To the Fecund Earth!
Elena Gomez on Aimé Césaire
Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays nata (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land) is a slippery subject for a review. It has not only itself been translated into English several times and once in German in the eighty-odd years since its first publication, but also, even in its original French, the author made several additions to the work over the years, notably to the 1947 Paris edition, published eight years after the original. Even the title in English has not been static: it has been published as Memorandum on My Martinique; Return to My Native Land; Notebook of a Return to My Native Land and Notebook of a Return to the Native Land [emphasis mine]. The newest English translation, published in 2017 by Duke University Press and translated by N. Gregson Davis, is titled Journal of a Homecoming. This makes it difficult for any one version to be read as definitive, and we risk losing the enriching complexities of the work if we ignore its history. The additional passages are especially risky to ignore given the nature of the poem—it’s a book-length work that contains elements of the epic form, loosely narrative but also episodic, impressionistic, and lyrical, drawing upon the language of Black Caribbean culture, surrealism and occasionally natural sciences. ① Compare this to, say, Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, which included new poems from di Prima whenever it was republished. These were added as discrete poems, and with each of them titled ‘Revolutionary Letter #xx’, the additional poems, sometimes marked with the year, were much more easily traceable.
It’s worth turning to André Breton’s preface, written in 1941 after he befriended Aimé and Suzanne Césaire (his wife, who ‘radiated like flambé punch’, ②) in which he described the poem as ‘nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our times.’ ③ But in the preceding passage, Breton describes the mission ‘assigned to man today, of breaking violently with the modes of thinking and feeling that eventually render his existence impossible’, and that ‘for the past century, it has devolved upon poets to split open the armature that stifles us’. ④ In its earliest published version of Cahier, the urgent political vision is already there: of the Black, colonised subject, but also of the vibrant, living land itself—and that this, in combination with the lyrical beauty of Césaire’s poetic voice, are to be read together as necessary and complementary components.
To put this distinction into focus, here is the first passage of the Arnold and Eshleman edition (2013; translating the 1939 version):
[1]
At the end of first light burgeoning with frail coves the hungry Antilles,
the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited by alcohol,
stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dust of this town sinisterly stranded.
And here is the passage added to the beginning of the Eshleman and Smith translation (2001) of the 1947 version:
At the end of daybreak …
Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it, I detest the flunkies
of order and the cockchafers of hope. Beat it, evil grigri, you bedbug of a
petty monk. Then I turned toward paradises lost for him and his kin, calmer
than the face of a woman telling lies, and there, rocked by the flux of a never
exhausted thought I nourished the wind, I unlaced the monsters and heard
rise, from the other side of disaster, a river of turtledoves and savanna clover
which I carry forever in my depths height-deep as the twentieth floor of the
most arrogant houses and as a guard against the putrefying force of
crepuscular surroundings, surveyed night and day by a cursed venereal sun.
The tone shift is palpable, the voice declarative. The speaker detests the flunkies! It’s a rally for war. The absence of the ‘I’ in the first half or so of the original version is not necessarily noticeable if it’s the first version one encounters; its introduction in the later version is unambiguous, an emphatic proclamation, and Arnold has clocked this too. Arnold’s introduction to the 2013 bilingual edition is thorough in both its contextualisation of Cahier with regard to its publication history, as well as poetic structure and analysis that lays bare the technical composition of lines. For example, Césaire’s use of the alexandrine line, which is based on syllabic count rather than metric, cannot be faithfully rendered in English, and consequently Arnold and Eshleman ‘attempted to approximate … by using a greater solemnity, more formal lexical choices, or unusual syntax in translating those same lines.’ ⑤
It was this 2013 edition I first read, and it’s this edition I am ostensibly ‘reviewing’ now, but this edition has none of the later interjections added to other English translations, as seen in the striking comparison of the first passage above. Further, the newer translation introduces numbers to demarcate each strophe, which gives the effect of a much more modern formal appearance on the page. These multitudes of versions, and translations, and translations of different versions, effectively prevents any reviewer from making any claims for the ‘truth’ of the text. It’s interesting that Arnold concludes his introduction to this edition by stating that the translators’ intention to produce the text in English is to ‘strip away decades of rewriting that introduced at ideological purpose absent from the original’. This might be ungenerously read as an attempt to reveal the ‘true’ version of the poem, but it is then followed with: ‘We do not claim to reveal what the poem ultimately means but rather how it was meant to be read in 1939.’ ⑥ It remains the question whether a translation made decades later can even do this, but we start to see the slipperiness of Césaire’s poetry in action—the translation becomes an act of recuperation, but one that can never fully be rendered in the way the translators intend.
