A Reading of Aimé Césaire's "Return to My Native Land"

Author(s): Emile Snyder

Source: L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. 10, No. 3, French-language Literature of Africa and the
Caribbean (Fall 1970), pp. 197-212
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26279591
Accessed: 05-05-2019 10:46 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to L'Esprit Créateur

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 A Reading of Aime Cesaire's
Return to My Native Land

Emile Snyder

A IM£ Cesaire, black poet, dramatist, essayist, political writer, and

* 7| politician (Mayor of Fort-de-France) was born in Martinique
in 1913. From his early youth to the present he has suffered
the curse of colonialism. His literary work, as well as his own political
involvement, aim at the condemnation and eradication of a system
which debilitates man.

Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land)

appeared only in fragments in the review Volontes (1939) after every
French editor had refused it. And it is only through the intervention
of Andre Breton who met Cesaire in Martinique after the fall of France
and who discovered this long epic and lyrical poem which he called
"nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our times," that the
poem was printed in its entirety by Presence Africaine (1956) in Paris. 1
The reader's reaction has generally been a mixture of admiration
and resentment. Admiration at the pyrotechnics of images, the un
believable richness of the vocabulary, the ever surprising rhythmical
use of the French verse — and Sartre in "Orphee noir" 2 has said
that no French poet handles the French language as the black poet
Aime Cesaire — the assurance of the tone. Yet resentment at the dif
ficulty in following the linear continuity of ideas evolving behind the
amazing smoke-screen of language.
The aim of this article is to travel, with the reader, the furrows of
the poem, to accompany him along the Dantesque circles of self
recognition, Cesaire's own self-recognition and the recognition which

The present references to the text are from the bilingual edition, Return to
My Native Land, published by Presence Africaine in 1968. The translation
is mine. And the numbers in parentheses refer to the English pages of this
bilingual text.
Preface to Leopold Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et
malgache de langue frangaise (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948).

Vol. X, No. 3 197

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 L'Esprit Createur

every man must have of himself in order to face life in a m

authentic manner.
Since the poem is still relatively unknown I take the liberty of
quoting large fragments of it in order to make my commentary more
relevant. I purposefully made no attempt at what generally is expected
of a critical essay: a stylistic analysis. My main concern here has
been to provide a linear explanation in order to convince the reader that
there is nothing hermetic about Return to My Native Land, and to
place him in the "situation" of the poet coming to terms with his own
hard logic. In order to conform with this intention — which became
for me a moral responsibility — I have deliberately cultivated what I
would call a "flat" prose: small steps in the pursuit of the giant's
strides!

The first movement of the poem begins with a long description

of the physical and psychological wounds of the Antilles: a monotonous
spurt which corresponds to the monotony of Cesaire's life in Marti
nique and to the present life of his compatriots:

At the end of the dawn, flowered with frail creeks, the hungry West Indies,
pitted with smallpox, dynamited with alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay,
in the dirt of this city sinisterly stranded.

Martinique sticks to the young poet's skin. He has only one desire,
to escape from this Hell of hunger and lethargy. Elsewhere, recalling
his lycee days in Martinique, Cesaire has said: "I literally choked
amid these Negroes 3 who felt white," and added, "I left Martinique
with rapture."
There is a progression in the description of the Antillese horror.
He begins by focussing on the atrophied geography of his island, and
on the flat city (Fort-de-France) "embarrassed, lopped, reduced, cut
off from fauna and flora" (13), then comes to consider, with contempt
and anger, the situation of his compatriots, this Martinique crowd "pas
sive to its true cry" (13) because for centuries it has accepted the yoke
of servitude; he attacks openly the sequels of colonialism: "consumption,
famines, fears" (15)... But above all what haunts the poet is the loss

3. In my own commentary I shall use the term negro in preference to the term
black only to conform to the translated text itself where the term negro is
being consistently used ... and not in an intentional pejorative sense.

