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The “Césaire Effect,” or How to

Cultivate One’s Nation
Mireille Rosello

W
hen discursive rupture points explode on the cultural scene, due
to the incandescent power of a thinker’s words as well as to a pub-
lic’s ability to hear the call of a new political and poetic voice, the
person who originally embodied the new cry soon disappears behind his
or her notoriety. Like Marx, like Freud, Césaire hardly owns his words, his
persona is public property, even his written work is tightly interwoven with
that of his critics, commentators, imitators, opponents, and admirers: quo-
tations from Le cahier d’un retour au pays natal, from La tragédie du roi
Christophe have become a “terreau primordial” ‘primordial soil’ (Leiner)
out of which grows an intricate proliferation of new and not so new inter-
pretations, as well as a strident chorus of vociferous or moderate judg-
ments and counterjudgments.
Like other commentators, I have to choose between various metaphors
of continuation, inheritance, influence, posterity, and Jacqueline Leiner’s
allusion to a fertile soil captures my imagination perhaps better than other
models. Yet, at least two other paradigms are difficult to ignore: the idea of
filiation and that of legacy. In some sense, we may think that it was
inevitable for “Papa Césaire” to engender literary and political children.
After all, did his poetic alter ego not once ask:
[. . .] et de moi-même, mon coeur, ne faites ni un père, ni un frère
ni un fils, mais le père, mais le frère, mais le fils
ni un mari, mais l’amant de cet unique peuple. (Cahier 70)
and as for me, my heart, do not make me into a father nor a brother,
nor a son, but into the father, the brother, the son,
nor a husband, but the lover of this unique people. (Notebook 71)
However, I would like to avoid using Césaire’s work and Cesairian pre-
existing mythologies as a vast repertoire of material that we could all use
to justify and corroborate any coherent narrative about the fictional figure
that we constantly re-invent for different purposes. It may be more fruitful
to explore the contradictory meanings and values that our chosen
metaphors of the poet help circulate like bees (another metaphor I am
afraid) that carry pollen from flower to flower. Any complex image can sus-
tain the complexity of reactions generated by Césaire’s complexities and
the “filiation” paradigm is no exception: if Roger Toumson, the co-author
of Aimé Césaire, le nègre inconsolé, resolutely and confidently claims to be
“adepte respectueux d’une filiation idéologique, philosophique et lit-
téraire” ‘a respectful follower of an ideological, philosophical, and literary
legacy’ (Apologie 7),1 we are also familiar with the violent reactions trig-
gered by Raphaël Confiant’s decidedly anti-Cesairian volume, Aimé Césaire
ou une traversée paradoxale du siècle (1993). Some flew to the rescue,
disgusted by the symbolic murder of the good black father and refusing to

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78 Research in African Literatures

see any continuity between this apparently personal attack and the decla-
ration made by the “créolistes” in their 1989 Eloge de la créolité: “Nous
sommes à jamais fils d’Aimé Césaire” (18) “We are forever Césaire’s sons
(80).” Annie LeBrun spared no vitriolic prose to denounce Patrick
Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Jean Bernabé’s “malhonnêteté” and
“terrorisme” (“Aimé Césaire” 18). Just as she had contemptuously dubbed
the first generation of French feminists “neo-feminists,” she contemptu-
ously relegated Césaire’s critics to the rank of “neo-créoles” (21), dismiss-
ing their ideas as a version of Parisian chic, a territory where Chamoiseau,
Confiant, Bernabé (and even Edouard Glissant) operate in the apparently
despicable company of Julia Kristeva and Michel Serres (21).2
Self-defense or oil on the fire, the targets of her wrath greeted her
intrusion on the West Indian scene with less than complimentary remarks.
In 1998, in an otherwise moderate and thoughtful article, Jean Bernabé
packs LeBrun away in a laconic footnote while making it clear that he sees
her as the archetypal example of ludicrous “césairolâtres, gardiens du tem-
ple appliqués, dans leur zèle intempestif et leur myopie intellectuelle, à
agonir d’injures, de quolibets et de dénégations horrifiées les prétendus
blasphémateurs” ‘Cesairolizers, guardians of the temple, who, in their mis-
guided zeal and intellectual near-sightedness, insist on hurling insults, sar-
castic remarks, and horrified denials at the alleged blasphemers’
(“Négritude césairienne” 57). Perhaps more importantly (for is it fair to
allocate good points either for best polemic formula or for greater level of
self-control and moderation?), he points out that the very notion of filia-
tion is ambiguous and that “[l]a qualité de fils peut, il est vrai, s’assortir
d’épithètes diverses, légitime, spirituel, loyal, rebelle, prodigue, dénaturé,
bâtard et j’en passe” ‘it is true that different adjectives can qualify the son’s
nature: a son can be legitimate, spiritual, loyal, rebellious, prodigal, bas-
tard, unfit, and so on’ (55). After all, the faithfulness of loyal sons can
explain some analysts’ unflinching support, admiration, and praises but
rebelliousness, while it can be condemned as betrayal, can just as easily be
forgiven as a case of disillusioned love, or even praised as a more genuine
interpretation of Césaire’s love for freedom.3
In other words, the metaphor of “sons” (since the gender-specific allu-
sion to male offspring seems to dominate here) may be frustratingly capa-
ble of having the opposite yet unproductive effect or either fueling or
defusing a controversy that may seem suspicious because of its grandilo-
quent excesses. Perhaps other models might encourage us to treat the so-
far aborted debate as a valid intellectual or poetic point of departure.
It is not that I systematically object to metaphors of filiation but I
always suspect that the implicit allusions to family trees imply that some
(legitimate) heirs inherit while others are excluded from the legacy. And
although I acknowledge that there is a strong desire for leadership and
guidance in Césaire’s poems and plays, I cannot conceive of a definition of
a political and lyric poetry that would dictate (successfully) its own future
interpretations and appropriations. I cannot understand how the legacy of
a poet could be limited, maimed, shrunk by the existence of any will. One
of the poems of Moi, laminaire, “Transmission,” reads:
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Mireille Rosello 79

