The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941-1945) by Suzanne Césaire (review)

Suzanne Roussi Césaire produced only seven short essays during a brief 1941-1945 stint as coeditor and general production facilitator of the Martinican cultural review Tropiques. These works, roughly 45 pages in all, which form the entirety of her oeuvre, were out of print and virtually forgotten for the remainder of her short life. Wife of Martinique's most famous poet and premier politician, Aimé Césaire, after the war Suzanne raised their six children, taught, moved back and forth as Aimé's career required between Paris and Fort de France, and never published again. She wrote one play for a community theater troupe in 1952, the text of which has been lost. She died at age fifty in 1963. And yet Suzanne Césaire has reemerged over the past few decades as one of the most important theorists of Caribbean identity. Writers and scholars have turned increasingly to the beauty, insight, and vision of her short texts for an understanding of the rich potential of Antillean culture that can arise from "the mobilization of every living strength brought together upon this earth where race is the result of the most unremitting intermixing," from "the incredible store of varied energies until now locked up within us" ("The Malaise of a Civilization" 33). Suzanne Césaire reminds the Caribbean writer that, "The most unsettling reality is our own. We shall act. This land, ours, can only be what we want it to be" (33).

As Keith L. Walker succinctly argues in his introduction to the first complete English translation of her works,

Suzanne Césaire's seven essays are a fertile intellectual terrain from which have germinated many strains of reflection upon the Antillean predicament: the thought and innovations of the ethno-psychiatrist Frantz Fanon; the theories of camouflage and the rhizomatic or multi-rootedness of Antillean culture elaborated in Édouard Glissant's Caribbean Discourse; the critique of the colored bourgeoisie or of Caribbean Bovaryism, initiated by Jean Price-Mars and taken up by Marie Vieux Chauvet . . .

(xix)

It is thus extremely appropriate that, fifty years after her death, Suzanne Césaire's essays finally appear in a compiled edition under her own name. Edited by Daniel Maximin in a slim volume containing the seven Tropiques articles, 30 pages of introduction, and a handful of poems dedicated to her by her husband and her daughter Ina Césaire, Césaire's works are now available in a very able translation by Keith L. Walker published by Wesleyan. This edition, a translation of the 2009 volume produced in French by Seuil, is a necessary addition to Caribbean studies: first because Tropiques, though in print in a 1994 facsimile reproduction through the French publisher Jean Michel Place, is neither generally accessible nor the best means to grasp the power of one writer's voice; second because translations of only some of Suzanne Césaire's essays are scattered among various anthologies and are often woefully abridged.

The Wesleyan edition demonstrates the deep respect its contributors have for both the Césaires. Keith Walker opens his Translator's Introduction with a line from the conclusion to Suzanne Césaire's first essay in Tropiques, "Leo Frobenius and the Problem of Civilizations": "It is now urgent to dare to know oneself, to dare to confess to oneself what one is, to dare to ask oneself what one wants to be." Walker's choice of epitaph serves as a perfect introduction to the work of this intriguing figure, as it contains both the challenge of Césaire's breathlessly urgent voice to her readers and the continuing relevance of the questions she raises for Caribbean identity. Taking as his theme the title of Césaire's seventh, final, and best-known essay, also used as the title for this edition as a whole, Walker explores the varied camouflages that her writing elucidates, employs, and undermines:

Each...