198 Fall 1970

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Snyder

of dignity of a people reduced to the appearance of

dependent child, of a "good-for-nothing" who cannot eve
erly "a-single-of-the-ten-laws-of-the-Lord" (19). Hunger,
logical batterings have finally produced this seeming aph
Yet in this meaningless Martinique life, spent in the w
the passing of seasons (25) there is one moment of expec
that is the season of Christmas and with it the self-delusion of an
envisaged world of peace and plentifulness for the belly. Cesaire, then
a militant marxist, attacks the Christian religion, the opium of the
Martinique poor, by depicting the promises of Christmas — and the tran
sitory abundance: food preparations, rum drinks, the poetry of
spices (25-27) — culminating in the glory of the midnight mass
"alleluia kyrie eleison... LEisoN..." (29). At the same time the
poet reflects, from experience, on the religious syncretism of the black
masses in Martinique: in spite of the efforts of the missionaries, the
Catholic liturgy finds its expression through a Negro sensitivity, is trans
lated into rhythmical physical gestures.

And not only the mouth sings, but also the hands, feet, buttocks, sexual
organs, the whole being is liquefied in sound, voice and rhythm. (29)

But the dream of Christmas is soon over and once again the Mar
tinique people are reabsorbed into the unsufferable reality. The end
of the first movement finds the poet narrowing the memorial circles of
return; it closes with the evocation of his own family life — the
poverty of their daily existence— and with the pathetic image of
Cesaire's mother working well into the night on the Singer sewing
machine to earn extra income for the family:

and my mother, whose limbs, in the service of our tireless hunger, pedal, ped
al, day and night, I am even awakened at night by those tireless limbs which
pedal the night, by the bitter punctures in the soft flesh of the night made by
the Singer machine my mother pedals, pedals for our hunger day and night.

Thus the life of a young lyceen in Martinique, confronted every

where with resignation, apathy, sickness:

...you do not know where to send your aborted dreams, the river of life is so
desperately torpid in its bed; there is neither swelling nor sinking, but uncer
tainty of flowing; there is lamentable emptiness; (31)

Vol. X, No. 3 199

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 L'Esprit Createur

In the face of this reality the young Cesaire has but one desire: to
leave Martinique forever, to forget the Martiniquais that he is, an
to thrust himself into the promise of Europe, "that other dawn o
Europe" (37). But the first movement also concludes on an ambiguous
note, the intimation of a betrayal on the part of the poet: "the wind
of trusts betrayed" (37). And the subsequent movements of the poem
— the progressive journey into the past — will show the poet a
tempting to free the confession from his soul, to come to terms wit
his previous inauthenticity.
So Cesaire leaves Martinique. But he needs an alibi to validate
his departure, to infuse it seemingly with a worthwhile purpose. Havin
rejected his roots as a Martiniquais (hence the "trusts betrayed") h
wants to cover up his defection with a newly found idealistic purpose
The poet plans to assume upon himself the collective misery of th
world (anything seems better than to have to assume the misery of his
own Martiniquais people!), and to wear the rags of all the humiliated
people of the world:

To leave
As there are hyena-men and leopard-men, I would
be a jew-man
a kaffir-man
a hindu-man-from-Calcutta
a man-from-Harlem-who-doesn't-vote

the famine-man, the insult-man, the torture-man one can at any moment seize,
beat up or kill — yes really kill him — without having to account to anybody,
without having to excuse oneself to anyone

a jew-man
a pogrom-man
a little tyke,
a bum

but is remorse to be slain, beautiful as the stupefied face of an English lady at

discovering a Hottentot's skull in her soup-tureen? (37)

Cesaire drowns the particular misery of Martinique into the misery

of all the racially humiliated peoples. At the same time a fortuitous
event takes place: in Paris, Cesaire finds his calling for poetry.

