In Search of the Missing Mother: Suzanne Césaire, Martiniquaise

Author(s): Kara Rabbitt

Source: Research in African Literatures , Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring 2013), pp. 36-54
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/reseafrilite.44.1.36

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In Search of the Missing Mother:
Suzanne Césaire, Martiniquaise
Kara Rabbitt
William Paterson University of New Jersey
rabbittk@wpunj.edu

ABSTRACT

More than fifty years after her death, the mid-century Martinican theorist
Suzanne Césaire has reemerged in Caribbean studies as a source for a new
cultural genealogy. Offering a brief biographical and critical overview of
her life and works, this article argues that Césaire is being recuperated as
the missing mother of Martinique’s intellectual family tree not least because
the rhetorical strategies she employed within her essays continue to invite
her readers to engage in the questions they raise. Suzanne Césaire embraced
fully the cultural diversity and vitality of the Black Americas—of “here”—
in a time when many Martinican intellectuals abandoned Europe only to
focus almost exclusively on Africa. By drawing in her readers through the
discursive strategies of the manifesto, Césaire’s essays also demand a con-
tinually present reading—within an evolving “now”—of their importance.
Deictically rich, the essays recall to “us,” their interpellated readers, that
here matters now and still.

S
uzanne Roussi Césaire, wife of the poet-politician Aimé Césaire and
cofounder with him of the influential 1940s’ review Tropiques, is an intrigu-
ing figure both in Martinican cultural history and for mid-century surreal-
ism. Writer, mother, activist, and scholar, she linked her multiple worlds and
influences during a critical period for Martinique. And then she disappeared: she
published no texts after 1945, she left Martinique and her husband in 1963, and
died young—at age 50, with her youngest child only 12 years old—in 1966. For
decades following her death, Suzanne Roussi Césaire became little more than a
footnote. Recent reexaminations of her significance, however, seem to indicate that
she is being recuperated by today’s writers and scholars as a source for an alterna-
tive genealogy within Martinican literature, and even postcolonial literature more

•  REsearch in african literatures, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring 2013). © 2013  •

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 K AR A R ABBITT  •  37

Aimé and Suzanne Césaire.1

generally. Suzanne Césaire appears to be emerging as a missing mother for “les

fils de Césaire.”2
And with reason: the few published works of this mid-century theorist pro-
vide key means of embracing and constructing a distinctly West Indian cultural
identity that predate by decades those developed by such later Martinican writers
as Édouard Glissant. During the wartime period of her writing, Suzanne Césaire
also created a rhetorical force demanding a presence from her readers, who become
participants in an enunciative moment that still feels fresh and urgent in her prose.
She brought Martinique into writing in a way never before presented: here, now,
alive, vibrant with possibility and agency. And she commanded her readers to
engage with her words—making effective rhetorical use of the first-person plural
to pull “us” into the world she describes. It is not, then, surprising that recent writ-
ers and critics have turned back to her essays for inspiration and understanding,
recuperating her as genealogical/theoretical ancestor, making of her what Jennifer
Wilks has termed the “Madonna” of francophone modernism (109).
As evidenced by the multiple homages, eulogies, and reassessments fol-
lowing his death, “Papa” Césaire offers a complex legacy that includes négritude
and departmentalization, as well as vital poetic innovation, powerful political
condemnation, and one path of cultural construction.3 Suzanne Césaire, a firm
believer in the fertility and vitality of the Caribbean, provides a different point of
origin for theoretical trends—from antillanité to créolité—that address the cross-
pollination of cultures and voices she celebrated in her essays. Fifty years after
her early death, she is reemerging as a metaphoric maternal force for a family tree
that branches from the trunk proffered by the writers of Tropiques to the diverse
cultural explorations—in French and Creole—of today’s Martinique. That one

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38  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 44 Number 1

of the “fils de Suzanne,” Daniel Maximin, has finally facilitated the publication
of her extant works under Suzanne Césaire’s own name—the well-received Le
Grand Camouflage: Ecrits de dissidence (1941–1945) (Seuil, 2009), recently released in
Keith L. Walker’s English translation as The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent
(1941–1945) (Wesleyan, 2012)—will ensure that later generations continue to turn
to this woman of mysterious force as cultural source. Even Maximin’s own loving
presentation of her significance and contexts in the foreword to that work, however,
leaves us more questions than answers (7–23 in Seuil edition; xxv–xxxvi in Wes-
leyan edition). Likewise, Suzanne Dracius’s recent “Memorial/Memoire: In Search
of Suzanne Césaire’s Garden,” in exploring a few of the questions left lingering by
the passing of the great Aimé Césaire finds only that much is still unknown, or
forgotten, or lost (156–57), even as it underscores that homages to Suzanne follow-
ing the death of Aimé show that “[w]e are a curious people, a curious humanity
with a strange relation to woman,” and to this woman in particular (158).
This article, thus, attempts to address some of the gaps in our understanding
of the life and writings of and about Suzanne Césaire, even as it argues that the
rhetorical strategies employed within her essays invite us to continue to engage in
the questions they raise. A half a century after her death, Suzanne Césaire’s voice
calls urgently still to her native land that “here” matters, that Martinique is present
and vital, that this tiny island speck holds significance for the world.
The gaps in the biography are closing, though not yet fully filled. This much
we know: Jeanne Aimée Marie Suzanne Roussi was born August 11, 1915. In the
early 1930s, as was typical for her generation, she left Martinique to complete her
education in France, studying literature at the University of Toulouse. A classmate
of Aimé Césaire’s sister, she met Aimé through this connection and moved to
Paris, where the two married in 1937. Like many of her contemporaries, after her
studies in France, she brought back to Martinique a solid grounding in European
intellectual history, a firm belief in French leftist politics, a new awareness of the
richness of African cultures, and the expansionist vision of surrealism’s radical
poetics. Crucially, Suzanne Césaire also fully embraced the cultural diversity
and vitality of the Black Americas in a time when many Martinican intellectuals
abandoned Europe only to focus primarily on Africa. Author of seven short essays
in Tropiques between 1941 and 1945 and coeditor of this vital cultural review, she
influenced her native land as much by her efforts in support of the journal’s exis-
tence and content—as editor, paper-procurer, protestor against censorship—as she
did by her published works within it.4 Suzanne thus also serves, as have numerous
women in intellectual or political movements, as one of the unsung facilitators
behind works bearing the names of others.
A mother and a scholar, Suzanne Césaire is intriguing not least in the balanc-
ing of roles she played. Shortly after her 1937 marriage to Aimé Césaire she gave
birth to their first son, Jacques, in Paris. The couple returned to Martinique in 1939
and had another son, Jean-Paul, that year. Suzanne then appears to have briefly
taught, like Aimé, at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France. The two, along with
René Ménil and Aristide Maugée, founded the cultural revue Tropiques in 1941.
Suzanne wrote three essays that year as well as producing another son, Francis.
During the period of 1942 to 1945, she gave birth to her daughter Ina, wrote four
more essays for Tropiques, and joined her coeditors in the battle for its continued
publication.5 After the war, Suzanne moved to Paris with Aimé when he became

