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  • Aimé Césaire’s Lost, Found, Scattered Body
  • Clayton Eshleman (bio)

While co-translating The Collected Poetry of Aimé Césaire with Annette Smith in the late 1970s/early 1980s, I met with Césaire twice on my own, each time with a list of words that we needed his help with. We would meet in a café near the Sorbonne in Paris. The third time the poet agreed to respond to questions; in the summer of 1982, Annette and the scholar A. James Arnold joined us, and Césaire invited us to his son’s apartment where he stayed while representing Martinique in the French National Assembly. Because this would be our last discussion with him about his work, after he responded to our questions (which would occasionally send him to the bookshelves to check an arcane word he had not used for many years), we asked him to read us a poem. Sitting under a painting by Wifredo Lam, he chose “Corps perdu” (“Lost Body”) and read it to us in a measured, solemn voice.

“Lost Body” is the title piece of a collection of ten poems Césaire published in 1949 (in an edition including thirty-two etchings by Picasso). As Arnold, who regards “Lost Body” as one of Césaire’s most powerful poems and the finest example of his demiurgic manner, has written: “‘Lost Body’ is located at the watershed that slopes in one direction toward the origins of negritude and in the other toward the modifications necessitated by a hostile political and economic situation.”1

Lost Body* I who Krakatoa I who everything better than a monsoon I who open chest I who Laelaps I who bleat better than a cloaca I who outside the musical scale I who Zambezi or frantic or rhombos or cannibal I would like to be more and more humble and more lowly always more serious without vertigo or vestige to the point of losing myself falling into the live semolina of a well-opened earth [End Page 983] Outside in lieu of atmosphere there’d be a beautiful haze no dirt in it each drop of water forming a sun there whose name the same for all things would be DELICIOUS TOTAL ENCOUNTER so that one would no longer know what goes by —a star or a hope or an underwater retreat raced across by the flaming torches of aurelian jellyfish Then I imagine life would flood my whole being better still I would feel it touching me or biting me lying down I would see the finally free odors come to me like merciful hands finding their way to sway their long hair in me longer than this past that I cannot reach. Things stand back make room among you room for my repose carrying in waves my frightening crest of anchor-like roots looking for a place to take hold Things I probe I probe me the street-porter I am root-porter and I bear down and I force and I arcane        I omphale Ah who leads me back toward the harpoons        I am very weak I hiss yes I hiss very ancient things as serpents do as do cavernous things I whoa lie down wind and against my unstable and fresh muzzle against my eroded face press your cold face of ravaged laughter The wind alas I will continue to hear it nigger nigger nigger from the depths of the timeless sky a little less loud than today but still too loud and this crazed howling of dogs and horses which it thrusts at our forever fugitive heels but I in turn in the air shall rise a scream so violent that I shall splatter the whole sky and with my branches torn to shreds and with the insolent jet of my wounded and solemn shaft I shall command the islands to be [End Page 984]

Now I will try to key in the transmutational power of “Lost Body:” It opens with seven percussive lines, like the blasts of a conch, in which the assertive speaker forces objects and phrases into verbal display. Suddenly there is a shift in tone and implied social position...

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