Of Colonized Mind and Matter: The Dis/Abilities of Negritude in Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal

The article analyzes Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal in order to demonstrate the varied uses of ability and disability in the written works of the Negritude movement, and specifically how disability, seen as a state acquired via colonialism, gains a negatively charged status. It argues that Cahier's decolonizing call for freedom is accomplished through an ableist rhetoric that equates being free with a nondisabled act of standing, as well as through a disparate association of men with disability and women with ability. The article realizes this argument by reading the varied norm-based dis/abilities Cahier associates with male and female figures. The disabilities in the male figures arise from colonialism, and the recurrent disabled site is the mind, with consequent ramifications for the matter (body). This phenomenon produces what, in the article, are termed psychocorporeal disabilities, which are together both physical and psychological. The singular female in the text is nondisabled, and her mind is overlooked for her essential bio-capacity to produce. The article makes the claim that Cahier, as a text of the liberation-based Negritude movement, realizes its goals in part through a reductive, normative disability-based construction of others, thereby undeniably dismantling one hierarchy (colonial), while unwittingly reaffirming others (gender, disability).