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 K AR A R ABBITT  •  39

Aimé and Suzanne Césaire with four of their children.

assemblyman of the newly created French department of Martinique. They had

two more children, Marc, born in Paris in 1948, and Michèle, born in Fort-de-
France in 1951. A very dedicated Communist, by at least Michel Leiris’s account,
Suzanne spent her Sundays selling communist newspapers for the cause in Paris,
even with then five young children at home.6 She seems to have returned with
Aimé to Martinique after he left the Communist Party in 1956, but separated from
her husband in April of 1963 and returned to Paris to teach. She died at the age of
50 three short years later, on May 16, 1966. Though we have not a single printed
word from her after 1945, she did write a play loosely adapted from Lafcadio
Hearn’s story about the 1848 slave revolt in Martinique, Youma, The Story of a West-
Indian Slave. This adaptation, titled Aurore de la liberté (“The Dawn of Liberty”), was
performed by an amateur group in 1952 but never published.7
Within the cultural history of the era, Suzanne Césaire remains an enigma, a
glimpse, a moment: she is mentioned, but not discussed in many references to the
time period.8 Her recent reemergence in postcolonial studies, however, indicates
her evolving significance, due not least to her repeated insistence on the vitality
of the Caribbean space. In this, Suzanne’s essays offer a sharp contrast to Aimé’s
contemporary vision of a mute and sterile land, such as found in his opening
“Presentation” in the first edition of Tropiques: “Point de ville. Point d’art. Point de
poésie. Pas un germe. Pas une pousse. . . . En verité, terre sterile et muette” ‘No
city. No art. No poetry. Not a sprout. Not a shoot. . . . Truly a sterile and mute
land’ (5). Like a figurative mother embracing the potential of her brood, Suzanne
speaks instead to the fertile possibility of Martinique: in this same 1941 issue of
the review, she calls on her compatriots to rise up and recognize their place in the
world, reminding them that “Ici, aussi, des hommes naissent, vivent et meurent;

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40  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 44 Number 1

Ici aussi, se joue le drame entire” ‘Here, too, people are born, live, and die; here, too,
the whole drama plays itself out’ (“Leo Frobenius” 36).9 This “here,” this present
and presence gain an urgency in her writing that would grow through her essays,
culminating in the compelling call for a new Martinican literature of her final
essay, “Le Grand camouflage.”
Reaching back to Suzanne Césaire as a feminine and alterative source to the
father figure of Aimé, however, is complicated by her lack of explicit attention
to the figure of the female. With one oft-quoted exception—when she speaks of
the exoticism and diversity represented by the “hummingbird-women, tropical
flower-women, women of four races and dozens of bloodlines”—Césaire rarely
addresses gender in her writing. Far from exclusively feministic texts, her essays
speak to broad cultural questions of colonial and racial oppression, of national
identity, and of literary audacity and innovation. And yet, as she would say, they
are there (“pourtant elles y sont”)—those “hummingbird-women,” those feminine
symbols of Antillean, African, American identity that peek out through her pages.
From her opening words in Tropiques’ first edition, Césaire evokes, in fact, a
maternal force that pulses through humanity.10 In her study of Frobenius she states,

Non, l’homme ne crée pas la civilisation, non la civilisation n’est pas l’œuvre de
l’homme. L’homme est au contraire l’instrument de la civilisation, un simple
moyen d’expression d’une puissance organique qui le dépasse infiniment.
L’homme n’agit pas, il est agi, mû par une force antérieure à l’humanité, une
force assimilable à la force vitale elle-même, la Païdeuma fondamentale. (27)

No, we do not create civilization; it is not our handiwork. We are rather instru-
ments of civilization, a simple means of expression of an organic force that is
infinitely bigger than us. We do not act; we are acted upon, moved by a force that
precedes humanity, a force comparable to the life-force itself, the fundamental
Paideuma.

This maternal-like life-force operates, thus, both prior to and continuous with
human expression. It is linked, throughout her essays, to the question of space
and place as active and interactive agents. Césaire’s use of the theories of Leo
Frobenius, focusing on the “plant-man” qualities of an Ethiopian culture, brings
to the fore that vital relation to place that is necessary for the Martinican to know
him- or herself.11 Echoing René Ménil’s arguments from the 1932 Légitime défense,
Césaire calls on her peers to study first themselves, their land, their own identity:
“Il est maintenant urgent d’oser se connaître soi-même, d’oser avouer ce qu’on est,
d’oser se demander ce qu’on veut être” ‘We must now dare to know ourselves,
dare to admit what we are, dare to ask ourselves what we want to become’ (36).12
Her essay of the same year examining the influence of the critic Emile
Chartier (or “Alain”) likewise stresses a fundamental force that moves through
and surpasses the individual, and echoes again this urgent “now” that makes her
study a manifesto. The essay culminates in a call to the artist and the reader to
give in to rather than attempt to dominate this vital force:

Il s’agit maintenant de saisir et d’admirer un art nouveau, qui tout en gardant

l’homme à sa vraie place, fragile et dépendante, ouvre cependant à l’artiste des

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 K AR A R ABBITT  •  41

possibilités insoupçonnées, dans le spectacle même des choses ignorées ou

tues. (59)
A une nouvelle conscience du monde, à une nouvelle conscience de l’humain
répond un jeu nouveau, splendide.
Et déjà de troublants chefs d’œuvre sont le signe de cette reconnaissance et voici
se lever sur ce monde transfiguré et retrouvé les promesses d’un art qui sera
expression totale de la vie. (61)

Now we must seize upon and admire a new art, which both keeps humanity
in its true place—fragile and dependent—and opens up unsuspected possibili-
ties to the artist through the surprising spectacle of forgotten, silenced things.
Toward a new consciousness of the world, a new consciousness of humankind
joining in a new and splendid game.
Already troubling masterpieces mark this acknowledgment, and above this
transformed and rediscovered world rises up the promise of an art that will be
the total expression of life.

