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LOSING CESAIRE Natalie Melas 1. Losing Cesaire What does one mourn in the death of a writer one has never known in the flesh, with whom one has no bond of nationality, race, or belonging? What has one lost exactly? There is, of course, the usual shock of mortality and the acute sense of awe and gratitude and respect due to an exceptionally gifted author of words that have the power to move and to change and to awaken. But in the case of a consummately politically engaged writer like Aime Cesaire, arguably the greatest poet of anticolonialism and later of decolonization, there is also the sense that the words, the work, are now definitively severed from a singular life of struggle and so, inevitably, it is once again decolonization and anticolonialism that one has lost, their passing that one mourns. A hope is deferred, an illumination is extinguished and becomes spectral. I do not remember exactly when I first read Aime Cesaire's most celebrated work, the long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. I had read nothing like it before, nothing that grabbed me by the throat and plunged me into a maze of words so urgent, so engulfing, and so fundamentally disorienting—aesthetically, historically , politically—that 1 have never completely made my way out. This is not a poem you can master or possess; it inhabits you, takes hold of you, implicates you, teaches you, aims to transform you. At fifty-eight pages in the Presence Africaine edition, it exceeds the customary bounds of form and proportion , developing loosely and associatively like notes jotted in a notebook. Transferred to a poem this form has the nearly magical quality of making it impossible to contain or recollect the whole work in consciousness. Even on the hundredth reading, the reader is likely to rediscover a line or a paragraph as if for the first time. Explosive, telluric, this poem defies the slow wear of historicist chronology. It is less a document of colonial oppression, racial denigration, and the urgency of emancipation than a linguistic instantiation of them in all their affective and historical dimensions . As such, Cesaire's Notebook can offer a rare and immediate conduit to the ethos, energies, and stringent necessity of anticolonialism. Cesaire's death is an occasion to reflect on and reevaluate his life and work, the art and ideology of decolonization or black modernism, the cultural movement of Negritude with which he is so closely identified alongside Leopold Sedar Senghor, and a host of other issues. It is imperative, however, to start with even a brief visit to the Notebook itself, for despite its reputation, this foundational work remains relatively unknown in the Anglophone world. From the first line to the last, the reader of the Notebook is captivated by a singular voice. It harangues, it revolts, it accepts, it despairs, it exults, it pleads, it betrays, it prays, it denounces. To a large extent the poem is the rhetorical story of this voice, this incipient subject in his multivalent attempts to come into consciousness and into language under hostile, even deadly circumstances. Critics have called the Notebook an "epic of consciousness ."1 The voice begins Calibanically, as Jacques Coursil puts it, by cursing: Au bout du petit matin ... Va-t'en, lui disais-je, gueule de flic, gueule de vache, va-t'en, je deteste les larbins de Vordre et les hannetons de Vesperance. Va-t'en, mauvais gri-gri, punaise de moinillon. In the dark hours of morning.... Get out, I says to him, copface, pigface, get out, I hate the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Get out, evil juju, bedbug of a little monk. 2 102< N k a Journal of Contemporary African Art Film still f r om Aime Cesaire: A Voice for the 21st Century, 2 0 0 6 . Court esy California Newsr eel . N k a- 1 0 3 This initial gesture of driving away an interlocutor keys us right away into the fundamental anticolonial paradox of the poem: Cesaire must articulate his condition as a black man in the very language that negates him. The work of the poem, thus, as Abiola Irele remarks, is to transform the French language into "the antagonistic language of the 'Other.'"3 Having driven away the "flunkies of order," the speaker turns to the misery of the Antilles, where he finds "in this inert city, this boisterous crowd which so astonishingly passes to the side of its cry ... to the side of its real cry."4 It is a crowd without unity because it lacks a sense of its history, of its belonging, and is hence "not participating in anything that can be expressed, affirmed or liberated in the broad daylight of its own land."5 And so the speaker's heroic poetic vocation is born, and he sets off into the wider world where he "would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions," imagining that he would return to his homeland and say to it: '"Embrace me without fear ... and if AirriG Cesaire, Lost Body (New York: Geo r g e Braziller, 1986), illustrations by Pablo Picasso. all I can do is speak, it is for you I would speak' / And again I would say: / 'My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those who collapse in the dungeon of despair.'"6 The stakes are enormous and the claims are grandiose, but we are barely one quarter of the way into the poem and the voice will course through a great many modulations in order to map out the parameters of the conditions of possibility for its own emergence before finally, ambivalently, ceasing to speak and leaving it to the reader to puzzle over what it has accomplished, what it has spoken and for whom. To name just a few stops: There is history: "TOUSSAINT , TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE;" There is death: "My memory is encircled with blood. My memory has a belt of corpses."7 There