I should discover once again the secret of great communications and of great
combustions. I should say storm. I should say river. I should say tornado. I

200 Fall 1970

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Snyder

should say leaf. I should say tree. I should be wet by all rains, made damp
with all dews. I should roll like frenzied blood on the slow current of the eye
of words like mad horses, clots of fresh children, curfews, vestiges of temples,
precious stones far enough away to discourage miners. Whoever would not
comprehend me would not comprehend the roaring of the tiger. (37)

The poetic creed Cesaire enunciates is that of surrealist poetry

in its purest tradition. The poetic verb is synonymous with action, is
imbued with the magic of creation. It is also not unlike the African
notion of language where words carry in themselves the life-essence of
things and, of course, of beings. At the same time, and in a more
personal way, poetry becomes a means to political engagement, the
discovery of the "miraculous weapons" (title of a volume of poetry
by Cesaire) with which to free his people. At the initial writing of
Return to My Native Land Cesaire had not meant to become a poet.
Rather, poetry had been simply a form of exorcizing the caged anger
he felt; nonetheless, it also provided him with the vicarious feelings
of a savior.

It is a great moment of hope in the wanderer's life. He sees himself

as the prophet of his people, now returning home, and admired for
his foresight, courage, and magnanimity,

To flee. My heart was full of generous hopes. To flee... I should arrive lithe
and young in this country of mine and I should say to this land whose mud
is flesh of my flesh: I wandered for a long time and I am returning to the
deserted foulness of your wounds.
I should come back to this land of mine and say to it: Embrace me without
fear.... If all I can do is speak, at least I shall speak for you. (41)

But his mission fails, "And now I am here again . . ." (43), fails
because he has left for the wrong reasons. He has idealized his people,
and — much more reprehensible — he has idealized his role towards
them. Once again he is confronted by the Antillese reality. Yet this
initial failure is not altogether negative. Although alone, as a "lonely
noctiluca" (45) (plant opening only at night), and contemplating the
"warm election of cinders, ruins, crumblings" (45), he is left with a
growing awareness of the real challenge; with an "open conscience" (43)
which is the initial stage for an authentic return among his people.
The authentic return is not to come for a while. There are so many
ways in which a man of good will, a "liberal," can delude himself.

Vol. X, No. 3 201

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Τ >Γ?Λ
JU 1 I vj I IV i l 1LUIX

Having failed in his immersion in

Cesaire now seeks to assume the p

Mine, these few thousand death-bea

and mine, too, the archipelago bent l
if with maternal concern for the most
icas; and the womb which spills towa
Streams, and one of the two incandescent slopes between which the Equator
funambulates towards Africa. And my unfenced island, its bold flesh upright at
the stern of this Polynesia; and right before it, Guadeloupe slit in two at the
dorsal fin, and quite as miserable as ourselves; Haiti, where Negritude stood
up for the first time and swore by its humanity; and the droll little tail of
Florida where a Negro is being lynched, and Africa caterpillaring gigantically
up to the Spanish foot of Europe, its nakedness where death cuts a wide
swath. (47)

There is, of course, a greater degree of honesty in this identification.

But in this process the poet is not free of facile idealization. Martinique
itself becomes changed, engulfed, in the poetic map of Negritude (the
neologism which he coins for the first time in any poem); he now sees
it bold and free ("its bold flesh upright," and "my unfenced island"),
an active sharer in the glorious past of the Negro race. Another
betrayed trust, another device to accommodate the reality of Marti
nique!
Figment of the imagination? Undoubtedly! Still, this moment of
self-delusion is not in vain, for Cesaire is able to recover from the past
the symbol of the first Negro Caribbean hero, the Haitian patriot
Toussaint Louverture. The poet dedicates a canto to Toussaint Lou
verture, evoking the lonely death of the warrior, in a cell in the
mountainous Jura where the French have imprisoned him. This recall
spurs him on to revolt — "shall not the splendor of this blood burst
forth?" (53)
A new tone comes into the poem. It is a tone of menace, a warning
to the white world that it can no longer rest smugly assured upon
the positivistic tradition of its past: the irrational will usurp the rational,
madness shall become the order of the day:

the early dementia, the flaming madness

of a tenacious cannibalism (55)