One can read in these words the well-versed student of the work of Rimbaud,
Lautréamont, and Breton, among others. But Césaire’s passionate urgency in her
discussion of these questions is hardly academic: she is driving toward a much
transformed relation to place, to a Martinique emerging as a feminine and vital
force that pulses through her children’s blood. Her use of the deictic “mainten-
ant” (“now”) and of the enunciatively marked present and future tenses of spoken
discourse engage her readers in the creation of this vision, as well does the deic-
tic “voici”: here and now are the driving moments of the text, pulling us into its
present and drawing us toward what will be.
These rhetorical strategies underscore how much, in direct contrast to the
male predecessors, she echoes above and, to certain contemporary poets of the
negritude movement, Suzanne Césaire refuses—absolutely—textual distance
from the Caribbean space. She critiques such representations as creating an
exoticized and eroticized feminine topography of Martinique, similar to those she
quotes in her later critique of John Antoine-Nau: “nuit des madras multicolores /
Sur les tiges des beaux corps balances” ‘night of multicolored madras / Around
the legs of beautiful balanced bodies,’ or “la négrillonne du Sud, / D’un noir
luisant, presque doré de tant reluire, / Soleil noir avec un soleil blanc pour sourire”
‘Southern Negro girl, / Of a glowing black, almost golden in your gleaming, / A
black sun with a white sun for a smile.’ In “Misère d’un poésie” she condemns
this tradition as touristic literature, a European trend adopted by assimilated
Martinicans of the early twentieth century that reduces her complex country to a
series of picture postcards. In contrast, her relation to place is grounded in geog-
raphy, anthropology, history, meteorology, and ethnography. Martinique is not
the exotic woman of the colonial dream, nor the sterile and silent land of Aimé
Césaire’s fears as articulated in the opening pages of Tropiques, but a lush, if harsh,
site of upheaval, energy, vitality, a land of mixing and of repression and of pos-
sibility. Echoing her earlier call to “know oneself” she begins by 1942 to speak in
“Malaise d’une civilization” to a collective identity—“ourselves”—that will place
Martinicans in a fertile relationship with their land:

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42  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 44 Number 1

Il est exaltant d’imaginer sur ces terres tropicales, rendues enfin à leur vérité
interne, l’accord durable et fécond de l’homme et du sol. . . . Nous voici appelés
à nous connaître enfin nous-mêmes, et voici devant nous les splendeurs et les
espoirs. .  .  . Il s’agit .  .  . d’une mobilisation de toutes les forces vives mêlées
sur cette terre où la race est le résultat du brassage le plus continu; il s’agit de
prendre conscience du formidable amas d’énergies diverses que avons [sic]
jusqu’ici enfermées en nous-mêmes. Nous devons maintenant les employer
dans leur plénitude, sans déviation et sans falsification. Tant pis pour ceux qui
nous croient des rêveurs. La plus troublante réalité est nôtre. Nous agirons.
Cette terre, la nôtre, ne peut être que ce que vous voulons qu’elle soit. (“Malaise
d’une civilisation” 48–49)

It is exhilarating to imagine in these tropical lands, finally returned to their

internal truth, an abiding and fruitful covenant between people and earth. . . .
We are called to finally know ourselves and find in front of us our splendors
and our hopes. . . . It is a question . . . of mobilizing all the living strength of this
land where race is the result of constant mixing; it is a question of becoming
aware of the incredible mass of diverse energies that we have until now shut
up inside. We must now employ them fully, without hesitation or falseness. Too
bad for those who think us dreamers. We will act. This land, our land, can only
be what we want it to be.

The enunciative agency of the repeated first-person plural pronoun pulls Cés-
aire’s readers into the movement and moment of the text. Her “living land,” filled
with dynamic and diverse people, opens a space hitherto unfound in Martinican
literature and occupies it with the active subjects her readers become: “We will act.”
Women themselves are few in Césaire’s essays, and yet present, and signifi-
cant. In her 1941 essay, “André Breton, poète,” for example, she evokes in Breton’s
writing the nameless woman whose love serves to link man to the cosmos. And
this muse-figure reads more accurately the signifying forces at play than does,
perhaps, the poet himself: “Pour la femme cet hymne étrange, ce convulsif appel
aux puissances du monde et du désir où l’amour prend sa signification totale qui
est d’intégrer l’homme au cosmos, de le mettre en liaison directe avec les éléments.”
‘For woman this strange hymn serves as a convulsive call to the power of the world
and of desire, where love gains its full significance: that of integrating man with
the cosmos, of putting him in direct contact with the elements’ (32–33).
Suzanne Césaire also creates a woman of Martinique itself in her 1945 “Le
Grand camouflage”: “My island, Martinique, with her cool necklace of clouds”
(267). While feminization of the colonized space was not unique, her depiction
is filled with more complex women-subjects, not just exoticized objects of desire
but figures connecting history with an evolving future: “the hummingbird-
women, the tropical flower-women, the women of four races and dozens of blood-
lines” (“Le Grand camouflage” 268). Her genealogy is also complex: Martinique’s
mother is the “black slave woman” whose great-grandsons by the slaveholder now
grapple with their “double ferocity” inherited from African warriors and greedy
colonizers (271).
Africa, too, in Césaire’s vision is a woman, a mother-figure and lover-figure
who calls her love and her pain out to us through the drums of her children:

