A Theory of Negritude

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE once described Aime Cesaire as a poet who "snatched" surrealism from the Europeans and turned it against them. One of the best-known Black Francophones, Cesaire not only assimilated the dominant culture to attack it eventually, but he transcended the physical and psychological ruins of colonialism and built a new aesthetic. Aime Cesaire: The Collected Poetry shows the evolution of Cesaire's style in a complete and annotated text.

Born in Martinique in 1913, Cesaire grew up with the French prose classics and the poetry of Victor Hugo. His family had middle-class aspirations and so emphasized the value of French culture that Creole never became a viable means of expression for Cesaire. Sent to study in Paris at age 18, he met Leon Damas and Leopold Senghor and began to formulate his theory of negritude.

The Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, first published in 1939, is an extended lyric poem, and was the first appearance of "negritude" in print. In choosing the word, its creators had simply latinized the derogatory word for black in French (negre) and attached an augmentative suffix. Lacking in English ****equivalent, the term has no absolute definition. Cesaire chose to show negritude in relation to its negation so as to illustrate its strength:

my negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of day

my negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earth's dead eye

my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral

it takes root in the red flesh of soil

it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky

it breaks through opaque prostration with its upright patience

To understand the significance of the negritude movement, one must understand how Cesaire succeeded in expressing revolutionary ideas in the rigid structure of the French language. Cesaire's skill with the language has provoked many people to conclude that his poems are merely intellectual word games, but the play of words and rhythms is precisely one of the ways Cesaire infuses French with the elements of negritude. In "Batouque," the title word is like the clap of hands, regularly punctuating the phrases as clapping in a chant. The words tumble forth and build to a feverish pitch that is drilled into the mind by the incessant chorus batouque.

Unfortunately, some of Cesaire's dexterity in French suffers in the translation. For example, "ils tirent a blanc," has to be literally translated so that the double meaning of shooting blanks and shooting whites is obvious. There are other places where the translation falters: In "Tom Tom II," "a petits pas de pluie de chenilles" translates to "with baby steps like a rain of caterpillars," which not only sounds inane but loses the alliteration and onomatopoeia of the original. The English and French versions are on opposing pages so that the reader can concentrate on one version and refer to the other when necessary.

Cesaire's poetry was clearly influenced by Rimbaud and Baudelaire, as well as by the works of the American primitivists from the Harlem Renaissance, particularly Claude MacKay. But it was the style of the French symbolists he most admired. The first line of "The Griffin" ("I am a memory that does not reach the threshold") is reminiscent of the opening of Nerval's "El Desdichado," and Cesaire's use of the Alexandrine meter recalls Baudelaire's poems. However, his exotic images were not correspondences to a higher world, but the very natural environment of Martinique and Africa (which he had seen and Baudelaire had not). His affirmation of African values through a European language allowed Cesaire to infuse his poetry with politics. Negritude, at first merely a stylistic definition, came to reflect the political dilemma of newly-liberated African and Caribbean countries.

Cesaire entered the world of politics after a seven-year visit to Haiti, which he felt demonstrated the possibility of Caribbean independence. In 1945 he was elected Martinique's Deputy to the National Assembly in Paris to form the constitution of the Fourth Republic. His collections of poetry during this period, published as Solar Throat Slashed (Soleil Cou Coupe). The Miraculous Weapons and Lost Body combine his surrealistic style and a growing violence in his verse:

then it is no use for me to press my

heart against yours/nor to lose my-

self in the foilage of your arms/the

herd finds it/and very solemnly/in

a manner always new/licks it/

amorously/until the first blood sav-

agely appears...

ALTHOUGH HIS POETRY includes images of violence, mutilation, and blood, Cesaire's aim was not revolution but self-renewal. Until 1956 he was an avowed Communist, like many French surrealists, but he later came to reject Marxism because of its part in the dominant culture that had colonized Martinique. Cesaire founded the Martinican Progressive Party (PPM) in 1958 and during the 1960s, wrote plays about colonialism and liberation. The personal and political loss that colonialism had caused is tragically painted in "Africa":

your solar tiara knocked down to

your neck by rifle butt;

they have turned it into an iron-col-

lar, your clairvoyance

they've put out its eyes; prostituted

your chaste face;

screaming that it was guttural, they

muzzled

your voice, which was speaking in

the silence of shadows

Cesaire also embraced the struggle of Black Americans in "On the State of the Union," a highly sardonic poem on the murder of Emmet Till, a Black boy who allegedly eyed a white woman. The white Americans are described as bloodless, their hearts made of "tough antiseptic meat."

But Cesaire never resolved the problem of poetry's relation to revolution, a problem which South African poets now face. Yet he succeeded in becoming a bridge between the seemingly irreconcilable worlds of Europe and Africa. Instead of rejecting the African culture, he held it up as a vision in which all mankind would recognize itself. And like the Black American Alice Walker, Cesaire realized that only by using the particular can a writer reach the universal.

Perhaps Cesaire was too optimistic in believing the world would accept Africa on equal terms. Even his own Martinique is merely an overseas department of France and its dual identity has not died. The most recent poems included in Collected Poems are hardly as fiery as his earlier works, revealing his doubts about the new African states and about his own ideals. But the mingling of pleasure and violence and the searing images remain. His themes of mythology and negritude still haunt his poems, as in the brutal yet hopeful "Ferments":

Seducing your bird-like reticence

with

the feast of my liver oh Sun, torn

open, lurching.

The bitter struggle taught us our

cunning,

biting the clay, kneading the dust

marking the sweating earth

with blazons of our backs, with the

bloody

trees of our shoulders, bloody

eagle disentangled jolt of dawn.

The political climate has changed since the poem's first publication in 1960 and so has the optimism that accompanied it. Yet Cesaire's poetry of negritude, in its tension between form and content, transcends the particular and is thus an essential chapter in Black history and literature.