Negritude, identity and decolonization (2/2)

It is to blacks that these blacks address themselves, and it is to speak to them about blacks; their poetry is neither satirical nor imprecatory: it is an awareness. (So, you may ask, why are we interested in it, if not as a document? We can’t go into it). I would like to show by what route one finds access into this jet world and that this poetry, which at first seems racial, is ultimately a song of all and for all.

In the anthology I am presenting to you, there is only one subject that everyone is trying to deal with from Haiti to Cayenne, a single idea: to manifest the black soul. Negro poetry is evangelical, announcing the good news: Negritude has been rediscovered. But this negritude does not fall of its own accord under the gaze of the soul: in the soul nothing is given. The herald of the black soul has gone through white schools, in accordance with the iron law that denies the oppressed all the weapons that they themselves have not stolen from the oppressor: it is through the shock of white culture that his negritude has passed from immediate existence to the reflective state. But at the same time, he more or less stopped living it. By choosing to see what he is, he has split himself, he no longer coincides with himself.

I will call this poetry “Orphic” because this tireless descent of the Negro into himself makes me think of Orpheus going to claim Eurydice from Pluto. (…) This poetry, which at first seems racial, is in the end a song of all and for all (…). Black poetry in the French language is the only great revolutionary poetry today.

Race, negritude, recognition, solidarity

The Negro, like the white worker, is a victim of the capitalist structure of our society  this situation reveals to him his close solidarity, beyond skin shades, with certain classes of Europeans oppressed like himself  it prompts him to project a society without privilege where skin pigmentation will be held to be a mere accident. But if oppression is one and the same, it is shaped by history and geographical conditions: black people are its victims, as black people, as colonised natives or as deported Africans. And since he is oppressed in his race and because of it, it is first of all his race that he must become aware of.

Those who for centuries really tried, because he was a Negro, to reduce him to the state of a beast, he must force them to recognize him for a man. But there is no escape here, no cheating, no crossing the line. (…) The Negro cannot deny that he is a Negro, nor can he claim for himself this abstract colourless humanity. Thus he is driven to authenticity  insulted, enslaved, he straightens up, he picks up the word “nigger” that has been thrown at him like a stone, he claims to be black in front of the white man, in pride.

The issue of the use of the French language

Or what risks dangerously slowing down the efforts of black people to reject our tutelage, is that the heralds of negritude are forced to write their gospel in French. Scattered by the slave trade to the four corners of the world, black people have no common language; to encourage the oppressed to unite, they have to resort to the words of the oppressor. It is French that will provide the black singer with the largest audience among blacks, at least within the limits of French colonisation. It is in this goose-flesh language, pale and cold as our skies, and of which Mallarmé said that “it is the neutral language par excellence, since the genius of this land demands a softening of all too bright colours and bariolages, it is in this language, for them half dead, that Damas, Diop, Laleau, Rabéarivelo will pour the fire of their skies and their hearts : It is the only way they can communicate  like the scholars of the XVIᵉ century who could only get along in Latin, the blacks can only find each other on the terrain full of pitfalls that the white man has prepared for them  between the colonised, the colonist has arranged to be the eternal mediator  he is there, always there, even absent, even in the most secret conciliabula. And since words are ideas, when the negro declares in French that he rejects French culture, he is taking with one hand what he rejects with the other, he is installing in himself, like a crusher, the enemy’s thinking machine. This would be nothing: but at the same time, this syntax and vocabulary forged in other times, thousands of miles away, to meet other needs and designate other objects, are unfit to provide him with the means to talk about himself, his worries, his hopes. French language and thought are analytical. What would happen if black genius were above all synthetic? The rather ugly term négritude is one of the only black contributions to our dictionary. But finally, if this negritude is a definable or at least describable concept, it must subsume other, more elementary concepts corresponding to the immediate data of Negro consciousness : where are the words that make it possible to designate them ?

The status of poetry

The feeling of failure in the face of language considered as a means of direct expression is at the origin of all poetic expression. Prose is failure in essence.