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 K AR A R ABBITT  •  43

[L]a nuit tropicale se gonfle de rythmes, les hanches de Bergilde ont pris aux
roulis montés des abîmes aux flancs des volcans leur allure de cataclysme, et
c’est l’Afrique elle-même qui, par delà l’Atlantique et les siècles d’avant les
négriers dédie à ses enfants antillais le regard de convoitise solaire qu’échangent
les danseurs. Leur cri clame à voix rauque et large que l’Afrique est là, présente,
qu’elle attend, immensément vierge malgré la colonisation, houleuse, dévoreuse
de blancs. Et . . . sur ces terres limitées, petites, entourées d’eau comme de grands
fossés infranchissables, passe le vent énorme venu d’un continent. Antilles-
Afrique, grâce aux tambours, la nostalgie des espaces terrestres vit dans ces
cœurs d’insulaires. (“Le Grand camouflage” 272)

[T]he tropical night fills with rhythm; Bergilde’s haunches have taken on the
cataclysmic allure of the rolling chasms of the volcano’s flanks. And Africa
herself—from the other side of the Atlantic and the centuries before the slave
ships—consecrates to her Antillean children the look of solar lust that the danc-
ers exchange. Their cry proclaims in a loud and raucous voice that Africa is here,
present, that she is waiting, enormous and virgin, despite the greedy turbulence
of White colonization. And . . . on these little, limited lands, surrounded by water
like great impassible gulfs, wafts the immense wind from another continent.
The drums create an Antilles-Africa; their rhythm makes a nostalgia for earthly
spaces live on in these insulated hearts.

These female figures of land—Martinique and Africa—are not thus eroticized or

passive in Suzanne Césaire’s essays, as they are the work of colonialist writers or
even in some of her negritude peers.13 These women-lands act on and through their
people, consecrating upon them a cultural force that Césaire invites the Martini-
can writer to voice in a new and authentic literature of place: “This land, our land,
can only be what we want it/her to be.”
Césaire’s writing itself—an idiosyncratic and aggressive assault on rational-
ist prose riddled with parataxic gems—also appropriates and symbolizes the
mythical feminine forces exalted by the surrealists. Each of her texts in turn delves
further into the possibilities beyond the dogmatic essay style of even the more
innovative of her masculine peers. One need only compare the surprisingly pro-
saic essays of André Breton with Suzanne Césaire’s more lyric evocations to wit-
ness the power of her forms, culminating in the call to being of a new Martinican
literature in “Le Grand camouflage,” to be found, again, “here”:14

Cependant les balisiers d’Absalon saignent sur les gouffres et la beauté du

paysage tropical monte à la tête des poètes qui passent. A travers les réseaux
mouvants des palmes ils voient l’incendie antillais rouler sur la Caraïbe qui est
une tranquille mer de laves. Ici la vie s’allume à un feu végétal. Ici, sur ces terres
chaudes qui gardent vivantes les espèces géologiques, la plante fixe, passion et
sang, dans son architecture primitive, l’inquiétante sonnerie surgie des reins
chaotiques des danseuses. Ici les lianes balancées de vertige prennent pour char-
mer les précipices des allures aériennes, elle [sic] s’accrochent de leurs mains
tremblantes à l’insaisissable trépidation cosmique qui monte tout le long des
nuits habitées de tambours. Ici les poètes sentent chavirer leur tête, et humant
les odeurs fraîches des ravins, ils s’emparent de la gerbe des îles, ils écoutent le
bruit de l’eau autour d’elles, ils voient s’aviver les flammes tropicales non plus
aux balisiers, aux gerberas, aux hibiscus, aux bougainvilliers, aux flamboyants,

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44  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 44 Number 1

mais aux faims, aux peurs, aux haines, à la férocité qui brûlent dans les creux
des mornes. (273)

But the cannas of Absalon bleed into the depths and the beauty of the tropical
landscape intoxicates passing poets. Through the shifting network of palms
they see the Antillean conflagration rolling into the Caribbean, a tranquil sea
of lava. Here, life lights up into a vegetal fire. Here, in these hot lands that keep
alive geological species, the plant holds—within its primitive architecture—the
passion and blood and disquieting noise of the dancers’ chaotic movement. Here,
the lianas swinging vertiginously take on aerial allures to charm the precipices,
grasping with their trembling hands the elusive cosmic trepidation that grows
through the night inhabited with drums. Here, poets feel their heads reeling
as they drink in the fresh odors of the ravines, they seize upon the collection
of islands, they listen to the sound of the surrounding water, they watch the
rising tropical flames not of canna, of gerberas, of hibiscus, of bougainvilleas,
of flamboyants, but of hunger, of fear, of hatred, of the ferocity burning in the
hollows of the hills.

“Here,” “here,” “here”: Césaire calls her readers into the presence of place. Her
deictic markers force us into a now, a here, an urgency of the immediate. There is
no distance or distain possible for her interlocutor: we are called to see, to share
this place her prose brings vividly before our eyes. Césaire’s essay refuses both
the prosaic style of the intellectual essay and the prosody of a poem. Her readers
slide into the text “vertiginously”; her words pull us into her world and thrust us
against its rough and unsettling beauty.
Suzanne Césaire’s essays explored the possibilities of relation, of dialogue,
of active engagement with multiple histories, with a vibrant and unstable land,
with overlapping waves of influences and inspirations. Her few short forays into
cultural criticism and manifesto in the 1940s touched on strategies and concerns
that run through the works of later Martinican writers, especially those as Glissant
and even of Confiant, who actively refute some of Aimé Césaire’s choices. Carib-
bean theorist, yes, despite the brevity of her writing and its non-didactic style, but
above all Caribbeanist, Antillaise, Martiniquaise: Suzanne Césaire, when sought in
the shadows of her better-known husband, fits well as the missing mother of a
Martinican literary tree.
Unlike, however, the calm and paternal figure of Aimé Césaire that springs
so easily to mind from its numerous reproductions, the biographical Suzanne
Césaire is difficult to envisage as that figurative ancestor. Beautiful, quiet, she
is tucked into the rare photographs she occupies. The glimpses one catches of
her in pictures of the era—behind the children, in profile, with Aimé—are few.
A group photograph featured in the exhibition Surrealism: Desire Unbound at the
Metropolitan Museum, and reproduced as well in Annie Cohen-Solal’s 2000 book
on American painting, Un jour, ils auront des peintres, shows her in New York in
1945, almost hidden among the women below and in front of the main focus of the
picture, the vital, dominant, and male figures of the day—André Breton, Marcel
Duchamp, and Aimé Césaire.15 An out-of-focus picture of her, very young, graced
the flyleaf of the 1978 two-volume reedition of the Tropiques revue, but has disap-
peared from the more recent single volume reprint.16 Though it is difficult to see
her wholly, one yet senses her presence, her significance, her being there and not
there, known of, but somehow unknowable.

