for the French Caribbean. Césaire and Damas did not learn to write Creole in school. During their most fertile years, no consistent scribal form of Creole existed, and the illiteracy rate in the region was roughly 90 percent. In the 1978 interview with Leiner, Césaire underscores that a work written in Creole in 1939 would not have been any more accessible to the Martiniquan people than a work written in French: “If we had written in Creole, nobody would have understood a word.”57

Reviewing the decision Césaire (and many others) made, Édouard Glissant has suggested that a distinction be established between a “poétique naturelle” and a “poétique forcée,” a means of expression in which there is no tension between content and language and a means of expression in which that tension is implicit and unavoidable.58 In Le discours antillais of 1981, Glissant posits the existence of a “poétique naturelle” based on an uninterrupted continuity between the (practical) language in which local debates are carried out within a single community and the (aesthetic) language that a subgroup of that community uses for poetic creation. His comments bear a resemblance to those offered by Fanon insofar as both presuppose that Caribbean writers labor under a sense of lack: they are “forced” to choose the language of the colonizer because their own language is presumed to be insufficient or—quite simply—not a language at all. Glissant argues that the francophone Caribbean writer senses the need “to forge a path” through French in order to arrive at a more intimate language not internal to French’s “logique.”⁵⁹ A “forced poetic” is born from “the awareness of an opposition between the language one uses (dont on se sert) and the language one needs (dont on a besoin).” While Glissant’s point may be granted, especially since it is so often thematized in Negritude poetry itself, it should also be noted that most writers sense a disconnect between the language they use and the language they need, whether they are colonial subjects or not. There is a difference, of course, between the alienation one feels toward language (or the Symbolic) in general and the alienation one feels toward the language of the colonizer in particular. And certainly Negritude writers understood their objective to include “forging a path,” adapting French in such a way that it could be bent to new uses. Yet it is by no means clear that the actual experience of writing in French inspired feelings of loss alone. That is, although the choice to write in French was overdetermined by a colonial dogma that destroyed the author’s faith in the powers of the indigenous or Creole language, the imposed language could be approached by the author as entailing both loss and gain. Alex Gil has astutely observed that there were practical advantages to using French—and, especially, to using print: “Césaire wrote most of his life on a typewriter or with a pen. His art was destined for the printed page, with the occasional stage or spoken word. Why didn’t he restrict himself to the oral traditions of the Africa and Caribbean he loved and channeled?” asks Gil: “Why didn’t he write in Creole? I say he wanted to leave a mark on the present. … The book and the French language were tools of Empire, but Césaire would make miracles out of these weapons, transmuting them beyond their ordinary, yet toxic uses.”⁶⁰ It is worth pointing out, in the same vein, that “making miracles out of these weapons”—the book and the French language—was a practice that allowed not only Césaire but Negritude writers in general to familiarize themselves with a singular materiality: that of the printed word. As I hope to show, the materiality of the printed word would prove to possess sensual and expressive potentials all its own.

Césaire’s decision to write in French has been placed under even greater scrutiny as a result of the 1989 publication of Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant’s Éloge de la créolité. The pressure on Césaire—as an exemplary Caribbean writer—to justify his choice has only increased since 1993, when Confiant turned to attack him less mercifully in Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle.⁶¹ Sensitive to the accusation that he had ignored or belittled the Creole language (and Creole culture in general), Césaire returned to the issue in a seldom-quoted interview with Jean-Michel Djian published in 2005. Here he reiterates the same points made earlier—that during the years of his maturation “in Martinique, one only read French,” and that, as a consequence, the act of writing would have been inextricably linked to the French language. However, he adds to his earlier response an important clarification: not only did he love French, he loved written French. The disembodied signs of the French language exercised a unique seduction upon him precisely because they were inscriptions: “I read all the writers. Already, at a very young age, my father introduced me to Alexandre Dumas, whom he adored. I then plunged headfirst into Corneille, Racine, Hugo, Pascal, the writers of the eighteenth century. I loved them. I loved their words. [J’aimais leurs mots].” ⁶²

