An analysis of author and political activist Aimé Fernand Césaire provides
an intriguing change in perspective to Euro-centered Surrealism. Born in
Martinique as Surrealism emerged as a separate entity from Dada, Césaire became
an alternate voice in not only the arts world but politics. His life spanned
nearly a century, and his work encompassed poetry, prose and drama as he
explored not only Surrealism but Modernism as well, while at the same time
working politically to free colonial entities struggling to emerge from the
racist imperialism imposed upon them by the European continent. Césaire was born to modest circumstances but as
a promising young student earned a scholarship to attend the prestigious Lycée
Louis le Grand in Paris, where he met African students Léopold Senghor and Léon
Damas. Together they founded the student magazine Etudiant Noir, and developed the concept of “Negritude,” affirming
African heritage and speaking out against colonialism. This perspective was outlined in his 1939 Cahier
d'un retour au pays natal, published in the journal Volontés. It is
a long, autobiographical piece of intermixed prose and poetry, and in it
Césaire lambasts European culture while claiming his Caribbean and African heritage,
using natural and dream imagery in vivid juxtaposition to historic events.
Césaire’s poetry eventually attracted the attention of Andre Bréton, who
journeyed to Martinique to try to convince him to join the Surrealists. The Caribbean-African poet changed the face,
literally, of Surrealism as he published two books of poetry influenced by the
movement. One of them had a title based on a poem published by Guillaume
Apollonaire in 1948 - “Soleil cou coupé” (Sun Cut Throat) was based on “Zone”
from Apollonaire’s Alcools:
You walk toward Auteuil you want to go home on foot
To sleep among your festishes from Oceania and
Guinea
They are Christs of another form and another faith
They are lesser Christs of obscure hopes
Farewell farewell
Sun cut throat
There is speculation that Césaire may have even been more influenced by
an earlier version of the same poem by Apollonaire:
The sun lies yonder it’s a sliced throat
As perhaps one day some of the poor whom I have met
The sun scares me, it sheds blood all over Paris
Césaire’s poem “At the Locks of the Void,” speaks with the voice of the
earth and those closest to it, oppressed by a colonizing, imperialistic culture
that is oblivious and brutal. The poet “sings with a voice still caught up in the babbling of elements and they attack “Europe patrols my
veins like a pack of filariae at the stroke of midnight. To think that their
philosophies tried to provide them with morals. That ferocious race won’t have
put up with it.”
AT THE LOCKS OF THE VOID
Aimé Fernand Césaire
In the
foreground and in longitudinal flight a dried-up brook drowsy roller of
obsidian pebbles. In the background a decidedly not calm architecture of torn
down burgs of eroded mountains on whose glimpsed phantom serpents chariots a
cat's-eye and alarming constellations are born. It is a strange firefly cake
hurled into the gray face of time, a vast scree of shards of ikons and blazons
of lice in the beard of Saturn. On the right very curiously standing against
the squamous wall of crucified butterfly wings open in majesty a gigantic
bottle whose very long golden neck drinks a drop of blood in the clouds. As for
me I am no longer thirsty. It gives me pleasure to think of the world undone
like an old copra mattress like an old vodun necklace like the perfume of a
felled peccary. I am no longer thirsty. All heads belong to me. It is sweet to
be gentle as a lamb. It is sweet to open the great sluicegates of gentleness:
through the staggered sky
through the exploded stars
through the tutelary silence
from very far beyond myself I come toward you
woman sprung from a beautiful laburnum
and your eyes wounds barely closed
on your modesty at being born
It is I who
sings with a voice still caught up in the babbling of elements. It is sweet to
be a piece of wood a cork a drop of water in the torrential waters of the end
and of the new beginning. It is sweet to doze off in the shattered heart of
things. I no longer have any sort of thirst. My sword made from a shark's-tooth
smile is becoming terribly useless. My mace is very obviously out of season and
out of play. Rain is falling. It is a crisscross of rubble, it is a skein of
iron for reinforced concrete, it is an incredible stowage of the invisible by first-rate
ties, it is a branchwork of syphilis, it is the diagram of a brandy bender, it
is the graphic representation of a seismic floodtide, it is a conspiracy of
dodders, it is the nightmare's head impaled on the lance point of a mob made
for peace and for bread.