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 K AR A R ABBITT  •  45

Small portrait of young Suzanne Césaire.

Suzanne Césaire occupied, nevertheless, a distinct semiotic space in the

vision of her contemporaries. In André Breton’s view she was, famously, “belle
comme la flamme du punch” ‘as beautiful as the flame of rum punch’ (“Martinique
charmeuse de serpents: Un Grand poète noir” 121) or, more evocatively, “un vis-
age de cendre blanche et de braises” ‘a face of ashen cinders and glowing embers’
(“Pour Madame”).18 Michel Leiris described her as being the color of gold and
inhabiting the border between finesse and savagery. He stated: “on a plaisir à être
devant elle, comme devant un merveilleux paysage qui serait intelligent” ‘it is a
pleasure to be before her, as before a marvelous and yet intelligent landscape.’19
In these evocations of her beauty, as complimentary as they may be, one senses
the danger of exoticism reducing her to a space of projected desire. Her turn away
from the camera, away from the historical stage, appears, in this context, a strategic
move into a separate agency. Suzanne Roussi Césaire, who refuted categorically
all exoticized visions of place, escapes such projections of her feminine function in
the views of others through her very absence. Her apparent refusal to embrace the
roles and interpretations thrust upon her may partially account for her subsequent
erasure in the histories of her times.
For despite her status as cofounder of Tropiques, and the lyrical beauty of
the seven short essays she wrote for its pages, Suzanne Césaire’s separation from
Aimé—which remains an unstoried part of his biography to this day—and her
departure from the island before her death seem to have assured her cultural
obscurity for the following two decades. There is almost no reference to her in
works on Aimé Césaire or on Martinique until the 1980s. The voice of Maryse
Condé offered one major exception as early as 1978: in her critical introduction
to Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Condé termed Suzanne the
theoretician of the Tropiques revue.20 By the 1990s, Condé would, in fact, become
one of the most influential forces leading to the reopening of Suzanne Césaire’s
pages. Daniel Maximin’s literary dialogue with the writers of Tropiques and
Légitime défense in his 1981 novel, L’isolé soleil, likewise invited a new appreciation
of Suzanne’s significance. In the 1980s and 1990s most critics who studied her
did so through the inspiration of one or both of these influential Guadeloupean
writers.21 Condé’s special edition of the journal Callaloo in 1992, dedicated to the
literature of Guadeloupe and Martinique, provided a wealth of new perspectives
on her essays. Ann Armstong Scarboro, for example, offers therein her view of “Le

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46  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 44 Number 1

Anonymous, Members of the Surrealist group at Pierre Matisse’s home, New York, 194517
Image courtesy of the Marcel Duchamp Archives, Villiers Sous Grez

Grand camouflage” as “a blueprint for a literature of liberation” (12), claiming that

Zobel, Schwarz-Bart, Glissant, and Maximin are, in their works, “respond[ing] to
Suzanne Césaire’s call to action” (27). In the same edition, two other critics stress,
however, that Maximin’s heroine Siméa in L’Isolé-Soleil was “both a critic and
an admirer of Suzanne Césaire” (Dumontet 111), as they underscore the novel’s
critique of Suzanne’s European cultural sources (Ibid.; Erikson 121).22
Interpellations of Suzanne Césaire’s essays by these later writers led to sub-
sequent studies of her influence. In a significant 1994 article entitled “Suzanne
Césaire et Tropiques: De la poésie cannibale à une poétique créole,” Marie-Agnès
Sourieau, for example, recuperates Césaire as a precursor of créolité. Her text offers
one of the first glimpses of Suzanne Césaire as genealogical source of a new rela-
tion to the land, to the word, and to a people. In discussing the question of paternity
in Suzanne’s work, Sourieau shows how she shifts the vital question of origin to
one of a relation to place. In so doing, she implicitly evokes both Suzanne and the
feminized land of Martinique as a maternal-like figure. This figure, paradoxically,
exposes not a single origin but what Sourieau terms “le processus de relations col-
lectives qui façonnent l’identité antillaise” ‘the process of collective relationships
that creates Caribbean identity’ (77). Suzanne Césaire brought Tropiques’ readers
back to the land in which they lived and invited them to consider their interrela-
tionship with it, and with each other. As Sourieau argues, by moving beyond the
mythology of origin, Césaire based the originality and legitimacy of the Martini-
can people on their relationship to the place that had sculpted them for over three
centuries and which offered them a unique sense of generational continuity (71).

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 K AR A R ABBITT  •  47

And, as mentioned above, Daniel Maximin’s critical forward to the recent

Seuil edition of her works, “Suzanne Césaire, fontaine solaire,” places Suzanne
Roussi Césaire solidly and equally on the family tree that Aimé Césaire had no
difficulty in rightfully claiming.23 Maximin’s homage gives just due to the other
parent, to Suzanne’s importance for the very existence of Tropiques, for the vitality
of its pages, and for the influence on subsequent generations of the theoretical
framework she laid out for a new Caribbean literature. Maximin, in fact, makes of
Suzanne Césaire the true “motherland” of Caribbean literature—an “île-femme”
whose efforts have grounded her followers in a new relation to place:

En cela surement réside la fascinante leçon de vie de Suzanne Césaire, car mal-
gré son absolu silence après Tropiques, . . . malgré tous les malgré qui font taire
scandaleusement l’écriture des femmes, malgré tant de place laissée à l’homme
dans sa vie comme dans ses textes, malgré la réticence des poètes à libérer les
muses, elle a, dans tous les articles ici présentés, enraciné sa pensée non sur un
territoire littéraire balisé, une propriété privée d’altérité, mais dans une terre
fertilisée par tous les possibles de l’écriture et la mémoire vive.
. . . dans la conscience vive d’une culture de la naturation . . . et dans l’exigence que
sensations esthétiques et sentiments ressentis doivent être inlassablement trans-
mutés en création d’écriture, dans tout cela s’incarne cette synthèse d’humanité
plantée, édifiée en une île-femme dans Antilles: Suzanne Césaire, fontaine vive
accueillante à “des chutes de soleil” inespérées. (22–23)24

