Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora

CHAPTER 4 Writing Home: Comparative Black Modernism and Form in Jean Toomer and Aimé Césaire

CHAPTER 4 Writing Home Comparative Black Modernism and Form in Jean Toomer and Aimé Césaire Jennifer M.Wilks If I could feel that I came to the South to face it. If I, the dream (not what is weak and afraid in me) could become the face of the South. How my lips would sing for it, my songs being the lips of its soul. —Jean Toomer, Cane “Embrassez-moi sans crainte . . . Et si je ne sais que parler, c’est pour vous que je parlerai.” . . . “Ma bouche sera la bouche des malheurs qui n’ont point de bouche, ma voix, la liberté de celles qui s’affaissent au cachot du désespoir.” “Embrace me without fear . . . And if all I can do is speak, it is for you I shall speak.” . . . “My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those who break down in the solitary confinement of despair.” —Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal 102 Jennifer M.Wilks While there is no evidence of an actual encounter between the enigmatic American author Jean Toomer and Martinican poetstatesman Aimé Césaire, the many points of convergence between their works illustrate the ways in which interwar African diasporic intellectual communities developed in print as well as in person. The role of Paris in this multilayered development is key in that the French capital not only hosted those diasporic encounters that did take place, such as that between African American Langston Hughes and Martinican René Maran,1 but also, as the center of the vogue nègre (Negro vogue) and a diverse expatriate community, opened up that which Brent Edwards calls “transnational circuits of expressive culture” (18). Thus, although Toomer traveled to Paris in the mid- to late 1920s and Césaire lived there between 1931 and 1939,2 what interests me more than literal historical gaps are virtual literary connections. The Harlem Renaissance was shaped in large part by francophiles Jessie Redmon Fauset and Alain Locke, who followed the emergence of black “expressive culture” on both sides of the Atlantic, and African American literature reached Francophone audiences through translations in the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie américaine (1928) and pre-Négritude periodicals such as Légitime défense (1932) and La Revue du monde noir (1931– 1932), the latter a bilingual publication coedited by anglophile Paulette Nardal. Indeed, the strong impression left by Harlem Renaissance depictions of African Americans as independent, proud, and culturally distinct subjects prompted Aimé Césaire to observe, “Ils ont été les premiers à dire: ‘Le Noir est beau’” (They were the first to say, “Black is beautiful”) (qtd. in Fabre, “Du mouvement” 149; my translation). Césaire’s statement is brought to life by the striking resonance between the two epigraphs—one, the tortured musings of Toomer’s Ralph Kabnis, the other, the tentative overture of Césaire’s unnamed persona. Both bespeak the manner in which the tension between community and creation informs African diasporic modernisms differently than their French and Anglo American counterparts . In an essay on early French readings of Cane, Michel Fabre contends that most critics of the 1920s overlooked the “interplay of the folk tradition of communal wisdom and the voice of the solitary modernist” in Toomer’s groundbreaking text (“Reception” 204). This critical oversight casts the folk and the modern, the communal and the individual, as competing rather than complementary elements of modernism, yet it is precisely in such pairings that I locate the black modernist aesthetics of Toomer and Césaire.3 While Cane exudes the “‘folk spirit’” that Toomer encountered during his two- Black Modernism and Form in Jean Toomer and Aimé Césaire 103 month stay in Sparta, Georgia (McKay 32), Césaire’s Cahier, partially composed during his eight-year sojourn in Europe, renounces “poetic expression for its own sake” in order to present a persona who “sees himself as both poet and leader, the spokesman for a people not yet aware of their uniqueness” (Arnold 146). Toomer and Césaire not only write to the U.S. South and to the Caribbean, then, seeking to restore the link between an exiled modernist subject and his respective ancestral or geographic home, but also write of both locales, transforming them from noncoeval, premodern backdrops into stages for defining modernist encounters. Through these literary migrations, themselves mirrors of...