One common categorisation of Cahier is as a book that blends prose and poetry. But to categorise it this way is to dilute it. Consider Césaire’s own writing on poetry in his essay ‘Poetry and Knowledge’, in which he defines and elevates the role of the poet and poetry in unambiguous terms. Calling parts of this poem ‘prose’ might be acceptable if we subscribe to very narrow stylistic and formal rules of what ‘can’ and ‘cannot’ be considered poetry—this does a disservice to the potential meaning and expansion unlocked by Césaire himself in the poetic mode. In this context, to categorise this writing under ‘prose’ is ultimately meaningless. But my resistance towards identifying a blend in this work ends here.
Césaire’s oeuvre contains multitudes, and these multitudes become denser and more complicated when we start to read his poetry alongside his theory, and again alongside his political life (he was elected mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945 and held this position for several decades). His contribution to the literary movement Négritude, with Leópold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas, sought to re-inscribe and assert Black African culture and consciousness across all aspects of life in the francophone world. Through this, and through the themes in his poetry and other writings, we can see these multitudes in action: racial and cultural history and experience, literary expression, social and political structures and how these all work alongside each other. As such Cahier is a text that cannot be contained with a single lens. At the risk of flattening these subjects, we can broadly identify a few that appear in the work: Blackness, decolonisation, Marxism, vegetal land, ocean, weather, blood, slavery, bodies, revolt. The poem in its reworkings becomes a palimpsest, or at least has been read as such by scholars and translators of his work. ⑦
It’s worth noting, too, as Arnold points out in his introduction to the bilingual edition, which translates the original 1939 version, that the additions made later to the 1947 Paris edition were politically motivated. By this point, Césaire had become a Marxist and a member of the French Communist Party. Arnold writes:
As a member of an anti-capitalist political party that had criticized the surrealist style of his first collection of poetry, The Miraculous Weapons, in 1946, he found himself duty-bound to introduce in 1947 the social issues he had eschewed in 1943. ⑧
This anti-capitalist thread is fortified, it seems, by the introduction of the first-person subject right from the beginning—the social subject here is read as a revolutionary subject, and vice versa. But knowing that the idea of the original version—so palpably visionary and steeped in history, so full of human rage and joy and the ingredients of revolt—was being criticised for its surrealist qualities makes me immediately protective of this version and the politics it already contained. Despite the slippery nature of the text(s) comprising Notebook, I am convinced the political vision is there from the beginning, despite what the French Communist Party might have surmised. This vision is embodied in Césaire as a literary and political figure: he was an editor, scholar, politician and poet whose work has rightly been regarded and examined by scholars in various ways. So, to attempt to pin him down along these lines, to render him in writing, we risk overemphasising one aspect of him over another, or ignoring others entirely. To scholars and readers, there is Césaire as the poet of Négritude, or Césaire as the Martinican Surrealist poet, via Bréton. Further, there is also Césaire as the ecopoet, with Sebastian Galbo describing his poetry as ‘vegetal’: ‘the particular nuances of recurring “moments” or efflorescences in Césaire’s poetry involving creolization through the distinct aesthetic lens of botanical imagery.’ Galbo is critical of the typical narrative of critical discourse around Césaire that positions the ‘one-dimensional worldview’ of Négritude against Glissant’s Relation. He offers an alternative to scholarship that wants to position the botanical leitmotifs as spiritual or regenerative. In a remarkable reading of the botanical imagery in Césaire that unites it with the poet’s anticolonial poetics, Galbo observes:
