Aimé Césaire: The Poet's Passion

Aimé Césaire in dialogue with translators Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, 12 June 1982.

Photograph taken by A. James Arnold in Césaire's apartment in Paris. Permission granted by A. James Arnold.

The Balata road ascends through Martinique's primal forest until Morne-Rouge and beyond, toward the plateaus of Ajoupa-Bouillon, Lorrain, and Basse-Pointe, where the poet was born, and where you discover and experience "the hysterical grandsuck of the sea."¹ Nobody knows or can say precisely when, on this route, you leave the south of the country, its dry brightness, its tamed beaches, its anxious insouciance, and enter the domain of this north of heavy rains and occasional mists, whose fruits—chestnuts, apricots, and terebinth mangoes—are rich and present, and where in the distance the drummers and storytellers may be heard. There, everyone roots themselves motionlessly in their childhood, as if standing in the red mud that lies in wait to attack the Pérou and Reculée mornes.

But the poet's youth was also marked by peaceful errantries. In the years immediately preceding the Second World War, he was a student in Paris, having left these mornes in Martinique's north and the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France. He discovered the so-called Old Continent, but above all he encountered Africa, "gigantically caterpillaring up to the Hispanic foot of Europe, its nakedness where death scythes wildly." Not the explorer's discovery, but that essential part of the son who had returned to the source of his passions and concerns. Among them, Africans, Antilleans, Guyanese, Madagascans, Reunionese, who at that time made up the colonial intellectual emigrant communities in Paris, itself at the margins of another emigration from the same places, factory workers and sub-proletarians as they were called at the time, and which would subsequently be officially and systematically organized around postwar reconstruction (some will remember the famous "Bureau of Migration of the Overseas Departments," known by its French acronym as the highly efficient Bumidom, which operated until the end of the 1960s). Aimé Césaire was already a political militant who moved in the circles of the editors of the journals L'étudiant noir and Légitime défense, and who may have attended the meetings at the home of Madame Paulette Nardal, a committed defender of the Antillean and black personality. He met the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Guyanese Léon-Gontran Damas, forming the inseparable trio of Negritude, but above all, in 1939, in what could be called solitude but in any case through a powerful effort that went unnoticed at the time, published as it was in a provincial journal called Volontés that entered into history as a result, he caused to spring forth, as if by dint of a powerful stamping of the foot on the still distant land, the Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), a work we would immediately place on the level of its precursor of 1917, Saint-John Perse's Eloges, and its successor of 1943, René Char's Feuillets d'Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnos), composed during the French Resistance and among the greatest poems of our age, one which for me carries a deeper meaning well beyond its reputation as a work of political militancy.

Thus, his errantry, in no way erratic, and his discovery of the world were radicalized through a deliberate act: a plunge into the Martinican native land, with the following particularities. Notebook is not a realistic, descriptive text, but there is nothing closer to the rhythms, the suffocations, and the pulse of that reality; it is not a text of triumphalist exaltation, and yet it was to become a source of inspiration for the African diaspora. It weaves a tragic and in no way complacent poetics of the geography and history of this country that was still unknown to itself, and for the first time in our literature, it marked a communication, a...