INTRODUCTION
1. See Jean-Pierre Bobillot, “Naissance d’une notion: La médiopoétique,” in Poésies et médias XX–XXIe siècle, ed. Céline Pardo, Anne Reverseau, Nadja Cohen, and Anneliese Depoux, 155–73 (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2012). Elaborating on Régis Debray’s Cours de médiologie générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), Bobillot distinguishes a “médiologie,” a typology of supports (such as paper and pen or typewriter), from a “médialogie,” a typology of modes of diffusion (such as print publication or the Internet). A “poésie typosphérique” is a poetry written to be published in print and read (166). On media specificity and the “alphabetic I” of lyric poetry, see also Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
2. See Ronnie Leah Scharfman, Engagement and the Language of the Subject in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1980).
3. In the “aesthetic regime,” or “le régime de l’écriture,” the word becomes detached from its context of utterance and addresses an unknown rather than immediate community. The text is “oublieuse de son origine, insouciante à l’égard de son destinataire.” Jacques Rancière, La parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature (Paris: Hachette, 1998), 82. I examine the implications of Rancière’s model more fully in chapter 4.
4. On the birth of lyric poetry as “something essentially graphic,” not oral, see Giorgio Agamben, “Corn: From Anatomy to Poetics,” in The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 33. Although this is not the place to enter into extended dialogue with Franco Moretti and his model of “distant reading,” I would like to situate myself in the growing, neo-Darwinian field of literary studies that approaches the text as resulting from a battle to survive in a field of production that overdetermines its nature. The best riposte to this variety of criticism—which I consider to be an undialectical corrective to theories of authorial intentionality, is provided by Alexander Gil Fuentes in his doctoral dissertation, “Migrant Textuality”: “I make the more radical claim that texts adapt by default. Put differently, no text (or literary device) ever survives a recontextualization intact, and vice-versa, no context remains intact.” Gil Fuentes, “Migrant Textuality: On the Fields of Aimé Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, December 2013), 62, available at Academic Commons, http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:161180. As I will argue further in the following, the advantage of Adorno’s notion of “aesthetic subjectivity” is that it offers a recursive, dialectical model of creation that takes into account both the pressure of material, economic forces and the force of the author’s unique intervention in the field.
5. See Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed., trans. and intro. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 167. Sometimes called an “artistic subject” or an “artistic identity,” the “aesthetic subject” is a hybrid entity resulting from the dialectical engagement of a living writer with the demands of artistic production. I flesh out the concept of aesthetic subjectivity in chapter 1.
6. Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 90. Jackson argues persusively that “lyric reading” often neglects the production and reception conditions that shape our interpretation of the “I” in the poem and its relation to history.
7. As Françoise Vergès points out in the context of Frantz Fanon, many Antilleans (including the Negritude writers) are mulattos, or “black métis Creole of the French Antilles.” Vergès, “Creole Skin, Black Mask: Fanon and Disavowal,” Critical Inquiry, 23, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 511. Damas had the lightest skin and thus was most easily identified as mulatto, not black, but this did not stop him from proclaiming his blackness as a politics and a history he shared with Césaire and Senghor. As many critics have observed, for Césaire, being black (“nègre”) was primarily a cultural identity, whereas Senghor tended to associate blackness with racial identity.
8. Quoted in René Depestre, “An Interview with Aimé Césaire,” in Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham, ed. Robin Kelley, 79–94 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 83.
9. I would thus qualify Chris Bongie’s contention that Édouard Glissant understands more clearly than Césaire the predicament of the Caribbean poet; both know that the attempt to “speak for” a people is problematized by the recourse to writing and the use of French. Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 42–43.
10. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010), 137.
11. Ibid. Césaire’s written gestures “isolate” him “from exactly that collectivity with which [he] yearns to identify,” as Scharfman so precisely puts it. Scharfman, Engagement, 94.
12. Rancière is describing varieties of interpreting art, not what the art is in some essential, transhistorical sense.
13. Édouard Glissant, “Une errance enracinée,” in L’intention poétique (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 51. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. Glissant is writing here about Saint John Perse; he is contrasting the relation the conteur créole maintains with a live audience with the relation Perse maintains—or fails to maintain—with a specific community. Although it could be objected that the conte créole is a narrative form with more links to epic than lyric, Glissant is making a point about how the “I” form of Perse’s poetry (which, like Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, shares both lyric and epic attributes) abjures communion with a specific audience in order to achieve a greater communion with a universal body, or humanity in general. The case of Perse is not identical to that of Césaire, although both employ effects—an unusual lexicon and dense figuration—that distance them from the Antillean community.
14. Melvin Dixon, introduction to The Collected Poetry, by Léopold Sédar Senghor, trans. Melvin Dixon (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998): “I am struck by the fact that the principal architects of negritude were primarily from the Western Hemisphere—not only Léon Damas and Aimé Césaire … but also Paulette and Jane Nardal and René Maran from the French Antilles and Claude McKay from Jamaica. … Perhaps this is one reason why so many African writers from Wole Soyinka of Nigeria to Ezekiel Mphahlele of South Africa have taken issue with Senghor” (xxix); “Senghor’s poetic method depends on the otherness of his audience”(xxx).
15. Léopold Sédar Senghor, Ce que je crois (Paris: Grasset, 1988), 136.
16. See Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002): “What might seem at first glance to be rule-governed behavior is in fact constantly in tension with the vital and ultimately inarticulate forces of pain and emotion that compel such expression. … Aesthetic form constantly is put under pressure to change and renew itself in order to accommodate what time and experience have brought to it” (328). For an equally compelling study, see Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007): although the poem’s “I” is, above all, “not to be confused with an extralinguistic entity,” it is still the case, as Blasing argues further, that this “I” is one that “must be heard as choosing words, intending sounds to make sense. … The poem … is an act of intending to mean” (27, 29). For an alternative view, see Rei Terada’s review, “Poetry and the Fate of the Senses,” in Comparative Literature 56, no. 3 (2004): 269–74.
17. Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 328–29. The reaction against a deconstructive approach was launched by Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp in “Against Theory” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 723–42. Since then a generation of scholars in the United States—and, interestingly, France as well—has argued for a return if not to the artist’s intention as the source of all meaning, then at least to an acknowledgment of the intersubjective (author–reader) relation implicit in reading. On the effacement of physical presence in the lyric, see Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery and Amy Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Hungerford argues that, whereas Paul de Man “sees personhood as the product of rhetoric,” personhood should be seen “as the product of rhetoric plus embodiment” (63); “the conflation of texts and persons impoverishes our ideas not only of art … but also of persons, since it renders the fact of embodiment irrelevant, when embodiment is exactly what situates us in history and makes us vulnerable to oppression” (21).
18. Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), xiii.
19. Laurent Jenny, “Méthodes et problèmes: La Poésie, 2003” at the Université de Genève website, http://www.unige.ch/lettres/framo/enseignements/methodes/elyrique/index.html. Jenny writes that the most “delicate” question posed to lyric poetry is that of “the exact status of the lyric subject. Precisely what value should we accord to the Je who expresses itself in the poems? Must we identify it completely with the poet and treat it as an autobiographical subject?” Author’s emphasis.
20. See Dominique Combe, “La référence redoublée,” in Figures du sujet lyrique, ed. Dominique Rabaté (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996); Michel Deguy, La poésie n’est pas seule (Paris: Seuil, 1987); and Jean-Michel Maulpoix, Du lyrisme (Paris: Jose Corti, 2000). For a summary of the debates, see Jean-Michel Maulpoix’s website: http://www.maulpoix.net. Other influential movements in poetry and poetry criticism include Jean-Marie Gleize’s “littéralité” [see Gleize, Poésie et figuration (Paris: Seuil, 1983)]; the “grève lyrique”—or strike against lyricism—conducted in the pages of La revue de littérature générale by Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alféri; the experimental movement, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or OULIPO; the new multimedia practice (and theory) of poets such as Christophe Hanna, Olivier Quintyn, Franck Leibovici, Suzanne Doppelt, and Emmanuel Hocquard; the exploration, after Wittgenstein, of poetry as a “forme de vie” (see Marielle Macé, Façons de lire, manières d’être [Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2011]); and critics grouped around the French sound poets, such as Jean-Pierre Bobillot. For a refreshing view of the contemporary poetry scene in France, see Christophe Wall-Romana, “Dure poésie générale,” Esprit Créateur 49, no. 2 (2009): 1–8.
21. For an insightful treatment of the representation of race in experimental writing, see Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009). See also two ground-breaking studies in the anglophone context: Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Nathaniel Mackey’s Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
22. On the notion of “contramodernity,” see Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
23. Pascale Casanova, La république mondiale des lettres (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 65.
25. The status of the Antilles and French Guiana (where Césaire and Damas, respectively, were born) was not exactly that of a colony. The population of the French Antilles were accorded citizenship in 1848; yet, as Nick Nesbitt observes, “The citizenship extended to the inhabitants of the vieilles colonies in 1848 had always been, as it remained in 1945, partial and subaltern.” Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 88. Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Réunion received the status of French “départements” in 1946, but, despite Césaire’s tireless efforts, the citizens of the départements have not obtained full self-determination.
26. See Jacqueline Leiner, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire par Jacqueline Leiner,” in Tropiques, vol. 1 (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978), xiv: “What I have tried to do is to inflect the French language, to transform it in order to express, let’s say: This me, this nigger-me, this Creole-me, this Martinican-me, this Caribbean-me. That’s why I was much more interested in poetry than in prose—precisely because the poet is the one who creates his language, while the writer of prose, in the main, uses language.”
27. F. Abiola Irele, “The Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude Movement,” in The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 760.
28. On Caribbean creolization as cultural identity, see Wilson Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays (London: Beacon, 1967); Kamau Brathwaite, Verene Shepherd, and Glen Richards, Questioning: Creolization Discourses in Caribbean Culture, in Honor of Kamau Brathwaite (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle and Oxford: James Currey, 2002); and Édouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981).
29. See these two impressive studies: Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
30. Charles W. Pollard, New World Modernism: T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004): “as Caribbean writers have transformed the methods of modernism, modernism itself has become a more discrepant cosmopolitan literary movement” (9).
31. The place of Jacques Roumain in the story of Negritude is an ambiguous one. Césaire claimed that he had not read Roumain—or known of La Revue Indigène—before he composed the Cahier, even though Roumain was a Student at the Institut d’Ethnologie in 1938. Damas may have been more familiar with the work of Roumain through his friendship with Langston Hughes. Irele contends that “When Césaire wrote his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and published it in the journal Volontés in 1939, he had fully absorbed the lessons of both the Harlem Renaissance and the Haitian Renaissance, which merged with other influences in French literature and the esthetic and social revolutions that marked European culture in the interwar years, in particular Marxism and Surrealism, to produce the great statement of the black condition his long poem has come to represent.” Irele, “The Harlem Renaissance,” 774. The articles in Tropiques reveal the influence of La Revue Indigène, but I am not convinced that the first 1939 version of the Cahier does.
32. Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la créolité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 45; the authors state that Césaire did not accomplish the “tâche première de construire cette langue écrite.” For a contextualization of Césaire’s choice and that of the entire équipe of Tropiques, see Alex Gil, “The Césaire Gambit: Marking and Re-Making the Present,” @elotroalex, August 11, 2013, http://elotroalex.webfactional.com/?s=The+C%C3%A9saire+Gambit: “They understood that a cultural, and by extension political, revolution was necessary if they were to join their imagined global dialogue as equals, and their chosen vehicle was print and French. Given their goals their choice makes sense, a bundle of paper with French markings could travel farther than spoken Creole in the 1940s.”
33. See Gilbert Gratiant, preface to Fab’ compè zicaque, “Le langage créole et ceux qui le parlent,” reprinted in Fables créoles et autres écrits, preface by Aimé Césaire (Paris: Stock, 1996), 47. Gratiant dates the composition of his first poem in Creole around 1935. Lafcadio Hearn had also attempted to construct a written form for Caribbean Creole as early as 1885. On the adoption of Martiniquan Kreyol by Raphaël Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau as an exoticizing strategy for attracting French readers, see Maryse Condé’s polemical “On the Apparent Carnivalization of Literature from the French Caribbean,” in Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities, ed. Jean Muteba Rahier (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999).
34. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), 30: “Historiquement, il faut comprendre que le Noir veut parler le français, car c’est la clef susceptible d’ouvrir les portes qui, il y a cinquante ans encore, lui étaient interdites.”
35. Senghor, until granted French citizenship around 1935, was officially a colonial subject. The residents of four Senegalese cities—known as the “Quatre Communes,” Saint-Louis, Dakar, Gorée, and Rufisque—became citizens of France during the Second Republic, but Senghor was born in Joal, south of Dakar.
36. For a rehearsal of Ngũgĩ’s points in the language of sociology, see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language,” in Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 43–65.
37. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986), 3.
38. Influenced by Arthur de Gobineau and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Senghor believed that African culture was emotional and intuitive, and thus African languages were less conceptual than European languages. Although, as scholars have argued, he added a dose of Bergsonism and reinterpreted these qualities as positive, the record shows that his attitude toward indigenous languages was not consistent. See Léopold Sédar Senghor, Libertés I: Négritude et humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 32, originally published in L’Homme de couleur, 1939.
39. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Comme les lamantins vont boire à la source,” postface to Éthiopiques, reprinted in Oeuvre poétique (1954; repr. Paris: Seuil, 1990), 166–67.
40. Senghor, “Le problème culturel en A.O.F,” in Libertés I, 19. Senghor argues for bilingual education in French West Africa but adds the troubling observation that Africans must be taught to write in their original languages because “notre peuple, dans son ensemble, n’est pas encore à même de goûter toutes les beautés du français” (ibid.).
41. Léopold Sédar Senghor, The Collected Poetry, trans. Melvin Dixon (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 276 (in English, 13).
42. Ibid., 588, (in English, 247).
43. Senghor, Oeuvre poétique, 427.
44. Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 13.
47. Over the past two decades, a number of works have sought to correct the assumption that no literary tradition existed in the francophone Caribbean. See, for instance, Jennifer M. Wilks, Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacascade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne Césaire, Dorothy West (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Dominique Chancé, Histoire des littératures antillaises (Paris: Ellipses, 2005); Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, Lettres créoles: Tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature: Haïti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane, 1635–1975 (Paris: Hatier, 1991); Jack Corzani, Léon-François Hoffman, and Marie-Lyne Piccione, Littératures francophones II: Les Amériques: Haiti, Antilles-Guyane, Québec (Paris: Belin, 1998); Régis Antoine Les écrivains français et les Antilles: Des premiers pères blancs aux surréalistes noirs (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1978); and Jack Corzani, La littérature des Antilles-Guyane Françaises (Fort-de-France: Désormeaux, 1978).
48. Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 30.
51. Ngũgĩ provided this narrative to me in response to a question I raised—why did Césaire write in French?—during the Q&A session after his second René Wellek lecture at the University of California, Irvine, in May of 2010. As ever, I remain grateful to Ngũgĩ for his generous attention.
52. On writing in Gikuyu, see Ann Biersteker, “Gikuyu Literature: Development from Early Christian Writings to Ngũgĩ’s Later Novels,” in The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 306–28. Biersteker indicates that the earliest publications in Gikuyu were early twentieth century vocabulary lists (the work of missionaries) and translations of the New Testament (1926).
53. Leiner, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire par Jacqueline Leiner,” x, xi, xiii; original emphasis.
54. Ngũgĩ, Decolonising the Mind, 16.
55. Aimé Césaire, préface to Fables créoles et autres écrits, by Gilbert Gratiant (Paris: Stock, 1996), 8. An earlier publication in Martinique is prefaced by Max-Pol Fouchet, who frames the “fables” in a far more conventional, typically exoticizing and infantilizing manner: “Antilles! Les Iles! Comme nous en rêvons. … Et comment n’en point rêver dans l’univers dur de l’Europe ‘aux anciens parapets.’” Max-Pol Fouchet, préface to Fables créoles et autres écrits (Fort-de-France: Désormeaux, 1976), 11.
56. Césaire, preface to Fables créoles, 8.
57. Leiner, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire par Jacqueline Leiner,” x, xi, xiii; original emphasis.