Je hurlais
Vous n’avez pas le droit de laisser couper
le chemin de la transmission (148).
i was screaming
you have no right to allow
the transmission channel to be cut. (149).
To be honest, I don’t know what the poem means exactly: and I have not
given up on my earlier promise not to quote a supposedly monolithic
Césaire just to confirm my own points. I am not sure that this sentence
refers to the transmission of his work (as the deputy? as the Mayor of Fort
de France?) and I am not excerpting these two lines as evidence that
Césaire will not leave a will. But what the poem gives me is the vision of an
“I” screaming in fear and anger, urging an anonymous “vous” to protect
the undefined “transmission channel” threatened with rupture. What is
being transmitted and how remains unclear. Transmission, however, is
treated as a sacred duty. We normally think of wills as what ensures the exis-
tence of a transmission (of goods, or ideas). I suggest that poetic wills work
the other way around: they interrupt legacies instead of preserving them.
Poems deserve daring acts of re-appropriation, loyal as well blasphemous,
accurate as well as inaccurate, thorough as well as superficial, academic as
well as mercantile, or perhaps academically mercantile as well as disinter-
estedly commercial.
Consequently, the image of that chaotic inheritance may be better
realized through metaphors of vegetal growth that reflect the complex
relationship between the seed and the soil, the tree and the shady area it
delimits and under which small plants grow in a mangrove-like environ-
ment: if Césaire’s overt ambition is to celebrate the poet and the politi-
cian’s metamorphosis into a “semeur d’idées” ‘sower of ideas,’4 “un
homme d’ensemencement,” as he puts it in the Cahier (70) (“a man of ger-
mination,” Notebook 171), readers can anticipate that, between the sowing
and the growing, much will take place that the poet cannot control: the
image of the farmer (or of the mature tree producing seeds or fruit) is not
a metaphor of straightforward filiation. Many elements must combine for
a seed to grow, and we may imagine that the historical soil where a “peo-
ple” is supposed to develop (the relationship with a more or less authori-
tarian Fifth Republic, the example of decolonizing African countries) will
play a role at least as important as their own (or their leader’s) desire, will,
and perception of their own destiny. It is the combination of the cultural
context as well as the meaning of the poet’s words that create a context
allowing or discouraging certain reappropriations, regardless of whether
the man encourages them or not. And literary critics may not have the best
tools at their disposal to quantify such delicate chemistry between the “ter-
reau” and the “semeur.” It is hard to assert with any confidence whether
Confiant’s book was the expression of many Martinicans’ muted doubts or
whether his essay was mostly heard in European circles that were ready to
welcome the excitement of eccentric dethronings. No exact science can
remove all unpredictability from the mysterious interaction between a soil
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80 Research in African Literatures

