Aimé Césaire (1913–2008)

Wow! Aimé Césaire lets European philosophers speak for themselves. This reveals some quite disturbing internalizations.

He quotes Ernest Renan, a French humanist philosopher:
"We aspire not to equality but to domination. The country of a foreign race must become once again a country of serfs, of agricultural laborers, or industrial workers. It is not a question of eliminating the inequalities among men but of widening them and making them into a law."

"With us, the common man is nearly always show more a declasse nobleman, his heavy hand is better suited to handling the sword than the menial tool. Rather than work, he chooses to fight, that is, he returns to his first estate. Regere imperio populos, that is our vocation. Pour forth this all-consuming activity onto countries which, like China, are crying aloud for foreign conquest. Turn the adventurers who disturb European society into a ver sacrum, a horde like those of the Franks, the Lombards, or the Normans, and every man will be in his right role. Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor; govern them with justice, levying from them, in return for the blessing of such a government, an ample allowance for the conquering race, and they will be satisfied; a race of tillers of the soil, the Negro; treat him with kindness and humanity, and all will be as it should; a race of masters and soldiers, the European race. Reduce this noble race to working in the ergastulum like Negroes and Chinese, and they rebel. In Europe, every rebel is, more or less, a soldier who has missed his calling, a creature made for the heroic life, before whom you are setting a task that is contrary to his race, a poor worker, too good a soldier. But the life at which our workers rebel would make a Chinese or a fellah happy, as they are not military creatures in the least. Let each one do what he is made for, and all will be well."

He deconstructs typical pro-colonialist arguments, interwoven with countless historical and gruesome events and the thoughts of the so-called civilized Europeans.

He reveals that Hitler’s rise was deeply grounded in Europe’s own past. Gruesome and systematic crimes against Brown, Black, and Yellow people were not only tolerated but enforced and exploited for profit. Hitler's regime did not emerge in a vacuum. If we had respected different peoples and cultures all along, our own European culture might have been different and more peaceful.

Our whole world might have been different! I dream of a world where hatred toward different cultures and religions cannot take root. Where it withers the moment we remember that we are all human, all deserving of dignity, no matter our origin.

You can’t sow violence and expect to reap peace. Hitler's regime internalized global patterns of hatred and redirected them inward, toward domestic targets. We have to stop the cycle of violence. show less

This was incredible. Exploring the contradiction and hypocrisy of Europe after the horrors of Nazism are revealed and arguing, successfully at that too, that Hitler wasn't the anomaly that he was–and is still, painted to be. Cesaire mostly uses French colonial history and the horrors done in Algeria, Madagascar, Vietnam as examples. No doubt it must have been a shock and a joke to the communities that had experienced and lived with the trauma European colonialism had wrought on them, when show more their colonizers were condemning Germany. The ironic tone of the writing, at parts strangely funny while showing contradiction, gave an even greater effect to the work the writing was supposed to do. Even though half the planet was still colonized when it was published (1950), and colonial exploitation has taken stealthier and more insidious forms since then, this book still remains both fortunately and unfortunately fresh and required reading. show less

Aimé Césaire is one of the key figures in postcolonial literature, and his Cahier is one of its seminal texts, discussed on just about every course on the subject. In fact it's so seminal, and its historical importance and relevance to later generations of writers are so well explained in the textbooks, that it's scarcely ever necessary actually to look at it. Which is a shame, because as well as being a key moment in literary history, it is an interesting and rewarding poem in its own show more right.

It's a surprisingly modest work in scale: a free-verse poem that takes up about thirty pages in print, so that it's not at all inconceivable that it would fit into an actual "notebook" in manuscript. To summarise something that can't and probably shouldn't be summarised, Césaire, who was studying in Paris at the time, imagines himself revisiting Martinique, watching what's going on at the break of dawn ("au bout du petit matin") from the point of view of a sparrow-hawk. And what he sees is not attractive or nostalgic: everything is tainted with dirt and disease and the damage done by slavery and colonialism. He looks back in time to see slaves being tortured by landowners, or Toussaint Louverture in his cell in the Jura (surrounded by the "white death" of snow). He thinks about a black man he has seen on a tram in Paris, apparently crushed by his sense of inferiority, and he comes to the realisation that blackness - Négritude - is something to celebrate and assert. The "great black hole" he wanted to drown himself in a little while ago is now the place where he can fish out and exploit "the night's malevolent tongue".