is a selfloathing encounter with a black man on a tram, memorably echoed in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks; there is even a love poem: "come water ovaries where the future wiggles its little heads / come wolves who pasture in the wild orifices of the body and the time when in the ecliptic inn my m o o n meets your sun."8 There are the breathtaking lines claiming Negritude, a neologism that first comes into print in this poem, and, while certainly linked to the assertion of an African essence in other parts of the poem, Negritude is invoked here in rigorously elusive terms: ma negritude nest pas unepierre, sa surdite ruee contre la clameur du jour ma negritude nest pas une taie d'eau morte sur Voeil mort de la terre ma negritude nest ni une tour ni une cathedrale elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol elle plonge dans la chair ardente du del elle troue Vaccablement opaque de sa droite patience my negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of day my negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earth's dead eye my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral it plunges into the red flesh of the soil it plunges into the ardent flesh of the sky it punctures the opaque prostration of its upright patience.9 1 0 4 - Wka Journal of Contemporary African Art Ai m e Cesaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Paris: Presence Af ricaine, 1983). Front icepiece by Wi l f r ed o Lam . The syntax of the passage makes its point with dazzling clarity. Negritude is not reducible to a noun, to a fixed thing or quality that you can hold and possess. Instead, it expresses itself in verbs of motion, that is, in an action in time, a movement in space. As in many other parts of the poem, the images defy the easy meanings of conventional associations and compel open-ended exegesis, for the nouns in question—stone, deafness, leukoma, tower, cathedral—do not resolve themselves under a unifying rubric and even after you have grasped the main point, you must puzzle through the indeterminacies of the detail. The emphasis shifts from substance to form, from what Negritude is to how it comes into representation. 2. Receiving Negritude Emerging in the ferment of diaspora encounters and black political movements in Paris during the 1930s, Negritude for Cesaire owed a great deal to his discovery of African American literature as well as to his encounter with Africans.1 0 Published in its initial form in an obscure review in late 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, the Notebook did not begin to find its audience until the late forties and early fifties, when it was published in significantly expanded form. The history of the poem's reception is complex and multivalent . It was immediately received by the towering arbiters of French avant-garde culture as a masterpiece . The surrealist poet and ideologue Andre Breton writes a preface entitled "A Great Black Poet" to one of the first postwar editions of the Notebook (Bordas, 1947), pronouncing it as "nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our time."1 1 Similarly, for the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in a very influential prefatorial essay, "Black Orpheus," the work of black poets, preeminently Cesaire, is the poetry of the time, carrying forth the torch of the historical vanguard.1 2 To some extent these writers reflect what Petrine ArcherStraw has identified as the negrophilic dimensions N k a»1 0 5 of modernism, a self-serving exoticism that seeks in racial and cultural others the redemption of an irreparably corrupt white culture. But the reception of the Notebook and of Negritude was not to settle for long in this historico-aesthetic vein, for the exigencies of decolonization were hard upon it. The controversy surrounding Negritude is impossible to separate from the cultural struggles surrounding decolonization. Cesaire's Negritude as expressed in the Notebook, together with Sartre's interpretation of it, is the main counterreference for Frantz Fanon's phenomenology of racism in his Black Skim, White Masks, even as it is in distinction from the continental cultural ideology of Negritude that Fanon elaborates his idea of national culture in The Wretched of the Earth. The attacks on Negritude were to grow in vehemence during the late sixties and seventies, particularly by militants reacting to the paternalistic excesses of African socialism. In an oft-quoted condemnation , Stanislas Adotevi denounces Negritude and its transvaluation of racial stereotype as a neocolonial discourse, nothing less than "the black way of being white" [la maniere noire d'etre blanc].1 3 Meanwhile, in Martinique, subsequent generations of writers were to struggle against both the crushing influence of Cesaire's poetry and against the repercussions of his political leadership , particularly the problematic postcolonial status of the islands as Overseas Departments— dependencies—of France. During the late seventies , Edouard Glissant elaborates a regional, archipelagic geographical framework and a fluid hybrid model of identity in a cultural ideology and a literary project that aim to counter the depersonalization of Martinican culture after departmentalization . Following his lead and also raising the ante, the Creolistes (chiefly Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant) after him develop a localist postcolonial aesthetic that strenuously contests the heroic representational disposition of the poet in Cesaire and faults him for ignoring the value of local culture and the Creole language. Moreover, a substantial body of scholarship around Cesaire's poetry and to a lesser extent his plays arose in the U.S. academy during the last two decades of the twentieth century, in part fueled by the rise of postcolonial studies, itself a late legacy of anticolonialism . Recent work explores in particular the woefully neglected dimension of gender and women's participation in Negritude and other transnational black cultural movements of the early twentieth century.1 4 3. Abstracting Authenticity Both Pablo Picasso and Wilfredo Lam produced illustrations for Cesaire's poetry. Among other works, Lam provided a frontispiece dated 1939 for the first full French edition of the Notebook published in 1947 and Picasso provided aquatint illustrations and an engraving as a frontispiece for a limited edition of Cesaire's collection of poems entitled Lost Body published in 1950.1 5 Cesaire knew Lam well and crossed paths with Picasso on many occasions, particularly in their common dealings with the French Communist Party, though it is not clear how well they might have known each other. More broadly, the aesthetics of the Notebook as well as the larger cultural project of Negritude belong to the cultural lineage that includes the intersection of primitivism with the iconoclasm of modernist art. Like Lam, Cesaire, would belong particularly to the strain of this intersection in which primitivism is appropriated from a putative position of authenticity. What is striking about the two frontispieces taken together is the contrast between Picasso's realism and Lam's abstraction. Picasso's engraving offers an image of a laureated "great black poet," to recall Breton's essay, intent on bringing an African head into a Hellenic iconography, as a kind of triumph of individual accomplishment and genius. Lam's image, on the contrary, draws from the iconography of the African mask, but in a highly schematic way such that the traces of particular cultural content are erased, leaving us with a bare, anonymous , abstracted image of the human form. Lam's figure bears the traces of his encounter with Picasso and Cubism that had taken place some four years earlier and he has not yet developed the totemic style that, after 1940, will become his visual signature and which we have come to associate with a particularly Caribbean modernism. It seems particularly significant, therefore, that this image which is not yet ethnically coded should accompany Cesaire's poem, instead of the more 106- IMka Journal of Contemporary African Art familiar and more Caribbean-identified works of the later period. Lam's cubist figure does not convey cultural detail, only a stance of attentiveness. As such, it is a powerful visual complement to the Notebook speaker's own multivalent indeterminacy and incompletion. In very different ways both Picasso's and Lam's images detour around the assertion of cultural or racial authenticity as a legitimizing stance, one by stressing realism, the other by stressing abstraction. This returns us to the question of form and the cultural politics of form raised in the proclamation of Negritude in Cesaire's Notebook. Among the great many questions that present themselves for the project of reevaluating the work of Cesaire and the notion of Negritude at the present time, one might be: How might Negritude, understood not in its content as a cultural essence but in its form as a mode of abstraction, offer a way of being modern without claiming authenticity? Natalie Melas is Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is the author of All The Difference in The World: Postcoloniality and the End of Comparison (Stanford University Press, 2007). Notes 'See Abiola Irele's extensive commentary in his edition of Aime Cesaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, 2nd ed. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), p. lxix. See also A. James Arnold's classic study Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poeties of Aime Cesaire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 168. 2 Aime Cesaire, The Collected Poetry, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 34. Translations slightly modified. Henceforth cited in the text as Cahier. 3 Irele, p. lx. 4 Cahier, p. 34. 5 Ibid., p. 36. 6 Ibid., p. 44. 7 Ibid., p. 58. 8 Ibid., p. 66. 9 Ibid., p. 67. ' 0 Brent Hayes Edwards's The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) is the definitive study of this formative episode of black internationalism . 1 ' Andre Breton, "A Great Black Poet: Aime Cesaire" in Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, ed. and trans. Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 1996), p. 194. ' 2 Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus, trans. S. W. Allen (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1963). Originally published as the preface to the Anthologie De La Nouvelle Poesie Negre Et Malgache, ed. Leopold Sedar Senghor (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948; 1998). "Stanislas Spero Adotevi Negritude Et Negrologues (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1972), p. 207. 1 4 See Edwards and also Jennifer Wilks, Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacascade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne Cesaire, Dorothy West (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). " The Wilfredo Lam image, untitled, was originally published in the Bordas edition of Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Paris, 1947). It is reproduced in the 1983 Presence Africaine edition of Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal from which the figure here is drawn. Originally published by the now defunct Editions Fragrance in a limited edition of 200 copies in 1950, this edition of Corps Perdu was reissued by George Braziller in New York, in 1986 with an introduction and translations of the poems into English by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. N k a- 1 0 7 ...

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