202 Fall 1970

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Snyder

As an antithesis to the rational bias of Western culture,

by the classic trinity, reason, order and beauty, the poet c
liberating force of madness. Very deliberately he play
Cesaire becomes the stereotyped image of the primitive,
which the white world, through ignorance, has fashioned
He grows roots and plants from his own body, nature ripe
in him:

From looking at trees I have become a tree

and my long tree-feet have dug in the ground long
serpent holes presaging the pillage to come to high
cities of bone
From thinking of the Congo
I have become a Congo buzzing with forests and
rivers where the whip cracks like a great flag
the flag of the prophet
where the water makes
likouala-likouala

where the bolt of anger hurls a good green axe,

forcing the wild boars of putrefaction to pour
over the beautiful violent edge
of the nostrils (55)

So the first stage of revolt expresses itself at this level of cosmic

dementia. The poet indulges in a ballet sequence — un numero — where
he parodies the savage, and plays at scaring the white world, "I never
gamble save at the Great Fear" (69). It is the incantation of the sorcerer

voum rooh ho
voum rooh ho

to charm the snakes to conjure

the dead
voum rooh ho

to compel the rain to upset

the tidal waves
voum rooh ho

to prevent the turning of shadows

voum rooh oh that my own skies
may break open (61)

It is also a mocked confession to exaggerate the portrait:

I have assassinated God with my laziness with

my words with my gestures with my obscene songs.

Vol. X, No. 3 203

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 L'Esprit Createur

I have carried the plumes of the parrot, the skin

of the musk-rat
I have exhausted the patience of the missionaries,
insulted the benefactors of humanity.
Defied Tyre. Challenged Sidon.
Worshipped Zambezi.
The extent of my perversity confounds me! (59)

But for Cesaire the Negro must forever carry the burden of a double
image: the image which the white man has of him, and the image which
his own history has fashioned of him. Hidden behind this artificial
mask of barbaric strength, the poet cannot dispel the painful memories
of a humiliated past:

—me on a road, a child, chewing

one sugar cane
—man dragged on a bloody road
a rope around his neck
—upright in the centre of an immense
circus, on my black forehead a crown
of daturas (61)

parody of the Passion where now a Negro Christ stands with a poisonous
crown of thorns ("daturas," white flowers) on his head, in the immense
circus of Western civilization!

But the resurgence of a feeling for revolt quickly dispels a recurring

abandon into historical determinism. Cesaire resumes the incantation
to violence. And it inaugurates a vision of a future freedom.

voum rooh oh

that may return the time of

promises
and the bird who knew my name
and the woman who had a thousand names
and the fountain of sun and of tears
and her hair of minnows
and her steps my climates
and her eyes my seasons
and the days without nuisance
and the nights without offence
and the stars of confidence

and the wind of complicity (63)

204 Fall 1970

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Snyder

The bird (always a symbol of freedom for Cesaire) recal

nature welcomes his future, the whole creation becomes
accomplice. In all the poetry of Cesaire nature is see
reenacting the human drama, the drama of man's liberat
Still, it is not yet time to rest in the bosom of a recove
The revolt, inspired in him by his recall of Toussaint
matures in him. For a while Cesaire really believes t
"satanic drive" he has escaped the burdening reality.
his newly discovered strength:

I force the vitelline membrane that separates me from myse

I alone
Sips with a straw
the first drops of virginal milk! (71)

But no amount of exoticism will cancel out the history which is

in him, the racial history which he embodies, lives with, even along
the corridors of the Ecole Normale Superieure where he studies, or
among his French intellectual friends:

How much blood in my memory, how many

lagoons! They are covered with death's-heads.
They are not covered with water-lilies.
Lagoons in my memory. No sashes of women on
their banks. (73)

There is no escape from self-recognition. In his first escape to

Paris, in his first infatuation with poetry, he had hoped to rise above
the past, above the present sordid reality, and

to fly
higher than the shivers (63)

but he had deluded himself into thinking that he was thus free at last.
As memories of blood keep rising to the conscious level, Cesaire is
brought to recognize the futility of his task. Poetry has been nothing
but a drug, a whitewashing of his racial anguish,

and there remains only the accumulated dung

of our lives — which do not answer.

