Loyal rebel

In Pablo Picasso’s portrait of Aimé Césaire, drawn after they met at the Soviet-organized World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace in Poland in August 1948, a man with a long, thin neck and close-cropped hair stands tall, his head ringed by a wreath of small flowers. His right eye is wide open; he might be gazing into the distance or glancing at the viewer. The shadow he casts makes it hard to tell exactly where he begins and ends.

The portrait, selected as the cover image for Césaire’s collection Corps perdu (1950; Lost Body, 1983), is a symbol of the competing claims made on and about the poet’s self and work, both in life and since his death in 2008. Just as Picasso’s sketch continues to resist simple definition, so does the real Césaire. He is the outspoken laureate of the tiers-monde, who used the master’s tools to remake the linguistic and social house; a committed but clear-sighted leftist whose break with the Communist Party in 1956 enabled his political career rather than stunting it; an upstanding graduate of the elite École normale supérieure who, as Martinique’s representative in the National Assembly in Paris between 1946 and 1993, was sympathetic to the case for his home country to become a department of France.

For all that Césaire’s writing challenges easy categorization, the recent publication of John Berger and Anna Bostock’s translation of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal groups him in the canonical Penguin Classics series for the first time. Written while he was a student, the French-language edition was published in 1939 and hailed by André Breton as an “irreplaceable document” and “the greatest lyrical monument of our times”. Published by Penguin in English in 1969, this translation, entitled Return to My Native Land (illustrated with Picasso’s drawing), is based on the definitive version released in 1956 by Présence Africaine. In a note, Berger and Bostock say theirs is neither “a free adaptation” nor “a completely literal translation”, reflecting their desire to retain the poem’s occasional “obscurity” as “only a detail to the lucid passion of the whole”.

This landmark long poem takes the reader on a journey from modern-day Martinique to key figures and sites in the history of colonialism around the world before returning to the Caribbean. Told by a poetic subject who both is and is not Césaire, and who comes to accept that he is a kind of lodestar for his people, Cahier is unflinching in its critique of colonialism and its legacies of violence. It draws on symbolist and surrealist techniques, and is bold in its use of neologism. The most renowned moments are Césaire’s use of the term “Négritude”, which he had coined as an assertion of global Black pride, in a passage that locates its origins in the Haitian Revolution, and the poem’s last words, “immobile verrition”, which Berger and Bostock translate as “seized swirl”. Derived from the Latin for “to turn”, this closing image evokes a still form of movement in relation to “la nuit”, gesturing to a meeting of the cosmic and natural orders, and capturing the tension between stasis and action that characterizes the speaker’s vision of his homeland and its future.

Césaire’s preoccupation with rhythm, his refrains, such as “Au bout du petit matin” (“At the end of the small hours”), and his stretching of metropolitan French attest to how Cahier’s thinking is, as Berger and Bostock note, “poetic”. This contributes to the formidable challenge of translating Césaire. Berger and Bostock often fare well, such as when we read of the speaker’s home’s “hairdo of galvanized iron buckling / in the sun like a drying hide”, or the “alcoholic swell of the sea”. But changes to the original that jump one step ahead of the poet are peppered throughout. At one moment, as the speaker prepares to go out into the world, verbs in the conditional tense are sometimes rendered as “I want to” and at other times as “I would”. The translators’ inconsistent use of the conditional dilutes the impact felt in French, downplaying the willed-for power of these sometimes cryptic speech acts.

Indeed, “difficult” is often a reader’s reaction on their first encounter with Cahier. In a lucid introduction to this reissue, Jason Allen-Paisant recalls thinking, as an undergraduate at the University of the West Indies, that “the poetry seems obtuse and I despair that I’ll ever understand the ideas it expresses”. Yet his relationship with Césaire has lasted years and spanned continents. Now a prizewinning poet and a professor at the University of Manchester, Allen-Paisant explores links between “spirit”, “poetry” and “knowing” in Césaire’s work in his new monograph, making the case for its capacity to speak to crises of climate and capitalism today. Nodding to the French tradition of littérature engagée, the book owes its content – but also its form – to Césaire. In particular Allen-Paisant draws on “Poetry and Knowledge” (1944), an essay in which Césaire sets out how “poetic knowledge” differs from “scientific knowledge” because of its roots in “an astonishing mobilisation of all human and cosmic forces”.

The introduction to Engagements with Aimé Césaire comprises eighteen epigrammatic notes that range in length from a sentence to several pages, and pose questions as they give definitions: “poetry is above all, a form, an understanding, of worlding”, for example. Four essays then broach Césaire’s poetry as, and with, philosophy; his relationship to possession; and the role of sound in verse and literature in the Anthropocene. Allen-Paisant is a careful and creative reader, and this book explores rich new links in Césaire’s work and between it and the world. His analysis (which draws on the speaker of the title poem in Corps perdu affirming that he would like to be on “the point of losing myself falling / into the lived body of a well-opened Earth”) of how Césaire grounds poetic knowledge in contact and how Négritude views “human existence as a fundamentally co-subjective/inter-subjective relationship with the other and with nature”, is astute and ethical without feeling didactic. “If we conceive of all ‘things’ as having some form of personhood, then we can make room for them in our decision-making”, Allen-Paisant concludes. The world in which Césaire practised politics has in many ways been swept away, but he would surely have agreed.

If the natural world was a touchstone for Césaire, so was Haiti. In 1944, he undertook an eight-month trip to the island where, in Berger and Bostock’s rendering, “Négritude rose to its feet for the first time and said it believed in its own humanity”. Haiti figures prominently in Cahier, and Césaire published a study, written in 1961, of Toussaint Louverture, a leader of the Haitian revolution, and La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963; The Tragedy of King Christophe, 1969), a play that tracks the transformation of a general under Louverture’s command into a tyrant. To this list we can add the first English translation of …… Et les chiens se taisaient, …… And the Dogs Were Silent. A version had previously been presented as a “dramatic poem”, collected in Les Armes miraculeuses (1946; The Miraculous Weapons, 1983), but this three-act drama is based on a typescript found by Alex Gil in the public library of Saint-Dié des Vosges, where it was among the papers of Yvan Goll, a poet and translator who received the document from Breton (who had been sent it by Césaire) and kept it after they fell out. Revealing that his dramatic turn began much earlier than the 1960s, the text casts a different light not only on Césaire’s evolution as a writer, but also on his account of the Haitian Revolution, which here is saturated in violence.

Like Cahier, …… And the Dogs Were Silent makes use of repetition to emphasize and undermine, and offers a sympathetic portrait of Louverture, who pledges to “guide this country to its own knowledge” and “acquaint this land with its secret demons”. Aimé Césaire’s imagery is similarly vivid and again channels diaspora: we read of Haiti’s “flaming fangs converging on America’s evil rump”, and of how “Congo and Mississippi flow gold / flow blood / the race of earth, the race of ash is on the move”. Short lines of dialogue in the bloody first two acts give way to longer speeches in the final act, in which Louverture dies. Defying his son’s call to surrender to the French, he refuses to entertain “French colonial doublespeak masking as republicanism”, as Gil notes in an introduction that lays out the origins of the play and the stakes of translating it, which he has done fairly and fluently. As in Penguin’s republication, printing the original alongside its English version will draw new readers, establishing …… And the Dogs, after decades in which it lay undiscovered, as a powerful text for today.

Franklin Nelson is an editor and writer at the Financial Times

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