58. See Glissant, “Poétique naturelle, poétique forcée,” in Le discours antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 236–45.
59. Glissant, Le discours antillais, 237.
60. Gil, “The Césaire Gambit.”
61. Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la créolité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989): “Césaire, un anticréole? Non point, mais un anté-créole, si, du moins, un tel paradoxe peut être risqué. … La Négritude césairienne est un baptême, l’acte primal de notre dignité restituée. Nous sommes à jamais fils d’Aimé Césaire” (18). Compare these words to Confiant’s: “On ne peut aujourd’hui être fils authentique de Césaire.” Raphaël Confiant, Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle (Paris: Stock, 1993), 38. To their credit, the authors of Éloge de la créolité recognize that writing in Creole in the 1930s was not an option, but that it became so in the 1980s due to a number of factors (including the attention it attracted in the field of linguistics). For a compelling treatment of Creole language politics, see Pierre Bourdieu, “Price Formation and the Anticipation of Profits,” in Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 68–69. See also Christopher Miller’s compassionate discussion of the dilemma facing African writers in Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); curiously, here, Miller does not extend the same compassion to Césaire (see 118–25).
62. Jean-Michel Djian, “Rencontre avec Aimé Césaire,” in Léopold Sédar Senghor: Génèse de l’imaginaire francophone (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 229. On Césaire’s childhood, see Patrice Louis, Aimé Césaire: Rencontre avec un nègre fondamental (Paris: Aéria, 2004), 20–21.
63. See Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé: La politique de la sirène (Paris: Hachette, 1997).
64. An unfortunate consequence of the position advanced by both Ngũgĩ and, in the Caribbean context, the Créolistes is that, although sympathetic in some respects, they tend to be overly prescriptive, limiting authors to one language, one cultural role, and even one subject matter. Ngũgĩ’s own account shows that even he could not marry writing and militancy, the narrative subtlety of his earlier fiction and the impact of propaganda. In 1977 he was forced to abandon the text as a material support when he made the decision to write in Gikuyu. For years he wrote plays (rather than novels), dramatizing “the content of our people’s anti-imperialist struggles to liberate their productive forces from foreign control” (Decolonising the Mind, 29). By his own admission, he placed content above form (ibid., 78), recognizing—like many an engaged realist before him—that the urgency of the situation called for a reprioritizing of values. Césaire, too, turned to writing plays a decade earlier, but these plays remain stubbornly textual, employing the same type of complex imagery and intertextual web of allusions found in his poetry.
65. Patrick Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). The “marqueur de paroles” is a character (as well as narrator) in Texaco and other novels by Chamoiseau. On another note, there are several ways to understand what a tradition of writing might be in the Caribbean islands. See also Chamoiseau and Confiant, Lettres créoles.
66. See Patrick Chamoiseau, Chemin d’école (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).
67. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983), 11; and Aimé Césaire, The Collected Poetry, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 37.
68. Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 21. “Je soupçonnais que toute domination (la silencieuse plus encore) germe et se développe à l’intérieur même de ce que l’on est. Qu’insidieuse, elle neutralise les expressions les plus intimes des peuples dominés. Que toute résistance devait se situer résolument là, en face d’elle, et déserter les illusions des vieux modes de bataille. Il me fallait alors interroger mon écriture, longer ses dynamiques, suspecter les conditions de son jaillissement et déceler l’influence qu’ exerce sur elle la domination-qui-ne-se-voit-plus” (21– 22). Chamoiseau’s imagery of volcanic explosion (“jaillissement”) as well as his hyphenations (“la domination-qui-ne-se-voit-plus”) are both derived from Césaire’s stylistics.
69. For a forceful, Hegelian version of the argument that aesthetic creation can produce substantive transformation, see Nick Nesbitt, Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 23.
70. Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 21.
71. See Edwin C. Hill Jr., Black Soundscapes White Stages: The Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).
72. See Glissant, Le discours antillais; and Glissant, Pays rêvé, pays réel, suivi de Fastes et de Les Grans Chaos (Paris: Gallimard Poésie, 2000); and Carrie Noland, “Édouard Glissant: A Poetics of the Entour,” in Poetry After Cultural Studies, ed. Heidi R. Bean and Mike Chasar (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011). On Martiniquan toponyms in particular, see Vincent Huyghues-Belrose, “Le nom des lieux à la Martinique: Un patrimoine identitaire menacé,” in Études Caribéennes, December 11, 2008, http://etudescaribeennes.revues.org/3494?id+3494.
73. For an excellent reply to the accusation of essentialism on Césaire’s part, see Richard Price and Sally Price, “Shadowboxing in the Mangrove,” Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 1 (February 1997): 3–36.
74. J. Michael Dash, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 99. Luís Madureira maintains, as I do, that Dash, otherwise a sensitive reader, in this case reads “too hastily.” See Luís Madureira, Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-Garde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 5. See also Miller, Nationalists and Nomads. Miller concludes that Césaire’s Cahier is “primitivizing and Romantic” (90). For a contrasting view, similar to my own, see Gil Fuentes, “Migrant Textuality.”
1. “SEEING WITH THE EYES OF THE WORK”
1. A. James Arnold, “Césaire’s Notebook as Palimpsest: The Text Before, During, and After World War II,” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 133–40. See also the more detailed study of the changes the Cahier underwent, especially after Césaire’s trip to Haiti in 1944, in Lilian Pestre de Almeida’s Aimé Césaire: Une saison en Haïti (Montreal: Mémoire d’Encrier, 2010). Arnold’s position has evolved: he recently coedited and cotranslated with Clayton Eshleman The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, bilingual ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013).
2. See Thomas A. Hale, “Les écrits d’Aimé Césaire, bibliographie commentée,” Études françaises 14, no. 3–4 (October 1978). I am counting the 1939 Volontés edition as well as the extracts printed in Tropiques, no. 5 (1942). For a list of new editions since 1978, see Lilian Pestre de Almeida, “Présentation: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” in Aimé Césaire à l’oeuvre, ed. Marc Cheymol and Philippe Ollé-Laprune, 97–105 (Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines, 2010). See also Alex Gil, “Bridging the Middle Passage: The Textual (R)evolution of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 38, no. 1 (March 2011): 40–56.
3. Arnold, “Césaire’s Notebook,” 133. As Alex Gil points out, the Cahier exists in four distinct forms: “The first version could be called spiritual, the second and third surrealist, while the last one, with spirit and sex removed, political. When you speak of the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal which one are you talking about?” See Gil, “The Césaire Gambit: Marking and Re-Making the Present,” @elotroalex, August 11, 2013, http://elotroalex.webfactional.com/?s=The+C%C3%A9saire+Gambit.
4. Arnold has stressed, for instance, the great degree to which Césaire’s style was influenced by the surrealists after he met Breton in 1941; see his annotations in Aimé Césaire, Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours, ed. A. James Arnold (Paris: Éditions CNRS, 2013), where he claims that Césaire underwent a “conversion à une écriture surréaliste de 1941 à 1943” (65). During this period, the Chilean review Leitmotiv published Césaire’s “Colombes bruissement du sang” in 1943 (later titled “Serpent soleil”); “Conquête de l’aube” appeared in the first issue of VVV; André Breton introduced Césaire’s “Les pur-sang” with “Un grand poète noir” in a 1944 issue of Hémispheres (no. 2–3); Roger Caillois (probably under pressure from Breton) published Césaire’s “Poème” in Lettres Françaises in 1945; immediately after the war Breton saw to it that “Batouque” appeared in Fontaine (vol. 35) and “Le Grand-Midi” in Confluences (vol. 6).
5. According to Pestre de Almeida, the Volontés edition has 7,445 words while the Présence Africaine edition has 9,666; see Pestre de Almeida, Aimé Césaire: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), 100.
6. A. James Arnold, “Poétique forcée et identité dans la littérature des Antilles francophones,” in L’héritage du Caliban, ed. Maryse Condé (Paris: Jasor, 1992), 22. Again, when Arnold published the bilingual edition of the Cahier in 2013, cotranslated with Clayton Eshleman, he persisted in referring to the work as the “preoriginal” in his introduction—despite the volume’s title, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, xix.
7. Arnold, “Césaire’s Notebook,” 133.
8. By “high modernism,” a contested designation indeed, I mean an innovative literature that challenged the habits of most readers. My use of the term corresponds to the definition implicit in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory; however, I grant Jessica Berman her point, well supported in Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), that experimental practice goes well beyond the confines of Western Europe, articulating politics with form in a variety of ways: “If we step outside the hypercanon of European modernism … into the worldwide sphere of textual activity, we discover a multiplicity of transnational modernisms that foreground their ethical and political dimensions as essential horizons for modernist experimentation” (28–29). See also Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
9. A. James Arnold, Negritude and Modernism: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). In particular, Arnold studies the intertextual relation between Césaire and Paul Claudel; Saint-John Perse; Charles Péguy; and Leo Frobenius. More recently, Arnold has provided a useful summary of the contexts of issue number 20 of Volontés; see Césaire, Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours, 71–73.
10. As Alex Gil has written, “textual transformation [is] a process determined by the adaptation of addressable textual units to different editorial and textual environments, rather than […] a shift in what we would call a coherent poetics born out of the author’s purported artistic integrity or journey of self discovery.” “Migrant Textuality: On the Fields of Aimé Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, December 2012), 57, available at Academic Commons, http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:161180.
11. See David Alliot, Aimé Césaire: Le Nègre fondamental (Gollion, Switz.: Infolio, 2008), 53. Pelorson (sometimes spelled “Pellorson”) was a former ENS student: he changed his name to Georges Belmont after the war (perhaps because of his collaborationist activities under Vichy). See Kora Verón “Césaire at the crossroads in Haiti: Correspondence with Henri Seyrig,” Comparative Literature Studies 50:3 (2013): 430–44.
12. “In Memorium” was published in Volontés, 18 (June 1939); “Héritage” and “Aux tirailleurs Sénégalais morts pour la France” were published in the same issue of Volontés as the Cahier, that is, no. 20, in August 1939.
13. Miller may be considered to be the strongest link—beside Jolas—between transition and Volontés. Although he published only once in transition, he was part of the anglophone expatriate milieu to which many other transition writers belonged.
14. The translation never appeared, but Yale University possesses a typescript dated 1932 of a French version of “Anna Livia Pluribelle” composed by Samuel Beckett and revised by Philippe Soupault and Jolas himself, so that might have been the text Volontés intended to publish.
15. According to Alex Gil, Queneau cofounded Volontés. Apparently he met Césaire in the editorial office of Volontés and later encouraged Gallimard to publish Césaire’s first full volume of poetry, Armes miraculeuses, after the war. See Gil, “Breaking News: It Was Queneau!” @elotroalex, September 12, 2013, http://elotroalex.webfactional.com/research-sejour-report/.
16. Craig Monk, “Eugène Jolas and the Translation Policies of transition,” Mosaic 32, no. 4 (December 1999): 17–34.
18. Eugène Jolas, Man from Babel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 116. The book was posthumously published by Yale University Press in 1998; Jolas died in 1952.
19. Eugène Jolas, “Revolution of the Word,” transition, 16–17 (June 1929). The manifesto was largely written by Jolas but cosigned by fifteen collaborators, including Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Elliot Paul, and Caresse Crosby. Céline Mansanti has suggested that the manifesto was written to serve as an alternative to surrealism; in fact, during the period, transition welcomed several dissident surrealists, including Robert Desnos (who was friendly with Damas), Roger Vitrac, Tristan Tzara, and Antonin Artaud; see Mansanti, La revue transition (1927–1938): Le modernisme historique en devenir (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), 164–77.
20. His Mots-déluge of 1933 is, in his own words, “a book of French neologistic poems.” Jolas, Man from Babel, 112.
21. Jolas, “Revolution of the Word,” 16–17.
22. Charpentes 6, no. 1 (1939); editors included André Gide, Jean Giorno, and Jules Supervielle. This issue contains Césaire’s translation of Sterling Brown, “Les hommes forts,” Senghor’s “Neige sur Paris,” and Damas’s “Aux premiers âges.” As for “Nigg,” I have been unable to discover anything more about this author. The verses published under this pseudonym are fairly conventional except for their subject matter and do not resemble poems by Senghor, Damas, or Césaire.
23. See Perloff, “Logocinéma of the Frontiersman” (np).
24. Eugène Jolas, “Logos,” transition 16–17 (1929): 28.
25. See Brent Hayes Edwards, “Aimé Césaire and the Syntax of Influence,” in Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement, ed. Carrie Noland and Barrett Watten (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). The anaphoric verse structure results from Whitman’s huge influence and probably reached Césaire’s ears through the poets of the Harlem Renaissance (and not Jacques Roumain or Jules Laforgue). Even before his trip to New York, Jolas showed an interest in anglophone black writing: in his Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie Américaine of 1928, he published translations of Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay.
27. Eugène Jolas, Mots-déluge: Hypnologues (Paris: Éditions des Cahiers Libres, 1933), 12; added emphasis. Jolas was inspired by Joyce, but he has neither the linguistic scope of the Irish author nor his stylistic flair. Jolas’s neologisms and portmanteau words pepper an otherwise conventional sentence construction. According to specialists of Martiniquan Creole (Kreyol), word creation in that language does not follow the Latinate form adopted by Jolas and Césaire but instead relies on “agglutination” (adding the initial ‘l’ of the definite article to the noun); “aphérèse” (shortening a word by cutting off the first syllable); “redoublement” (repeating the same morpheme or word twice, as in “doudou” or Damas’s “français français”); and “composition” (joining two words together with a hyphen). Two less common procedures that might have informed Césaire’s neologistic practice are the creation of the “mot-valise” or “téléscopage,” as in “oraliture” or “Francréole”; and “dérivation,” the addition of a suffix, as in “marqueur” from the verb “marquer.” See Teodor Florin Zanoaga, “Observations sur la formation des mots en français littéraire antillais,” in Le français dans les Antilles: Études linguistiques, ed. André Thibault, 207–21 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012). Christian Filostrat maintains that “negritude” was not, in fact, a neologism of Césaire’s but rather a borrowing from a nineteenth-century American dictionary. See Filostrat, Negritudes Agonistes, Assimilation Against Nationalism in the French-Speaking Caribbean and Guyane (Cherry Hill, NJ: Americana Homestead Legacy Publishers, 2008), 119. As A. James Arnold points out, however, this thesis has not been verified: “D’ailleurs, selon Filostrat, Césaire aurait pu pêcher le mot négritude dans un dictionnaire américain du XIXe siècle, à une époque où il était encore courant en Amérique du Nord. La thèse ne sera sans doute jamais validée de façon concluante, mais elle est réconfortée par le propos, souvent répété par Césaire, que les nègres des États-Unis eurent inventé la négritude”; Arnold, ed., preface to Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours (1295).
28. My translation. Compare these lines to the stream of invective that appears at the opening of the 1956 Présence Africaine edition of the Cahier, first added to the Bordas edition of 1947: “Au bout du petit matin … / Va-t-en, lui disais-je, gueule de flic, gueule de vache, va-t-en je déteste les larbins de l’ordre et les hannetons de l’espérance. Va-t-en mauvais gris-gris, punaise de moinillon.” Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983), 7. All further references to this edition will be indicated in the text as PA.
29. Christian Filostrat announced the discovery and reprinted the pertinent pages of this third issue of L’Étudiant Noir in Négritudes agonistes, 119–33.
30. The three pages of new text begin with “je te livre le chain gang.” The letter, which was displayed at the 2011 exhibition “Césaire & Lam,” held at the Grand Palais, is reproduced in the exhibition catalog, Daniel Maximin, ed., Césaire & Lam: Insolites bâtisseurs (Paris: HC Éditions, 2011), 43.
31. I have tried to imitate the lineation of the handwritten manuscript. Nowhere have I ever seen this lineation imitated in print. The lines appear in the Volontés edition on page 51. Further references to this edition will be indicated in the text as V.
32. Aimé Césaire, The Collected Poetry, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 85. A full reading of these final lines would divert me from my current argument. To pursue such a reading, I would focus on the tension between speaking (suggested by the “tongue”) and printing (suggested by the past participle / adjective “imprimée” in the line “Je te suis imprimée en mon ancestrale cornée blanche”). For a persuasive reading along these lines, see Nick Nesbitt, Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 77–82.
