Césaire, Aimé

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CÉsaire, AimÉ

June 26, 1913

The Martinican poet, playwright, essayist, and politician Aimé Césaire emerged as one of the leading voices of the Négritude movement after World War II. Born in BassePointe, in 1931 he was sent to the Louis-le-Grand secondary school in Paris on scholarship to prepare for entrance to the École Normale Supérieure, which he entered in 1935. In March of that year he published an article on "Black Youth and Assimilation" (Négreries: Jeunesse noire et assimilation") in the only surviving issue of L'Étudiant noir. Neither he nor L. S. Senghor used the term Négritude in that ephemeral student paper. The notions of African heritage that would eventually be called Négritude were initially culled from Leo Frobenius's book Kulturgeschichte Afrikas, in French translation La Civilisation africaine (1936), as both Césaire and Senghor later confirmed.

Césaire has had a tortured relationship with black America. In the decade prior to Brown v. Board of Education professors Mercer Cook and Edward A. Jones saw the young intellectual and poet of Négritude as a beacon to the race. (Césaire's thesis on the theme of the South in the work of black American writers received a mention in Cook's Five French Negro Authors in 1943.) From the first Congress of Negro Writers and Artists held in Paris in 1956 to the late 1960s, however, Césaire was held in suspicion by the black elite of the United States. In 1958 John A. Davis of Howard University, who led the U.S. delegation to the Paris conference and who had taken grievous offense at Césaire's depiction of black Americans as a colonized people within their own country, co-edited the volume Africa from the Point of View of American Negro Scholars. Davis assigned to Samuel Allen the difficult task of presenting to integrationists the originality of a poet who was a Marxist, a Communist delegate from Martinique to the French National Assembly from 1946 to 1956, and an atheist. The Black Power movement from the end of the 1960s through the 1970s, which would promote a new radicalized black elite—many of whom had Caribbean connections—overturned the view of Césaire held by their elders. From the late 1970s to the present a new generation of university-trained black intellectuals has developed a more sophisticated view of Césaire, which has followed the general trend toward diasporic and postcolonial studies.

Négritude is the central subject that has dominated discussion of Césaire in the United States. Poorly understood and usually reduced to a tag line such as "Black is Beautiful," the word and the concept emerged in Césaire's long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Cahier d'un retour au pays natal), which was first published as a volume in New York by Brentano's in 1947. The poem in its pre-1956 editions demonstrates a fairly clear dialectical structure in which the speaker-hero first describes the sick state of his colonized native land; then, in a long middle section, the speaker makes an Orphic descent into his own and his island's social and psychic history; so as to be reborn in the upward-surging and much shorter final section of the poem. In conclusion, the speaker assumes a messianic leadership role. Césaire's concept of Négritude, unlike that of L. S. Senghor of Senegal with which it is too often confused, is thus a dynamic structure of a lyric and dramatic type that he has sometimes called Pelean (after the name of Martinique's volcano) because of the violent explosive imagery that characterized his poetry from the early 1940s to about 1960. The period from 1941 to 1948 marked Césaire's closest association with the Paris surrealists. The surrealist poetic features of his collections Miraculous Weapons (1946) and Solar Throat Slashed (1948) were so mystifying to American readers used to the style of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen that his treatment of subjects such as lynching elicited no critical reaction. His poem on the brutal killing of young Emmett Till in Mississippi in August 1955 was published in the Paris journal Présence Africaine as "Message sur l'état de l'Union" ("State of the Union Address") in the February–March 1956 issue before being collected in Ferrements (Ferraments, 1960). It met the same fate.

The full flower of Césaire's heroic vision of Négritude is to be found in his lyrical oratorio And the Dogs Were Silent (Et les chiens se taisaient), which was first published in English in 1990. In Dogs the sacrificial hero, called The Rebel, undergoes agony and death, which are meant to galvanize the community to collective action. Césaire told an early student of his theater that he had in mind the tragedies of Aeschylus as Nietzsche understood them in The Birth of Tragedy.

During the decade of the 1960s, as African and Afro-Caribbean societies—other than Césaire's own in the French West Indies—were gaining their independence, Césaire published no new poetry and turned to the theater. In his first play written for the stage, The Tragedy of King Christophe (La Tragédie du roi Christophe, 1963), a minor character called Metellus embodies the agonism that characterized the speaker of the Notebook and the hero of Dogs. Unable to come to terms with the needs of political compromise, Metellus is killed by the future leaders of Haiti on the battlefield. This fate quite clearly signifies that Césaire's lyrical Rebel was to be abandoned on the threshold of politics as predominantly black societies emerged across the world. The Haitian Revolution in Césaire's work is usually summed up in a few lines extracted from the Notebook. Toussaint Louverture (1961) preceded The Tragedy of King Christophe by two years and explains many of the choices Césaire made in the events and characters depicted. Toussaint Louverture is divided into three sections, which represent the dialectical movement of history as Césaire then understood it: I—The Insurrection of the White Colonists; II—The Mulatto Revolt; III—The Black Revolution. The revolt of the mulattos was but the antithesis of the white reactionary insurrection; it triggered the only true revolutionary movement, that of the black ethnoclass. Thus, Césaire's dramatic hero had to be Christophe, the black emperor, rather than Dessalines (murdered by his generals), Pétion (a mulatto), or Toussaint (the Rebel who dies sacrificially in a French military prison).

The condemnation of the United States and the United Nations for complicity in the death of Patrice Lumumba in Une Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo, 1965) did not elicit much sympathy from either black or white America. Nor did Césaire's preference for Malcolm X over Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Une Tempête (A Tempest, 1969) improve the playwright's standing in the eyes of the African-American establishment in the aftermath of the assassination of King. (Césaire told interviewers that he had King in mind in rewriting Shakespeare's Ariel and that Malcolm was his model for Caliban.) The elegiac tone of Césaire's final collection of verse, moi, laminaire… ( i laminaria…, 1982) marked a critical engagement with the heroic pose of the hero of Négritude. It has been neglected by partisans of Afrocentrism, who have invested heavily in a mythic interpretation of Césaire's first phase to the detriment of a full understanding of his work's significance for the black Americas.

Bibliography

Allen, Samuel. "Tendencies in African Poetry." In Africa from the Point of View of American Negro Scholars, edited by Alioune Diop and John A. Davis, pp. 175–198. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1958.

Arnold, A. James. Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Arnold, A. James. "La réception afro-américaine de Césaire: un dialogue difficile aux États-Unis." In Césaire 70, edited by M.aM. Ngal and Martin Steins, pp. 141–161. Paris: Silex, 1984.

Arnold, A. James. "Negritude, Then and Now." In A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Vol. 1. Hispanic and Francophone Literature, edited by A. James Arnold, pp. 479–484. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994.

Césaire, Aimé. A Season in the Congo. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Grove Press, 1968.

Césaire, Aimé. The Tragedy of King Christophe. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Grove Press, 1969.

Césaire, Aimé. The Collected Poetry. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983 (bilingual edition).

Césaire, Aimé. Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946–1982. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Charlottesville, Va., and London: University Press of Virginia, 1990.

Césaire, Aimé. A Tempest; based on Shakespeare's The Tempest—Adaptation for a Black Theatre. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992 [1985].

Cook, Mercer. Five French Negro Authors. Washington, D.C.: Associated Negro Publishers, 1943.

a. james arnold (2005)

Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History