Vol. X, No. 3 205

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 L'Esprit Createur

What madness in my dream of a marvelous

caper above this baseness!
Yes, the white men are great warriors, hosannah
for the master and the castrator of Negroes! (77)

In his bitter praise of the white man, the poet acknowledges his
complicity. The theme of guilt, the act of auto-expiation, is found
typically in almost all of the Francophone African poetry. Leon Damas
wrote, at the conclusion of one of his poems:

I feel that I look stupid

among them an accomplice
among them a pimp
among them a ripper
with hands frightfully red
with the blood of their ci-vi-li-za-tion

(Pigments, 1937)

It reflects the awareness of men torn by colonialism from their own

culture and partly acculturated to French culture (Senghor defines
himself as a "cultural mestiso"!) but at the price of what mutilation, of
what suppressed guilt! In praising thus the strategy of the white man
Cesaire denounces his own defection. What distance separates
him, Cesaire the intellectual from the Ecole Normale Superieure, a
poet, a grey-suited Frenchman — only darker! — among Frenchmen,
from his poor Martiniquais brothers! Because of the "magnanimity" of
the French colonial system — intent above all at making Frenchmen
out of the colonized — and because of his own vanity he has been
co-opted into the French elite and made forgetful of his past. But

By means of an unexpected and beneficient

internal evolution I now ignore my repulsive ugliness (79)

At this point begins the final movement of the poem, the authentic
return to the native land. In the next verses Cesaire describes two
experiences which have contributed to this "internal evolution." There
is first the recollection of a horse-trading day, on the market square in
Fort-de-France (79-80). The horse-dealers are engaged in their sales
pitch, having previously spruced up their old nags to look like young
energetic mares by injecting stimulants into them. And secondly there
is the poet who reflects upon his past masquerade,

206 Fall 1970

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Snyder

I shall not regard my swelled head as a sign of real glory.

And I laugh at my old puerile dreams.
No, we have never been amazons of the king of Dahomey, nor princes of
Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor wise men in Timbuctoo under Askia the
Great; nor architects in Djene, nor mahdis nor warriors. Under our armpits,
we do not feel the itch of those who bore the lance. And since I have sworn
to hide nothing of our history (I who admire nothing so much as the lamb
chewing his afternoon shadow), I want to declare that we were from the very
first quite pitiful dishwashers, shoeshiners without scope, and, at best, rather
conscientious sorcerers whose only incontestable achievement has been the en
durance record under the lash (81)

The abscess finally bursts open: the poet's pride oozes out like his
very blood hemorrhaging. It is a terrible confession for Cesaire to make.
In his early years in Paris, collaborating with Senghor and Damas on
the review L'Etudiant Noir (1934), reliving African history and culture
through the pages of Frobenius, Delafosse and others, he had come to
identify personally with the great moments of African civilization.
Thinking of cities like Tombouctou, Ouagadougou, he had said, "I
prostrate myself, I lower my head." But now he must strip himself of
this too facile and romantic identification. Not that he rejects any
relationship between Africa and himself, but the line of continuity
must first pass through the initial acceptance of himself and of
Martinique.
In this painful journey into the night, Cesaire comes hard against
his own past cowardly soul. There occurs the second confession, of
prime importance in understanding the meaning of the whole poem
(85-89), the suture between the past and the future revolt.

