Césaire at the Crossroads in Haiti: Correspondence With Henri Seyrig

When Aimé Césaire returned to Fort-de-France in August 1939, after having finished his studies at the Ecole normale supérieure on the rue d’Ulm in Paris, one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in France, he was not entirely unknown—he had published poems in several journals. Two years after his return, he encountered the leader of the surrealist movement, André Breton, who was forced to stop for three weeks in Martinique from 24 April to 16 May during his circuitous voyage from Nazi-controlled Paris to New York via Marseilles and Fort-de-France.¹ He found Césaire thanks to the discovery of a copy of the first issue of Tropiques, the just-launched cultural journal edited by the young lycée teacher, his wife Suzanne, and a small group of friends—Georges Gratiant, Aristide Maugée, René Ménil, and Lucie Thésée. The encounter with Breton and his fellow traveler, the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, expanded the publishing horizon of the Martinican poet. Poems from Tropiques, as well as others not published in the journal, now began to appear in New York in the journals VVV and Hémisphères; in Havana, with the Spanish translation of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal; in Santiago in Leitmotiv; in Buenos Aires in Lettres françaises; and in Algiers in Fontaine, before the collection Les armes miraculeuses was published by Gallimard in Paris in 1946.² Breton’s discovery of Césaire, whom he praised in an article titled “Martinique, charmeuse de serpents,” published in Hémisphères in 1943, gave an enormous boost to the career of the young poet. It is generally assumed, then, that it was Breton who launched Césaire onto the global literary scene.³ But as I show, new evidence reveals that Césaire’s development as a writer and his increasing visibility come from a far more complex confluence of events and people during this turbulent period. In addition to Breton, who maintained his network of surrealists from his apartment in New York, two other networks contributed to Césaire’s higher profile in the world of letters. The first was based on his ties with alumni from the Ecole normale supérieure. The second was his involvement in strengthening the links of the Free French with other countries. In the course of research on Césaire at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, I came across the collection of correspondence between Césaire and Henri Seyrig, the cultural attaché at the Free French consulate in New York.⁴ In those letters emerges a Césaire in flux, concerned about his own development as a writer. Information about the three interrelated networks contributes to a far more nuanced portrait of Césaire in the 1940s. It allows one to understand how, beginning with the appearance of Tropiques in an international context that led to the isolation of Martinique, Césaire was able, paradoxically, to develop a much higher profile in the world before major presses in Paris published his work.

The key to understanding that picture is Seyrig. The crossroads is Haiti, where Césaire spent seven months, from 17 May to 15 December 1944, accompanied by his wife Suzanne, who remained with him until 27 October.

In an article titled “Henri Seyrig (10 novembre 1895–21 janvier 1973): Nécrologie” that appeared in the journal Syria, Ernest Will offers insights into the life of the man who played such a key role in Césaire’s life during the war.⁵ From Will we learn that Seyrig was a brilliant archaeologist. He was also a very generous and open-minded man. Born in 1895 into a cultivated and well-off family, he studied at Oxford, served in World War I, and then enrolled at the Sorbonne, where he earned the coveted agrégation de grammaire in 1922. He was admitted the same year to the Ecole française d’Athènes, where he remained for seven years. Named director general of antiquities in Syria...