Therein lies the fascinating life lesson of Suzanne Césaire, for in spite of her
absolute silence after Tropiques, . . . despite all the “in spite ofs” that scandalously
silence women’s writing, in spite of the place left to man in her life as in her
texts, in spite of the reticence of poets to liberate their muses, she has, in all her
articles here presented, rooted her thought not on a marked-out literary territory,
a private property of otherness, but in a land made fertile by all possibilities of
writing and a sharp memory.
. . . in a vital understanding of the culture of naturation, . . . and in a demand
that esthetic sensations and deeply-felt emotions be indefatigably transmuted
in the creation of writing, in all of this is embodied, edified, Suzanne Cesaire—
synthesis of humanity and plant, island-woman of the Antilles, lively fountain
welcoming unexpected “sunfall.” (Walker xxxv–xxxvi)

This short critical overview, though far from exhaustive, points to a growing
reconsideration and critique of Césaire’s essays within Caribbean studies. There
is also an evident but often distinct reading of her significance from a mainly
surrealist standpoint. Inclusion of Suzanne Césaire’s essays in multiple recent
anthologies in English translation (see works cited) and also in French, such as
in Georgiana Colvile’s Scandaleusement d’elles: 34 Femmes surrealists, speaks to her
importance, particularly during the war, for the evolution, expansion, and indeed
survival of the surrealist movement. This surrealist reinvestigation of Césaire has
led to some very fruitful dialogues—by Robin D. G. Kelly and others—with her
writings for European and North American contexts. There is a clear danger, how-
ever, in “ceding . . . Suzanne Césaire to the surrealist camp,” as Sharpley-Whiting
terms this trend, particularly if this means, as it has in the past, erasure of her from
postcolonial histories or, as is often still the case, reduction of her arguments to
just one theoretical model (17).

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48  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 44 Number 1

In fact, these two trends of reinterrogation—within Caribbean studies and

within surrealist histories—are not always distinct, as evident in, for example, her
presence in Michael Richardson’s critical collection Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism
and the Caribbean. Michèle Praeger has provided one of the best meldings of the
fields of Caribbean studies and surrealist studies in her work on Suzanne Césaire
and André Breton in The Imaginary Caribbean and the Caribbean Imaginary, which
argues for the importance of Césaire’s challenge to “a certain frivolity of arbitrari-
ness” in surrealist discourse and her ability to make use of surrealism to “reunite
ethics and aesthetics in her metaphor” (80). Like Sourieau and Condé, Praeger
stresses the pre-Glissantian “Poetics of Relation” at play in Suzanne’s work and
central to the evolving discussion of Caribbean identity (82).
Ronnie Scharfman’s intriguing fictitious imagining of Suzanne Césaire’s
voice in “De Grands poètes noirs: Breton rencontre les Césaire” opens additional
doors for the links between these critical fields. She gives in it a perhaps too-
generous interpretation of Breton’s import for Suzanne’s critical evolution and
a somewhat simplistic reading of her import for him as muse. She does stress,
however, the complexity of reading Suzanne from this distance—or these dis-
tances—and shows how we read backwards through the subsequent development
of Suzanne’s ideas in others’ writing. Scharfman raises the question as well of the
interpretation of Césaire’s almost Rimbaldien story—a few profound and produc-
tive years following marked silence, both from her and about her. After pointing
out that Suzanne Césaire’s work did not directly address the situation of Carib-
bean women, she quotes Ina Césaire—whose work does—recalling her mother in
the post-war years in Paris functioning more as housewife than as writer “plus
souvent faire la vaisselle que tenir une plume” ‘doing more dishes than writing’
(238–39). In this ending to her fictitious letter from Suzanne, then, Scharfman
places us squarely back in the question of roles. Suzanne interests us as writer,
and intrigues us as woman.
For Suzanne Césaire’s maternal significance is, clearly, not only metaphoric
but biographical and biological: famously wife to Martinique’s most famous
citizen, she was also mother to several prominent figures in Martinican cultural
spheres. She produced in her marriage six children, all well-lettered artists, musi-
cians, writers, or teachers in their own right.25 Her second son, Jean-Paul (born
1939), for example, served, until his retirement in 2005, as director of the Centre
Culturel Départemental, an influential center created in 1976 under the direc-
tion of Aimé Césaire in support of cinematic and artistic endeavors. Termed by
some “Monsieur Fils,” Jean-Paul also directed two films: Dérives ou la femme-jardin,
inspired by the work of the Haitian poet René Depestre, and Hors les jours étrang-
ers, a documentary. Suzanne Roussi Césaire’s two daughters are likewise vital
figures in Martinican theater. Ina (born 1942) studied as an ethnologist and has
researched and published in that field, which informs her work in the cinema and
theater. In addition to her own plays, she has adapted others’ literary works for
the stage (including Simone Schwartz-Bart’s Pluie et vents sur Telumée Miracle and
Marie Chauvet’s Nuit et les diables). Her 1994 novel, Zonzon tête carrée, focuses on
Martinican oral history. Michèle (born 1951) studied history before moving into
work in the theater and cinema. She has written and directed plays and served
as head of the theater group Racines and the Centre Dramatique Regional de la
Martinique (CDRM)-Theatre des Antigones.

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 K AR A R ABBITT  •  49

Suzanne Césaire in profile with Aimé Césaire.

As both biological and metaphorical mother, Suzanne Césaire is thus

reemerging in Martinican studies—fifty years after her untimely death—as the
maternal figure of a cultural tree that branches, through Glissant and Fanon to
Chamoiseau and Dracius and her own children, from the trunk the Césaires cre-
ated jointly through their work in Tropiques. Papa Césaire is there; and yet, so is
Suzanne—“et pourtant elle y est”: beautiful and fierce, her voice still calls to her
native land, and still invites it into an ever-present “now,” toward the creation of
a shared future.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This article evolved from a paper given at the Association of Caribbean Women
Writers and Scholars, a key venue for women writers on and of the Caribbean. My
thanks to Jim Hauser and my peers in the Professional Writing Group of William
Paterson University for supporting its evolution.