And I, and I,
I sang the clenched fist
But you should know the extent of my cowardice.
One evening in the tram sitting across from me,
a Negro.
A Negro big as a pongo, who tried to make himself small on the tram bench.
He tried to relax his gigantic legs and trembling hungry pug's fists on the dirty
bench. And everything left him, left him. His nose seemed a peninsula adrift,
his very Negritude paled under the action of a tireless tawing. And the Tawer
was Poverty. A sudden fat lop-eared beast whose claws had scarred his face
into scabby islets. Or rather Poverty was a tireless worker, working on some
hideous scroll. One could see how the malignant and industrious thumb had
modelled the brow in bumps, pierced the nose with two parallel and disquieting
tunnels, prolonged the underlip beyond all measure, and as a perfect masterpiece

Vol. X, No. 3 207

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 L'Esprtt Crf.ateur

of caricature, had smoothed, polished, lacquered the tiniest little ear in all
creation

This was a sprawling Negro without shape or rhythm.

A Negro whose eyes were bloodshot, weary.
A shameless Negro whose toes sneered in a quite stinking way from the half
open lair of his shoes.
A comical, ugly Negro, and the women
behind me laughed as they looked at him.
He was RIDICULOUS AND UGLY
RIDICULOUS AND UGLY to be sure.
I hoisted a great smile of complicity...
My cowardice restored to me! (85-89)

The description of the Negro, as Cesaire saw him then, is in

pejorative terms. If Cesaire transcribes poetically ("peninsula adrift,"
"two parallel and disquieting tunnels," etc.) the visual apprehension of
the white women sitting in the tram, it is because out of embarrassment
he shared their visions of the poor Negro. He can, in retrospect, imagine
himself standing near them, dressed in a grey pin-striped suit, attache
case in hand, and looking at both the Negro and the women and again
at the women with a smile of connivance as if to reassure them, in that
moment, that there is no relationship between him and that "sprawling
Negro."
The secret is at last out, the former "betrayed trusts" recognized
and transcended. The acceptance of oneself begins with the assertion
that all is well:

I say that this is well.

I live for the meanest part of my soul.
For the driest part of my flesh. (93)

Ready to assume himself, while assuming his people, Cesaire is

now full of hopes. He projects a vision of a future in germination:

comes the humming-bird

comes the hawk
comes the wreckage of the horizon

comes the disappearance of days of dead flesh in the quick-lime of prey

and you, Ο star, will draw lemuridaen from your foundation with the unfath
omable sperm of man
the not dared form
which the woman's trembling womb bears like an ore. (97-99)

208 Fall 1970

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Q Μ V η Τ7 Ώ

The last image in this progression, that of the "not dared form" is a
precise reference to Cesaire's own child whom his wife was expecting
at the time.

The "days of dead flesh," what Cesaire will also call later the "old
Negritude" are now in the process of disintegrating. In a famous canto
to the new Negritude — perhaps, and unfortunately, the most
anthologized passage from Return to My Native Land — Cesaire
proclaims the positive values of the black world:

Eia for those who invented nothing

for those who have never discovered
for those who have never conquered

but, struck, deliver themselves to the essence of

all things,
ignorant of surfaces, but taken by the very
movement of things
not caring to conquer, but playing the game of
the world. (103)

These values — a participation of the whole creature in the forces

of the universe — may appear to rest solely upon a mystique, the now
famous Senghorian dichotomy between the "analytical" mind of Europe
and the "intuitive" mind of Africa, but even if it were so, Cesaire
refuses to immobilize himself in this soulful notion. Nigritude, as a
concept, must be no more than a springboard to action, and the
emotional rooting into the past a source of strength for future social
and political revolt. This is evident in the ensuing prayer.

I won't evade. Make my head a prow

and of myself, my heart, make neither a father nor a brother
nor a son, but the father, the brother, the son,
not the husband, but the lover of this unique people.