It is not true, however, that black people express themselves in a “foreign” language, since they are taught French from an early age and are perfectly at ease with it as soon as they think like technicians, scholars or politicians. It would be better to talk about the slight and constant gap between what he says and what he would like to say, as soon as he talks about himself. It seems to him that a Northern Spirit is stealing his ideas, gently bending them to mean more or less than he intended, that the white words are drinking up his thoughts like sand drinks blood. When he suddenly pulls himself together and stands back, the words lie in front of him, unusual, half signs and half things. He will not speak of his blackness in precise, spaced-out words that hit the nail on the head every time. He will not express his negritude in prose. But everyone knows that this feeling of failure in the face of language considered as a means of direct expression is at the root of all poetic experience.

The reaction of the talker to the failure of prose is indeed what G. Bataille calls the holocaust of words. As long as we can believe that a pre-established harmony governs the relationship between the verb and Being, we use words without seeing them, with blind confidence; they are sensory organs, mouths, hands, windows open onto the world.”

At the first failure, this chatter falls out of us; we see the whole system, it is no more than a deranged, overturned mechanism, whose great arms are still waving to indicate in the void ; we judge at a stroke the mad enterprise of naming; we understand that language is prose in essence and prose, in essence, failure; being stands before us like a tower of silence and if we still want to capture it, it can only be through silence.

No one has said it better that poetry is an incantatory attempt to suggest being in and through the vibratory disappearance of the word: by staggering over his verbal impotence, by driving words mad, the poet makes us suspect beyond this self-cancelling tohu-bohu enormous silent densities; since we cannot be silent, we must make silence with language.

From Mallarmé to the Surrealists, the profound aim of French poetry seems to me to have been this self-destruction of language. The poem is a dark room where words collide in mad rounds. Collision in the air: they light each other’s fires and fall in flames. It is in this perspective that the efforts of the “black evangelists” must be situated.”

To the colonist’s ruse, they respond with an inverse and similar ruse: since the oppressor is present even in the language they speak, they will speak that language to destroy it. Today’s European poet attempts to dehumanise words in order to return them to nature; the black herald, on the other hand, will defranchise them; he will crush them, break their customary associations, mate them through violence.

(Césaire, Les Armes miraculeuses.)

Only when they have disgorged their whiteness do they adopt them, making of this ruined language a solemn and sacred super-language, Poetry. Through poetry alone, the blacks of Tananarive and Cayenne, the blacks of Port-au-Prince and Saint-Louis can communicate with each other without witnesses. And since French lacks the terms and concepts to guess what negritude is, since negritude is silence, they will use “allusive words, never direct, reducing themselves to equal silence” to evoke it. Short-circuits of language: behind the fiery fall of words.”

But it’s a hierarchical pairing: by handing it over to the Negro, the schoolteacher additionally hands over a hundred language habits that enshrine the priority of white over black. The Negro learns to say “white as snow” to signify innocence, to speak of the blackness of a look, of a soul, of a crime. As soon as he opens his mouth, he accuses himself, unless he is determined to overturn the hierarchy. And if he overturns it in French, he is already poetising: can you imagine the strange flavour that phrases like “la noirceur de l’innocence” or “les ténèbres de la vertu” would have for us? It is this that we taste on every page of this book and, for example, when we read:

“Your black satin breasts bouncing and gleaming… that white smile of your eyes

in the shadow of the face

awaken in me tonight the dull rhythms…

of which get drunk over there in the land of Guinea our sisters

bare and naked

(…) The soul of the black country where the elders sleep lives and speaks”

Throughout this poem black is a colour; better still: a light; its soft, diffuse radiance dissolves our habits; the black country where the ancients sleep is not a dark hell: it is a land of sun and fire. But on the other hand, the superiority of the white man over the black man does not merely reflect the superiority that the colonist claims to have over the native: more profoundly, it expresses the universal adoration of the day and our nocturnal terrors, which are also universal. In this sense, the blacks are re-establishing the hierarchy they were overturning earlier. They do not want to be poets of the night, that is to say of vain revolt and despair: they announce a dawn, they salute:

“The transparent dawn of a new day”

shouts one of them, and another:

“Deliver me from the night of my blood”

Thus the word black is found to contain both all Evil and all Good, it covers an almost unbearable tension between two contradictory classifications: the solar hierarchy and the racial hierarchy. It gains an extraordinary poetry like those self-destructive objects that come out of the hands of Duchamp and the Surrealists; there is a secret blackness of white, a secret whiteness of black, a frozen flicker of being and non-being that nowhere, perhaps, has been translated so happily as in this poem by Césaire:

“My great statue wounded a stone to the forehead my great flesh

inattentive by day to pitiless grains, my great flesh by night

to grain of day…”

“Our faces beautiful as the true operative power of negation”

Behind this abstract eloquence, we see the boldest and finest effort to give meaning to the black skin and to achieve the poetic synthesis of the two sides of the night. When David Diop says of the Negro that he is “black as misery”, he is presenting blackness as pure deprivation of light. But Césaire develops and deepens this image: night is no longer absence, it is refusal. Black is not a colour, it is the destruction of this borrowed clarity that falls from the white sun.

The Negro revolutionary is negation because he wants to be pure destitution: to construct his Truth, he must first ruin that of others. The black faces, those nocturnal memories that haunt our days, embody the obscure work of Negativity that patiently gnaws away at concepts. Thus, in a reversal curiously reminiscent of that of the humiliated Negro, insulted when he claims to be a “dirty Negro”, it is the privative aspect of darkness that underpins its value. Freedom is the colour of night.”

Destruction, self-destruction of language, magical symbolism, ambivalence of concepts, all modern poetry is here, in its negative aspect. But this is no gratuitous game. The situation of the black man, his “original tear”, the alienation imposed on him by foreign thought under the name of assimilation, obliges him to reconquer his existential unity as a negro or, if you prefer, the original purity of his project through a progressive asceticism, beyond the universe of discourse. Negritude, like freedom, is a starting point and an end point: it has to be moved from the immediate to the mediate, it has to be thematised. It is thus a matter of the black person dying to white culture in order to be reborn to the black soul, just as the Platonic philosopher dies to his body in order to be reborn to truth.

This dialectical and mystical return to the origins necessarily implies a method. But this method is not presented as a bundle of rules for directing the mind. It is one with the person who applies it; it is the dialectical law of successive transformations that will lead the Negro to coincide with himself in Negritude. For him, it is not a question of knowing, nor of tearing himself away from himself in ecstasy, but of discovering, at the same time, and becoming what he is.

To this original simplicity of existence there are two converging paths of access: one objective, the other subjective. The poets in the anthology sometimes use one, sometimes the other, and sometimes both together. There is in fact an objective negritude expressed in the customs, arts, songs and dances of the African peoples. The poet will prescribe for himself the spiritual exercise of allowing himself to be fascinated by primitive rhythms, of pouring his thought into the traditional forms of black poetry.

Negritude and Surrealism

I have marked elsewhere how the proletariat as a whole closed itself off from this poetry destructive of Reason: in Europe Surrealism, rejected by those who could have transfused their blood into it, languished and withered. But just as it was losing touch with the Revolution, in the West Indies it was grafted onto another branch of the universal Revolution, and blossomed into a huge, dark flower. Césaire’s originality lies in the fact that he poured his narrow and powerful concern for the Negro, the oppressed and the militant into the world of the most destructive, the freest and the most metaphysical poetry, at a time when Éluard and Aragon were failing to give political content to their verse. And in the end, what comes out of Césaire like a cry of pain, love and hatred is Négritude-objet. Here again he continues the Surrealist tradition of the poem as objective. Césaire’s words do not describe Négritude, do not designate it, do not copy it from the outside like a painter does from a model: they make it; they compose it before our eyes: henceforth it is something we can observe, learn from; the subjective method he has chosen joins the objective method we spoke of earlier: he expels the black soul out of himself at a time when others are trying to internalise it; the end result is the same in both cases.