This testimony indicates that Césaire, as opposed to Ngũgĩ, learned the language of the colonizer at home as well as in school; further, the passage tells us that although Césaire’s first apprenticeship in French was oral and intimate, his infatuation only increased as he began to read for himself. The school and the library were thus an extension of his experience of family intimacy, not a violation of it. It could be argued, then, that Césaire’s contact with the French language was different from Ngũgĩ’s contact with the English language. However, I can’t help believing that Ngũgĩ, too, must have felt seduced by the written-ness of English. Indeed, a passion for the written text is characteristic of writers in general—whether this text is in the maternal tongue or not; whether it is first introduced aurally or not. As children or adolescents, authors often experience the written word as somehow more intimate—rather than less—than the speech they hear around them. The words on the page seem directed toward them personally and thus offer an escape from a collective daily reality at times experienced as banal or repetitive in comparison. In the 2005 interview with Djian, Césaire insists—twice, in fact—that he loves French writers; he loves their written words. This is an extremely significant distinction often ignored by writers and critics of the post-Negritude generation, who tend to think of language—French or Creole—as a homogeneous entity. But it must be recalled that writers love writing, they love the orthography of words, the choice of fonts, the meaningful space of the page, and even the uncommon or unpronounceable terms to which literary texts lend a stage, and not necessarily “language,” or “French,” in general. Some writers appreciate spoken language, dialect, lyrics, and slang as much as, if not more than, the discourses of canonical literature. (This may have been the case for Langston Hughes and, to a lesser extent, his admirer, Léon Damas.) But it is clear that in the case of other writers—and Césaire is exemplary in this regard—the language of the written word is experienced as a separate, highly charged verbal phenomenon, a medium in its own right.

If we take this into account, it is easier to see why a writer such as Césaire would embrace a highly literary form of the French language as his medium. The “highly literary” is not necessarily abstract and “cerebral.” It is entirely possible to have a visceral experience of the written word. A second language—even if it is that of the colonizer—can be experienced with the senses of the body, experienced even as an erotic object, a point made overtly in the works of Khatibi (and celebrated by his critics) that has not been sufficiently noted (or celebrated) in the works of Negritude. To deny the salience of this visceral experience to the poets of Negritude is at once to exclude them from the modernist moment (when a sensual investment in the grapheme was paramount) and to condemn them to playing only one role in culture, that of the griot (oral poet) or conteur (storyteller). We might wish to acknowledge that there is something Mallarméan in every poet insofar as he or she not ony speaks in the service of a present audience but also writes in the service of a readership yet to come.63 To insist that a Césaire or Damas be closer to a conteur than a Symbolist is implicitly to prescribe what kind of an artist a black colonial or postcolonial subject can be.⁶⁴

The Antillean writer is, inevitably and perhaps à contre-coeur, what Patrick Chamoiseau has called a “marqueur de paroles,” someone who, by marking, inscribes the self into a graphic tradition with a history of its own.65 Writing is a practice that many contemporary Caribbean authors associate with colonial domination, and thus it is approached with suspicion; yet writing also offers a unique chance. Despite the attacks Césaire has received, he in fact approaches the acquisition of writing as a complex negotiation, anticipating and nuancing the portrait of colonial subjectivation through literacy offered in works such as Chamoiseau’s Écrire en pays dominé. For instance, in the Cahier, Césaire presents a scene of instruction, a portrait of a typical colonial classroom, in which a young schoolboy’s voice (“la voix” of “un négrillon”) is reduced to silence as the catechism—and with it the entire machinery of the book—is drummed into his brain.⁶⁶ “Et ni l’instituteur dans sa classe, ni le prêtre au catéchisme ne pourront tirer un mot de ce négrillon somnolent, malgré leur manière si énergique à tous deux de tambouriner son crâne tondu, car c’est dans les marais de la faim que s’est enlisée sa voix d’inanition” (And neither the teacher in his classroom, nor the priest at catechism will be able to get a word out of this sleepy little nigger, no matter how energetically they drum on his shorn skull, for starvation has quicksanded his voice into the swamp of hunger).⁶⁷ Here the subject’s voice is reduced to silence by poverty (“les marais de la faim”) as well as by the rhythm of the colonizer’s drums (“à tous deux de tambouriner”). An interesting reversal thus takes place in which the colonizer’s words appear as repetitive, drum-like sound (un-mot-un-seul-mot)—and drumming is associated with the colonizer and negatively valorized—while the voice that has been buried in the swamp—“sa voix … s’est enlisée”—reemerges in the words we read on the page. The reflexive verb “s’enliser” resonates with the conjugated forms of the verb “to read,” “lire,” suggesting through phonic association that the voice that goes underground also emerges into legibility, into graphic form. (The present participle of “lire” is “lisant,” while the conjugated forms in the present tense are “je lis,” “tu lis, … ils lisent,” etc.) In other words, Césaire makes the disappearance of voice into an occasion for reading. He does so not to deny the coercive nature of instruction and the insidious neutralization of “les expressions les plus intimes des peuples dominés,”⁶⁸ but rather to enact, poetically, the work of resistant transformation required.⁶⁹ Out of the swamp in which the subject is buried, there may spring forth a subjectivity suppressed but not eliminated, a voice submerged (enlisée) yet rendered legible (en-lisait) in the form of marks.⁷⁰ Never innocent, never untainted by the conditions of its apprenticeship, writing nonetheless does not belong to the “instituteur” or the “prêtre” who first introduces it. Writing is not the sole possession of the colonizer for the same reason that it fails to transmit, unproblematically, “the most intimate expression” of a dominated people. Writing belongs to those who read; the voice submerged in marks is altered as it is relayed.