I advance to
the region of blue lakes. I advance to the region of sulphur springs
I advance to
my crateriform mouth toward which have I struggled enough? What have I to
discard? Everything by god everything. I am stark naked. I have discarded everything.
My genealogy. My widow. My companions. I await the boiling, I await the baptism
of sperm. I await the wingbeat of the great seminal albatross supposed to make
a new man of me. I await the immense tap, the vertiginous slap that will
consecrate me as a knight of a plutonian order. I await in the depths of my
pores the sacred intrusion of the benediction.
And suddenly
it is the outpouring of great rivers
it is the
friendship of toucans' eyes
it is the
fulminating erection of virgin mountains
I am pregnant
with my despair in my arms
I am pregnant
with my hunger in my arms and my disgust in my mouth.
I am invested.
Europe patrols my veins like a pack of filariae at the stroke of midnight.
To think that
their philosophies tried to provide them with morals. That ferocious race won't
have put up with it.
Europe pig
iron fragment
Europe low
tunnel oozing a bloody dew
Europe old bag
Europe
Europe old dog
Europe worm-drawn coach
Europe peeling
tattoo Europe your name is a raucous clucking and a muffled shock
I unfold my
handkerchief it is a flag
I have donned
my beautiful skin
I have
adjusted my beautiful clawed paws
Europe
I hereby join
all that powders the sky with its insolence all that is loyal and fraternal all
that has the courage to be eternally new all that knows how to yield its heart
to the fire all that has the strength to emerge from an inexhaustible sap all
that is calm and certain
All that is
not you
Europe
eminent name
of the turd
The poem
speaks to the issues that dominate Césaire’s work – the beauty and futility of
a mystical people, of eroding serenity in the face of violent, obscene
destruction:
In the foreground and in longitudinal flight a dried-up brook
drowsy roller of obsidian pebbles. In the background a decidedly not calm
architecture of torn down burgs of eroded mountains on whose glimpsed phantom
serpents chariots a cat’s-eye and alarming constellations are born. It is a
strange firefly cake hurled into the gray face of time, a vast scree of shards
of ikons of blazons of lice in the beard of Saturn.
The visual imagery of his last line in that stanza provokes allusions to both chronological indifference to the fires of suffering, tossed irritatingly but insignificantly into the "beard of Saturn." Césaire references ancient mythology with Saturn's beard (http://www.crystalinks.com/saturnmyth.html) - Saturn, or Chronos, represents the personification of time, pestered with the people who inhabit its earthly manifestations.
My sword made from a shark’s-tooth smile is becoming terribly
useless. My mace is very obviously out of season and out of play. Rain is
falling.
What have I to discard? Everything by god everything. I am stark
naked. I have discarded everything. My genealogy. My widow. My companions. I
await the boiling, I await the baptism of sperm. I await the wingbeat of the
great seminal albatross supposed to make a new man of me.
I am pregnant with my despair in my arms
I am pregnant with my hunger in my arms and my disgust in my
mouth.
I am invested. Europe patrols my veins like a pack of filariae
at the stroke of midnight.
Césaire portrayed the suffering of the African nations destroyed by the slave trade in many of his works, and the lines above illustrate the effects of that barbarity against the humans it exploited.
But as the poem closes, the tone is defiant, and Europe is ripped up into bits and pieces of irrelevance:
Europe pig iron fragment
Europe low tunnel oozing a bloody dew
Europe old bag Europe
Europe old dog Europe worm-drawn coach
Europe peeling tattoo Europe your name is a raucous clucking and
a muffled shock
And the poet
rallies to proud resistance:
I unfold my handkerchief it is a flag
I have donned my beautiful skin
I have adjusted my beautiful clawed paws
I hereby join all that powders the sky with its insolence all
that is loyal and fraternal all that has the courage to be eternally new all
that knows how to yield its heart to the fire all that has the strength to
emerge from an inexhaustible sap all that is calm and certain
All that is not you
Before
delivering a final epithet for his enemies:
Europe
eminent name of the turd
Césaire also
wrote drama, including a highly intriguing adaption of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Césaire’s version, Une
Tempête, incorporates elements of
African sorcery, racial stereotypes and the natural world. Well worth a future
read.
Davis, Gregson, Aimé Césaire.
Cambridge, U.K.; New York, NY, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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