Hello, Dr. Grafals again.
And today I begin framing our discussion of
Aimé Césaire's masterwork Notebook of a
Return to the Native Land or Cahier d'un retour
au pays natal.
You'll want to turn on the subtitles as I
cite references from the poem and secondary
material on Césaire.
Just to give you a sense of the magnitude
of this poem and the figure of Aimé Césaire
in Caribbean thought, there's this moment
of testimony in Frantz Fanon's classic book
Black Skin, White Masks.
Remember, Frantz Fanon was one of the thinkers
referenced by Katherine McKittrick, he was
a psychiatrist and a philosopher of decolonization
who was actually taught by Aimé Césaire
when Aimé was a teacher in a secondary school
in Martinique.
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon states:
"a European familiar with the current trends
in black poetry would be amazed to learn that
as late as 1940 no Caribbean was capable of
thinking of himself as black.
It was only with Aimé Césaire that we witnessed
the birth and acceptance of negritude and
its demands.
The most visible proof of this is the impression
the young generations of students get when
they arrive in Paris: it takes a few weeks
for them to realize that their contact with
Europe compels them to face a number of problems
which up till then had never crossed their
mind."
(131-132).
Fanon is referring to his own experience as
a young scholar in Paris, but he may as well
be referring to Aimé Césaire himself, who
studied in Paris in the 1930's.
In Paris, Césaire would first come in contact
with a transnational community of black thinkers
from all sides of the Atlantic.
He became friends with writers like Leon Damas
from Guiana (then a French colony in South
America) and Leopold Senghor from Senegal
(then a French colony of Africa).
These black thinkers shaped his perspective
in terms of a new diasporic understanding
of black identity and together they would
go on to publish the literary review L'etudiant
Noir, or The Black Student.
We can argue then that it's this encounter
with a transnational black diaspora that would
shape the global vision we find in Notebook
of a Return to the Native Land.
With Leopold Senghor, who was later to become
the first president of an independent Senegal,
Césaire inaugurates the Négritude literary
movement.
Indeed, the word négritude first emerges
in poetry in Césaire's Notebook.
Aimé Césaire conception of négritude, or
black consciousness, would go on to influence
the identity of third world writers in both
the Caribbean and Africa.
While his friend Senghor would articulate
a conception of négritude that was largely
essentialist, for Césaire négritude was
something to be understood in historical terms,
as he states in an interview: "There
is no predetermined négritude; there is no
essence; there is only history - a living
history." [in Casa de las Americas interview]
While influenced by the U.S. Harlem Renaissance,
including writers like Langston Hughes and
the Jamaican-born Claude McKay, Césaire was
also influenced by French surrealism: poets
like Arthur Rimbaud and André Breton.
Surrealism was important to Césaire's poetics.
He's reaching for a new form of expression
beyond rational-scientific discourse, that
can animate his unique relation to the world.
So when he writes his Notebook, he is using
European modernist form but transforming
it in radical ways, something that Alejo Carpentier
will do when he creates the marvellous real.
Now, the Notebook first appears in 1939 in
a Paris literary journal called Volontes.
Césaire moves back to Martinique, like the
poetic "I" in his poem.
He works as a high school teacher where, like
I mention, he teaches key thinkers like Frantz
Fanon.
He becomes the mayor of Fort-de France after
World War II and becomes the leading statesman
of Martinique until the 1990's.
The poem Notebook of a Return to the Native
Land actually has many different versions.
The version we read is closer to the one published
in book form in 1947, which expands the text
by the addition of for instance that first
stanza where the poetic "I" tells figures
of authority to "beat it" with the addition
as well of political references like the invocation
of the outcast Jew, outcast Hindu and outcast Harlem man on pages 11 to 12.
The first version is actually heavier on religious
imagery and it's actually much tighter in
structure.
A translation came out recently in 2013 and
there's still debate at which one is better,
although I do love some of the additions to
the 1947 version.
But I recommend reading the earlier version quite highly.
So now let's see about wrapping our heads
around the structure of the text.
So we can divide the text into three movements.
After the initial burst of energy of that
first full stanza, the first movement's tone
becomes more downcast, as the poem reviews
the negative geographic spaces of Martinique:
the poem describes the town and the people
as poor, alienated and lacking a real identity.
We are even witness to the speaker's family
and a short-lived Christmas celebration that
helps but ultimately fails to affirm identity
in the midst of this downtrodden space.
The second movement can be said to begin on
page 13, when the poetic subject is spurred
on by the desire to go away from the island,
yet in hopes of returning to grant a new positive
identity to his people and space.
We can say that in this movement there is
this passage through Europe, a passage through
the violence of colonial history, but there is also
this passages through multiple identities.
At times there are bursts of enthusiasm, where
the voice feels elated at the re-discovery
of identity, but there are moments of dejection,
low-points that pull the poet's voice to depths
of negativity.
Perhaps the most notable low point is when
the speaker encounters a poor black man on
a streetcar or trolley on pages 29-31.
It's a moment where the speaker confesses
to his cowardice, to an internalized racism
that still afflicts the subject.
But just when we think the speaker has reached
the depths of a kind of dark night of the
soul, there begins a third movement.
The third movement can be said to begin on
page 33 with the lines "But what strange pride
suddenly illuminates me?"
The movement rushes forward into this imaginative
re-conquest of the middle passage, when the
speaker goes back in time to revolt aboard
a ship carrying enslaved Africans.
The poem ends on this moment of transfiguration,
when the speaker is carried upwards, wrapped
by a lasso of stars.
The poem ends with one of the great endings
to 20th century poetry "and the great black
hole where a moon ago I wanted to drown it
is there I will now fish the malevolent tongue
of the night in its motionless veerition."
That last word "verrition" is a neologism,
a new word, that is one of the most talked
about words in black poetics.
As we discuss this poem this Friday, I want
you to choose an angle of approach that you
want to write about.
Let us brainstorm possible questions.
How does poetic subject engage with what McKittrick
will go on to call black geographies?
How is the poem signaling a process of transformation
that allows the subject to be connected to
a new global collectivity?
What attitudes and conceptions of his own
identity has to be interrogated and critiqued
in order to affirm his identity anew?
How is his articulation of poetic discourse
important as a decolonizing practice?
How does he go about transforming his dejected,
negative homeland-space into something
worth celebrating?
All these questions and more can help us get
to a deeper understanding of the text.
You may want to read the poem more than once.
I also encourage you to read out loud.
The Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith translation
is a triumph in the art of translation.
See if you can feel the movements and rhythms
of self that emerge in the poem, the ups and
downs of affect, the enthusiasm of ideas and
the deflations of self.
If we could characterize this poem, it is a
journey in time and space in hopes of rediscovering
a new racial identity, a racial identity that gestures
towards universality.
I'd like to end with something Césaire said
in an interview: "The West told us that in
order to be universal we had to start by denying
that we were Black.
I, on the contrary, said to myself that the
more we were Black, the more universal we
would be." [in the Annick Thebia Melsan interview]
Thank you and looking forward to [the discussion]