There is a lot of anger here, but it's expressed in surprisingly beautiful and complex language. Césaire was a poet first of all, even if he did end up devoting the last sixty years of his life to politics. You can get a lot of enjoyment out of the sweep and rhythm of his words, and the baffling variety of registers he uses. Unfortunately for us, he was also trained as a classics teacher, and had a habit of pillaging the remoter reaches of the Latin and Greek dictionaries for words that ought to but didn't - as yet - exist in French. When you read Cahier, it is often more difficult to come to terms with these obscure classical coinages than with the handful of specifically Caribbean terms he uses. At a few points this leads to real problems: crucially, for example, no-one has ever been quite sure what Césaire meant by the last word of the text, verrition - it possibly has something to do with turning or sweeping, but if so, why is it qualified by the adjective immobile?

(Rosello mostly translates these words into equally obscure or made-up English terms, to preserve the difficulty of the original. Thus verrition becomes "revolvolution". This is probably a trick you can only get away with in a parallel text: in a standalone translation it would be rather baffling.)

Eighty years on, it's easy enough to see the blind spots that weren't so evident in 1939 when the first version of the Cahier appeared. There's a lot of declamatory Whitmanesque penis-waving, and not much role for women in Césaire's view of the world; many people have pointed out how négritude's simplistic race-based focus forces it to overlook many of the ethnic and social complexities of the Caribbean, and more recently Patrick Chamoiseau and his co-authors in Éloge de la Créolité have challenged Césaire's exclusion of Creole language and culture. (Chamoiseau's novel Texaco is in many ways a direct challenge to the attitudes expressed in the Cahier, but it is careful to treat Césaire the person and politician with considerable respect and affection.)

The Bloodaxe edition comes with a very comprehensive introductory essay by Professor Rosello, who also did the parallel text translation. Without taking sides noticeably, she sets out the background to the poem's composition and discusses its reception and current (1995) views of its importance, and provides a fairly comprehensive bibliography. One rather striking omission is that she doesn't get into any detail about the textual history of the poem, beyond remarking that it first appeared almost unnoticed in a review called Volontés in 1939, and that it only really came to the attention of the critics in a new edition with a preface by André Bréton in 1947. From what I've read elsewhere I know that Césaire revised the poem quite heavily on at least three occasions, so it seems at least odd not to mention which version of the text is being used and why.

If you can live with that, this edition seems to be a very good way to approach the poem if French isn't your first language. Rosello's translation is fairly literal but by no means plodding, so depending on how good your French is, you can switch back and forth between the original and the translation quite comfortably. show less

A retelling of Shakespeare's play The Tempest, set on an island where the European colonial Prospero enforces slavery on a mulatto Ariel and a Black/indigenous Caliban. The text pushes beyond critiquing colonialism and into decolonisation. I read Richard Miller's 1985/1992 anglophone translation but wished I'd also had the original French for side by side comparison.

There are some interesting linguistic choices that aren't from Shakespeare, such as Prospero being "marooned" on the island, show more and the first scene very pointedly has people participating as players literally choosing their own characters: "You want Caliban? Well, that's revealing." "And there's no problem about the villains either: you, Antonio; you Alonso, perfect!" Caliban's first word is "Uhuru!" (Freedom!). Caliban rejects the slave name foisted on him by Prospero, and wants to be called "X" (like Malcolm, clearly). There's intertextual Baudelaire: "Des hommes dont le corps est mince et vigoureux,/ Et des femmes dont l'oeil par sa franchise étonne." And the play's intellectual coup de grâce is Prospero's choice of taunt at Caliban for not murdering him: "See, you're nothing but an animal... you don't know how to kill." Unlike Prospero and his fellow Europeans, Antonio and Sebastian, who have shown they know how to murder motivated by personal ambition.

In the end we find that Caliban has always been free in his own mind while Prospero continues to enslave himself to his desire for power over others. show less