In the chapters that follow, I will examine the poetry of Negritude with respect to the ways in which it balances an attention to the chosen medium—French lyric in print—against an attempt to convey an experience that medium has never been charged with conveying before. Chapter 1, “‘Seeing with the Eyes of the Work’ (Adorno): Césaire’s Cahier and Modernist Print Culture,” examines the reception conditions of Negritude’s inaugural masterpiece, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a return to the native land), by situating the 1939 version in its original context of publication. Césaire experienced difficulties finding a publisher for the Cahier but then gained a hearing from the editorial board of Volontés, a review affiliated with the high modernist aesthetics of Eugène Jolas, the publisher of James Joyce’s Work in Progress (Finnegans Wake). Chapter 1 explores this little-known publication history, demonstrating that while the Cahier conformed to the high modernist demand for verbal craft, the poem also advanced this craft by forcing it to accommodate a deeply traumatic empirical predicament. I juxtapose Césaire’s diasporic modernism, which insists upon the connection between the “lyric I” and the author, with Theodor Adorno’s paradigm of modernist construction, which separates the “aesthetic subjectivity” of the text from the empirical person of the writer and his intentions. The case of Césaire puts pressure on Adorno’s understanding of what constitutes an aesthetic subject in lyric poetry, for the Negritude author is not exactly a modernist lyric subject in Adorno’s sense. Chapter 1 initiates a line of questioning that is pursued throughout the book: What, or who, is the empirical subject that enters the crucible of writing? How must we revise Adorno’s theory when the “aesthetic subject” concerned is associated with a human being urgently attempting to convey the experience of his own racial subjectivation under colonial rule?

Chapter 2, “The Empirical Subject in Question: A Drama of Voices in Aimé Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient,” approaches the curiously multidimensional and non-self-identical nature of the human being, or empirical subject, as depicted by Césaire in Et les chiens se taisaient (And the dogs fell silent). Césaire’s first drama, rewritten over a span of fifteen years (approximately 1941–1956), testifies to the difficulty he experienced both as a poet called on to represent a shared experience of suffering and as a statesman required to play the role of leader. Whereas Adorno’s paradigm of lyric creation presents the “aesthetic subject” as a fabrication of words and the “empirical subject” as a nondiscursive entity, Césaire’s play encourages us to see the empirical subject—and thus the author himself—as a complex amalgam of conflicting voices. Et les chiens se taisaient, first performed as a radio play in 1956, allows us to reflect on the relation between performing roles (drama) and expressing subjectivity (lyric). Lyric, I argue, is more like drama (and subjectivity more like a set of roles) than we might suppose. Examining the production context of Et les chiens se taisaient through documents that have just come to light, I suggest that the ambiguous status of Césaire’s “lyric oratorio” points to the hybrid nature of the aesthetic subject caught between literature and performance, text and voice.

The next two chapters explore the relation between performance and literature, voice and text, in the work of the other great diasporic poet of Negritude, Léon-Gontran Damas. Chapter 3, “Poetry and the Typosphere in Léon-Gontran Damas,” is concerned with analyzing the graphemic features of Negritude’s first poetic volume, Pigments, and the way these features call for their own phenomenalization through the voice of the reader. In 1937 Pigments was published by Guy Lévis Mano, an editor of artist books patronized by the surrealists whose attention to the print support—typeface and layout—was unrivaled at the time. Chapter 4, “Léon-Gontran Damas: Writing Rhythm in the Interwar Period,” questions the critical assumption that Damas’s poetry is based on the musical rhythms of diasporic or African forms. I define “rhythm” via the work of Henri Meschonnic as an ever-renewed “ré-énonciation.” Against the grain of current scholarship on Damas, I argue that the rhythm of a poetic line can only partially be dictated by a written text, and thus the “soundscape” of the author must be conceived as textual sound created through textual means.⁷¹ Each reading (or ré-énonciation) differs slightly from every other, just as each performance of a score finds new stress patterns and possibilities for syncopation. Prior to 1937 Damas published his poems in small socialist reviews circulated at strikes and union meetings. Although his rhythmic structures have suggested to later critics the polyrhythms of African drumming, Cuban calypso, biguine, or African American blues, study of the archive suggests that they were modeled on techniques of lineation present in contemporaneous works by Jacques Prévert, Robert Desnos, and Louis Aragon. Bringing to bear performance theory as well as theories of the lyric voice, I study Damas’s poems as the site where the empirical author produces an aesthetic subjectivity within a specific rhetorical field.