Make me refractory to vanity, but docile to their genius

as the fist to the extended arm!

make me commissar of their blood

make me trustee of their resentments
make me a man of termination
make me a man of meditation
but also make me a man of germination

Vol. X, No. 3 209

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 L'Esprit Createur

make me the executioner of these mighty deeds

this is the time to gird one's loins like a valiant man
but so doing, my heart, preserve me from all hatred
do not make me that man of hate for whom
I feel nothing but hate
for cantonned in this unique race
you know, however, that my tyrannical love
is not out of hatred for other races
that I am the toiler of this unique race
what I want

is for the universal hunger

for the universal thirst

I call the race to be finally free

to produce out of its closed intimacy
the succulence of fruit (107-109)

The stress is put upon the words commitment, commissar,

trustee, etc., and underlines the responsibility of the Negro revolutionary
towards his people, his race. Yet at the same time, having come to
terms with himself, and with his real role, Cesaire is then able
to transcend his earlier anger, to free himself from hatred in order to
labor for the "universal thirst." Moving evidence of Cesaire's humanism!
And it is as a Martiniquais that he now prepares to land "at future
orchards" (109), drawing symbolic inspiration from the evocation of
the African canoe battling the waves. For Cesaire all ships, means
of navigation, except the canoe, symbolize the journey of slavery, the
exportation of Africans away from their homeland. In contrast, the canoe
exemplifies the African's ancestral ways of contact with his peoples,
the interior navigation of Nigritude.
In preparation for the apotheosis, Cesaire sings the canto of
acceptance which is also the canto of the reunification with his people.
He begins by accepting his people as they are,

I accept... I accept... totally, without reserve ...

my race which no ablution of hyssop or mixed lilies could purify
my race eaten by macula
my race ripe grape for drunken feet
my queen of spittle and lepers
my queen of whips and scrofula

Fall 1970

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Snyder

my queen of squasmes and chloasms4

(O these queens that I used to love in the far spring garden
behind the illumination of all the candles of
the chestnut-trees!) (113-115)

In preference to the French girls he may have courted in the Jardin

du Luxembourg in Paris (the "queens" in the "spring gardens"), he
now pays tribute to the Martinique girls ("my queen") insulted,
deprived, perhaps even diseased through the long imposition of
colonialism. He invokes, as a memorial, the poor anonymous martyrs,
his Martinique friends, Simeon Piquine, Grandvorka, Michel Deveine
— documented cases in Martinique — who died under the yoke of
colonialism

Presences, I will not make my peace with the

world on your buried backs (119)

The recurrent memories of "bloody lagoons" have become tomb stones

exacting from him a promise of truth and action. For the first time
in the poem the poet openly declares his love for his country, transcribing
it lyrically into the image of a child holding his mother's hand,

And we are standing now, my country and I,

hair in the wind, my little hand
now in its enormous fist, and force is not in us,
but above us, in a voice which pierces the night and
the audience like the sting of an apocalyptic hornet (125)

Now returned to his native land Cesaire sets out to begin the work
of reconstruction. He seeks among his compatriots "hearts of men who
beat the virile blood" (127); he admonishes those who are ashamed of
their color, of their roots, reminding them that there still exist
among them some "Uncle Toms," there still exist

the Negro pimp, the Negro askari,

and all the zebras striving, each in their fashion,
to wash off their stripes in a dew of fresh milk (129),

4. Neologisms created by Cesaire: in French squasmes from squame (squama,

scale in English), and chloasmes from cloaque (cesspool in English).

Vol. X, No. 3 211

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 L'Esprit Createur

alluding thus to what Frantz Fanon has called the desire for "lact
tion."

The poem concludes with a vertical vision of freedom — th

repetitions of the word upright (133-135). Cesaire, a man recon
with himself, celebrates with a dance of freedom,

mine the dance

the dance which breaks the iron-collar
the dance which opens the prison (139)

In the skies a dove, symbol of peace, is ascending. Inversely, the

poet, like Orpheus, begins the loving Jungian descent into the past of
his race, the underworld,

great black hole where I wanted to drown

myself last month (141)

and where he will now seek to rediscover the mysteries, the secrets
("malevolent tongue of the night," 141), of the ever permanent truths.

Indiana University

212 Fall 1970

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Sun, 05 May 2019 10:46:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms