Aimé Césaire and “Another Face of Europe”

In 1934, at a university canteen in Paris, a young black student from Martinique filled his plate with nothing but tomatoes. The server asked: “Why do you never eat meat? Is it because you don’t have enough money?” The student answered that the reason lay not in the lack of money, but in his philosophy: He was a vegetarian. He heard a peal of laughter behind him and turned, coming face to face with a dark-haired young man who said: “I am also a vegetarian, and for the same philosophical reasons as you!” The young Martinican later became one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century: Aimé Césaire. The other “vegetarian” student with “coal-black hair and a swarthy complexion,” as Césaire described him, was a Yugoslav Croat Petar Guberina, who later became an eminent linguist, the developer of the Verbotonal method for the rehabilitation of people with severe auditory and speech impairments (Louis 32, my translation).² As Césaire said in the interview in which he recounted this story, they became friends—“the best in the world” (“Ma poésie”).

This is how Césaire remembered their first meeting; Petar Guberina told the story a slightly different way. He remembered that he did not have enough money to buy a proper breakfast at the canteen, so he wanted to avoid going there altogether: He was annoyed when others would ask why he had not taken a proper meal. Guberina therefore went to the room for table tennis, below the canteen, where he met a young student from Martinique, Aimé Césaire, who was avoiding the canteen for the same reasons. Césaire told Guberina about “the misery on Martinique,” Guberina told Césaire about “the misery in Croatia,” and they instantly felt “a mutual understanding and friendship” (Guberina in Palcy). Then a third person appeared in the room for table-tennis—Léopold Sédar Senghor. From then on, the three of them would gather in the evenings, during which Césaire and Guberina learnt about Africa from Senghor.

I would like to argue that this life-long friendship between the two students who did not have enough money for a Parisian canteen is not just an anecdote to spice up the preface to Césaire’s Notebook, but a revealing synecdoche related to the deep and meaningful connections between black and Slavic—and especially Balkan Slavic—experiences. The fact that the hymn of négritude was written in the Balkans seems an opportune coincidence, as the Balkan Slav might be seen as Europe’s internal equivalent of the American or the colonized black. Though the three positions differ in many aspects, the similarities are striking and can provide insights into all three of these literatures and cultures.

In this article, I outline the parallels between black and Balkan culture beginning with an exploration of the influence that Guberina and Césaire had on each other’s work and lives. The article centers on the comparison of Guberina’s preface to Césaire’s famous poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land to the first two prefaces to the poem, written by Benjamin Péret and André Breton. My argument is that Guberina, in his preface, demonstrated that he knew how to listen to Césaire more carefully than the two French writers, which is perhaps one of the reasons that Césaire asked Guberina to write the preface for the definitive edition of the poem in Présence Africaine. The connection between the Balkan linguist and the poet of négritude constitutes the starting point for my argument that the Balkans can be understood and theorized more adequately through the prism of négritude or, as I call it, balkanitude, than they can be understood through the prism of Orientalism—or Balkanism. The adequacy of the orientalist discourse in the case of the Balkans has already been called into question by one of the most acknowledged theorists of the Balkan region, Maria Todorova, in her book Imagining the Balkans. However, no one has yet suggested...