The "Cesaire Effect," or How to Cultivate One's Nation

When discursive rupture points explode on the cultural scene, due to the incandescent power of a thinker's words as well as to a public's ability to hear the call of a new political and poetic voice, the person who originally embodied the new cry soon disappears behind his or her notoriety. Like Marx, like Freud, Césaire hardly owns his words, his persona is public property, even his written work is tightly interwoven with that of his critics, commentators, imitators, opponents, and admirers: quotations from Le cahier d'un retour au pays natal, from La tragédie du roi Christophe have become a "terreau primordial" 'primordial soil' (Leiner) out of which grows an intricate proliferation of new and not so new interpretations, as well as a strident chorus of vociferous or moderate judgments and counterjudgments.

Like other commentators, I have to choose between various metaphors of continuation, inheritance, influence, posterity, and Jacqueline Leiner's allusion to a fertile soil captures my imagination perhaps better than other models. Yet, at least two other paradigms are difficult to ignore: the idea of filiation and that of legacy. In some sense, we may think that it was inevitable for "Papa Césaire" to engender literary and political children. After all, did his poetic alter ego not once ask:

[. . .] et de moi-même, mon coeur, ne faites ni un père, ni un frère
ni un fils, mais le père, mais le frère, mais le fils
ni un mari, mais l'amant de cet unique peuple. (Cahier 70)

and as for me, my heart, do not make me into a father nor a brother,
nor a son, but into the father, the brother, the son,
nor a husband, but the lover of this unique people. (Notebook 71)

However, I would like to avoid using Césaire's work and Cesairian pre-existing mythologies as a vast repertoire of material that we could all use to justify and corroborate any coherent narrative about the fictional figure that we constantly re-invent for different purposes. It may be more fruitful to explore the contradictory meanings and values that our chosen metaphors of the poet help circulate like bees (another metaphor I am afraid) that carry pollen from flower to flower. Any complex image can sustain the complexity of reactions generated by Césaire's complexities and the "filiation" paradigm is no exception: if Roger Toumson, the co-author of Aimé Césaire, le nègre inconsolé, resolutely and confidently claims to be "adepte respectueux d'une filiation idéologique, philosophique et littéraire" 'a respectful follower of an ideological, philosophical, and literary legacy' (Apologie 7), ¹ we are also familiar with the violent reactions triggered by Raphaël Confiant's decidedly anti-Cesairian volume, Aimé Césaire ou une traversée paradoxale du siècle (1993). Some flew to the rescue, disgusted by the symbolic murder of the good black father and refusing to see any continuity between this apparently personal attack and the declaration made by the "créolistes" in their 1989 Eloge de la créolité: "Nous sommes à jamais fils d'Aimé Césaire" (18) "We are forever Césaire's sons (80)." Annie LeBrun spared no vitriolic prose to denounce Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Jean Bernabé's "malhonnêteté" and "terrorisme" ("Aimé Césaire" 18). Just as she had contemptuously dubbed the first generation of French feminists "neo-feminists," she contemptuously relegated Césaire's critics to the rank of "neo-créoles" (21), dismissing their ideas as a version of Parisian chic, a territory where Chamoiseau, Confiant, Bernabé (and even Edouard Glissant) operate in the apparently despicable company of Julia Kristeva and Michel Serres (21). ²

Self-defense or oil on the fire, the targets of her wrath greeted her intrusion on the West Indian scene with less than complimentary remarks. In 1998, in an otherwise moderate...