Aimé Césaire’s poetry does not depict anthropomorphized Venus flytraps, garrulous mangroves, or the stuff of fantasy. Rather, he fashions a polyvalent poetry that, drawing on vegetal imagery, articulates a fraught (post)colonial identity in a politically vexed and rapidly modernizing Caribbean world. ⑨
Any faithful reading of Cahier requires attention to more than one thing that requires reiterating; the book is uncontainable. All I can offer is a small suggestion to how we interpret and contextualise Césaire and his work. We have postcolonial readings of Césaire, and French Surrealist readings; in the past two decades we have seen the development of ecopoetics frameworks for understanding this work, including those that, as we see in Galbo, incorporate postcolonial ideas. But any attentive reading of this poem makes it clear that no single reading can sufficiently capture the interconnected nodes that are so clearly present in the poem. More than this, no intellectual engagement can fully express the immediate, corporeal sensations one experiences from reading lines such as
to the mealy night with its golden hatchings of erratic fireflies
Or
So much blood in my memory! In my memory are lagoons ⑩
Alongside thinking about how to pose a reading of Cahier in the context of a network, or a web, I’ve been somewhat entranced by metabolism; the process of conversion and production of energy in the body and the natural world. I come back to Marx’s blood and dirt, and to capital in the soil, the mouth as a site of subsistence, sustenance, voice—and here, in this poem, how the mouth is also a site of oppression: ‘for his voice gets lost in the swamp of hunger’¹¹ and later, ‘the forced feeding of very strange microbes’¹². We continue in this corporeal site. We find the presence of blood—‘our blood sings in the madrepore’, and then this: ‘make me a steward of its blood’. ⑬ But this fusion of body and land cannot simply be reduced to metabolism here—it is extractive rather than productive. And on borders, on the land, there is the map: ‘my special geography’ made ‘with the geometry of my own spilled blood’. ⑭ Take, too, this passage, which illuminates the fusion, and which brings together earth and human …
and far from the palatial sea that foams under the suppurating syzygy
of blisters, the body of my country miraculously laid in the despair of
my arms*, its bones shattered and in its veins, the blood hesitating like
a drop of vegetal milk at the injured point of a bulb… Suddenly now
strength and life assail me like a bull and I revive ONAN ⑮ who entrusted
his sperm to the fecund earth and the water of life circumvents the papilla
of the morne, and now all the veins and veinlets are bustling with new
blood and the enormous breathing lung of cyclones and the fire hoarded
in volcanoes and the gigantic seismic pulse that now beats the measure of
a living body in my firm embrace. ⑯
and this (in my view) Marxist critique of what happens to those bodies and that land:
those who invented neither powder nor compass
those who could harness neither steam nor electricity
those who explored neither the seas nor the sky
but knew in its most minute corners the land of the suffering ⑰
The reference to technological progress via energy consumption and tools of colonial expansion (if we read ‘powder’ as gun powder, and ‘compass’ as a tool of early colonisers) here brings together the crux of why Cahiers endures as a vital text for our times. Why? It is obvious to me that slavery, anti-Blackness, colonisation of natural resources for profit, and industrial technological capitalist advancement cannot be disentangled or isolated from each other—this is precisely the webbyness that Césaire was trying to reveal throughout his lifetime, and which continues to endure in his work. These strands are messy, and it’s impossible to comprehend it all at once, which is why poetry, especially exemplified in Césaire, contains the formal and aesthetic characteristics to register this entanglement without diluting the urgency of such a political vision.