33. Eugène Jolas, The Language of the Night (The Hague: Servire Press, 1932), 16. Jolas praises other inventors of neologisms, such as Alfred Jarry and the dadaists.
34. Césaire studied at the Rue d’Ulm from 1935 to 1938; I have checked the library catalog, and the 1937 edition of Physiologie du goût is still there. See René Hénane, “Note brève: Soleil cou coupé, verrition: l’énigme dévoilée” (paper presented at the conference “Aimé Césaire: Une Pensée pour le XXIème siècle”), cited in Paul-Christian Lapoussinière, Au bout du petit matin … de Nox à Lux: L’Épopée d’Aimé Césaire et de Victor Hugo (Ivry-sur-Seine, France: Éditions Panafrika Silex/Nouvelles du Sud, 2007), 92–93.
35. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du goût, première édition mise en ordre et annotée avec une lecture de Roland Barthes (Paris: Hermann, 1975), 55.
36. “Verrition (verro, lat., je balaye) … quand la langue, se recourbant en dessus et au dessous, ramasse les portions qui peuvent rester dans le canal semi-circulaire formé par les lèvres et les gencives” (ibid.); all translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
37. Roland Barthes, “Préface” in Physiologie du goût, by Brillat-Savarin, 18. Emphasis original.
38. For an early and influential version of this reading of Césaire as an oral poet, see M. a M. Ngal, Aimé Césaire: Un homme à la recherche d’une patrie (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1994).
39. On “subvocalization” in poetry, see Lesley Wheeler, Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). On “virtual hearing,” see Jacques Roubaud, “Prelude: Poetry and Orality,” in The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, eds. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, trans. Jean-Jacques Poucel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), 20. I treat the problem of voice in writing more fully in chapters 3 and 4.
40. According to Stanislas Dehaene, “when we encounter a new word” silent reading, or “sounding,” “is often the only solution.” Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: Viking, 2009), 27. With respect to the neural circuits of audition and the areas of the brain associated with speech, “we still activate their pronunciation [the pronunciation of unfamiliar words] at a nonconscious level” (ibid., 28).
41. See Martin Munro, Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); and Lilian Pestre de Almeida, Aimé Césaire: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, rev. ed. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012).
42. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982), 8.
43. René Hénane, Glossaire des termes rares dans l’oeuvre d’Aimé Césaire (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 2004). “Noctiluque” is a term meaning an animal, zoophyte, or plancton that shines at night (zoology); a Roman name given to the moon (mythology); a fleur that opens at night (biology). “Cyathée” comes from the Greek Kuathos, recipient, cup (botany). “Érésipèle” is a skin inflammation, often of the face, related to streptococcus (pathology). “Squasme” is a scaley skin disease.
44. See Jacqueline Leiner, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire par Jacqueline Leiner,” in Tropiques, vol. 1 (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978), xiv. Critics have forgotten that in these remarks Césaire connects the process of “bending” French with the poetics of Mallarmé: “Ainsi, si j’ai beaucoup aimé Mallarmé, c’est parce qu’il m’a montré, parce que j’ai compris à travers lui, que la langue, au fond, est arbitraire.”
45. It was Suzanne Césaire who first stated in 1942 that “la poésie martiniquaise sera cannibale ou ne sera pas” while critiquing the doudouisme of Martiniquan poetry; see Suzanne Césaire, “Misère d’une poésie: John Antoine-Nau,” Tropiques, vol. 4 (January 1942): 50. For an account of the impact of that statement, see Marie-Agnès Sourieau, “Suzanne Césaire et Tropiques: De la poésie cannibale à une poétique créole,” French Review 68, no. 1 (October 1994): 69–78.
46. On the appropriation and redirection of intertexts, see Daniel Delas, Aimé Césaire (Paris: Hachette, 1991); Jean-Jacques Thomas, “Aimé Césaire, de la poésie avant toute chose” (forthcoming); and Gil, “The Césaire Gambit.”
47. On the inclusion of Martiniquan Creole (or Kreyol) terms and phrases, see Annie Dyck, Le langage césairien, approche d’une écriture polyglossique (Mémoire de DEA, Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, 1988); and Lambert-Felix Prudent, “Aimé Césaire: Contribution poétique à la construction de la langue martiniquaise,” in Aimé Césaire à l’oeuvre, ed. Marc Cheymol and Philippe Ollé-Laprune (Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines, 2010).
48. See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans., ed., and intro. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997), 24: “Construction necessitates solutions that the imagining ear or eye does not immediately encompass or know in full detail. Not only is the unforeseen an effect, it also has an objective dimension, which was transformed into a new quality.” The term “construction” comes from Paul Valéry. See “Je disais quelquefois à Stéphane Mallarmé”: “Mallarmé a sans doute tenté de conserver ces beautés [the use of syllabic repetition] de la matière littéraire, tout en relevant son art vers la construction.” Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1957), 646.
49. I discovered these “Notes de classe” during a research trip to Fort-de-France in November 2010. They were donated by two of Césaire’s Lycée Schoelcher students, Michael Yang-Ting and Raymond Cottrell (Archives Départementales de Fort-de-France, Martinique; 1J257/1–7).
50. “Our meetings,” recounts Breton, used to take place in the evening after Césaire had finished “the courses he was giving at the lycée, courses that had as their subject matter the work of Rimbaud.” André Breton, “Martinique charmeuse de serpents: Un grand poète noir” in Tropiques 11 (May 1944): 80.
51. The notes for the class on Rivière are dated Wednesday, December 16, 1942. Breton was in Fort-de-France from April 24, 1941, until twentytwo days later. Breton’s comments make it appear likely that Césaire taught Rimbaud both in 1941 and 1942. During the blockade of Martinique and the installation of a Vichy-type government in Fort-de-France, promising lycéens were unable to obtain scholarships to study in France. It is for this reason that Césaire began teaching the materials of khâgne and hypokhâgne to the privileged few in his classes at the Lycée Schoelcher.
52. See Jacques Rivière, “L’Étude sur Rimbaud,” originally published in the Nouvelle Revue Française in two installments (July and August 1914), then republished in 1930 by Éditions Kra as a separate book, Rimbaud; and finally collected with other writings on Rimbaud by Rivière in Rimbaud, Dossier 1905–1925, ed. Roger Lefèvre (Paris: Gallimard, 1977). The passage quoted here is found in “Notes de classe” and on pages 166–67 of the 1977 Gallimard edition.
53. Césaire, Collected Poetry, 47.
54. Albert B. Lord argues that the oral poem is organized by means of “formulas” composed of several words, or “repeated phrases.” Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 31. “Substitution” occurs in the framework of grammar” (ibid., 35) as opposed to circulation and permutation of phonemes or phoneme clusters outside of lexemes or grammar.
55. Rivière, “L’Étude sur Rimbaud,” 168–69.
58. See, on this point, Jean-François Lyotard, Discours/figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), 215; and Jean-Pierre Bobillot, Trois essais sur la poésie littérale (Paris: Al Dante, 2003), 22–26.
59. See Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 15; see also Bobillot, Trois essais, 135.
60. Roger Dragonetti, “La littérature et la lettre (Introduction au Sonnet en X)” in Études sur Mallarmé, ed. Wilfried Smekens (Ghent: Romanica Gandensia, 1992), 49; added emphasis, my translation.
61. “Structure, une autre.” Mallarmé, “Crise de vers,” Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 2003), 211.
62. Mallarmé, “Crise de vers,” 211; Mallarmé, “Crisis of Verse,” in Divigations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 2007), 208.
63. Mallarmé, “Crisis of Verse,” 208, translation modified; Mallarmé, “Crise de vers,” 211. Although Mallarmé is concerned at first with the abandonment of traditional metrical forms (such as the alexandrine twelve syllable line), he proceeds to re-envision the role of the writer as well.
64. Arthur Rimbaud, “Lettre XI à Georges Izambard,” May 13, 1871, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1954), 268.
65. See Césaire, “Introduction à la poésie nègre américaine,” Tropiques (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1978; published in the second issue of Tropiques, July 1941, and conceivably part of his dissertation): “Car enfin, voilà une poésie qui n’offre pas à l’oreille ou à l’oeil un corps inattendu et indiscutable de vibrations. Ni l’éclat des couleurs. Ni la magie du son. Tout au plus du rythme, mais de primitif, de jazz ou de tam-tam c’est-à-dire enfonçant la résistance de l’homme en ce point de plus basse humanité qu’est le système nerveux” (41). In retrospect, Césaire’s assessment is troubling, for he fails to recognize the technical solutions arrived at by Johnson, Jean Toomer, and McKay (the poets he introduces). In contrast, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Césaire expresses considerable admiration for African American culture: “La culture noire est d’une terrible et extraordinaire vitalité,” he states in an interview with L. Altoun in 1970. L. Altoun, “Aimé Césaire et le théâtre nègre,” in Le théâtre (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1970), 112.
66. Césaire, “Introduction à la poésie nègre américaine,” 41.
68. See, among others, Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Jean-Baptiste Popeau, Dialogues of Negritude: The Cultural Context of Black Writing (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2003); and Chidi Ikonné, Links and Bridges: A Comparative Study of the Writings of the New Negro and the Negritude Movements (Ibadan, Nigeria: University Press PLC, 2005).
69. Lilian Pestre de Almeida offers a scholarly appraisal of the impact on Césaire of Haitian and African religions (and thus their languages, myths, and expressive forms) in Aimé Césaire: Une saison en Haiti.
70. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 267.
71. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée noir,” preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, ed. Léopold Sédar Senghor (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969); my translation.
72. For an account of Rimbaud’s materialism, his awareness of the economic conditions of poetic production, see Carrie Noland, Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
73. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 29.
75. See William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, intro. Ellen Kappy Suckiel, preface Ralph Barton Perry (1912; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); and Bruno Latour, “How to Talk About the Body: The Normative Dimension of Science Studies,” Body & Society 10, no. 205 (2004): 205–29.
76. “Je crois d’ailleurs—j’ai subi l’influence de Mallarmé—que le mot a sa musique, sa couleur, sa forme, sa force propre. Mais je crois aussi qu’il est PRÉHENSIBLE. C’est lui qui me permet d’appréhender mon Moi; je ne m’appréhende qu’à travers un mot, qu’à travers le mot.” Leiner, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire,” xii; original emphasis.
77. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 166. As a variant to “the subject in art” (267), the phrase is also translated as “the aesthetic subject” (29, 221, 356) and “the artistic subject” (231).
78. Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, vol. 3 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1982), 4939.
79. On the Afro-Caribbean “soundscape” in Césaire, see Martin Munro, Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
80. Engaging a different vocabulary, Kelly Oliver, following Freud, characterizes the ability to express subjectivity through a mediating artistic language as “sublimation,” which is the sign of a healthy, nonpsychotic self. See Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2004).
81. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1948); and Sartre, What Is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949): “The words are there like traps to arouse our feelings and to reflect them toward us. Each word is a path of transcendence” (45).
82. On Adorno’s conception of the “mediating subject,” see David Sherman, Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007): The “mediating subject” is not something transcendent and sublime but “always already tethered to the social, historical, and psychophysiological grounds that engender it” (177).
83. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 167.
84. Ibid.; German original quoted from Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 250.
85. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 250. The phrase “durch dem Akt von dessen Sprache” lends to the work’s language the agency of a performative speech act. A few lines further Adorno adds: “The intervening individual subject [who writes] is scarcely more than a limiting value, something minimal required by the artwork for its crystallization” (ibid.).
86. Adorno comes out of a German tradition of scholarship on the lyrisches Ich; for a succinct account of this critical tradition and the poets who animated it—Johann Goethe, Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Rainer Maria Rilke—see Dominique Combe, “La référence dédoublée: Le sujet lyrique entre fiction et autobiographie,” in Figures du sujet lyrique, ed. Dominique Rabaté (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 39–63.
87. See Deepika Bahri, Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003): “The postcolonial work, particularly of the cosmopolitan variety, is separated with difficulty from the fate of art as such in the age of advanced monopoly capitalism” (104). On the curious modernist temporality of Martinique, see Richard Price, The Convict and the Colonel (Boston: Beacon, 1998).
88. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1992), 265.
89. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 17–18.
90. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 167.
91. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 265.
92. It could be argued that the “individual,” for a Marxist, is inevitably a product of her social conditions; but Adorno is clear here that the very thing that distinguishes one individual from another (despite a shared conditioning) also provides resistance to those conditions.
93. For instance, on Césaire and Claudel, see Arnold, Negritude and Modernism; on Victor Hugo, see Lapoussinière, Au bout du petit matin; on Lautréamont, see René Hénane, Césaire et Lautréamont: Bestiaire et métamorphose (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006); on Charles Baudelaire, see Mireille Rosello, Littérature et identité créole aux Antilles (Paris: Karthala, 1992).
94. See, for instance, Lilyan Kesteloot, Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1991); Pestre de Almeida, Aimé Césaire: Une saison en Haiti; Romuald Fonkoua, Aimé Césaire (Paris: Perrin, 2008); and Prudent, “Aimé Césaire.”
95. “Whereas the two 1947 editions [of the Cahier] were revised exclusively by the addition of new material to the 1939 preoriginal, inflecting and intensifying its effects, the 1956 excised much of that same material and substituted for it blocks of text that would align the poem with Césaire’s new political position, which embraced the immediate decolonization of Africa in militant tones.” Arnold and Eshleman, The Original 1939 Notebook, xix. Arnold and Pestre de Almeida see signs of Césaire’s Catholicism, his exposure to Haitian vaudou, and even his intimate relationships flitting in and out of the editions published between 1947 and 1956.
96. Pestre de Almeida, Aimé Césaire: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (2012), 185; my translation; original emphasis.
97. See Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagements: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Eric Keenaghan, “Newly Discrepant Engagements: A Review of Three Recent Critical Works in Modernist Postcolonial Studies,” Journal of Modern Literature 29, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 176–90. See also Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian-American Poetry Since 1965 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009): “What is needed is … [to acknowledge] the existence of multiple and even competing groups whose practices we might recognize as avant-garde and whose aesthetic programs are inflected by their different social identifications” (4).
98. Mackey, Discrepant Engagements, jacket cover.
2. THE EMPIRICAL SUBJECT IN QUESTION
1. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983), 22. All further references will be to this edition, indicated by PA and the page number in the text.
2. Aimé Césaire, The Collected Poetry, trans. Clayton Eshlemen and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 45. I have modified the translation slightly: Eshlemen and Smith translate “un homme qui crie” as “a man screaming.” They make the same choice in their translation of Et les chiens se taisaient, where they systematically translate “cris” as “screams”; see Aimé Césaire, “And the Dogs Were Silent,” in Aimé Césaire: Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, trans. Clayton Eshlemen and Annette Smith (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990). All further quotations in English will be from this translation, and I will provide the page number in the text.
3. The official “Hommage à Aimé Césaire” website, established around the time of his death on April 17, 2008, presents on its homepage the opening lines of this passage: “Je viendrais à ce pays mien et je lui dirais: ‘Embrassez-moi sans crainte … Et si je ne sais que parler, c’est pour vous que je parlerai’” (http://www.hommage-cesaire.net/). Lilian Pestre de Almeida also notes the tendency among scholars to ignore the deflating passage that follows: “On oublie la chute terrible dans la réalité la plus mesquine, celle de la strophe 39 [“Et voici que je suis venu!”]. En clair, on lui fait dire le contraire de ce qu’affirme le poème, d’où le danger des morceaux choisis d’une oeuvre beaucoup plus complexe.” Aimé Césaire, Une saison en Haïti (Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2010), 100.
4. On Césaire’s use of triplicates, and, more generally, on his rhetorical style in political discourse, see Serge Gavronsky, “Aimé Césaire and the Language of Politics,” French Review 56, no. 2 (December 1982): 272–80.
5. Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Rolland Renéville and Jules Mouquet (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1954), 244; original italics; my translation.
