Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits by Jason Allen-Paisant (review)

This book is at once a set of reflections on Aimé Césaire's thought and an arena for Jason Allen-Paisant's own pursuit of a mode of thinking better attuned to the connectedness of human beings with the world. Césaire's writings provide an anchor for these musings, yet the book at once analyses Césaire's compelling commitment to reconceptualizing the relationship between self and other, and provides space for Allen-Paisant's exploration of the resonance of animist thinking for our lives in the present. In this sense the book is both literary criticism and essay, combining reading with creative reflection, to create a work that is at the same time philosophically provocative and affective. The key premise is that western epistemology relies on delineation, 'the border, the fence, the separating wall' (p. 1). For Césaire, however, this urge to delineate is bound up with the human quest for mastery that in turn lies at the foundation of racist and colonial thinking, whereas poiesis is a form of openness or 'becoming-other' (p. 6). The founding text for this analysis is Césaire's 'Poésie et connaissance', published in Tropiques in January 1945. Allen-Paisant returns to the essay intermittently throughout the book to explore Césaire's sketching here of the blending of the human, the animal, and the vegetal and his argument that it is the poet who is best able to reveal this blending, seeing beyond the reductive classifications of western science. The four main chapters of the study expand aspects of Césaire's conception of poetic knowledge to foreground further key concepts that flesh out its significance as both anti-colonial and environmental critique. '(Un)thinking Philosophy' focuses on the denunciation of western epistemology, opposing the colonial project of extraction to the realm of the magical, the sensual, and the spiritual, where the boundaries between the mind and the plants and creatures of the world are broken down. 'Possession as a Paradigm of Consciousness' explores how the idea of 'seizure' acts on the poet in a primal manifestation of life force that transcends individuality and rationality. 'Sound and Otherness' examines how sound, in particular sound used in poetry, engenders an alternative way of apprehending the world beyond the quest for meaning and representation. 'Animist Time and the White Anthropocene' brings the ecological implications of Césaire's thought to the foreground and calls for notions of both spatial and temporal porosity. Some of this material has already been published in articles, but Allen-Paisant's book forms a compelling whole that aptly shows the complexity of Césaire's ecocritical thought. There is perhaps some repetition, and there are few close readings of poems: essays and poetry are cited as ways into this animist thinking, but the poems are not analysed in detail as whole works. Yet this is an elegant and inspiring work offering a complex reading of Césaire and demonstrating his extraordinary timeliness still today. Its fairly brief chapters invite development through further engagements with Césaire's rich and wide-ranging poetic works.

...