Aime Cesaire (review)

Aimé Césaire, by Gregson Davis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 208 pp.

Gregson Davis's reading of Aimé Césaire can be defined as an effort to put forth new interpretations of the Césairean oeuvre, a project that is rooted in the fundamental demand for liberation that is at the heart of that work. As for that body of criticism that generally assimilates Césaire's poetry with a volcanic eruption, Davis judges that "there is ample evidence that Césaire has always labored to polish his verse with a care that belies the neo-Romantic myth of pure spontaneity" (19). Davis also believes that the famous stanzas usually accepted as the hallmarks for defining Césairean Negritude in Cahier du retour au pays natal have been the object of quasi-erroneous interpretations: "The lyric context of Césaire's assertions about African civilization discourages us from miscontruing them as straightforward declarations of an 'essential' blackness; rather, they are presented in the poem as proud utterances of a speaking subject who has been experimenting with various forms of self-characterization and who has now emerged from the crucible with new insight" (48). Davis likewise contests the exclusively Christian reading of Et les chiens se taisaient: "Those critics who stress the passion of Christ as the major archetype for the Rebel come close to miscontruing the broader significance of Césaire's ornamental use of Christian mythology and ritual; for the Martinican poet had come to adapt a universal perspective that interpreted Christ's death and resurrection as a younger variant of a much older pattern" (131).

Césaire's literary process is situated at the intersections of esthetic modernism and black consciousness. The Paris of the period between world wars, capital of the black world, has always been the locus par excellence where black writers could contribute to the rehabilitation of their world "while continuing to assimilate the most progressive components of the West as abundantly present in the vibrant intercultural ambience of prewar Paris" (15). The literary review Tropiques, a lab experiment in a new Antillean esthetic articulated around the valorization of African elements in Creole culture, was also to be the catalyst for the decisive encounter between Aimé Césaire and André Breton. Breton's preface to the New York edition of Cahier, Pablo Picasso's illustrations of the limited edition of Corps perdu, published in 1950, three years after the International Surrealist Exposition in which Césaire had participated, Wilfredo Lam's illustrations for the Spanish edition of Cahier, and Hans Hartung's for Soleil cou coupé in 1948 are further examples of the symbolic enthronement of Césaire in the Surrealist pantheon. Césairean Negritude operates from a platform where a modernist outlook, revised and corrected in the light of imperatives in the Antillean quest for identity, anchored in the complexities of the Antillean postcolonial condition, encounters the project that would henceforth be celebrated as a cultural renaissance of the black world. The route leading to the birth of the primal African matrix creates artistic affinities and similarities between Césaire and Cuban poet Wilfredo Lam and beyond with magical realism. Neo-African creativity represents the point of convergences between Césaire and the Carib--from Lydia Cabrera, the translator of the Cuban edition of Cahier, to Miguel Angel Asturias by way of Haiti, the cradle of heroic Negritude. Through locating places of intertextual convergence between Césaire's work and the Western literary and cultural imaginary this work becomes something of a counterpoint between Biblical references, Mesopotamian archetypes, modernism, and the deepening of African values in the Americas as they call across to each other, making Césaire's oeuvre a celebration of the world's imaginaries.

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