Négritude is that distant tom-tom in the night streets of Dakar, it is the voodoo cries coming out of a Haitian window well and sliding down the pavement, it is that Congolese mask, but it is also that slobbering, bloody, mucus-filled poem by Césaire, writhing in the dust like a cut worm.

“”What makes, says Senghor, the negritude of a poem, is less the theme than the style, the emotional warmth that gives life to the words, that transmutes the word into verb. “We could not be warned better that negritude is not a state, nor a defined set of vices and virtues, intellectual and moral qualities, but a certain emotional attitude towards the world.

Psychology has since the beginning of this century abandoned its great scholastic distinctions. We no longer believe that the facts of the soul are divided into volitions or actions, knowledge or perceptions and feelings or blind passivities. We know that a feeling is a defined way of experiencing our relationship with the world around us, and that it envelops a certain understanding of that universe. It is a tension of the soul, a choice between oneself and others, a way of going beyond the raw data of experience, in short a project just like the voluntary act. Negritude, to use Heideggerian language, is the being-in-the-world of the Negro.

Here, moreover, is what Césaire tells us about it:

“My Negritude is not a stone, its deafness rushed against the

clamor of the day

My Negritude is not a dead pillowcase over the dead eye of the

earth

My Negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral

she dives into the red flesh of the ground

she dives into the fiery flesh of heaven

she holes the opaque overwhelm of her patient right”

Négritude is portrayed in these beautiful verses as an act much more than as a disposition. But this act is an inner determination: it is not a matter of taking in one’s hands and transforming the goods of this world, it is a matter of existing in the midst of the world. The relationship with the universe remains an appropriation. But this appropriation is not technical.

Césaire calls his black brothers:

“Those who invented neither gunpowder nor the compass

those who could never tame either steam or electricity

those who have explored neither the seas nor the skies…”

But this haughty claim to non-technicity reverses the situation: what might have passed for a lack becomes a positive source of wealth. The technical relationship with Nature reveals it as pure quantity, inertia, exteriority: it dies. Through his haughty refusal to be homo faber, the Negro gives it back its life. As if, in the ‘man-nature’ couple, the passivity of one of the terms necessarily led to the activity of the other. In fact, Negritude is not passivity, since it “pierces the flesh of heaven and earth: it is patience”, and patience appears to be an active imitation of passivity. The Negro’s action is first and foremost an action upon himself. The Negro stands up and stands still like a bird charmer and things come to perch on the branches of this false tree.

It is indeed a capture of the world, but a magical one, through silence and rest: by acting first on Nature, the white man loses himself by losing it; by acting first on himself, the Negro pretends to win Nature by winning himself.

“They surrender, seized, to the essence of all things

ignoring surfaces but captured by the movement of all things

unwilling to tame, but playing the world’s game

truly the eldest sons of the world porous to every breath

of the world…

chair of the flesh of the world pulsing with the very movement of the world.”

On reading this, one cannot help but think of Bergson’s famous distinction between intelligence and intuition. And Césaire rightly calls us “omniscient and naive victors”. The white man knows everything about the tool. But everything scratches at the surface of things, he ignores duration, life. Negritude, on the other hand, is understanding through sympathy. The secret of blackness is that the sources of its existence and the roots of Being are identical.

If we wanted to give a social interpretation of this metaphysics, we would say that a farmer’s poetry is opposed here to an engineer’s prose. It is not true that black people have no technology at all: the relationship of any human group with the outside world is always technical, in one way or another. And, conversely, I would say that Césaire is unfair: Saint-Exupéry’s plane, which folds the earth like a carpet beneath it, is an organ of unveiling. But the black man is first and foremost a farmer; agricultural technique is “straight patience”; it trusts life; it waits. Every atom of silence is the chance for ripe fruit, every moment brings a hundred times more than man has given, instead of the worker finding in the manufactured product only what he had put into it; man grows at the same time as his wheat; minute by minute he surpasses himself and gilds himself; on the lookout for this fragile, swelling belly, he intervenes only to protect. Ripe wheat is a microcosm because it took the sun, rain and wind to make it rise; an ear of wheat is both the most natural thing and the most unlikely chance.

