Aimé Césaire: The Poet's Passion

, , AIME CESAIRE THE POET'S PASSION Edouard Glissant translation by Christopher Winks T he Balata road ascends through Martinique's primal for est un til Morne-Roug e and beyond, toward th e plateaus of Ajo upaBouillon , Lorrai n, and Basse-Pointe, where th e poet was born, and wh ere you discover and experience "the hysteri cal gra nds uc k of the sea ." ] Nobo dy knows or can say precisely wh en , on th is route, you leave th e south of th e country, its d ry brightness, its tarried beaches, its an xious insouciance , and enter the domain of thi s north of heavy rain s and occasiona l mists, whose fruitschestnuts , apricots, and terebinth man goes-are rich and present, and where in the distance the drummers and sto rytellers may be heard. There, everyo ne roo ts th em selves motionlessly in their child hood, as if standing in the red mud that lies in wait to attack the Pcrou and Reculee mo rn es. But the poet's youth was also marked by peaceful errantries. In the years im mediately precedi ng Wor ld War 1[, he was a student in Par is, havin g left these mo rnes in Ma rti niq ue's north and the Lycee Schoelcher in Fort-d e-Prance. He discovered the so-called Old Co ntine nt, but above all he encountered Africa, "gigantically caterpillaring up to th e Hispanic foot of Europe, its nakedness where death scythes wildly." No t th e explorer's discover y, but that essential part of th e so n who had returned to the source of his passions and concerns. Am ong them were Africans, Antilleans, Guyanese, Madagasca ns, and Reunio nese, wh o at that time made up the colonial int ellectual em igra nt communities in Pari s, itself at the margin s of another em igration from th e same places, factory wo rkers and sub-proletarians as they were called at the time, and whi ch would subsequently be officially and systematically organized around postwa r reconstruc tio n (so me will remember th e famous ~ Journ al of Contemporary Afri can Art "Bureau of Migra tio n of the Overseas Departmen ts," known by its Frenc h acronym as the highly efficient Bumidom, which operated until the end of th e 1960s). Aime Cesaire was already a po litical militant wh o moved in the circles of the editors of the journals L'Etudian t 1I0ir and Legitime Deien se, and who may have attended the meetings at th e home of Madame Paul ette Nardal, a committed defender of the Antillean and Black personalit y. He met th e Senegalese Leop old Seda r Sengho r and th e Guya nese Leon-Gontran Damas, forming the inseparable tr io of Neg ritude, bu t above all-in 1939, in what could be called solitude but in any case through a powerful effort that went unnoticed at th e time, published as it was in a provincial journal called volontes that entered into history as a resu lt, he caused to spring for th, as if by di nt of a powerful stamping of the foot on the still distan t lan d, th e Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook ofa Return to the Native Land), a wo rk we would immediately place on th e level of its precursor of 1917, Saint-John Perse's Eloges, and its successor of 1943, Rene Char's Fcuillets d'Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnosi, composed during th e French Resistan ce and among the greatest poems of our age, one whi ch for me carr ies a deeper meaning well beyond its reputation as a work of political militan cy. Thus, his errantry, in no way erratic, and his discover y of th e world were radicalized through a deliberate act : a plunge int o the Martiniquan native land, with the following particularities. Th e Notebook is not a realistic, descriptive text, but there is no thing closer to the rhythms, the suffocations , and the pulse of that real; it is not a text...