and what it bears but it would be even riskier to pretend to analyze sepa-
rately the three elements that compose this alchemy (Césaire’s words, his
audience, the historical context where the reception occurs) or to ignore
the constantly changing dialectic between the three elements: some may
be empowered or disempowered by the legacy just like some plants will
thrive in the shade of a huge tree but might find their ambition to emulate
its greatness thwarted by the very protection it has granted them.
Admittedly, the image of a tall and powerful tree whose influence
extends well beyond Martinique reflects the strength, perhaps the pride,
of a leader who represented “his” people until 1993.5 For some, “le silence
s’apparentera au vide laissé par la chute des sequoias ou par la béance des
caldeiras éteintes. Mais la pensée est convoyeuse de pollen” ‘the ensuing
silence will resemble the hole left by the fall of sequoias or the vacuum of
extinct calderas. But the thought pollinates’ (Ponnamah 121),6 while
others will choose to interpret the same silence as the disappearance of a
“figuier maudit” ‘accursed fig tree’7 that monopolizes space and stifles
future growth, but both the flattering and the critical vision treat Césaire
as an undisputed master whose fecundity is acknowledged: as Confiant
puts it, perhaps not so reluctantly, “Certes, comme dit le proverbe créole
«Sé déyé pyémango ki chajé moun ka vréyé wôch (On ne lance des cail-
loux qu’aux manguiers chargés de fruits)»” ‘Of course, as the creole
proverb puts it, we only throw stones to fruit-bearing mango trees’ (Aimé
Césaire 297). Consequently, just as it is impossible to dissociate the poet and
the politician, the Martinican and the “nègre,” the “cri,” and the deputy’s
rhetoric, it may be that Césaire’s work now includes (or is included by) all
the discourses that appropriate it, the words spawned by his own.
Paradoxically then, even the idea of a discrepancy between contradictory
aspects of his figure can be said to be part of the legacy. And one particu-
lar offshoot or branch shows no sign of being stifled by any “accursed fig
tree”: that most vexing and recurring difficulty, the issue of whether it is
possible to reconcile the poet and the politician, or rather, the perceived
distance between the poet’s violence and his political moderation. That
question seems to function like a Deleuzian rhizome, or perhaps like the
aerial roots of the Mauritian fig tree that Depestre recently adopted as the
metaphor of his multiple identity: the “banian” (banyan).8 With the regu-
larity of special issues and commemorations, the issue resurfaces like an
indestructible phoenix: did Césaire sell out when he opted for “depart-
mentalization” rather than independence in 1946, should he have fol-
lowed Sekou Touré’s example in 1958, did he refuse to hear his people’s
aspiration to independence in the early sixties and when the ARC claimed
a series of terrorist attacks in 1983?
In 1992, Lilyan Kesteloot recognized that “[d]epuis les années 60, en
Afrique et ailleurs, nous avons souvent entendu reprocher à Césaire le fait
de produire une poésie d’une extrême violence et de pratiquer une poli-
tique différente, prudente, modérée” ‘since the ’60s, in Africa and else-
where, Césaire has often been blamed for writing an extremely violent
poetry while practicing a different moderate, and cautious politics’
(“Politique, poétique et quête mystique” 7). And her response is straight-
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Mireille Rosello 81