2. Suzanne Césaire: Le Grand Camouflage. Écrits de dissidence (1941-1945)

The Tropiques magazine: a place of resistance and dissent

Suzanne Roussi Césaire was born in Trois-Îlets in Martinique on 11 August 1915 and died in 1966 due to poor health. She studied philosophy in France in the 1930s, where she met Aimé Césaire and married him in 1937. They had six children.

Suzanne Césaire and Aimé Césaire, teachers at the Lycée Schœlcher in Fort-de-France with three teacher friends – René Ménil, Aristide Maugée, Lucie Thésée – found the cultural journal Tropiques (1941-1945). France under German occupation. Marshal Robert, a member of the Petain regime, arrived in Fort-de-France with his fleet in 1939 to hide it away. French-style occupation, imposition of the fascist order with decrees, purges, deportations to the penal colony of Guyana, exactions of all kinds against the population, with the alliance of certain colonists and the powerful repressive force of hundreds of fusiliers of the French navy who took refuge in the West Indies with the gold of the Banque de France.

Bullying, racism, etc. The West Indies entered resistance-dissidence. Young Martiniquais entered dissidence and many of them reached Dominica and the English-speaking Caribbean in the fight against Nazism, via Borne Rouge in the north or Saint Lucia in the south, on makeshift rafts. Like the small Haitian state that declared war on Hitler before the United States did, they felt they were part of an anti-fascist international.

In this context, the journal Tropiques becomes a space of resistance. The opening text of issue 1 of the magazine, in April 1941, states:

“It’s no longer time to parasitise the world, it’s time to save it. It’s time to gird up our loins like a valiant man. Wherever we look, the shadows are winning. One by one, the fires are going out. (…) Yet we are among those who say no to the shadow. We know that the salvation of the world depends on us too. That the world needs every one of its children. The most humble. Time for dissent.”

The West Indies were liberated in July 1943, two months after Tropiques was banned, following the mutiny led by Commander Henri Tourtet and the entry into dissidence of the young West Indians.

The articles in Tropiques were brought to Admiral Robert’s information department by Suzanne Césaire to check the contents and request the paper needed for printing from Lieutenant Bayle. The latter agreed to the summary she presented: brilliant lessons for Terminale classes (Mallarmé, Péguy, Alain, Lautréamont), presentations of the African soul, or Hinduism, an inventory of botany, an omnipresence of poetry.

The distracted censors didn’t see that all these texts had to be read between the lines, right down to the last sentences, being wary of innocuous titles, which were in fact eruptive time bombs. Texts which, produced for yesterday and reread today, are as obvious as these seven articles in their topicality, and reiterate their major precept for any political, economic or cultural oppressor: “Accommodate me, I won’t accommodate you”. For three years, Tropiques passes unhindered through the filter of censorship.

Then came the censure from Captain Bayle: “I had thought to see in Tropiques the sign of a regionalism no less vigorous and no less desirable. I see that I was mistaken and that you are pursuing a different goal (…). You believe in the power of hatred, of revolt, and you set as your goal the free unleashing of all instincts, of all passions; it’s a return to barbarism pure and simple. Schœlcher, whom you invoke, would be astonished to see his name and his words used for such a cause (…). I therefore forbid the publication of the issue of Tropiques of which you kindly find enclosed the manuscripts.”

