Notebook of a Return
to the Native Land by Aime Cesaire, translated and edited by
Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, with an introduction by Andre
Breton, (Wesleyan U. Press, Middletown, CT: 2001)
a book review
by Rev. Dr. Larry Delano
Coleman
“Negritude”
immediately comes to mind, when I hear the name Aime Cesaire. He
invented that “Africentric” literary perspective, among
Francophone blacks, along with his fellow Parisian-educated, colonial
cohorts: Leopold Senghor and Leon Damas—whom I was honored and
thrilled to meet my freshman year at Howard University.
Having studied French for
5 years in junior high and high school, where we read, as class
assignments, Moliere's Le Bourgeoise Gentilhommme, Victor
Hugo's Les Miserables, and Guy de St. Exupery's Le Petite
Prince, among others, I yet retained sufficient confidence, over
40 years later, to undertake Cesaire's widely acclaimed “piece de
resistance,” Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natale,
albeit in English!
While it did not
disappoint, per se, I was less than enthralled with it awful honesty,
its unabashed rawness, and the abject sense of futility about his
Martinique island home.
Cesaire is a poet and a
damn good one! His craft is commendable. But his images hurt.
Perhaps, they hurt me, because my legacy is African-diasporic like
his and millions more. A few images may suffice to illustrate my
angst.
“At the end daybreak...a
cursed venereal sun.” The poem opens. “...the hungry Antilles,
the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited by alcohol,
stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dust of this town sinisterly
stranded.” It continues. “...an aged life mendaciously smiling,
its lips opened by vacated agonies; an aged poverty rotting under the
sun, silently; an aged silence bursting with tepid pustules, the
awful futility of our raison d'etre.” One wonders why he would ever
want to return to: “...this inert town, this desolate throng under
the sun, not connected with anything that is expressed, asserted,
released, in broad earth daylight, its own.” Fear is palpable in
such an “inert town” that is “not connected with anything...its
own.” Such are those “fears perched in trees...dug in the
ground...adrift in the sky, of piled up fears and their fumaroles of
anguish.”
I was reminded of
novelist, Richard Wright's, American Hunger, a social
anthology by his African American counterpart and contemporary, when
Cesaire drools upon hunger's insidious effect: “And neither the
teacher in his classroom, nor the priest at catechism will be able to
get a word out of this sleepy little nigger, no matter how
energetically they drum on his shorn skull, for starvation has
quicksanded his voice into the swamp of hunger...”
He places Martinique in a
neo-geographic, if not historic context, when he writes “And my
non-fence island, its brave audacity standing at the stern of this
polynesia, before it, Guadeloupe, split in two down its dorsal line
and equal in poverty to us, Haiti where negritude rose for the first
time and stated that it believed in its humanity and the funny little
tail of Florida where the strangulation of a nigger is being
completed, and Africa gigantically caterpillaring up to the Hispanic
foot of Europe, its nakedness where death scythes widely.”
Apostate,
sneering, hideous, complicitous, “rouge of dust mixed with rheum;”
these biting words are bullets in his expiatory arsenal. Cesaire
rages about his own “cowardice rediscovered!” Declaring “My
heroism what a farce! This town fits me to a t. And my soul is lying
down. Lying down like this town in its refuse and mud.”
Purging
himself, finally, he sighs reverently “At the end of this daybreak
of my virile prayer...the lover of this unique people... I accept, I
accept it all...to you I surrender my conscience and its fleshy
rhythm...my abrupt words...embrace, embrace us at dusk...”
Poignant,
palpable, powerful. Only such an impassioned soul as that of Aime
Cesaire, could have imprinted the soul of fellow Martiniquan and
psychiatrist, the iconic Franz Fanon, his devotee and student, whose
virile works—BLACK SKIN/WHITE MASK and THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH—so
imprinted me and others like me!
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