6. For a full account of the genesis of Et les chiens se taisaient, see Alex Gil, “Migrant Textuality: On the Fields of Aimé Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2012); available at Academic Commons, http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:161180. Gil demonstrates convincingly that the work was first conceived as a stage drama and that the excisions Césaire effected in the later versions transformed what was an originally coherent accompanying commentary (of the Chorus, for instance) into hermetic ecphrastic poetry: “Once you remove the mimetic action on the stage that authorizes and gives meaning to them, lines such as these transform into a peculiar form of detached ecphrasis; soon enough, when the geographical and historical references disappear as well, these ostensive lines end up being removed completely or disfigured to refer to a vague archetypal history of the African diaspora and colonialism”(41).
7. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans., ed., intro. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997), 216, 167, 169.
8. Ibid., 231. The mediated/immediate dichotomy, when applied to the subject, is a distortion of Adorno’s thought; as he states in his “draft introduction” to Aesthetic Theory, “the subject is in itself objectively mediated” (356). “The objectivation of art through its immanent execution requires the historical subject. If the artwork hopes through its objectivation to achieve that truth that is hidden from the subject, then this is so because the subject is itself not ultimate” (169). Adorno is arguing here with Riegl’s “concept of ‘artistic volition’”; as I maintained in chapter 1, for Adorno, it is only when the author, as empirical subject, abandons volition that her action becomes creative (169).
9. Peggy Phelan, comment offered at her seminar, “Literature and Performance,” held at University of California, Irvine, March 1–3, 2011.
10. Phelan poses the question in these terms: “What is the repertoire of images from which identity is shaped?” (ibid.). See also Judith Butler’s probing analysis of subjectivity in Giving an Account of Oneself (Amsterdam: Koninklijke van Gorcum, 2003), which is grounded in premises similar to those implicitly at work in what Phelan calls “the performance world view.”
11. Léon-Gontran Damas, Pigments—Névralgies, ed. and postface Sandrine Poujols (Paris and Dakar: Présence Africaine, 2005), 41; my translation. “Solde”—dedicated, we might note, to Aimé Césaire—expresses the quintessential sensation of falsity that Fanon also associates with “l’expérience vécue” of the assimilated colonial subject.
13. Aimé Césaire, Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours, ed. A. James Arnold (Paris: Éditions CNRS, 2013), 1293; my translation. Césaire is inspired here by Claude McKay’s Banjo, excerpts of which were published in French translation in La Revue du Monde Noir. Césaire’s relationship to black popular culture (celebrated in Banjo as an authentic alternative to white culture) was problematic; he did not easily embrace, as did Damas, either Caribbean or African American popular forms (see chapter 3).
14. Césaire, Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours, 1292. The quotation comes from Jules Michelet, Le peuple, 1877, xxix (“Lettre-préface à M. Edgar Quinet”). Once again Césaire establishes an intertextual relation with a canonical (white) French author in order to depict a condition that he racializes.
15. In L’Étudiant Noir (the title of which was L’Étudiant Martiniquais before Césaire became editor), Césaire may have also had African colonials in mind, but “Nègreries” fits into a series of Antillean writings of the period that target the évolué of the Antilles in particular (see essays in Légitime Défense and La Revue du Monde Noir). At the time, Antilleans were taught that they were superior to Africans; Césaire, in this context, is challenging Antilleans to embrace their African past.
16. Aimé Césaire, Et les chiens se taisaient: Tragédie (arrangement théâtral) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956), 115. All further references will be to this edition.
17. Nick Nesbitt, Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in the French Caribbean (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 22.
18. For a full account, see Alex Gil, “Découverte de l’Ur-texte de Et les chiens se taisaient,” in Aimé Césaire à l’oeuvre, ed. Marc Cheymol and Philippe Ollé-Laprune (Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines, 2010), 145–56. See also Gil, Migrant Textuality: “A dizzying chain of textual events, these four major versions trace a journey from historical particularity to an oneiric universalism and on to what we may be tempted to call a reconciliation of the two in the attempts to stage it at the height of the anti-colonial movement of the 1950s” (2–3).
19. See the “Letter to André Breton,” April 4, 1994, quoted in Gil, “Découverte,” 147. See also Kora Véron “Césaire at the Crossroads in Haiti: Correspondence with Henri Seyrig,” Comparative Literature Studies 50:3 (2013): 403–44. The letters Véron discovered reveal that André Gide first intended to publish the play, called Toussaint Louverture, in his Algerian review, L’Arche, in 1944, but Césaire thought his “tentative” remained “trop historique” (437), so he kept revising it.
20. Rodney E. Harris, L’humanisme dans le théâtre d’Aimé Césaire (Ottawa: Naaman, 1973), 56.
21. Yvan Labejof claims in “Autour d’une mise en scène de “Et les chiens se taisaient’” that he heard a French radio production directed by Sylvia Monfort, but he does not provide a date. See Aimé Césaire: L’homme et l’oeuvre, ed. Lilyan Kesteloot and Barthélémy Kotchy (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1973), 155. Janis L. Pallister repeates Labejof’s claim in Aimé Césaire (New York: Twayne, 1991): “A performance of the Césaire’s play has been broadcast on French radio by Sylvia Monfort et al., but evidently not successfully so” (48). The radio play in German translation was largely a product of Janheinz Jahn’s revisions. Césaire did not want Jahn to stage the radio play, which was an abbreviated version of his 1946 text; but Jahn did so without Césaire’s permission, basing the German version on his own 1955–1956 translation for radio. See Gil, Migrant Textuality, 224. A review of the German version of the radio play, titled Und die Hunde Schwiegen, indicates that the long monologues did “not lead to a real plot”; nonetheless, the play appears suited for radio because of its “lyric-rhythmic circular dance.” See “‘And the Dogs Were Silent’: The Rebel Wasn’t,” Frankfurt Evening Post, January 16, 1956, anonymous reviewer, trans. Jonathan Blake Fine.
22. Scholars have not been able to pin down the precise number of times Et les chiens se taisaient has been produced on stage. In his annotations to Aimé Césaire, Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours, A. James Arnold presents the evidence we have: “À la quatrième de couverture, imprimée après la page de titre dans l’édition Désormeaux de 1976, Césaire ajouta: ‘Cette pièce a fait l’objet de tentatives de mise en scène de Sarah Maldo[r]or, d’Yvan Labéjof et du regretté Jean-Marie Serreau.’ Or, les archives de Serreau consultées par nous au département des Arts du spectacle de la Bibliothèque nationale de France ne retiennent aucune trace de sa mise en scène, ce qui est regrettable” (783–84). Clément Mbom refers to the 1956 performance of Et les chiens se taisaient, performed at the Sorbonne during the Premier Congrès des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs, in “Aimé Césaire: Poète ou dramaturge?” in Soleil éclaté, ed. Jacqueline Leiner (Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1984), 262. The only mention of the Haiti performance I have found is in “Les fondements littéraires de la réception d’Aimé Césaire au Bénin” by Guy Ossito Midihouan in Aimé Césaire et le monde noir, ed. Richard Laurent Omgba and André Ntonfo (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012). In 1978 Sarah Maldoror released an approximately thirteenminute documentary film (16 mm) titled Et les chiens se taisaient comprising a collection of the Rebel’s speeches, starting with the “Mort au cri ‘Morts aux blancs’” speech that I analyze further in this chapter.
23. Ernstpeter Ruhe, Aimé Césaire et Janheinz Jahn: Les débuts du théâtre césairien (Würzburg: Königshawusen and Neumann, 1990), 9. Gil quotes from the stage directions in the “Ur-text” to show that this earliest version was more “theatrical,” and potentially easier to stage, than the 1946 rewrite; see Migrant Textuality, 29–30.
24. Interview with François Beloux, “Un poète politique: Aimé Césaire” in Le Magazine Littéraire 34 (1969): 27–32, at 30, quoted in Gil, Migrant Textuality, 155.
25. See letter to Jahn quoted in Ruhe, Aimé Césaire et Janheinz Jahn, 8: “piece où j’ai tant mis de moi-même et de mes problèmes.”
26. A. James Arnold, introduction in Aimé Césaire, Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, xv.
27. Ruhe, Aimé Césaire et Janheinz Jahn, 17.
28. On this period, see Pierre Bouvier, Aimé Césaire et Frantz Fanon: Portraits de décolonisés (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2010), 111–23. See also Aimé Césaire with Françoise Vergès, Nègre je suis: Nègre je resterai (Paris: Albin, 2005): “À Haïti, j’ai surtout vu ce qu’il ne fallait pas faire! Un pays qui avait prétendument conquis sa liberté, qui avait conquis son indépendence et que je voyais plus misérable que la Martinique, colonie française!” (56). Immediately after the war, France appeared to be the gold standard of antiracism and tolerance; at the time, the Fourth Republic seemed to promise Martinique greater liberties within the fold of departmentalization. As documentation of Césaire’s many interventions in the Assemblée nationale reveal, he regretted supporting departmentalization once he realized that the “territoires d’outre-mer” would not be granted the same rights as those enjoyed by the departments of the “hexagone.” See Ernest Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire: Député à l’Assemblée nationale 1945–1993 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993). Césaire’s first known public speaking engagement on political matters (in Haiti he gave nine lectures on literary topics), occurred in late December 1944; in this speech before a Martiniquan audience he referred explicitly to the problem plaguing Haitian self-governance: the distance between the elites and the people; see Thomas A. Hale, who cites an account of Césaire’s speech published in Justice, the organ of the Martiniquan Communist Party, in “Littérature orale: le discours comme arme de combat chez Aimé Césaire,” Soleil éclaté, ed. Jacqueline Leiner, 173–186 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, l984), 177.
29. On the Prometheus myth, see K. A. Poniewaz, “Les regards des dieux: La vision tragique de Et les chiens se taisaient,” in Jeux du Regard 3 (2007): 129–37; and Alain Moreau, “Eschyle et Césaire: Rencontres et influences dans ‘Et les chiens se taisaient,’” in Soleil éclaté, ed. Jacqueline Leiner, 285–301 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1984); on the Oedipus myth, see A. James Arnold, Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); on Claudel’s theatre as intertext, see Ernstpeter E. Ruhe, “L’Anticlaudelianus d’Aimé Césaire: Intertextualité dans Et les chiens se taisaient,” Oeuvres et Critiques 19, no. 2 (1994): 231–41; and on the Biblical subtext, see Lilyan Kesteloot and Bartholémy Kotchy, Aimé Césaire, l’homme et l’oeuvre (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1973).
30. Harris, L’humanisme dans le théâtre d’Aimé Césaire, 49; my translation.
31. See Gil, “Découverte”: “Plus encore que la matière historique qui doit passer à la trappe, l’abondante matière qui change de place dans l’économie générale de la pièce retient notre intérêt. A maints endroits la réplique d’un personnage de l’Ur-texte se retrouvera dans la bouche d’un autre personnage, antagoniste parfois! Le fait que les répliques ne correspondent plus à la psychologie de tel ou tel personnage souligne de façon indiscutable la décision d’abandonner le drame historique à la faveur de l’oratorio marqué au coin du surréalisme” (154).
32. Eshleman and Smith translate these lines as “My law is that I should run on an unbroken chain until the fiery joining that volatilizes me purifies me and ignites me with my amalgamated gold prism” (50). The “de” in French is unclear, though; it may be that the “amalgamated gold prism” is not what “ignites” him; it is what is destroyed. He is purified of (“épuré de”) the prism.
33. I have modified the Eshleman and Smith translation, which reads: “You gods down there / benevolent gods / I’m carrying off in my brokendown mug / the buzzing of a living flesh/ here I am …” (67).
34. Femi Ojo-Ade reads the drums as a positive force (the African convocation to a community) that overpower the negative force of the dogs, but this does not seem to be substantiated by the symbology of the play. See Femi Ojo-Ade, Aimé Césaire’s African Theater: Of Poets, Prophets, and Politicians (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2012), 51–59.
35. See Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
36. Marianne Wichmann Bailey, The Ritual Theater of Aimé Césaire: Mythic Structures of the Dramatic Imagination (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1992), 153–54. In “Autour d’une mise en scène,” Yvan Labejof explains that in Martinique the “chiens” of the title would evoke both the dogs used to hunt down escaped slaves (“marrons”) and reincarnated souls (154).
37. See Ojo-Ade, Aimé Césaire’s African Theater, 59.
38. Bailey, The Ritual Theater of Aimé Césaire, 159.
39. On “fresque historique,” see Rodney Harris, L’humanisme dans le théâtre, 56.
40. In the Cahier, the speaker resists the temptation to be “a man of hate.” That colonialism turns the colonizer (and not just the colonized) into a beast is a point Césaire makes clearly in Discours sur le colonialisme (and one that he actualizes in Les chiens through the figure of the dogs): “La colonisation, je le répète, déshumanise l’homme même le plus civilisé; que l’action coloniale, l’entreprise coloniale, la conquête coloniale, fondée sur le mépris de l’homme indigène et justifiée par ce mépris, tend inévitablement à modifier celui qui l’entreprend; que le colonisateur, qui, pour se donner bonne conscience, s’habitue à voir dans l’autre la bête, s’entraîne à le traiter en bête, tend objectivement à se transformer lui-même en bête” (Césaire, Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours, 1453). The Discours sur le colonialisme was published in 1948, 1950, and 1955.
41. For the annotated text, see “L’homme de culture et ses responsabilités,” in Césaire, Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours (1553–1559).
42. Ibid., 1555. For a contrasting view, see Nick Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013); Nesbitt contends that in Césaire’s preface to Guy Fau’s L’abolition de l’esclavage of 1972, “Césaire explicitly affirms a quasi-Fanonian vision of the necessity and justice of anticolonial violence” (ibid., 112).
43. On the relations between Fanon and Césaire, see Bouvier, Aimé Césaire et Frantz Fanon; and André Lucrèce, Frantz Fanon et les Antilles (Fort-de-France: Le Teneur, 2011; 71–94), which also contains Césaire’s “Hommage à Frantz Fanon,” first published by Présence Africaine in 1962. This text also affirms Césaire’s conviction that violent revolt is the only way to overthrow a colonial regime. The editors of Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours did not include this “Hommage” in their collection.
44. See also the Cahier: “ne faites point de moi cet homme de haine pour qui / je n’ai que haine” (PA, 50).
45. For instance, at the end of the second added monologue, the Rebel rejects the “glèbe usée” (or sterile earth) of inaction evoked earlier and states that now he is ready to move forward on more firm and fertile ground: “je suis prêt! / glèbe tassée, je suis prêt.”
46. Bailey, The Ritual Theater, 112.
47. “Christophe, Lumumba, the Rebelle,” Bailey observes, “all draw away from the people in whose name they act” (The Ritual Theater, 113). Even the ending of Une tempête, which is often read as a victory for the rebel, Caliban, ends with Caliban leaving the stage, his “La liberté ohé, la liberté!” reduced to “les debris du chant.” Prospero, the figure of European reason, fares no better; he makes “mechanical” gestures while uttering a “langage appauvri et steréotypé.” See Aimé Césaire, Une tempête (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 91–92.
48. The Rebel realizes he cannot advance toward his goal without “le cri,” this time drawn from a hollow, a “creux boueux,” that is strangely reminiscent of the “grand trou noir” at the end of the Cahier.
49. An important exception is Rémy Sylvestre Bouelet’s reading of the selfreflexive monologue in Césaire’s plays in the context of a dialectical unfolding; see Bouelet, Espace et dialectique du héros césairien (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987), 19. Bailey interprets the self-reflexive moment as an instance of “ego-shedding and initiatory descent. His conflict now is with himself” (ibid., 211). For both, the pattern is that of dialectical advance toward synthesis.
50. Staging the self-reflexivity of the Rebel serves an important didactic function as well, for one of the rationales for colonization cited by the “Grand Promoteur” is that slavery is justified because blacks are nothing more than “les Danseurs de l’Humanité” (23), an echo of the Administrator’s claim that the white race is the only race of “people qui pense” (11).
51. These are stage directions contained in the 1946 edition, Les armes miraculeuses, 123, 139, 145, and 172.
52. I therefore have to differ with Georges Ngal, who opposes “héroisme” to “singerie” in his long list of Césairean dichotomies; see Ngal, “Le théâtre d’Aimé Césaire: Une dramaturgie de la décolonisation,” Revue des Sciences Humaines, fasc. 40 (October–December 1970): 616.