NOTES
1. All images are public archive photographs, unless otherwise indicated.
2. Phrase made famous by the 1989 Éloge de la créolité, wherein J. Bernabé, P. Cham-
oiseau, and R. Confiant state, as representatives of their generation, “Nous sommes à
jamais fils d’Aimé Césaire” ‘We are forever sons of Aimé Césaire’(18). All translations
are by the author, unless otherwise indicated.
3. See, for example, the collection of essays of the special edition of Research in
African Literatures 41.1 (Spring 2010).
4. In his discussion of Tropiques in A, B, Césaire: Aimé Césaire de A à Z, Patrice Louis
calls her the soul of the collective (149).

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50  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 44 Number 1

5. Cited by the Martinique’s Chief of Information Services, Lt. de Vaisseau Bayle,

in his indictment of the journal in 1943, she joined her name to those of her husband,
Ménil, Maugée, Georges Gratiant, and Lucie Thésée in a vehement acceptance of his
radical insults in a letter dated May 12, 1943, they concluded, “We do not speak the
same language.”
6. Journal “6 novembre, 1949” (473–74).
7. Georgiana Colville dates the play from 1955 (74). Chris Bongie follows Michel
Leiris’s date of 1952 (457, n. 23). I am inclined to concur with his choice, since Leiris’s
text appears to be an eyewitness account and was published shortly thereafter (88).
8. Examples of the missing story of Suzanne Césaire’s significance can be found
in such works as Renée Larrier’s Francophone Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean,
which devotes exactly one quarter of a sentence to her, or in Clarisse Zimra’s earlier
“W/Righting His/tory: Versions of Things Past in Contemporary Caribbean Women
Writers,” which makes but passing reference to the theorist (231).
9. In translating Césaire’s use of “Man” I have, where appropriate, adopted current
acceptable avoidances of the gendered term in English, maintaining the neutral sense
of humanity I interpret as her meaning. In fact, “Homme” often reads in her pages as
the most nongendered form of humanity, even as she maintains the gender-ridden
standards of academic discourse of her day.
10. Particularly in reference to the concept of “païdeuma,” a term that requires
some elucidation. Working from Frobenius, Senghor defined “païdeuma” as the “fac-
ulté et [la] manière originales d’être ému: d’être saisi” of a people; the unique ways in
which a people is moved by and expresses life’s force.
11. Suzanne Césaires’s use of Fobenius’s ethnological theories has been harshly
criticized by some, including Romuald Fonkoua in his work on Edouard Glissant.
Though Fonkoua does not take enough into account the ways in which Césaire’s per-
ceptions of cultural identities evolve dramatically through her essays in Tropiques, he
does show the theoretical limitations of at least her early forays into the questions she
raises regarding Martinican identity. Even Fonkoua, however, stresses that ultimately
Suzanne Césaire’s work reveals, in his words, “la préoccupation presque obsédante des
Antillais en quête d’une expression adéquate du moi” ‘the Antillean’s quasi-obsessive
quest for an adequate expression of self,’ the vital component later writers sought from
her interrogations (137). For additional consideration of Césaire’s use of European
sources in her earlier essays, see Rabbitt.
12. This phrase recalls Ménil’s postulation in “Généralités sur l’écrivain de couleur
antillais” in the 1930’s predecessor of Tropiques, Légitime défense: “[P]uisque l’Antillais
de couleur exprime les sentiments d’un autre . . . il convient donc au noir antillais de
reconnaître d’abord ses passions propres et de n’exprimer que lui-même, de prendre, en
sens inverse de l’utile, le chemin du rêve et de la poésie” ‘Since the Caribbean writer of
color expresses the feelings of an other . . . he should first recognize his own passions
and express only himself. Moving away from usefulness, he should take the path of
dreams and of poetry’ (9).
13. Senghor’s evocative “Femme noire,” for example, while loving and laudatory,
focuses on the place of the male poet in relation to the woman/land, rather than on
her agency.
14. An example of the unplayful, anti-rimbaldien prose of the First Surrealist Mani-
festo, wherein Breton defines his terms thusly: “Surrealism is founded on the belief in
the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipo-
tence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought. It attempts to eradicate all
other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in the resolution of life’s
principal problems” (37).

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 K AR A R ABBITT  •  51

15. This photograph inspired Maryse Condé’s 2003 presentation at NYU’s celebra-
tory conference on the occasion of Aimé Césaire’s 90th birthday. Her exploration of
the significance of America for Césaire was reproduced in Black Renaissance Noire (5.3)
along with a subsequent interview by Condé with Césaire on the topic. Though the
article mentions Suzanne’s presence in the photograph, she does not figure in either the
paper or the interview. This silence is common in works focused on her husband, even
by critics such as Condé who has spoken eloquently elsewhere to Suzanne Césaire’s
significance.
16. This photo incited the critic Michèle Praeger to ask, “What remains of this eter-
nally young and beautiful woman whose melancholy and piercing look interrogates
and responds simultaneously?” (76). See also Jennifer Wilk’s discussion of the signifi-
cance of its decontextualized position before the book even begins, which creates of
Suzanne Césaire both an icon and an object (110–11).
17. Left to right (back row) Roberto Matta, Yves Tanguy, Aimé Césaire, Henry Sey-
rig, André Breton, Denis de Rougemont, Nicolas Calas, Marcel Duchamp, Sam Francis;
(front row) Eliza Breton, Suzanne Césaire, Sonia Sekula, Jackie Matisse, Patricia Matta,
Teeny Duchamp, Eva Calas.
Anonymous, Members of the Surrealist Group at Pierre Matisse’s Home, New
York, 1945
Photograph
19.7 × 24 (7 3/4 × 9 7/16)
Image courtesy of Marcel Duchamp Archives, Villiers Sous Grez
18. This description compliments, in an odd way, Breton’s closing proclamation
regarding Aimé Césaire’s poetry: “La parole d’Aimé Césaire; belle comme l’oxygène
naissant” (126). Suzanne becomes the consuming fire; Aimé the self-generating oxygen
that would feed it.
19. Leiris’s journal entry “12 février, 1946” (426).
20. In fact, the direct quote is more circumspect: “Il est intéressant de constater que
sa femme Suzanne se fait en quelque sorte le théoricien du groupe” ‘It is interesting to
note that his wife Suzanne became in some sense the group’s theoretician’ (12).
21. Michèle Praeger, for example, specifically thanks Maximin for “attract[ing] his
readers’ attention to this beautiful and lucid little-known text” (180, n. 5, in reference
to “Le Grand camouflage”).
22. Likewise Dumontet studies Confiant’s critique in Le Nègre et l’admiral of the
overly Frenchness—both in sensibility and in language—of most of the revue Tropiques
(116).
23. “Ils sont tous sortis de moi, de notre enseignement. . . . j’ai eu incontestablement
de l’influence sur toute une génération.” ‘They all came from me, from our teaching. . . .
I undoubtedly influenced an entire generation.’ Interview with Jacqueline Leiner, 115,
as also recently cited by Renée Laurier in her study of the pedagogy of Aimé Césaire, “A
Tradition of Literacy: Césaire in and out of the Classroom,” 41. This latter article offers
a wonderful contextualization of pedagogical practices and histories and makes clear,
once again, the revolutionary impact of Aimé Césaire on generations of Martiniquais;
it ignores, however, yet again, Suzanne’s roles in the classroom and in the imaginary.
24. The citation at the end of this evocative description uses, ironically if inevitably,
the words of Aimé Césaire to capture the essence of Suzanne. The quote is from his
poem “Rocher de la femme endormie ou Belle comme l’exasperation de la secession”:

