"The Red Hour": Poetic Violence and the Time of Transformation in Aimé Césaire's Et les chiens se taisaient

In Aimé Césaire's first tragedy, Et les chiens se taisaient (first published in 1946), an anti-colonial hero called the Rebel struggles in a pre-abolition story-world where the past holds a prophetic grasp on the future. Césaire articulates social transformation through untimely temporal structures associated with organic life cycles, seasonal change and meteorological unpredictability. These ecological models provide the figural registers through which Césaire depicts revolution as a violent eruption of the new at all levels of existence. Unable to be foreseen or contained, these poetic acts of violent creation involve the specific intensity and peculiar temporality of birth. This essay suggests that Les chiens' slave revolt performs the untimeliness of decolonization as a poetics that fundamentally rejects mechanical notions of change determined by linear models of time and history. By reading Les chiens through allusions to its philosophical source material, I show how much of what Césaire constellates can be linked both genealogically and aesthetically to two distinct temporal schemas associated with Greek antiquity: Dionysiac cyclical renewal and kairological "right time." While often opposed on a philosophical level, these two untimely schemas, as juxtaposed by Césaire, express the plural and poetic temporality of decolonial revolution's tragic eruptions. His encounter with Nietzsche's Dionysiac and with the kairos of political theologians involved concepts that, in their capacity as expressions of primitivity, reveal at once the civilizational heritage of Africa as well as the destructive forces capable of undoing European imperialism.