Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
By Aimé Césaire, Susan Sontag and Annette Smith
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About this ebook
Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. The long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. With its emphasis on unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, manipulation of language into puns and neologisms, and rhythm, Césaire considered his style a "beneficial madness" that could "break into the forbidden" and reach the powerful and overlooked aspects of black culture.
Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith achieve a laudable adaptation of Césaire's work to English by clarifying double meanings, stretching syntax, and finding equivalent English puns, all while remaining remarkably true to the French text. Their treatment of the poetry is marked with imagination, vigor, and accuracy that will clarify difficulties for those already familiar with French, and make the work accessible to those who are not. André Breton's introduction, A Great Black Poet, situates the text and provides a moving tribute to Césaire.
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is recommended for readers in comparative literature, post-colonial literature, African American studies, poetry, modernism, and French.
Aimé Césaire
Aimé Césaire (1913 – 2008) was best known as the co-creator (with Léopold Senghor) of the concept of négritude. As a widely recognized and influential figure of the negritude movement, Césaire has been translated into English for over a decade.
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Notebook of a Return to the Native Land - Aimé Césaire
A Note on André Breton
Annette Smith
André Breton (1896–1966) is considered the figurehead of the French Surrealist movement, which was derived from the Zurich-based Dada.
Imported into France by the Rumanian Tristan Tzara, Dada
represented a literary and artistic rebellion against the values of the contemporary world, and especially the bourgeois world. Surrealism anchored itself easily enough in France, a country already prepared for subversive writings by the works of such authors as Lautréamont, Rim-baud, Alfred Jarry, and Guillaume Apollinaire. Its principal tenet was its faith in a nonrational approach to reality, in the unconscious as revealed through dreams and automatic writing, and in the cultivation of the bizarre, the scandalous, and the iconoclastic.
The only unflinching Surrealist, in a group otherwise characterized by its fluidity, Breton became the theorist of the movement in several manifestos as well as in his novel Nadja (1928). During his stay in Paris, from 1932 to 1939, Césaire was, of course, exposed to a good deal of Surrealistic works, which happened to resonate both with his personal aesthetics and with the countercultural aesthetics and political goals of the budding Negritude movement (see p. 15). Shortly after the 1939 Paris publication of the Notebook, Césaire returned to a Martinique riddled not only with long-standing colonial problems, but with more immediate ones. For, after the defeat of France in 1940, the island passed under the control of the pro-Nazi Vichy government, whose distinctly anti-republican, censorious, and racist policies worsened the already grim situation of the black population of Martinique. It was to provide a dynamic response to this situation that in 1941 Césaire and other Martinican intellectuals founded the review Tropiques. This publication aimed at adapting the values of Surrealism to the specific context of Martinique, while exalting and exploring the concept of Negritude.
At this point, a felicitous conjunction took place: in April 1941, on his way to voluntary exile in the United States, André Breton made a stopover in Fort-de-France, stumbled upon the first issue of Tropiques, met Césaire and his friends, and subsequently read the Notebook. The following 1943 Breton essay we translate here, Un Grand Poète noir,
records this incandescent moment and was to serve as a preface to the 1947 first bilingual edition of the Notebook, which Breton godfathered from New York.
A Great Black Poet
André Breton
April 1941. Blocking the view, affixed to the beach by madre-pores and visited by surf—at least the children had the playground of their dreams to romp in all day long—a ship’s carcass in its very fixity provided no respite to the exasperating impossibility of moving about other than with measured steps in the space between two bayonets: the Lazaret concentration camp, in the harbor of Fort-de-France. Released after a few days, with what voracity did I plunge into the streets, seeking whatever still novel experience they could offer, dazzling markets, the hummingbirds in voices, the women whom Paul Eluard had described, upon returning from around the world, as more beautiful than any others. Soon, however, another shipwreck was looming, threatening to again block the entire horizon: The city itself was adrift, deprived as it were of its essential parts. Shops, and everything in their windows, took on a disquieting, abstract character. Activity was a bit slower than need be, noise too clear as if through beached debris. In the subtle air the continuous ringing, far off, of an alarm bell.
It is under these circumstances that, apropos of buying a ribbon for my daughter, I happened to leaf through a periodical on display in the haberdashery where the ribbon was sold. It was, under an extremely unpretentious cover, the first issue of a review called Tropiques, which had just come out in Fort-de-France. Needless to say, knowing the extent to which ideas had been debased in the last year and not unfamiliar with the lack of scruples characteristic of police reactions in Martinique, I approached this periodical with extreme diffidence … I could not believe my eyes: For what was said there was what had to be said and it was said in a manner not only as elegant but as elevated as anyone could say it! All the grimacing shadows were torn apart, scattered; all the lies, all the mockery shredded: Thus the voice of man was in no way broken, suppressed—it sprang upright again like the very spike of light. Aimé Césaire, such was the name of the one who spoke.
I shall not pretend that I did not at once take some pride in the fact that what he expressed was in no way unfamiliar; the names of the poets and authors he referred to would have been in themselves sufficient evidence; but even more the tone of those pages rang true, demonstrating that a man was totally engaged in an adventure while having at his command all that was required to establish something not only of an aesthetic but of a moral and social nature—or better, to make his intervention necessary and inevitable. The texts that accompanied Césaire’s indicated persons with generally the same tendencies and whose thinking fully coincided with his own. In complete contrast to the writings with