The reply written by Suzanne Césaire was as follows :“Sir, We have received your indictment of Tropiques. “Racists, sectarians, revolutionaries, ingrates and traitors to the Fatherland, poisoners of souls”, none of these epithets are essentially repugnant to us. “Poisoners of souls”, as Racine said to the gentlemen of Port-Royal. “Ungrateful traitors” to our beloved Fatherland, as Zola was called by the reactionary press. “Revolutionaries”, like Hugo in Châtiments. “Passionately sectarian, like Rimbaud and Lautréamont. “Racist, yes. From the racism of Toussaint Louverture, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, to that of Drumont and Hitler. As for the rest, don’t expect us to make any pleas, or vain recriminations, or even discussions. We do not speak the same language. Signed: Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Georges Gratiant, Aristide Maugée, René Ménil, Lucie Thésée. Fort-de-France, 12 May 1943.”

The Great Camouflage

In Le Grand Camouflage, Suzanne Césaire offers a panoramic, political and poetic view of the Caribbean – a view expanded since her trip to Haiti in 1944.

“Beyond analysis, denunciation, injunction, to reach the most beautiful of style, the closest to poetry, where true beings become characters, where logical order is blurred into mise-en-scene, where the natural setting is transmuted into the central character, and where the woman reaches the feminine of writing at the end of her last page by closing her eyes to better perceive the interior-night of bodies, heart and language.” Daniel Maximin, ” Suzanne Césaire, solar fountain ” (theatrical adaptation, 2015).

Suzanne Césaire writes, about cyclones : “At the heart of the cyclone everything cracks, everything collapses in the tearing sound of great demonstrations. Then the radios fall silent. The great palm tail of fresh wind has unfurled somewhere in the stratosphere. Where no one will follow the crazy iridescence and waves of light.” SC.

“After the rain, the sun. Haitian cicadas think of cringing love. When there’s not a drop of water left in the burnt grass, they sing furiously that life is beautiful, they burst into a cry too vibrant for an insect’s body. Their thin film of dry silk stretched to the extreme, they die, letting out the world’s least wet cry of pleasure.”

“Haiti remains, wrapped in soft sun ash with cicada eyes, the scales of mabouyas, the metal face of the sea that is no longer water but mercury. It’s time to lean out of the aluminium clipper window of the big bends.”

“And now, total lucidity. My gaze, beyond these perfect shapes and colours, catches a glimpse of the inner torments of this beautiful West Indian face. (…) For three centuries the colonial adventure has continued, the wars of independence are just one episode (…)

 While we are proud to note everywhere in American lands our extraordinary vitality, while ultimately it seems to allow us salvation, nevertheless we must dare to say that refined forms of slavery still prevail. Here, in the French West Indies, they degrade the thousands of negroes for whom the great Schœlcher wanted, a century ago, along with freedom and dignity, the title of citizen.

“We must dare to show on the face of France, illuminated by the implacable light of events, the stain of the West Indies, since so many of the French seem determined to tolerate no shadow there.”

“Awareness of the complexity of Caribbean identity ahead of its time. Poetics of liberation. Ability to depict not only the beauty of Martinique’s landscapes, but also the history of the island’s suffering and exploitation. Suzanne Césaire was more interested in the West Indies as a place where complex, multicultural influences converged than in the return to an idealised African past proposed by other negritude writers. A precursor of West Indian theorists such as Glissant and Chamoiseau.” Paraphrase p. 64-65, Annette Joseph-Gabriel, “Imaginer la libération “.

“Suzanne Césaire’s desire to dismantle the foundations of colonial thought, but also her desire to construct a new imaginary for a new Caribbean civilisation. In the context of the Second World War, her thought became dissident, and she attacked racism and fascism, which she hid behind literary or ethnological reviews to avoid censorship. Poetics that emphasise Caribbean art forms that are free of stereotypical images of tropical paradise. Reflections on cultural belonging, intellectual affiliation and political connection: a vision of decolonial citizenship inscribed in the West Indies, which perceives the Caribbean archipelago as a confluence of epistemologies.” Paraphrase p. 66, Annette Joseph-Gabriel, ” Imagining liberation “.

Coda du Grand Camouflage

        “And if my West Indies are so beautiful, it is then that the great game of   hide-and-seek has succeeded, it is because it is certainly too sunny, that day,   to see there.” Suzanne Césaire, Tropiques, number 13-14, 1945.