The chapters on Damas attempt to situate his early poetry in a number of poetic and political contexts; likewise, chapter 5, “Red Front / Black Front: Aimé Césaire and the Affaire Aragon,” returns to Césaire’s work to analyze the poetic choices he made during the interwar period. I examine the tension between the competing exigencies to which the Negritude author was subjected. On the one hand, Césaire felt the need to satisfy poetic demands: he wanted to live up to and advance the technical and rhetorical standards of the twentieth-century print lyric. On the other, he was committed to political change; his recourse to journalistic discourse suggests that he was responding to an ethical imperative to testify for a shared experience of oppression. Césaire’s Cahier weaves together both referential (journalistic) discourses and self-referential (lyric) discourses, attempting to be situated and to transcend situation at the very same time. The tension between political relevance and poetic transcendence was also at the heart of the Affaire Aragon, a debate between Aragon’s communism and André Breton’s surrealism that leaves its mark on Césaire’s approach to writing the Cahier. This chapter examines more closely the critical reception of Negritude, arguing that the Cahier—from the perspective of the 1930s—raises some of the same questions animating postcolonial theory today. What kinds of hermeneutic and ethical limits does a committed poem impose on formalist reading practices? Conversely, what pressures does a formally experimental poem place on content-oriented approaches? And finally, what kind of aesthetic subjectivity might emerge from a heterogeneous, aggressively intertextual poem?

The final chapter of the book moves forward in history to address the poetry produced as the Pan-African solidarity of the modernist period waned and a specifically Caribbean consciousness emerged. In chapter 6, “To Inhabit a Wound: A Turn to Language in Martinique,” I propose that, paradoxically, the written (rather than the spoken) word becomes a means for Césaire to return to the Caribbean landscape. During a period when numerous critics were insisting that Creole constitutes the only language in which an authentic connection to Martiniquan history and experience can be achieved, Césaire elected to write in a profoundly literary French. Instead of gravitating toward the rhythms and idioms of speech, he works to develop an even more rarified poetic vocabulary, purposefully selecting arcane terms found only in books and technical manuals. In “Calendrier lagunaire” (Lagoonal calendar), a late poem from the collection moi, laminaire (1982), Césaire incorporates geographical, zoological, and botanical lexicons that turn out to possess roots in languages ranging from Arawak to Greek. Thus, instead of obscuring the specificity of Martinique through a language supposedly foreign to it, Césaire reveals the hybrid origins of the languages used to designate a specific site. The poet, so frequently criticized for writing in French, shows through ingenious lexical means that in fact he does not write in French—not because he writes in Creole but because French is not French.

In his own way, then, Césaire anticipates the thesis of créolisation, namely, that no language is originary, self-identical, or pure. His revelation of an imperial history embedded in toponyms, geographical terms, and botanical nomenclatures buttresses Édouard Glissant’s contention that, in a land without written history, history is inscribed in the land and its names.72 Critics who have sharply opposed Negritude to later movements, such as Antillanité and Créolité, have missed the opportunity to identify within Césaire’s work a strong resistance to essentialism.⁷³ Far from exhibiting a “preoccupation with enracinement, filiation, and a foundational poetics,” the poet inscribes within his work—by means of his very diction—a history characterized by the layering, intermingling, and creolization of cultures.⁷⁴ All three major poets of Negritude are aware of and celebrate the process of creolization to which they owe their poetic voice, their “aesthetic subjectivity,” even as they seek to redress the suppression of Africa and recall specific conditions of suffering. My conclusion points to ways in which we might consider Negritude to be a modernist movement precisely because it performs that work of retrieval and recall. The poems of Negritude tell an imperial tale of diaspora and creolization, albeit through indirect, poetic, and exclusively textual means.