53. See Aimé Césaire, La tragédie du Roi Christophe (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1963), 118 and 110. At the end of the play, Christophe pleads to be relieved of all the trapings of royalty: “Défais-moi de tous ces vêtements, défais-m’en comme, l’aube venue, on se défait des rêves de la nuit. … De mes nobles, de ma noblesse, de mon sceptre, de ma couronne. Et lave-moi! Oh lave-moi de leur fard …” (147). The Rebel’s desire for nudity early on in the play suggests that he hopes to avoid the fate of the self-aggrandizing King. He does not escape the Lover’s accusation nonetheless.
54. The Cahier dramatizes this same dilemma by presenting a speaker who vacillates constantly between the gesture of “rising up” (“debout”) and the gesture of hurling himself on the ground, both of which are imitated by the Rebel. See the Cahier: “Je refuse de me donner mes boursouflures comme d’authentiques gloires. / Et je ris de mes anciennes imaginations puériles” (PA, 38); “Je me cachais derrière une vanité stupide le destin m’appelait j’étais caché derrière et voici l’homme par terre” (PA, 43).
55. This argument is precisely the one made by Judith Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself, 40; it is the insight of poststructuralism in general that the “I” is constituted by means of a language, a structure of address, and generic conventions that it does not choose and that shape its selfunderstanding (and the limits thereof).
56. See Marcel Mauss, “Une catégorie de l’esprit humain: La notion de personne, celle du ‘moi’” (a lecture first delivered in 1938), in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950).
57. For an account of “disidentification” as fundamental to identity formation, see José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 5).
58. On the possible influence of Kojève and Hegelian thought on Césaire, see Nesbitt, Voicing Memory.
59. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 44.
60. “Permanent parabasis” is Paul de Man’s term; see de Man, “Rhetoric of Temporality” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., intro. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). With reference to Schlegel’s notion of irony, de Man writes: “The positive name he gives to the infinity of this process is freedom, the unwillingness of the mind to accept any stage in its progression as definitive … it designates the fact that irony engenders a temporal sequence of acts of consciousness which is endless” (220); “Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but never overcome it” (222).
61. On the persistence of accountability despite the impossibility of complete self-identity, see Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 44–45. This is not the place to elaborate on Césaire’s position with regard to performance in general; I will simply note that there are real reasons why he would have been wary of any association of blackness with performance. One need only think of Langston Hughes’s comments on the pressure he felt to be an entertainer in The Big Sea; or Jean Genet’s astute grasp of the situation in Les Nègres, to understand Césaire’s reticence with regard both to popular cultural portrays of blacks (minstrelsy, blacks as natural dancers, etc.) and the deep problematic of colonial mimicry.
62. Roger Toumson and Simonne Henry-Valmore, Aimé Césaire: Le nègre inconsolé, (Fort de France, Martinique: Vents d’ailleurs, 2002), 73.
63. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 17–18.
3. POETRY AND THE TYPOSPHERE IN LÉON-GONTRAN DAMAS
1. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983), 44.
2. Aimé Césaire, The Collected Poetry, trans. Annette Smith and Clayton Eshleman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 64–65. The verses are repeated later in the poem.
3. Ibid., 68–69. Negritude poets drew much of their imagination of the African past from the works of Leo Frobenius; see Dominique Combe, Aimé Césaire: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993); Georges Ngal, Aimé Césaire: Un homme à la recherche d’une patrie (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1994); and Lilyan Kesteloot, Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1991).
4. Marcel Cohen is the direct target of Jacques Derrida in De la grammatologie. As early as 1927, however, Maurice Delafosse had published Les nègres (Paris: F. Rieder), in which he debunks Cohen’s scholarship, claiming that it “ne serait pas rigoureusement exact de dire que les nègres ne possèdent qu’une littérature orale et que cette littérature soit nécessairement du genre dit populaire … on y [en Afrique noire] observe aussi une littérature orale savante et une littérature écrite” (65). The works of Delafosse had a very strong influence on Damas in particular.
5. According to Joan F. Higbee, Damas became aware of his inferior status even before arriving in France, from the first day he began his studies in Martinique: “To a Guyanese ‘WHITE’ was not ‘BETTER.’ His [Damas’s] introduction to narratives that asserted European superiority occurred, he told me, when he left Guiana to attend the Lycée Schoelcher in Martinique.” Higbee, “Léon-Gontran Damas: My Thesis,” in Léon-Gontran Damas 1912–1978: Founder of Negritude, A Memorial Casebook, ed. Daniel L. Racine (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979), 128.
6. See Raymond F. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory 1840–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).
7. For an account of the paradoxes of this period, see Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000).
8. Étienne Léro, “Misère d’une poésie,” Légitime Défense, 1 (1932), 10; my translation.
9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006): “Printcapitalism,” writes Anderson, “made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways” (36).
10. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 8. See also Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
11. Jacqueline Leiner, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire par Jacqueline Leiner,” in Tropiques (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978), xiv.
12. I speak here of the “black man” (as opposed to the “black person”) and I refer to the black subject as “he” or “him” (instead of “she” and “her”) primarily in the interest of concision. However, I am also registering the fact that most theorists of colonial subjection (including Fanon) distinguish between gendered positions in the colonial racial economy. For a sensitive account of how assimilation impacted Caribbean women, see Shireen K. Lewis, “Gendering Négritude: Paulette Nardal’s Contribution to the Birth of Modern Francophone Literature,” in Race, Culture, and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature and Theory from Négritude to Créolité, 55–69 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
13. For both Fanon and Damas, “no ontology of the black man can be realized in a colonized society”; see Frantz Fanon, Peau noire masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), 88; my translation.
14. There were, of course, hybrid works: Senghor wrote a poem about Harlem titled “New York” with the intention of reciting it to the accompaniment of a jazz orchestra and solo trumpet. His “Élégies majeures” indicate the instruments with which they are to be accompanied. In 2006 Daniel Delas released a CD and book titled Senghor et la musique (Paris: OIF and Le Français dans le Monde, 2006) that displays the efforts of three groups of students (in Dakar, Toulouse, and Tunis) to set his poems to music. To my ear, at least, what emerges from the exercise is further proof that poetic language exists on a different plane from musical rhythm; only one “cut” (“Prière aux masques”) convincingly brings out the repetitive, drum-like meter of the poem.
15. Léon-Gontran Damas, ed. Poèmes nègres sur des airs africains (Paris: GLM, 1948).
16. See, in particular, “Comme les Lamantins vont boire à la source,” the postface to Éthiopiques, reprinted in Léopold Sédar Senghor, Oeuvre poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 155–68. Senghor explains that his poems should be able to be recited—not just “sung”—in the French style (167). “Mais on me posera la question: ‘Pourquoi, dès lors, écrivez-vous en français?’ Parce que nous sommes des métis culturels, parce que, si nous sentons en nègres, nous nous exprimons en français” (ibid., 166).
17. On the phenomenon of subvocalization, see Lesley Wheeler, Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
18. Henri Meschonnic, Critique du rythme: Anthropologie historique du langage (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1982).
19. According to Alexandre M’Boukou, “Mr. Damas was the bond of continuity between Légitime Défense and L’Etudiant Noir.” M’Boukou, “Léon-Gontran Damas on Race, African-Afro-American Relations, Africa, and Négritude,” in Léon-Gontran Damas 1912–1978: Founder of Negritude, A Memorial Casebook, ed. Daniel L. Racine (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979), 166. Damas was the cofounder de L’Étudiant Noir, the goal of which was to end the “tribalization” of the Latin Quarter (see Racine, Introduction à Léon-Gontran Damas, in ibid., 3). On this period and on the importance of the Revue du Monde Noir for Damas’s poetics in particular, see Michel Fabre, “René Maran: Trait d’union entre deux négritudes,” in Négritude africaine: Négritude caraibe (Paris: Université de Paris XIII, 1973).
20. Damas became aware of Hughes’s literary presence around 1931, when his poems appeared in La Revue du Monde Noir. Later Damas tried his own hand at translating Hughes, and apparently he was in the process of writing Hughes’s biography when he died in 1978. (I found no trace of this biography in the Damas archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.) Although Damas could not have seen The Weary Blues when he began writing in 1926, he would have had access to the text by the time some of the poems were printed in Esprit in 1934. The mise en page of Hughes’s “Poem” is too similar to that of Damas’s “Ils sont venus ce soir” to be pure coincidence. For a treatment of the relationship between Jacques Roumain and Langston Hughes that also sheds light on Roumain’s relationship to Damas, see Anita Patterson, Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
21. Présence Africaine republished the “definitive” version of Pigments with Névralgies in 1972; in the meantime, Graffiti appeared in 1952; Black Label in 1956; and a first edition of Névralgies in 1966.
22. Antoine Coron, “Artisans de belles vraies oeuvres,” in Les Éditions GLM 1923–74: Bibliographie (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1981), xiii. Pigments bears a preface penned by Robert Desnos and an engraving by Frans Masereel. Lévis Mano used two fonts for Pigments, Série 18 romain c.12 and Ronaldson old style romain c.9 (31), the same ones he used for many of the surrealist works he published that year: Tristan Tzara’s Vigies; Henri Michaux’s La ralentie; Georges Hugnet’s L’Apocalypse; Georges Bataille’s review Acéphale: Religion, Socologie, Philosophie; Valentine Penrose’s Sorts de la lueur; Man Ray’s La photographie n’est pas l’art; André Breton’s Exposition internationale Paris 1937 and De l’humour noir; René Char’s Placard pour un chemin des écoliers; and Paul Eluard’s Quelques-uns des mots qui jusqu’ici m’étaient mystérieusement interdits. See also the postface by Sandrine Poujols to the 2005 edition of Pigments/Névralgies (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2005), 157–66.
23. Cunard’s publishing house, the Hours Press, took part in the renaissance of the book that characterized the French, British, and American avant-gardes. Cunard published surrealists and black writers and was the editor of Negro: An Anthology in 1934.
24. Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 7.
25. Esprit (September 1934), 707. During the era of the Popular Front, Emmanuel Mounier’s review carved out a space in both the political and the cultural fields by supporting neither fascism nor communism. Mounier was closely tied to the Catholic metaphysics of Jacques Maritain; they cofounded Esprit in October 1932. The editorial decision to include Damas in the pages of the review was probably based on a combination of paternalism and Mounier’s doctrine of “personalism,” which advanced the idea that every human being has the right (and obligation) to develop his potential as fully as possible. See Bernard E. Doering, Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 60–75.
27. On ethnographic surrealism, see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
28. Marcel Moré, “Poèmes de Léon Damas,” Esprit (September 1934), 705.
29. Senghor: “Des poètes nègres francophones de ma génération, Damas est, sans conteste, celui qui a le mieux illustré le rythme nègre.” Léopold Sédar Senghor, preface to Léon-Gontran Damas: L’homme et l’œuvre, by Daniel Racine (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983), 12. See also Keith L. Walker, The Game of Slipknot: Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999): “From his poems (which typographically meander across, up, and down the page, resembling musical scores at times) rise pianistic melodies, the hammering cadences of African and Harlem drums, and the stammerings, stutterings, and moans of a Louis Armstrong muted trumpet” (74). Richard Serrano is the only critic I know who has fruitfully questioned this stereotype; see Serrano, Against the Postcolonial: ‘Francophone’ Writers at the Ends of French Empire (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005).
30. Moré, “Poèmes de Léon Damas,” Esprit (September 1934), 705.
31. Another poem published in the same issue, “Solde,” indicates that the plight of the assimilé involves an alienation from the self, an alienation from one’s own body.
32. “Cubes” was published in New Masses 10 (March 13, 1934). See Seth Moglen, “Modernism in the Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and the Broken Cubes of Picasso,” Callaloo 25, no. 4 (Autumn 2002): 1188–1205 and Ryan James Kerman “The Coup of Langston Hughes’s Picasso Period: Excavating Mayakovsky in Langston Hughes’s verse,” Compartive Literature 66:2 (2014): 227–46. The “Vers en escalier” also appears in Mayakovsky’s poetry as the Russian Lestnitsa. On the typographic and design features of New Masses, published from 1926–1948, see Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1989), 226–31 and Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
33. For a scholarly elaboration of this argument, see Simon Gikandi, “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference,” Modernism/ Modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 455–80.
34. See Wheeler, Voicing American Poetry, 75.
35. Richard Burton, “My Mother Who Fathered Me: ‘Hoquet’ by Léon Damas,” Journal of West Indian Literature 4, no. 1 (January 1990): 14–27.
36. Originally transported from Senegal to the Caribbean by slaves, the banjo became a popular instrument in jazz bands and music halls and was featured in Claude McKay’s novel of the same name (Banjo, 1929). The original word for “banjo” is bagnan, which is translated into French as a “violon fait d’un gourd.” On the wordplay at the end of “Hoquet”—especially the creation of “ban” (or exile) out of “ban / jo”—see “Le vocabulaire de Damas: Entre anti-académisme et modernité” by Gervais Chirhalwirwa and Biringanine Ndagano in Léon-Gontran Damas, poète moderne, ed. Chirhalwirwa and Ndagano (Matoury, Guyane: Ibis Rouge, 20009), 41.
37. See Jean-Pierre Bobillot, Trois essais sur la poésie littérale (Paris: Al Dante, 2003), 126.
38. Gilles Deleuze, Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit, 1993), 139.
41. Ibid., 142; Deleuze’s analysis anticipates to some extent Jacques Derrida’s in Le monolinguisme de l’autre: Ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996); Deleuze associates such aggressive stylistics with avant-garde writers like Luca and Beckett, or with “minor literatures,” not with writing in general.
42. Bobillot, Trois essais, 134. Bobillot writes: “And what if all poetry, from the most classic to the most modern … beyond what it seems explicitly to say, consisted in an effort to find spaces within language where it might be possible to stage a return of the repressed—orgasmic and intense? If repression is the very condition of language and meaning, might the return of the repressed be the source of jouissance, of pleasure in language? Is this, then, the role of negativity in poetry?” (126); my translation.
43. Deleuze, Critique et clinique, 142.
44. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 94.
45. Glossing the two types of alienation treated by Fanon—the fundamental, universal alienation of the subject at the hands of the Symbolic and the specialized variety of alienation that results from colonial subjectivation—Moten writes: “‘Continuous and distinct’ seems right to me [as a way of understanding the relation between the two types of alienation] but what is required is that analytic attention of the highest order be given to the range of those continuities and distinctions. In the end, what’s important is, I think, the modes of life that emerge from the experience of those whose subjectivity has been interdicted and who operate, at the same time, within a refusal of what has been refused to them” (email communication with the author, November 13, 2012).
46. Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: Caraf Books/University Press of Virginia, 1989), 123; see also Moten, In the Break: “The illusion of any immediacy of sound is re/written and the overdetermined and deferred fixity of writing is un/written by the material and transformative present of sound” (60). Kamau Brathwaite makes a similar point in History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon, 1984).
47. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 123. See also Houston A. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
48. Burton, “My Mother Who Fathered Me”: “This fettering of the authentic voice of the Afro-Caribbean within the notational straight-jacket of Europe is, Damas implies, as much an act of violence or rape of innocence as the other enslavements of West Indian history” (25).
49. Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Literary Ellington,” Representations 77 (Winter 2002): 1.
51. Aimé Césaire, “Léon-Gontran Damas: A Man of Considerable Stature,” in Léon-Gontran Damas … A Memorial Casebook, 95.
4. LÉON-GONTRAN DAMAS
1. Henri Meschonnic, Critique du rythme: Anthropologie historique du langage (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1982), 72; translations are my own.
2. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), 7.
3. Susan Howe, “Writing Articulation of Sound Forms in Time,” in The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009): “Font-voices summon a reader into visible earshot” (200).
4. Meschonnic, Critique du rythme, 72.
5. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010), 137.
6. Importantly, this event is not necessarily experienced as “art” per se. For Rancière, the category “art” is a product of a discourse named “aesthetics” that emerges in the eighteenth century.
7. Rancière, Dissensus, 137. Emphasis in original.
9. Free and obligatory primary education was instituted in the French colonies the same day that slavery was abolished (for the first time) on April 27, 1848. The first Antillean agrégé was Louis Achille, in 1915. See MADRAS, Dictionnaire encyclopédique et pratique de la Martinique: Les hommes, les faits, les chiffres (Fort-de-France: Éditions Exbrayat, 1996).
10. Rancière, Dissensus, 116.
11. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983), 22; my translation.
12. In La parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature (Paris: Hachette, 1998), Rancière alludes to the myth of Theuth (also treated in Derrida’s Disseminations) to underscore his point. Theuth was the inventor of writing and despised foe of the Platonic Republic. As recounted by Socrates in the Phaedrus, the invention of writing brings about the end of the author’s ethical responsibility to an audience of fellow citizens: “No longer guided by a father … the written word spins off in all directions [s’en va rouler au hasard, de droite et de gauche],” lending itself to “n’importe qui” (81–82), “the undetermined mass of possible readers [la masse indéterminée des lecteurs possible]”(169); my translation.
13. Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé: La politique de la sirène (Paris: Hachette, 1996), 86.
15. Ibid.; and Stéphane Mallarmé, “Bucolique,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 2003), 252.
16. Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 3. Stewart argues that there is “a veritable deaf spot in the tenets of even the most sophisticated reception theories.” See also Adalaide Morris’s introduction to Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
17. See Jed Rasula, “Poetry’s Voice-Over,” in Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adalaide Morris, 274–316 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
18. Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science: Pound, Yeats, Williams, and Modern Sciences of Rhythm (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 11–12. Comte de Gobineau, the father of modern racism, also believed that each race had a pulse that beat to a different rhythm.
19. Fahamisha Patricia Brown, Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 2.
20. It should be noted that Bernard Zadi Zaourou claims to have discerned traces of “négro-africaine” oral forms in Césaire’s use of anaphora and other forms of repetition; see Zaourou, Césaire entre deux cultures: Problèmes théoriques de la littérature négro-africaines aujourd’hui (Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1978), 169–75. Other scholars, including A. James Arnold, attribute Césaire’s incantatory style to the influence of Charles Péguy, to whom Césaire dedicated an essay in Tropiques.
21. Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 51; my translation. “Ces enfants ne comprennent pas les formules, ne saisissent pas les allusions, mais c’est à eux que l’homme des contes d’abord s’adresse” (51).
22. Senghor’s theory of rhythm owes a good deal to vitalist philosophy, as Donna V. Jones argues in The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Negritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
23. Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté I: Négritude et humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 20; also see Senghor, postface in Ethiopiques, reprinted in Oeuvre poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 164.
24. Léopold Sédar Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), 5.
25. Senghor, postface in Éthiopiques, 161; interestingly, Senghor is speaking here about Césaire’s “Batouque,” which follows patterns of lineation similar to Damas’s.
26. A third and compelling argument about race-identified rhythm is offered by Brent Hayes Edwards in The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). He argues that African rhythm cannot be conveyed directly but instead haunts the text, coming “to mark a certain inaccessibility, a certain part of an ‘African’ heritage that remains elusive and unconquered” (55).
27. Martin Munro, Different Drummers: Rhythm & Race in the Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 139. While Munro is to be commended for reintroducing the question of “rhythm and its relationship to race and culture in the Americas” (4), it is a pity that he does not attend to poetic rhythm more closely. In his twelve pages devoted to Negritude poetry, not once does Munro cite the poems in the original French. While he purports to analyze the rhythm of the poetry, what he is really talking about is the theme or “figure” of rhythm. “Rhythm does indeed figure constantly in Césaire’s poems, and it is often explicitly linked to his idea of black culture.” Ibid., 139. The same goes for his discussion of Césaire in “Listening to Aimé Césaire,” Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 7, no. 1 (2009): 44–60. When Munro does refer to the actual rhythm of the poem, he reduces this rhythm to repetition, as if Caribbean poets were the only ones to employ repetition as a technique. See also Edwin C. Hill Jr., Black Soundscapes White Stages: The Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Hill’s reading of Damas’s last poem, Black-Label, contains many fine insights, but he falls into the same trap as Munro, quoting the poetry exclusively in English while asserting that he is discussing “rhythm”; “Damas’s aggressive enumeration, forming its own rhythm and beat, creates not only a corpus of self-loathing and self-negation but also a path.” Ibid., 115. It is startling—and of deep concern—that some American presses have become oblivious to the difference a foreign language makes. A French original does not have a rhythm identical to that of an English translation.
28. Peggy Phelan, “‘Just Want to Say’: Performance and Literature, Jackson and Poirier,” in PMLA 125, no. 4 (October 2010): 942–47, 946.
29. Tom Vander Ven, “Robert Frost’s Dramatic Principle of ‘Oversound,’” American Literature 45, no. 2 (May 1973): 241.
31. Phelan, “‘Just Want to Say,’” 946.
32. Vander Ven, “Robert Frost’s Dramatic Principle,” 246.
33. Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre, 5.
34. See, for instance, the definition of “rhythm” provided by Victor Zuckerkandl in Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1956), 169–70. For Zuckerkandl, “rhythm” is the “return of the similar,” while meter is “the return of the same”; “rhythm” is a recurring and thus recognizable pattern of stresses, with each unit potentially containing a different number of syllables (as opposed to the metrical unit of the alexandrine, which must always have twelve).
35. Phelan, “‘Just Want to Say,’” 946.
36. Ibid. Phelan’s evocation of Frost—and, later, Richard Poirier—is her way of indicating that the current devotion to the representation of “subjectivity” ignores two important axioms of poststructuralist performance theory: that authentic subjectivity cannot be so clearly distinguished from performance; and that the self may be performative, a product of its reiterated enunciation.
37. See Richard Poirier, “The Performing Self,” in The Performing Self, foreword by Edward W. Said (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 100. Phelan leans on this essay to establish performance as a constitutive function of subjectivity; see ibid., 88.
38. Poirier, The Performing Self, 100.
39. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 63.
40. “Every act is compromised by the medium of its enactment.” Rasula, “Poetry’s Voice-Over,” 278.
41. Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses: “I propose that the sound of poetry is heard in the way a promise is heard. … Voice takes place not merely as a presence but as the condition under which the person appears. The realization of expression depends on the bind, the implicit tie of intelligibility between speaker and listener that links their efforts toward closure. Through lyric we return literally to the breath and pulse of speech rhythm in tension with those formal structures we have available to us for making time manifest. In this way, lyric, no matter how joyous or comic, expresses that seriousness, the good faith in intelligibility, under which language proceeds and by means of which we recognize each other as speaking persons. The object of that recognition is a sound that becomes a human voice” (105).
42. Jacqueline Leiner, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire par Jacqueline Leiner,” in Tropiques, vol. 1 (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978), xxii.
43. On performance as disappearance, see Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993): “Performance occurs over a time which will not be repeated. It can be performed again, but this repetition itself marks it as ‘different.’ The document of a performance then is only a spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to become present” (146).
44. “Grapholect” is Walter Ong’s term for designating the repertoire of words available through writing as opposed to speech; see Ong, Orality and Literacy, 8.
45. Phelan, “‘Just Want to Say,’” 946.
46. See, for instance, Senghor, “Poésie française et poésie négro-africaine,” in Liberté III: Négritude et civilisation de l’universel (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 23–26; and the postface to Éthiopiques, reprinted in Oeuvre poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1990).
47. Négritude & poésie: Les grandes voix du sud, vol. 1: Léopold Sédar Senghor, Jacques Rabamananjara, Tchicaya U Tam’si (Vincennes: Frémeaux, 2008; RFI Cultures France, 2007).
48. Senghor is responding to Henri Hell’s complaint that the Cahier is nothing but a “papillotement incessant des images.” Senghor, postface to Éthiopiques, Oeuvre poétique, 162.
51. Senghor, introduction to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, 5 and 2.
52. See Lilyan Kesteloot, Les écrivains noirs de langue française: naissance d’une littérature (Brussels: Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1963); Hubert de Leusse, Léopold Sédar Senghor l’Africain (Paris: Hatier, 1967); and Janheinz Jahn, A History of Neo-African Literature (London: Faber and Faber, 1968). For a refreshing alternative, see Paul Ansah, “Senghor’s Poetic Method,” Critical Perspectives on Léopold Sédar Senghor, ed. Janice Spleth (Colorado Springs: Three Continents Press, 1993). Ansah writes: “It is difficult to see how effectively African rhythms can be conveyed in French” (48); “While it is true that Senghor has a great sense of rhythm in his poetry and conveys very pleasant sound effects, there is nothing in this to suggest that he is any more African than Claudel or Saint-John Perse, the two French poets who are closest to Senghor in poetic techniques, or even Victor Hugo whom Senghor himself describes variously as ‘Maître du tam-tam’ and ‘Maître du rythme.’” (49).
53. Meschonnic, Critique du rythme, 72; added emphasis.
58. See Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
59. Meschonnic, Critique du rythme, 290.
60. Ibid., 217. “Signifiance” is another term Meschonnic employs to evoke “the organization of the marks by which the signifiers … produce a specific semantics, distinct from the lexical sense” (ibid., 217; emphasis original)—or, in short, rhythm. The term “signifiance” is also used by Julia Kristeva in Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974). Meschonnic is not interested, as is Kristeva, in a psychoanalytic interpretation of the semiotic register of language in terms of anal and oral drives.
61. Meschonnic, Critique du rythme, 223.
62. One could argue that Damas was exposed early on to French Guyanese Creole and that the African “drumbeat” could have been conveyed to him through that language. However, it is just as likely that the inflections of Portuguese or Amerindian were impressed upon him in that way. We will return to the question of Damas’s French presently.
63. Meschonnic, Critique du rythme, 223.
66. Senghor, “Le Problème culturel an A.O.F.,” in Liberté I, 20; originally presented as a paper at the Dakar Chamber of Commerce for the Foyer-France-Sénégal on September 10, 1937.
67. Léopold Sédar Senghor, Oeuvre poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 23.
68. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003), 49. Moten retrieves the term “interinanimation” from John Donne; see also Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011): with reference to the same Donne poem, “The Exstasie” (1633), she notes “a constant (re)turn of, to, from, and between states of animation” (7). In “The Exstasie” we read of “lovers lying still as stone. … Here, the live and the stone are inter(in)animate and the liveness of one or deadness of the other is ultimately neither decidable nor relevant.” On diasporic reenactments or the bringing back to life of the dead, see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
69. “Limbé” is sometimes translated as “Dance,” but it may also be a Creole term derived from Bantu, meaning “chagrin amoureux.” In Pigments Damas adds a definition in a footnote: “… Aux Antilles, nostalgie de l’être que l’on a perdu. Par extension, spleen, cafard” (Paris: GLM, 1937), np.
70. Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 36.
71. See Hill, Black Soundscapes White Stages, 120. Hill also provides a history of the “tam tam” as both an instrument and an idea; it is the latter, I would contend, that plays a greater role in the poetry of Negritude; see 102–5.
72. Bridget Jones, “Léon Damas,” in Critical Perspectives on Léon-Gontran Damas, ed. Keith Q. Warner (Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1988), 36. Jones suggests that phonetic studies would reveal “the persistence of African speech rhythms in Creolized French”; “Though he writes in a relaxed standard French, Damas often seems as close to Creole as to Mallarmé” (36). See, also, Keith Q. Warner’s “New Perspective on Léon-Gontran Damas” in the same volume, 97.
73. Barthélémy Kotchy, “L’expression poétique chez Damas,” Présence Africaine 112, no. 4, Special issue: “Hommage posthume à Léon Gontran Damas” (1979).
75. On reciting by heart as implicated in the typosphere, see Jacques Roubaud, La vieillesse d’Alexandre: Essai sur quelques états récents du vers français (Paris: Maspero, 1978), 120.
76. Janis L. Pallister, Aimé Césaire (New York: Twayne, 1991), 44.
77. On Damas’s politics during this period, see also Philippe Dewitte, Les mouvements nègres en France 1919–1939 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985), 371–72.
79. Quoted in Sandrine Poujols, postface to Pigments/Névralgies, Léon-Gontran Damas (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2005), 161–62.
80. Soutes, 2 (February 1936); republished in Jacques Prévert, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Danièle Gasiglia-Laster and Arnaud Laster (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1992).
81. I borrow the term “incremental repetition” from Fahamisha Patricia Brown, who does a fine job of analyzing the marks of oral genres (especially the sermon) in African American poetry; see Brown, Performing the Word, 30.
82. “Tentative de description” was originally published in Commerce (Aragon’s journal) in 1931.
83. Esprit 2, no. 23–24 (September 1934), 706. Aragon, too, relied on this period style, obtaining in “Le Songe d’une nuit d’été” (Soutes 2, February 1936) an effect similar to Damas’s. See also poems published by Robert Desnos in the mid 1930s, for example, “No pasaran” written in 1934 as a protest against the fascists in Spain and circulated as a song. During this period Desnos joined the radical antifascist group Front Commun, and his poems were heavily influenced by popular cabaret music. Damas attended Desnos’s Saturday night parties, as did Langston Hughes when he was in Paris. See Katharine Conley, Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2003).
84. An “oeuf dur” is really a hard-boiled egg, but I have chosen to translate the expression as “hard egg” in order to approximate the sharp, monosyllabic rhythms of Prévert’s poem.
85. Léon-Gontran Damas, Pigments/Névralgies (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2005), 52.
86. Robert Desnos, Oeuvres, ed. Marie Claire Dumas (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 647. My translation.
87. See Madeleine Rebérioux, “Le théâtre d’agitation: Le Groupe Octobre,” in Le Mouvement Social 91 (April–June 1975): 109–99.
88. I am quoting here from the original Esprit publication; the version found in Pigments is quite different. Damas changes the versification in many places and replaces “mon assortiment” with “mes hardes”; “se foutre de mon assortiment” becomes “se gausser de mes hardes.” In the 1972 Presence Africaine version, “se régaler” is replaced by “jouir jouir”; “ce sacré pays” is “ce sacré foutu pays”; and other small changes (39).
89. See James Sneed, “On Repetition in Black Culture,” Black American Literature Forum 15:4 (Winter, 1981): 146–54, 150.
90. See Janet G. Vaillant, Black, French, and African: A Life of Leopold Sedar Senghor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 47 and 70–71.
91. Léon-Gontran Damas, Poésie d’expression française d’Afrique noire, Madagascar, Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Indochine, et Guyane 1900–1945 (Paris: Seuil, 1947), 10; my translation; emphasis added. See also Anthony Mangeon, “Miroirs des littératures nègres: D’une anthologie l’autre, revues,” Gradiva 10 (2009). Damas’s anthology, Mangeon remarks, “attempts of course to get beyond the colonial relation,” yet it conceives of itself “in an imperial context,” the same context employed by the SFIO at the time (52; my translation). Mangeon sees Damas’s approach as consistent with that taken by the signatories of the 2007 manifeste “Pour une littérature-monde en français.” Indeed, the turn away from “race” as an organizing category also characterizes the work of Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih and makes these authors vulnerable to the accusation of trading one limiting framework for another, one based on an imperial paradigm; see Lionnet and Shih, eds. Minor Transnationalisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
92. See Roger Toumson and Simone Henry-Valmore, Aimé Césaire: Le nègre inconsolé (Fort-de-France: Vent des Îles and Paris; Syros, 1993), 111–12.
93. Damas, Pigments/Névralgies, 85, 39–40.
94. Meschonnic, Critique du rythme, 225. Emphasis original.
95. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 169.
96. Phelan, “‘Just Want to Say,’” 946.
97. Vander Ven, “Robert Frost’s Dramatic Principle,” 246.
98. Poirier, The Performing Self, 100.
99. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed., trans. and intro. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 167; and Meschonnic, Critique du rythme, 225.
100. See Jacques Rancière, “Politics of Aesthetics,” in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 24
101. If “speech is the coordination of noise into articulate utterance,” and if poetic language is a challenge to this coordination, an attempt to recover the “acoustic aspect” embedded in—and repressed by—sense, then poetry constitutes a constant “dragging of meaning back toward its source in a dispersion of phonetic material awaiting articulation.” Stewart, Reading Voices, 24–25.
5. RED FRONT / BLACK FRONT
1. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1968), 239–40.
2. See Raphaël Confiant, Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle (Paris: Stock, 1993). According to Confiant, Césaire wrote in a language uninflected by Martiniquan Creole (or Kreyol) with few allusions to customs familiar to the lower class of indigenous Martiniquans to which he belonged.
3. Beyond the Caribbean, debates concerning the pertinence of poetry to political change have also been lively. While at one extreme Victor Hountondji attributes to Césaire’s poetry the ability to incite “a cultural revolution first, a political one next,” Robert C. Young maintains that literature is largely an irrelevant epiphenomenon. Hountondji, Le Cahier d’Aimé Césaire: Évènement littéraire et facteur de révolution (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), 63; and Young, Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
4. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 220. Fanon prefers the poetry of René Depestre, which he characterizes as “descriptive and analytical poetry” (226). Strangely, however, René Char’s wartime writings are exemplary for Fanon of a properly engaged poetry. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 279.
5. André Breton, “Misère de la poésie: ‘L’Affaire Aragon’ devant l’opinion publique,” in Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, vol. 1, ed. José Pierre (Paris: Terrain Vague, 1980), 213.
6. Mireille Rosello, introduction to Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, trans. Mireille Rosello and Annie Pritchard (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodax Books, 1995), 111. See also Confiant, Aimé Césaire.
7. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée noir,” in Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, ed. Léopold Sédar Senghor (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948).
8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). The chapters of the book were published serially during 1946 in Sartre’s journal, Les Temps Modernes.
9. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), 30.
11. See Édouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981): “la parole poétique de Césaire, l’acte politique de Fanon nous ont menés quelque part, autorisant par détour que nous revenions au seul lieu où nos problèmes nous guettent” (36).
12. See, in particular, Jacques Derrida, Signéponge/Signsponge, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
13. See, for instance, the efforts of Lambert-Félix Prudent, “Aimé Césaire: Contribution poétique à la construction de la langue martiniquaise”; and André Thibault, “L’oeuvre d’Aimé Césaire et le ‘français régional antillais,” both in Aimé Césaire à l’oeuvre, ed. Marc Cheymol and Philippe Ollé-Laprune (Paris: Éditions des Archives Contemporaines, 2010).
14. Such a set of assumptions has recently been taken to task by Jahan Ramazani in The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Through studies of anglophone rather than francophone poets (Derek Walcott, A. K. Ramanujan, Louise Bennett, Okot p’Bitek), Ramazani questions the treatment poetry has received at the hands of postcolonial theory, asserting that the “relative metaphoric density of poetry, which helps make it less ethnographically transparent than other genres, has contributed to its marginalization in postcolonial studies” (72). In terms that apply equally well to works in French, Ramazani laments that too often political and sociological analysis of poems “overshadows the figurative dimension of postcolonial aesthetics” (75). For further meditations on the limits placed on expression by postcolonial critics, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (New York: Verso, 1993); Eric Luis Prieto, “The Poetics of Place, the Rhetoric of Authenticity, and Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” Dalhousie French Studies 55 (2001): 142–51; and Brent Hayes Edwards, “Introduction: The Genres of Post-colonialism” in Social Text 22, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 1–15.
15. See, for instance, E. S. Burt, Poetry’s Appeal: Nineteenth-Century French Lyric and the Political Space (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
16. This passage first appeared in Tropiques 5 (April 1942) under the title “En guise de manifeste littéraire.” It was written after the meeting with Breton in May of 1941 and dedicated to him. The passage (along with the others) was folded into the Brentano’s edition of 1947 and appears on page 32 of the Présence Africaine edition.
17. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983), 32. All subsequent citations from this edition will be noted in the text as PA followed by page number.
18. Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. and ed. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 22. All further English translations will be drawn from this volume unless otherwise noted.
19. For the suggestion that “tourte” is like a “pâté,” I am indebted to Dominique Jullien. A “tourte” may also be a kind of pigeon; in any case, it would make sense for “tourte” to refer to a bird, given the rich network of bird imagery that is threaded throughout the poem.
20. Jules Fairie, Dictionnaire français-créole (Ottawa: Leméac, 1974), 449 and 334.
21. “Parbleu,” the Petit Robert tells us, is a euphemism for “Pardieu,” itself already a distortion of “Par Dieu.”
22. The Rosello and Pritchard translation reads: “there are still madras cloths around women’s loins rings in their ears smiles on their faces babies at their breasts and I will spare you the rest: ENOUGH OF THIS OUTRAGE!” (99). Eshleman and Smith arguably fail to catch Césaire’s sarcastic allusion to the stereotypical figure of the doudous, a mulatto woman (in one popular version) abandoned by her white male lover who is often seen wearing a “madras.” The immediate “scandal” to which Césaire is referring is that of the exoticizing (and eroticizing) of the desperately poor island.
23. There are four other cases in the Cahier of such typographical emphasis: “TOUSSAINT, TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE”; the chamber pot marked “MERCI”; the twice-repeated “COMIQUE ET LAID”; and the pronoun “NOUS” in the conclusion. In the Volontés version, the hymn, “KYRIE ELEISON,” is also capitalized. There is far more to say about Césaire’s use of typographical emphasis. For brevity’s sake, I will merely point out that in every case the capitalized words indicate the relation of the Cahier to another text.
24. See also the January 1927 issue of La Voix des Nègres, which displays prominently a number of slogans: “Nègres, en garde!”; “À TOUS LES NÈGRES DU MONDE!” The command “Debout,” followed by a substantive, is highly typical of French protest discourse.
25. Michael Richardson writes that Césaire “may or may not” have read Légitime Défense, the review in which a response to the Affaire appears. Richardson, Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, ed. Michael Richardson, trans. Michael Richardson and Kryzysztof Fijalkowski (London: Verso, 1996), 5. A. James Arnold argues that Césaire did not “participate” in Légitime Défense and did not “share its Marxist conviction that culture renewal must be preceded by political revolution.” Arnold, Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 9. However, Lilyan Kesteloot is adamant that Césaire was very taken with the manifesto: “then a ‘Khâgne’ student at the lycée Louis-le-Grand, [Césaire] was the first to hear it and listen to it.” Kesteloot, Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974), 17. Carole Sweeney supplies a probing analysis of the review and its place in the life of Caribbean students in Paris in From Fetish to Subject: Race, Modernism, and Primitivism 1919–1935 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004); she maintains that the link between surrealism, communism, and antiimperialism forged in Légitime Défense had a decisive influence on the politics/ poetics of L’Étudiant Noir (134). See also Philippe Dewitte, Les mouvements nègres en France 1919–1939 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985), 267–75. The fact that Suzanne Cesaire titled her essay in Tropiques 4 (January 1942) “Misère d’une poésie” indicates that the Césaires knew about Breton’s intervention in the Affaire Aragon at least by the 1940s. Césaire later argued with René Depestre over the role of socialist realism as promulgated by Aragon. Apparently Aragon consistently refused to publish Césaire’s work when in charge of organs like Commune.
26. That Césaire had been struggling for a while with the nature of poetic language—its political efficacy or lack thereof—is suggested in a letter he wrote to Breton in 1944 (April 4). The letter, which can be found in the Fond Jacques Doucet of the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève in Paris, is quoted by Alex Gil in Migrant Textuality: On the Fields of Aimé Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisient (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2012), available at Academic Commons, http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:161180. Gil explains that “before he met him, Césaire tells Breton he was a prisoner of reality, of the Cahier, of his “thème.” Now Césaire thanks Breton for the solution, “Se laisser parler. Se laisser envahir par ses rêves. Se laisser dominer par ses images. Il n’était plus question de “thèse,” ni de “thème.” Il s’agissait tout simplement d’oser la vie, toute la vie” (122). Gil cites the letter in order to advance his argument that Césaire “adapted” his style to Breton’s surrealist understanding of poetry’s function; however, I would submit instead that Breton merely confirmed a tendency already present in Césaire to let himself be “dominated” by the force of his own imagery (“se laisser dominer par ses images”).
27. See André Thirion, Révolutionnaires sans révolution (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1972), 296.
28. See ibid., 294–349; and Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 142.
29. See Louis Aragon’s remarks on revolutionary literature in “Le surréalisme et le devenir révolutionnaire,” Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution 3 (November 1913).
30. For an account of the events leading up to the publication of “Front rouge,” see Svetlana Boym’s Death in Quotation Marks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); she claims that the poem was written in homage to Vladimir Mayakovsky, who committed suicide in 1930, and she traces the influence on “Front rouge” of Mayakovsky’s 1918 “Levyj marsh” (Left march) (174–79).
31. Aragon translated and published Mayakovsky’s “Levyj marsh” (Left march) as “La marche à gauche” in Littératures Soviétiques in 1955.
32. On the “nontotalizable heterogeneity” of Mayakovsky’s poetry, “its combination of poetic and antipoetic elements,” see Boym, Death in Quotation Marks, 150.
33. The precise charge was: “excitation de militaires à la désobéissance et de provocation au meurtre dans un but de propagande anarchiste” (incitement of the military to disobedience and provocation to kill as a goal of anarchist propaganda). See Thirion, Révolutionnaires, 329.
34. The list of signatories included, among others, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Amedée Ozenfant. Breton probably borrowed the name from Karl Marx’s Misère de la philosophie, a rebuttal of the works of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
35. Quoted in Thirion, Révolutionnaires; my translation.
36. Breton, “Misère de la poésie,” 213; all translations of this work are my own.
38. Ibid., 206. For an account of the issues treated in the trial, see James Petterson, Poetry Proscribed: Twentieth-Century (Re)visions of the Trials of Poetry in France (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008).
39. Breton, “Misère de la poésie,” 213.
40. See Régis Antoine’s account in Les écrivains français et les Antilles: Des premiers pères blancs aux surréalistes noirs (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1978), 363. Given the apparently frequent exchanges between students from the French colonies and surrealist writers, one cannot help wondering why their names do not appear on the petition. Breton, “Misère de la poésie.”
41. In the introduction to Refusal of the Shadow, Michael Richardson describes Légitime Défense as “the first publication in which colonized blacks collectively sought to speak with their own authentic voices” (4). In contrast, in Les écrivains français et les Antilles, Régis Antoine questions the originality of the publication (364) and explains why the editors sought to align themselves with the surrealists’ oneirism (336).
42. Anticipating Sartre, Léro proposes that surrealist automatic writing provides a means for rediscovering an authentic voice. Léro, “Misère d’une poésie,” Légitime Défense, 10–11. See also Ménil’s article, “Généralités sur ‘l’écrivain’ de couleur antillais,” in the same volume (Légitime Défense, 7–9). A further allusion to the Affaire appears in the preface to the issue: “As for Freud [Quant à Freud],” the editors proclaim, “we are ready to use the immense machine for dissolving the bourgeois family that he put in gear.” Defending Freud at this point in time would have appeared to be a direct assault on the platform that emerged from the Union des intellectuals: in Kharkov, “freudisme” was condemned as a complacent bourgeois invention. Surrealism had been chastised specifically for promoting the works of Freud. On the attitude of Légitime Défense toward Léon Blum’s Popular Front, see Antoine, Les écrivains français et les Antilles, 366.
43. Léro, “Misère d’une poésie,” 11.
45. It is worth noting that the phrase “in its entirety” is not translated in the English version available in Kesteloot’s Black Writers in French (37).
46. The title “S.O.S.” is reiterated in the title of a poem by Léon-Gontron Damas published in Pigments (1937), and in the title of a poem by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), published in Black Magic (1968). It serves as a rallying cry for black liberation movements across time.
47. René Ménil, “Sur la préface de Breton au Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” in Tracées: Identité, négritude, esthétique aux Antilles (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1981), 204; my translation.
48. Ibid; my translation.
50. Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1988), 129.
51. There is a great deal to say about the figure of “marronage” as an indigenous poetics of detour. See, especially, Glissant’s Le discours antillais and Césaire’s poem “Le verbe marronner / à René Depestre,” in Aimé Césaire, The Collected Poetry, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
52. Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, 129.
53. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 229–30.
54. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed., trans. and intro. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 231.
55. The expression “site of entanglement” is the translation of Glissant’s “point d’intrication”; “Il faut revenir au lieu,” he writes; “… non pas retour au rêve d’origine, à l’Un immobile de l’Être, mais retour au point d’intrication, dont on s’était détourné par force.” Glissant, Le discours antillais, 36.
6. TO INHABIT A WOUND
1. Césaire, “Calendrier lagunaire,” in moi, laminaire … (Paris: Seuil, 1982). See appendix 2 for the English translation.
2. “Caïeu” (line 8) is a botanical term derived from the Norman “cael,” from the Latin catellus, little dog (a runt, or rejeton), signifying a small bulb on the side of the main bulb of a plant. “Valleuse” (line 12, derived from avaler) designates a particular geological formation; a small valley abuts the ocean and forms a sort of incision, or “valleuse,” in a cliff. “Ascidie” is both a zoological and botanical term, from the Greek askidion, meaning a small sack, a recipient for liquids, made of an animal stomach; it is the technical name given to a tiny mollusk in the form of a sack with two openings for taking in and expulsing water and it also designates a pitcher-shaped part of a plant. The “arganier” (line 38), or argania spinosa, is the botanical name for a species of tropical tree with very hard wood, known colloquially in the Caribbean as a “bois-fè.” “Bathyale” (line 40) comes from the Greek bathus and refers to a great depth, at the level of the continental plates in the sea. “Abyssale” has, of course, many familiar connotations, but it is also a technical term for sea-depths beyond the level of the “bathyale” (2,000 meters deep), from 2,000 to 5,000 deep, and thus unfathomable. “En cuscute” (line 45) is a botanical expression derived from the Arabic kachut, which means “to attach.” Plants “en cuscute” do not have chlorophyll; they wrap their red vines around the living branch and parasitically suck out its green tissue. And “en porana” (line 45) describes in botanical terms a kind of climbing, twining bush, a member of the morning glory family (convolvulus) found in the Antilles.
3. Please see appendix 2 for the English translation.
4. For a lovely reading, see Lilian Pestre de Almeida, “En visitant la tombe de Césaire ou Lecture du poème ‘Calendrier lagunaire,’” Présence Africaine 178 (2008): 148–57: “Plusieurs se sont étonnés que Césaire n’ait point choisi un autre poème, les mots du Rebelle, par exemple. En fait, Césaire n’a jamais vacillé et avait décidé depuis un moment que ce ‘Calendrier lagunaire’ serait le texte final” (148–49). See also Michèle Constans, “‘Essentiel paysage’: L’herbier imaginaire d’Aimé Césaire,” Environnement, nature, paysage 645 (2013), http://cybergeo.revues.org/25910#quotation; M. Souley Ba, René Hénane, and Lilyan Kesteloot, Introduction à moi, laminaire d’Aimé Césaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011); Roger Toumson, “Situation de moi, laminaire …” in Césaire 70, ed. Georges Ngal and Stein (Ivry-sur-Seine: Silex/Nouvelles du Sud, 2004); Clarisse Zimra, “La dernière transhumance du rebelle,” in Oeuvres et critiques, Aimé Césaire du singulier à l’universel (Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1994); and Bernadette Cailler, “Crevasse, métaphore vive du texte: Réflexions sur un poème de moi, laminaire …” in Aimé Césaire, ou, l’athanor d’un alchimiste: Actes du premier colloque international sur l’œuvre littéraire d’Aimé Césaire, Paris, 21–23 novembre 1985, by Aimé Césaire, ed. Jacqueline Leiner (Paris: Éditions Caribéennes, 1987).
5. “Calendrier lagunaire” was first published in a section titled Noria of the Oeuvres complètes (Fort-de-France: Désormeaux, 1976). A “noria” is a hydraulic machine for raising water from the oceanic depths. In an interview with Jacqueline Leiner, Césaire recalls: “‘Noria’, effectivement, c’est assez juste, dans la mesure où, pour moi, le mot est une sorte de noria qui permet de râcler les profondeurs et de les faire remonter au jour.” Leiner, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire par Jacqueline Leiner,” Tropiques, reprint (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978), xii. “Calendrier lagunaire” was later reproduced as the first poem in Césaire’s penultimate volume, moi, laminaire. …
6. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, introduction to The Collected Poetry, by Aimé Césaire, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 24. On the tombstone, all appearances of the first person “je” begin with a lower case “j”; in Eshleman and Smith’s version, the “j” is frequently but unsystematically capitalized. Pestre de Almeida believes there is a strong mythic subtext that links the speaker to Protée (“En visitant la tombe,” 156). See also A. James Arnold’s preface to Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours, by Aimé Césaire (Paris: Éditions CNRS, 2013): “À des degrés divers, chaque ouvrage poétique de Césaire depuis 1939 met en scène le Moi et se livre à des variations sur le Moi, mais jamais auparavant le Moi n’avait été de la part de Césaire l’objet explicite d’un recueil. Le pronom de la première personne, pour la seule et unique fois dans son œuvre, est dans le titre d’un recueil. Or cette présence du Moi est problématique au plus haut point: moi, laminaire …, et ceci dès le titre, procède à l’effacement de ce Moi, non seulement en le privant, dans l’édition originale, d’une majuscule, mais en procédant à sa constante mise en question: il est une laminaire, une grande algue qui, fixée à un rocher, se déploie, pour se rétracter, avant de se redéployer, et ainsi de suite” (60).
7. Le Nouveau Petit Robert: Dictionnaire de la langue française (Paris: Dicorobert, 1994).
8. For details on this period, see David Alliot, Aimé Césaire: Le nègre universel (Paris: Infolio, 2008), 162–77. Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945; a few months later he was elected as deputy to the National Assembly for the French Communist Party. In 1956 he resigned from the Communist Party and established his own, Le Parti progressiste martiniquais, in 1957.
9. On the racial politics of SERMAC, see Julian Gerstin, “Musical Revivals and Social Movements in Contemporary Martinique: Ideology, Identity, Ambivalence,” in The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective, ed. Ingrid Monson (New York: Garland, 2000). For an account of the so-called preservation of an official Martinican culture, administered through SERMAC, see David A. B. Murray, Opacity: Gender, Sexuality, Race, and the ‘Problem’ of Identity in Martinique (New York: Peter Lang, 2002).
10. In Char’s “J’habite une douleur,” bearing the weight of the mortal body (“un fardeau,” “le poids”) is identified with aging and the suffering that comes from leading an existence governed by time.
11. We should hear in the poet’s struggle with a “poulpe” an echo of Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, the hero’s epic duel with Maldoror transformed into an octopus in “Chant Two.”
12. The “frère” of line 43 might very well refer to Depestre, with whom Césaire was actively debating the value of Communism and of a revolution for Martinique defined in Communist terms. Césaire left the Communist Party in 1956 but Depestre remained a militant. In “Le verbe marronner / à René Depestre,” Césaire defends the radical nature of his poetic form by opposing it to an easily digestible colonial discourse: “Depestre le poème n’est pas un moulin à/passer de la canne à sucre. …” He also aligns his approach (“j’aime mieux regarder le printemps”) with the real revolution: “Justement / c’est la révolution,” the coming of spring. Césaire, The Collected Poetry, 368–69.
13. See Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, 2nd ed., trans. James E. Maraniss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996): “The Caribbean is … a cultural meta-archipelago without center and without limits, a chaos within which there is an island that proliferates constantly” (9).
14. Césaire, The Collected Poetry, 35.
15. The “vr-” combination, as in “vrac de varech” and the “immobile verrition” with which the Cahier ends, is often indicative of generative but incipient movement, change, revolution.
16. Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974): “Bien avant de servir à communiquer, le langage sert à vivre” (217). My translation.
17. Quotations are from Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971): “… Poetically Man Dwells …,” 228; “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 148 and 151; and from Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), “The Question Concerning Technology,” 301–2.
18. In “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Heidegger traces the etymology of buan (the High German word for “building”) to show that it initially referred to “the manner in which we humans are on the earth,” the way in which we “Wohnen” (translated into English as “dwell” and into French as “habiter”) (146–47). See also “Bâtir Habiter Penser,” in Martin Heidegger, Essais et conférénces, trans. André Préau, preface by Jean Beaufret (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 172–73.
19. Heidegger, “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 198.
20. Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 148.
21. Ibid., 161; original emphasis.
22. Heidegger, “… Poetically Man Dwells …,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 223.
23. Ibid., 216; and Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, 60, 63.
24. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
25. See Jean Bernabé, Raphaël Confiant, and Patrick Chamoiseau, Éloge de le créolité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Richard Price provides a scathing critique of the folkloric, folklorizing tendencies of Créolité in The Convict and the Colonel: A Story of Colonialism and Resistance in the Caribbean, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006): “An imagined diversalité or métissage can be packaged as a consumable cultural product” (175). A cautionary note is also offered by Édouard Glissant in Poétique de la relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 103.
26. See Raphaël Confiant’s strenuous attack on Césaire in Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle (Paris: Stock, 1993).
27. Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 146.
28. Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 101.
29. See Jacqueline Leiner, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire par Jacqueline Leiner,” in Tropiques, reprint (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1978), xix.
30. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 84.
31. On the title of the volume, moi laminaire, in which “Calendrier lagunaire” was published (after its initial inclusion in the 1976 Oeuvres poétiques published by Éditions Désormeaux), Césaire stated: “Je n’ai jamais séparé mon destin personnel du destin collectif: un vieux reste d’esprit tribal sans doute! Qui à l’inverse m’a préservé de l’engagement littéraire, comme on pouvait l’entendre à une certaine époque. Je suis engagé comme l’algue est accrochée à son rocher.” Jean-Pierre Salgas, “Interview with Jean-Pierre Salgas,” Jeune Afrique, no. 1142 (Paris, Novembre 24, 1982), 73. See also the lovely analysis offered by A. James Arnold in Césaire, Poésie.
32. Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 161; original emphasis.
33. This is Césaire describing his relationship with Léopold-Sédar Senghor during their years together at the Rue d’Ulm; see Charles H. Rowell, “It Is Through Poetry that One Copes with Solitude: An Interview with Aimé Césaire,” Callaloo 31, no. 4 (2008): 990.
34. See René Hénane, Glossaire des termes rares dans l’oeuvre d’Aimé Césaire (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 2004). See also Pierre Vilar’s sensitive treatment of Césaire’s lexicon in Les armes miraculeuses d’Aimé Césaire (Geneva: Éditions Zoe, 2008) and Papa Samba Diop, La Poésie d’Aimé Césaire: propositions de lecture accompagnées d’un Lexique de l’œuvre (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010).
35. Leiner, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire par Jacqueline Leiner,” ix; emphasis in the original.
36. “Aimé Césaire et les nègres sauvages: Interview par Jeanine Cahen,” in Afrique Action, November 21, 1960, 23, cited in Thomas A. Hale, Les Écrits d’Aimé Césaire: Bibliographie commentée (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1978), 406.
37. “Si je nomme avec précision (ce qui fait parler de mon exotisme), c’est qu’en nommant avec précision, je crois que l’on restitue à l’objet sa valeur personnelle.” Lilyan Kesteloot, Aimé Césaire (Paris: Seghers, 1979), 188; quoted in Hénane, Glossaire des termes rares, 8.
38. On Césaire’s allergy to “exoticism” as a form of colonial subjection, his reaction against doudouisme and the tourist vision of his island, see the account of his rediscovery (and revalorization) of the tropical landscape after his meeting with Wifredo Lam in May 1941 in Daniel Maximin, Césaire & Lam: Insolites bâtisseurs (Paris: HC Editions, 2011).
39. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 84.
40. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).
41. See Foucault, Les mots et les choses, 140–44.
42. Carl Linneaus, Philosophie botanique, quoted in ibid., 258, 145.
43. Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 198.
44. To recall, Césaire is concerned with the “singular value” that is manifested through the precise naming of each plant; see Hénane, Glossaire des termes rares, 8.
45. Aimé Césaire, “Discours d’inauguration de la Rue Henri Stéhlé,” unpublished essay written for the dedication of the Rue Henri Stéhlé in Fort-de France, Saturday, April 1, 1982 (Archives Départementales de la Martinique, Fort-de-France), 7.
46. Leiner, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire par Jacqueline Leiner,” ix.
47. Saint-John Perse, Eloges, vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 31.
48. Leiner, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire par Jacqueline Leiner,” ix; original emphasis. Césaire is responding to Leiner’s question: “Les articles consacrés à la flore, au folklore antillais ont-ils permis une prise de conscience plus grande de la réalité martiniquaise?” See also Christina Kullberg, The Poetics of Ethnography in Martiniquan Narratives: Exploring the Self and the Environment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013, 33–36.
49. On the history embedded in Martiniquan toponomyms, see Vincent Huyghes-Belrose, “Le nom des lieux à la Martinique: Un patrimoine identitaire menacé,” in Études Caribéennes, December 11, 2008, http://etudescaribeennes.revues.org/3494; and Vincent Huyghes-Belrose, “Le paysage martiniquais entre archéologie et atlas,” in Études Caribéennes, July 4, 2006, http://etudescaribeennes.revues.org/763.
50. See René Hénane, Césaire et Lautréamont: Bestiaire et métamorphose (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006).
51. See Sylvère Garraudière, L’École aux Antilles Françaises: Le rendez-vous manqué de la démocratie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007); and Roland Jean-Baptiste Édouard, ed. 40 Ans de lectures sous les Tropiques (Antilles, Guyare: Bibliothèque Pédagogique de la Circonscription du Marin, 1989).
52. Eshleman and Smith, introduction to The Collected Poetry, 1. They continue: “It was also Révert who identified Césaire as a candidate for France’s highest liberal arts institution, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and recommended him as well for the Parisian Lycée Louis-le Grand, at which, in September, 1931, he began to prepare for entrance to ‘Normale’” (ibid., 1–2).
53. This sobriquet refers to the Amiral Georges Robert, the administrator Vichy placed in charge of Martinique during World War II.
54. Henri Stéhlé, “La végétation des Antilles françaises,” Tropiques 1, no. 2 (July 1941): 71–75. The article is extracted from the Bulletin Agricole of March 1940; all translations are my own.
59. Henri Stéhlé, “Les dénominations génériques des végétaux aux Antilles françaises: Histoires et légendes qui s’y attachent,” Tropiques 2, no. 10 (February 1944): 53.
60. See Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 200. Linnaeus “banished many things: European languages except Greek or Latin; religious names (though he allowed names derived from European mythology); foreign names (meaning foreign to European sensibilities); names invoking the uses of plants” and so on. “What Linnaeus proposed was a naming system abstract in relation to the properties of plants but concrete in relation to the history of botany in Europe” (ibid., 201).
61. Stéhlé, “Les dénominations,” 53–54.
65. On the dialects spoken in Martinique, see Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant, Les lettres créoles (Paris: Hatier, 1991).
66. Stéhlé, “Les dénominations,” 65.
67. Ibid., 69–70. In his glossary, René Hénane lists “catalpa” as a “botanical term,” but he does not provide an etymology or any other explanation (Glossaire des termes rares, 35). This just goes to show how in one generation the local origin of a name can be forgotten, then consecrated as scientific. What, exactly, constitutes the “Creole” language, and what, exactly, constitutes a botanical discourse, changes over time.
68. In this regard, it is worth noting that Linnaeus’s nomenclature was standardized and universalized by “the American Code incorporated after the Congress of 1930”; the terms of this nomenclature potentially betray the “folklore” they contain under the pressure to follow “laws of priority and of phenotype universally recognized.” Stéhlé, “Les dénominations,” 62.
69. Pestre de Almeida notes that Césaire was “enchanted” by dictionaries: “grand lecteur d’encyclopédies, amoureux des mots, s’intéressant toujours aux cartes géographiques et astronomiques.” Pestre de Almeida, “En visitant la tombe de Césaire,” 150–51.
70. Michael Davidson, “Life by Water: Lorine Niedecker and Critical Regionalism,” in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, ed. Elizabeth Willis (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 208), 18. For Davidson, critical regionalism is “a use of locale to comment on global forces, placing indigenous peoples, local economies, and non-metropolitan spaces within the orbit of capitalist production worldwide” (ibid.).
72. Césaire may have taken his cue from Stéhlé in more ways than we recognize. For Stéhlé, every name, whether from a colloquial or technical lexicon, possesses a significance that can, in theory, be retrieved. Other possible influences of Stéhlé on Césaire can be found in “Calendrier lagunaire,” for instance, the choice between two vegetal modes, “s’accrochant en cuscute” or “se déployant en porana,” might have been inspired by Stéhlé’s first article in Tropiques, which discusses at length the difference between the two types of vine (73).
73. Césaire, “Discours d’inauguration de Stéhlé,” 7; all translations are my own.
76. Daniel Tiffany, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), 6.
CONCLUSION
1. Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 284.
2. Laura Doyle, “Modernist Studies and Inter-Imperiality in the Long Durée,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 685; original emphasis.
5. Ibid.; original emphasis.
9. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed., trans. and intro. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997): “The genial [genius] is a dialectical knot: It is what has not been copied or repeated, it is free, yet at the same time bears the feeling of necessity; it is art’s paradoxical sleight of hand and one of its most dependable criteria. To be genial means to hit upon a constellation, subjectively to achieve the objective” (171).
10. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1992), 262.
12. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 42.
13. Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), back cover jacket.
14. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 42.
17. See Christopher Miller, Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
18. Ibid., 2, 40. Miller’s contention is that unionist and communist associations for black workers were more critical of the colonial system than the poets of Negritude.
19. Ibid., 42. The CDRN was founded in 1926. See Philippe Dewitte, Les mouvements nègres en France, 1919–1939 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985).
20. It is not clear to me that attacks against white rule are any less virulent in the Cahier, Damas’s “S.O.S.” or even Senghor’s “Neige sur Paris” (“I’ll never release this reserve of hatred”) than in an article such as “Le mot nègre,” published by the editors of La Voix des Nègres in 1927. “Le mot nègre,” signed “Le Comité,” in La Voix des Nègres (January 1927), 1: “C’est le gros mot du jour, c’est le mot que certains de nos frères de race ne veulent plus être appelés ainsi.” The editors refuse the titles “noir” and “hommes de couleur” because they believe such distinctions support the hierarchy of skin color imposed on the peoples of Africa and the Caribbean; they chose to assume the pejorative “nègre”: “Non, messieurs les diviseurs pour régner! … Ce nom est celui de notre race.”
21. Miller, Nationalists and Nomads, 10.
22. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Lyric Poetry & Society,” Telos 20 (1974); first published in German in 1957.
23. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 230.
24. On “universalizing,” see J. Michael Dash, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998); on “elitist,” see Bongie, Friends and Enemies; and on “colonial,” see Raphaël Confiant, Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle (Paris: Stock, 1993).
25. Aimé Césaire, Return to My Native Land, trans. John Berger and Anna Bostock, intro. by Mazisi Kunene (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1969).
26. During that period the goal of black writing was, in so many cases, to confirm international black solidarity, not to circumscribe Creole identity. The regionalism of today’s Créolistes might have been received in that environment as something akin to tourist art, or kitsch. For a contemporary, critical view of the Créolistes that shows the extent to which they fall into the trap of tourist art, see Richard Price, The Convict and the Colonel: A Story of Colonialism and Resistance in the Caribbean, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
27. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, intro. by Maxwell Geismar (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 99.
29. Unpublished manuscript in the Léon-Gontran Damas archives at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture, Box #3/Folder: “Critical Studies.” The manuscript is not dated but was probably written in the late 1960s.
30. The first African studies program was established at Howard University in 1954; Damas taught at Howard from 1973 to 1978. On this period, see also Richard Serrano, Against the Postcolonial: ‘Francophone’ Writers at the Ends of French Empire (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 144–45.
31. The list of scholars who have sought to prove that Negritude inspired independence movements throughout the world is very long. Most recently, Nick Nesbitt reminds us that the works of Negritude had a “preeminent role in the awakening of black diasporic consciousness of this century”; see his account in Nesbitt, Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 77.
32. Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010), 38. See also “The Paradoxes of Political Art”: “Politics breaks with the sensory self-evidence of the ‘natural’ order that destines specific individuals and groups to occupy positions of rule or of being ruled, assigning them to private or public lives, pinning them down to a certain time and space, to specific ‘bodies’, that is to specific ways of being, seeing and saying. This ‘natural’ logic, a distribution of the invisible and visible, of speech and noise, pins bodies to ‘their’ places and allocates the private and the public to distinct ‘parts’—this is the order of the police” (Dissensus, 139).
33. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984), 432.
34. Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 230.
36. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 263.