De temps en temps à travers la brume de sable

Qui s’éclaircit
A travers les jeux cicatriciels du ciel
Je la vois qui bat des paupières

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52  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 44 Number 1

Histoire de m’avertir qu’elle comprend mes signaux

Qui sont d’ailleurs en détresse des chutes de soleil
Très ancien

From time to time through the mist of sand

That lights up
Through the scarring games of the sky
I see her batting her eyelids
Warning me that she understands my signs
which are moreover those of distress from very ancient
Sunfall

25. See Louis 45–46 for a full rundown of their accomplishments.

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(1941–1945). By Suzanne Césaire. Paris: Seuil, 2009. 7–23. Print.
Ménil, René. “Généralités sur l’écrivain de couleur antillais.” Légitime défense. Nendeln/
Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1970. Print.
Praeger, Michèle. The Imaginary Caribbean and the Caribbean Imaginary. Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 2003. Print.
Rabbitt, Kara M. “Suzanne Césaire and the Forging of a New Caribbean Literature”
The French Review 79.3 (Feb. 2006): 538–48. Print.
Scarboro, Ann Armstrong. “A Shift toward the Inner Voice and Créolité in the French
Caribbean Novel.” Callaloo 15.1 (1992): 12–29. Print.
Scharfman, Ronnie. “De Grands poètes noirs: Breton rencontre les Césaire.” Nouveau
monde, autres mondes: Surréalisme et Amériques. Eds. Daniel Lefort, Pierre Rivas,
and Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron. Paris: Lachenal et Ritter, 1995. 231–39. Print.
Sourieau, Marie-Agnès. “Suzanne Césaire et Tropiques: De la poésie cannibale à une
poétique créole.” The French Review 68.1 (1994): 69–78. Print.
Wilks, Jennifer M. Race, Gender, & Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacascade,
Marita Bonner, Suzanne Césaire, Dorothy West. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP,
2008. Print.

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54  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 44 Number 1

Zimra, Clarisse. “W/Righting His/tory: Versions of Things Past in Contemporary

Caribbean Women Writers.” Explorations: Essays in Comparative Literature. Ed.
Makoto Ueda. New York: UP of America, 1986. Print.

Translations of Suzanne Césaire’s essays

Ducornet, Guy, and Franklin Rosemont, trans. “André Breton, Poet.” Surrealist Women:
An International Anthology. Ed. Penelope Rosemont. Austin: U of Texas P, 1998.
127–28. Print.
Fijalkowski, Krzysztof, and Michael Richardson, trans. “1943: Surrealism and Us.”
Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. Ed. Michael Richardson.
London: Verso, 1997. 123–26. Print.
. “A Civilization’s Discontent.” Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean.
Ed. Michael Richardson. London: Verso, 1997. 96–100. Print.
. “Leo Frobenius and the Problem of Civilizations.” Refusal of the Shadow:
Surrealism and the Caribbean. Ed. Michael Richardson. London: Verso, 1997. 82–87.
Print.
. “The Great Camouflage.” Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. Ed.
Michael Richardson. London: Verso, 1997. 156–61. Print.
Gibson, Erin, trans. “1943: Surrealism and Us.” Surrealist Women: An International
Anthology. Ed. Penelope Rosemont. Austin: U of Texas P, 1998. 133–36. Print.
. “Surrealism and Us.” Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P, 2001. 489. Print.
. “The Domain of the Marvelous.” (Excerpt from “The Esthetics of Alain.”)
Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2001.
488. Print.
. “The Domain of the Marvelous.” (Excerpt from “The Esthetics of Alain.”) Sur-
realist Painters and Poets: An Anthology. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. Cambridge: MIT Press,
2001. 157–58. Print.
. “The Domain of the Marvelous.” (Excerpt from “The Esthetics of Alain.”) Sur-
realist Women: An International Anthology. Ed. Penelope Rosemont. Austin: U of
Texas P, 1998. 137. Print.
Rabbitt, Kara, trans. “The Great Camouflage.” New Mango Season: Francophone Writing
1.1 (2007): 27–36. Print.
Rosemont, Penelope, trans. “Discontent of a Civilization.” Surrealist Women: An Interna-
tional Anthology. Ed. Penelope Rosemont. Austin: U of Texas P, 1998. 129–32. Print.
Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, and Georges Van den Abbeele, trans. “The Great Cam-
ouflage.” Negritude Women. Ed. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 2002. 135–40. Print.
. “The Malaise of a Civilization.” Negritude Women. Ed. T. Denean Sharpley-
Whiting. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. 130–34. Print.
Walker, Keith L., trans. The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941–1945). Ed. Daniel
Maximin. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012. Print.

•  •  •  •  •

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