In his letter to Maurice Thorez in 1956, resigning from the French Communist Party, Césaire wrote:
It is clear that our struggle—the struggle of colonial peoples against colonialism, the struggle of peoples of color against racism—is more complex, or better yet, of a completely different nature than the fight of the French worker against French capitalism, and it cannot in any way be considered a part, a fragment, of that struggle. ⑱
He continues:
I believe I have said enough to make it clear that it is neither Marxism nor communism that I am renouncing, and that it is the usage some have made of Marxism and communism that I condemn. That what I want is that Marxism and communism be placed in the service of black peoples, and not black peoples in the service of Marxism and communism. That the doctrine and the movement would be made to fit men, not men to fit the doctrine or the movement. And, to be clear, this is valid not only for communists. If I were Christian or Muslim, I would say the same thing.
In a broad and crude binary, we might place on one side of the poem the ‘political’ content, and on the other the ‘aesthetic’. Césaire’s work, though, it not a binary to be upheld; we see this in his use of metaphor. In ‘Poetry and Knowledge’, Césaire writes that ‘mankind is no tree’, with arms as branches. Rather, ‘Its arms imitate branches, but they are withered branches, which for having misunderstood their true function (to embrace life), have fallen down along the trunk, have dried up: mankind does not blossom at all.’ Césaire’s metaphor recalls Marx’s metabolic rift—the mislaying of human function against or in opposition to ‘nature’. But for Césaire, the poet is someone with the capacity to repair that rift:
…[the poet] has surrendered to primal life, he has said yes, he has consented to that immense life that transcends him. He has rooted himself in the earth, he has stretched out his arms, he has played with the sun, he has become a tree: he has blossomed, he has sung.
In other words, poetry is full bloom. ⑲
Articulated here, in clear sight, is the triumph of Cahier: it successfully and heartwrenchingly registers in poetic form these intertwining themes of land, body and capital so that they are unified but discrete. It maintains lucidity while containing its calls to arms. It is poetry and discourse that remains politically urgent and historically illuminating, a map for our times. Césaire’s poetry frees us. It gives us permission to embrace the entanglements that create space for liberation.
✷✷✷
✷ 1. The English translations discussed in this review contain introductions with detailed accounts of the various editions and republications over Cahier’s lifetime.
✷ 2. Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), p.xii.
✷ 3. Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, p.xiii.
✷ 4. Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, p.xiii.
✷ 5. Aimé Césaire, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (bilingual edition), translated by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman, (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), p.xii.
✷ 6. Césaire, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, p.xx.
✷ 7. See also ‘Introduction: A Poetics of Anticolonialism’ by Robin D.G. Kelley in Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); or James A. Arnold, ‘Beyond Postcolonial Césaire: Reading Cahier D’un Retour Au Pays Natal Historically’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 44:3, 2008, p.258–75.
✷ 8. Césaire, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, p. xviii.
✷ 9. Sebastian Galbo, ‘“Lands that spit and spew”: Aimé Césaire’s vegetal poetry’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54:2, 2019, p.145.
✷ 10. Césaire, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, p.23.
✷ 11. Césaire, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, p.7.
✷ 12. Césaire, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, p.9.
✷ 13. Césaire, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, p.41.
✷ 14. Césaire, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, p.45.
✷ 15. Onan receives the following translator’s note: "In Genesis 38:9 Onan refused to impregnate his dead brother’s widow. When Jehovah saw that Onan had disobeyed the divine injunction, He killed Onan. As he does elsewhere, Césaire keeps the vehicle of the metaphor (the speaker will copulate with Mother Earth) but provides a new tenor (a nature religion that harks back to Africa).”
✷ 16. Césaire, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, p.47.
✷ 17. Césaire, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, p.35.
✷ 18. Aimé Césaire,, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez’, Social Text 28:2, 2010; French original 1956 Présence Africaine, p.127.
✷ 19. Aimé Césaire, Lyric and Dramatic Poetry 1946–82, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990), p. xlviii.
Elena Gomez is the author of Crushed Silk, Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt and Body of Work. She is currently completing a PhD in Marxist ecopoetics at the University of Melbourne.