forward: rather than denying the gap between the poetics and the politics,
she accepts that the two activities are sometimes incompatible at least at
the level of tactics: “Nous avons tenté, nous le faisons encore à l’occasion,
d’expliquer que écrire et agir sont aussi des choses différentes et qu’il est
classique qu’on réalise dans l’écriture (ou l’art en général) au niveau de
l’imaginaire, ce que l’existence concrète vous empêche d’entreprendre ou
de faire aboutir” ‘We have tried, and occasionally still try, to explain that
writing and action are two different things and that writing (or art in gen-
eral) typically allows people to achieve, at the level of the imaginary, what
everyday life prevents you from starting or completing’ (7). In other
words, Césaire’s career forces him to be an “homo duplex” (Toumson,
“Jubilé” 18) and his role as a politician and poet is bound to appear as con-
tradictory: an absence of ambiguities would have been problematic, prob-
ably a betrayal of both roles (Césaire adamantly refuses Aragon’s national
poetry and he does not confuse his role with that of his tragic heroes).
Kesteloot’s argument is perfectly logical but it is also true that it may not
sound acceptable to those who continue to perceive this discrepancy as a
form of betrayal because they object to the dialectical tension between
visions and daily politics.9
I have to admit that I am not particularly eager to agree to separate the
poet’s strategy from the politician’s tactics. But it is not because I see the
politician’s seemingly unglamourous patience as an unavoidable compro-
mise. Rather, it is because I want to qualify the word “violence” when
applied to Césaire’s poetry: his literary work, it seems to me, cannot be
reduced to a welcome form of “violence,” be it politically sublimated vio-
lence or a long-awaited “Pelean” eruption. It may be that the type of vio-
lence to which Césaire objects is absent from his political work and
present, but only as one of the options, in the literary work that stages sev-
eral scenarios. I would argue that Césaire’s work contains violence, but
often as one of the two sides of a debate, where two theories, two philoso-
phies are often defended by several characters. And the question is not
whether or not Violence, in the abstract, is desirable but whose violence,
what type of violence is desirable at which moment. If we take the example
of La tragédie du roi Christophe, we can read the play as a demonstration that
Christophe is a failure (and thus understand its “lesson” as a caution
against violent decolonization) but we could also notice that the tragedy
contains more than Christophe’s voice and that its polyphony can be inter-
preted as a mise en abyme of political discourse: the play represents the
genre of political debate (just as political decisions can be ultimately be
compared to the characters’ decisions). When Christophe receives a letter
from his “noble ami Wilberforce,” he reads it out loud, so that the English
abolitionist’s views are now framed by his own commentary: both voices
coexist, albeit conflictually:
Mais, Wilberforce, vous ne m’apprenez rien et vous n’êtes pas le
seul à raisonner ainsi: “On n’invente pas un arbre, on le plante!
On ne lui extrait pas les fruits, on le laisse porter. Une nation n’est
pas une création, mais un mûrissement, une lenteur, une année
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82 Research in African Literatures

par année, anneau par anneau.” Il en a de bonnes! Etre prudent!

Semer, me dit-il, les graines de la civilisation. Malheureusement,
ça pousse lentement, tonnerre! Laisser le temps au temps . . .
Mais nous n’avons pas le temps d’attendre [. . .] (57-58)
But see here, Wilberforce, you’re not telling me anything new, I’ve
heard it all before. (Reading) Bah! You don’t invent a tree, you
plant it. You don’t extract the fruit, you let it grow. A nation isn’t
a sudden creation, it’s a slow ripening, year after year, ring after
ring. Ha, that’s a good one! Be cautious! Sow the seeds of civilzia-
tion, he says. Yes,
Unfortunately, it grows slowly.
Damnation!
Let time do its work.
Time, time, But we don’t have time to wait [. . .] (41; translation
slightly modified)
Régine Latortue is right to point out that Christophe and
Wilberforce’s disagreement rests on the choice of two different metaphor-
ical systems and that there is an unresolved tension between the
Englishman’s “organic tropes” (295) and Christophe’s images, which priv-
ilege what she calls “architecture” but might also be compared to the par-
adigms of filiation that Césaire’s legacy so often elicits: Christophe wishes
to find “quelque chose grâce à quoi ce peuple de transplantés s’enracine,
boutonne, s’épanouisse, lançant à la face du monde les parfums, les fruits
de sa floraison” (23) “something that will enable this transplanted people
to strike roots, to burgeon and flower, to fling the fruits and perfume of its
flowering into the face of the world” (13), a vision, after all not so differ-
ent from that of the Cahier’s narrator who wants to see his negritude “libre
enfin / de produire de son intimité close / la succulence des fruits”
(Cahier 69), “to generate / free at last, from its intimate closeness / the suc-
culence of fruit” (Notebook 71). But Christophe also seeks “quelque chose
qui, au besoin par la force, l’oblige à naître à lui-même et à se dépasser lui-
même” (23), “something which, to speak plainly, will oblige our people, by
force if need be, to be born to itself” (13), to which Wilberforce objects.
What is crucial about this confrontation between two metaphorical
constructions is that neither system is coherent enough to translate simply
into a political platform and that whatever wisdom and model is proposed
by the play comes from the confrontation not only between the two visions
but also between the contradictory elements within each program. In
Wilberforce’s letter, “Inventer, créer” (a nation) is opposed to “planter” (a
tree), which presupposes time, patience, allowing a situation to ripen. But
the doubling of the metaphor (inventer/planter un arbre vs créer/laisser
mûrir une nation), which, rhetorically, is supposed to convince by means
of a slightly modified repetition of the same argument, ends up adding
contradictory elements to the thought.
First of all, it may not be contradictory to invent a nation and then to
let it “bear its fruit” and I would argue that Césaire’s “cri nègre” might have
been a performative invention of a people that was then followed by
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Mireille Rosello 83

patience. As for the opposition between “planting a tree” and “inventing a

tree,” it may be obvious that the latter does not sound right mostly because
the familiar set phrase is “to plant a tree”; but if the conjunction of the
name “tree” and of the verb “plant” seems correct (the “right” choice), the
original analogy is not that self-evident: Wilberforce does not demonstrate
in which way a nation is a tree. Conversely, the idea of “inventing” a nation
may not be so preposterous after all: every nation could be seen as the
result of one or several performative speech acts that bring it into exis-
tence by naming it even if the act of naming is bound to be the locus of
violent struggles: during the War of Algeria, one of the difficulties was to
make the word “independence” even conceptually acceptable by the peo-
ple as well as by international governments.10
On the other hand, even if Christophe is right that his country must
be forced to come into existence, this original act of creation may not jus-
tify subsequent moments where he will substitute his own will to that of the
community once that community has agreed to be invented by a founding
“cry.” Christophe’s unforgivable violence is therefore not to be confused
with the “violence” of the original call. In other words, it is possible to ally
“lent mûrissement” ‘slow ripening’ and “inventer un arbre” ‘invention of a
tree’ even if the metaphor must be taken further than its own analogical
commonsense.
Césaire’s paradoxical position is that he must first speak for a people
that does not exist and then listen to what that people that he has con-
tributed to creating wants him to say as his representative. At first, he
speaks in order to transform the “foule bavarde et muette” ‘chattering and
mute’ (Cahier/Notebook 34-35) into a people whose newly acquired voice
will then need a representative. The first peformative “cry” is an act of dis-
sidence that was not the result of a mandate; and that original word para-
doxically invents the people that will force the representative to disappear
behind its collective will, even if the people’s will no longer corresponds to
the man’s aspirations. I would argue that the gap between Cahier and Moi,
laminaire keeps the trace of this resignation, not between two roles, but
between two moments of the same role of “awakener” who then respects
the will of the creature he has awakened. Kesteloot writes: “Le député
maire sera [. . .] ce que les Antillais attendaient de lui. Eux qui ne
voulaient ni guerre ni cataclysmes mais plus de villes, plus de confort, plus
de consommateurs, il sera leur maire, leur bon père, leur papa Césaire”
‘The mayor will be what the Martinicans wanted him to be. They did not
want war or cataclysms, they wanted more cities, more comfort, more con-
sumers. He will be their mayor, their good father, their papa Césaire’ (“La
quête d’un poète” 80). Césaire’s opponents will of course retort that it is a
bit facile to assume that this is really what “les Antillais” wanted. But then
again, who is to say that the voice of a community is ever perceptible even
by those who seek to defend their interests? Once invented, the people of
“negritude” may have had better ways of expressing itself than “bavardage”
(powerless gossip) but even the most acceptable form of democratic deci-
sion, the election of one deputy rather than of another, simplifies the cho-
rus of multiple opinions and reduces it to one of the pre-packaged options
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84 Research in African Literatures

offered by electoral lists. Who is to say what “the people” really thinks of
Césaire? Those of us who have access to print can agree or disagree, cele-
brate or condemn, regret one step and claim another, but the principle of
representation opens an infinite gap that no single voice can ever hope to
bridge completely. Sometimes, political dissension finds extremely devious
or at least indirect ways to reach an audience, and some critiques are com-
pletely separate from recognizable aspects of the deputy’s or of the writer’s
work; to take an extreme example, Daniel Delas points out that in a recent
trilogy of best-sellers authored by Marie Jeanne de Jahan, the author’s ide-
ological stance emerges through apparently trivial remarks: “Décrire
Césaire comme ‘un petit homme au crane ovoïde, le nez chaussé de gross-
es lunettes’ n’est pas politiquement engagé mais ridiculise le leader noir”
‘It is not a political statement to describe Césaire as a “little man with an
oval head and large glasses on his nose,” but it ridicules the black leader’
(“Histoires de békés” 125).11 Depending on whether the reader is a met-
ropolitan who has never read Césaire, or an African who knows Le cahier by
heart, or a Martinican who voted for Césaire all her life, such “allusions
apparemment anodines” ‘apparently trivial remarks’ (125) will have incal-
culable consequences.
The portrait is malicious and petty, but easy to dismiss as irrelevant;
consider, on the other hand, a much more generous yet devastating pas-
sage that presents itself as the voice of the “petit peuple” (a voice con-
stantly filtered by “marqueurs de parole” ‘word markers’ who honestly and
more or less successfully try to take stock of the community’s reaction). In
Texaco, Chamoiseau talks about “l’effet Césaire” to describe the unquan-
tifiable results of Césaire’s physical presence in the middle of the shanty-
town that inhabitants and authorities struggle to appropriate:
Sa présence était impressionnante, non pas sa voix qu’il n’élevait
pas, ni ses gestes très calmes, mais sa présence: elle comblait les
esprits des légendes qui couraient sur lui. C’était papa-Césaire,
notre revanche vivante sur les békés et gros-mulâtres. Lui, que je
n’avais même pas osé solliciter dans mes pires désespoirs . . . Et
puis, il repartit, après avoir serré quelques mains, dont celles de
Marie-Clémence. Je ne sais pas pourquoi, mais quand son image
me revient dans la tête, j’ai toujours le sentiment d’une solitude
sans fin. D’après Ti-Cirique, c’est le tribut que doivent payer au
monde les poètes dont les peuples restent à naître. (398; emphasis
added)
His presence was impressive, but not his voice which he did not
raise, nor his very calm movements but his presence: it filled the
spirits of the legends woven around him. Here was Papa Césaire,
our revenge on the békés and the big wig mulattoes. He, who I
hadn’t even dared solicit in my bottomless despairs . . . . And—
then he left, having shaken a few hands, including that of Marie-
Clémence. I don’t know why, but when his image comes back to
me, I always get the feeling of his endless loneliness. According to
Ti-Cirique, it’s the price paid to the world by poets whose peoples
are yet to be born. (355; emphasis added)
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Mireille Rosello 85

Remarkably, the congratulatory and seemingly friendly portrait praises the

politician’s concern for the poor people whose houses are being destroyed
but the passage finally annihilates, with one particularly harsh remark, the
most important claim that the poet could have made, that of having
helped his people come into existence: Césaire’s people “reste à naître,”
the performative invention of a nation is still to come.
Most critics, however, tend to accept the founding “cri nègre” as a suc-
cessful moment of awakening which enabled the beginning of a different
type of communication. Delas notes that “[d]ans tous les moments les plus
exaltés, le Cahier abonde en interjections, maintes fois répétées, qui sont
autant de variantes du grand cri nègre: voum rooh oh, Eia! Hurrah! Et qui
comme autant de moyens quasi mécaniques pour libérer et lancer la voix,
pour donner une bouche à ceux qui n’en ont pas” ‘in all the most pas-
sionate moments, the Notebook is rich in interjections repeated many times
and they are all variations on the great black cry: voum rooh oh, Eia! They
are quasi-mechanical means to free and project the voice, to give a mouth
to those who do not have one’ (Aimé Césaire 73). A scream that seeks to
awaken others does not have to be rational and it is necessarily violent. But
once the phatic function of the call has been established, is the poet con-
demned either to repetition or to a less spectacular form of expression? Is
a cry necessarily unique and unrepeatable?
In an article on “Le meurtre du père nègre dans l’oeuvre d’Aimé
Césaire,” Guillaume Suréna tells his readers that Glissant once said “le cri
césairien ne sert plus” ‘the Cesairian cry has become irrelevant’ (359).
Interestingly, that decisive dismissal is another form of successful cry, a sort
of glistening upshot that we notice through the complicated fabric of the
mangrove of interpretations. Tenuously linked to a powerful name, quoted
and repeated, the sentence loses no strength from the fact that the critic
does not securely attach it to an original text or context. A reference cred-
its Delas who is said to have “cited” the striking formula in his Aimé Césaire.
But even if we trace the sentence back to Delas’s book (157), we do not find
the origin of the sentence and Glissant’s judgment remains out of context.
This is all the more remarkable as the statement is both clever and highly
problematic in this ambiguity. I wonder, for example about the relationship
between the adjective “Cesairian” and the noun “cry”: does Glissant mean
that the whole of Césaire’s work is a form of cry, a “cri Césairien,” and that
the Cahier, the plays and the speeches have outlived their effectiveness? Or
does he mean that when Césaire, nowadays, chooses “le cri” as a form of
expression, that particular rhetoric cannot be useful? In other words, is any
cry useless today (and why?) or is it that Césaire’s cry, once heard, is now
irrelevant? And, supreme ambiguity of Glissant’s formula: the “ne sert plus”
is not qualified. We don’t know who has no use for “le cri.” Which means
that I no longer know if Glissant is actually complimenting Césaire on
reaching that moment when he has made his own cry redundant or if he
considers that the cry has failed to awaken the people.
In the end, then, the most unreconcilable opposition may not be
between the poet and the politician but between those who believe that
the word can be a “miraculous weapon” and those who adopt a different
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86 Research in African Literatures

attitude to language. For Césaire, the belief in the power of the word is
almost a form of faith, an original creed: in “Poetry and Knowledge,” he
writes: “«In the beginning was the word . . .» Never did a man believe it
more powerfully than the poet [. . .] it is appropriate to speak of poetic vio-
lence, poetic aggressiveness, of poetic instability. In this climate of flame
and fury that is the climate of poetry, money has no currency, courts pass
no judgments, judges do not convict, juries do not acquit. Only the firing
quads still know how to ply their trade” ( xlix and l).
Faith explains the slippage between what the “poet” believes and what
we are told poetry “does” (as if here, the “I” were describing reality). We
do not have to accept this description of the “climate of poetry” but this
passage is a formidable definition of what Césaire wants the word to mean.
The word is not only an instrument of knowing but also an act of resistance
against the symbols of power: poetry on the same footing as other institu-
tions that use the word to govern.
If we do manage to convince ourselves that the poetic word is capable
of creating a specific type of environment where others’ words are empow-
ered or defused, then the familiar opposition between Césaire’s poetry
and political speeches starts looking like a moot point. Is it after all that
important to agree on which part of the work has specifically literary value
since Césaire’s own definition of the “word” confirm what literary theory
has already taught us: that criteria used to canonize and decanonize cer-
tain texts are political. Delas notices, for example, that the speeches made
by the deputy at the National Assembly have not been included in the
Complete Works published by Desormeaux. Wondering why, he asks: “Les
innombrables discours politiques que Césaire va prononcer désormais ont-
ils tous valeur littéraire? A l’évidence non; mais au nom de quoi retenir
ceci et rejeter celui-là? Sont-ce les grands événements qui font les grands
discours? Sans doute mais les grands événements ne sont pas les mêmes
pour tous” ‘From now on, Césaire will deliver innumerable political
speeches. Do they all have a literary value? Of course not. But according to
what criterion do we keep one and reject another? Do great events make
great speeches? Probably, but great events are not the same for everyone’
(Aimé Césaire 77). Not to mention that we have entered an era where those
who have power over words (the media for example) determine whether
events exist or not. Quotations from Césaire’s poems could be inserted
into passionate political speeches, with their frequent use of rhetorical
questions, pronouncements and straightforward declarations. But some
poems are also like speeches or conversations. The open letter to René
Depestre, suspected of letting Aragon influence him, is a poem but also a
sometimes colloquial series of questions and advice: “Est-il vrai que tu
doutes de la forêt natale?” (“Le verbe marronner” 368) (“is it true that you
mistrust the native forest?” 369). Other formulas are so powerfully memo-
rable that they blur the distinction between slogans and poetical visionary
formulas; confronted with a French government that encouraged emigra-
tion to the métropole in the sixties and seventies, Césaire protested against
what he dubbed “génocide par substitution” ‘genocide through substitu-
tion.’12 Just as Césaire wanted, in the Cahier, to find “des mots de sang frais”
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Mireille Rosello 87

(56) “words of fresh blood” (57), perhaps, coining “génocide par substitu-
tion” is the invention of a “mot d’ordre de sang frais” ‘a slogan of fresh
blood.’ (Worthy of finding its place in a poem, the original formula tran-
scends the distinction between political analysis and metaphorical insight:
Césaire’s unique talent may be to know how to deconstruct the particular-
ly irreducible opposition between slogans and poetry, between freedom
and what Annie LeBrun dismisses as mere “mots d’ordre” ‘marching
orders’ (“Aimé Césaire” 17).13 Perhaps, coining “génocide par substitu-
tion” is the invention of a “mot d’ordre de sang frais.”
We may not, after all, have to choose between the legacy left by Frantz
Fanon and the lessons offered by Aimé Césaire, although it is tempting to
see each of the two figures as two incompatible strategies: one reading of
their itinerary would obviously interpret them as opposite poles. Fanon
was on the side of violence, Césaire always refused it or rather, knew that
violence had a price or even that violence was the prize to pay for certain
decisions. Like all other binary readings, opposing a violent Fanon and a
nonviolent Césaire both tells a truth and misses others. It is not true, for
example, that violence was always absent from Martinique and
Guadeloupe even if nothing compares to the brutality of the war of Algeria
in the French West Indies (see Confiant). It is also probably true that
departmentalization was not the only alternative to violence; after all, not
all African states had to wage wars before being granted their indepen-
dence. It is, however, possible that the specter of the Congo haunted
Césaire long after Lumumba’s death. And finally, it may well be that the
word “violence” cannot simply be reduced to an opposition between
metaphorical, or verbal and physical or political violence: the violence of
words in Césaire is not purely metaphorical if someone like Fanon could
claim the master’s murder in Et les chiens se taisaient as a model. Of course,
as Albert Owusu-Sarpong suggests, “Il faut se placer dans le contexte poli-
tique et historique. Césaire a écrit la pièce en 1944, à une époque où la
France était occupée par les forces hitlériennes, où tout était censuré par
le gouvernement de Vichy” ‘We must remember the political and histori-
cal context. Césaire wrote the play in 1944, when France was still occupied
by Hitler’s armies, where everything was censored by the Vichy govern-
ment’ (153). The critic therefore concludes his comparison between
Fanon and Césaire by stating that “la décolonisation pour Césaire sera
révolutionnaire mais elle ne sera pas violente” ‘for Césaire, decolonization
will be revolutionary but not violent’ (160) and that “la violence des ces
personnages césairiens est surtout verbale” ‘the violence of Cesairian char-
acters is mostly verbal’ (160). And yet, who is to say that Fanon was wrong
to have appropriated the play as an incitation to insurrection and to vio-
lence? (See Fanon 86-88.) His responsibility as a reader is to have chosen
his side among the characters that present us with many different political
positions, many different ideological choices. Césaire’s plays are not about
Violence in general but about the confrontation between Ariel and
Caliban, between, to paraphrase Aragon, “celui qui croyait à la violence et
celui qui n’y croyait pas” ‘the one who believed in violence and the one
who did not’ between Christophe and Wilberforce, he who believed that a
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88 Research in African Literatures

nation can be invented and he who thinks that nations demand time and
ripening. The plays as a whole are neither an apology of violence nor an
hymn to nonviolence but the recognition that violence may take different
forms, that each type of violence has a price, and that choosing may be
about accepting to pay that particular price.
Ultimately, I think that the awakener is waiting for the reader to
choose. Reading “Crevasses,” from Moi, laminaire, Jonathan Ngaté hears a
“challenge so deafening in the end precisely because it is not explicitly
stated: ‘I have been doing my part for years. What are you really prepared
to do?’ Read this way, this poem is Césaire’s invitation to a responsible
‘prise de parole’ by his readers-as-his-people and, beyond that, a corollary
commitment to meaningful action” (52). Ngaté now speaks for Césaire, as
if history had turned the tables on the “semeur.” What Keith Walker calls,
about The Discourse on Colonialism, “une anti-rhétorique de persuasion per-
manente, distincte de la séduction circonstancielle du beau parleur” ‘an
antirhetoric of permanent persuasion, different from the opportunistic
seduction of the smooth talker’ (69) could be seen as the distinctive char-
acteristic of a poet who believed in words uttered by those who had been
woken by his own “cri nègre.” But if there is something beyond words, it
may well be the fragile horizon of changes imagined without any desire to
impose them.

NOTES
1. Daniel Delas considers that Roger Toumson and Simonne Henry Valmore
have written “la première biographie officielle de Césaire” (“Aimé Césaire”
48). He also suggests that the Cesairian controversy has provisionally ended
with Chamoiseau’s Ecrire en pays dominé and that the time may have come for
academics to analyze “avec sérénité” ‘calmly’ (48) all the books published
between 1989 (Eloge de la créolité) and 1997. See also Richard Burton’s “Two
Views of Césaire: Négritude and créolité.”
2. The attack against Cixous and Kristeva appears in Vagit-Prop 41ff. On Aimé
Césaire, see also her Pour Césaire (1993) and Statue cou coupé (1995).
3. Confiant himself says that his book “se veut le cri sincère d’un films qui estime
avoir été trahi par ses pères et en l’occurrence par le premier d’entre eux,
Aimé Césaire” ‘is meant as the sincere cry of a son who believes that he has
been betrayed by his forefathers and in this particular case, by the original
father, Aimé Césaire’ (37).
4. “Déclaration du mardi 9 février 1993,” Le Progressiste 17 Feb. 1993 cited in
Toumson and Henry-Valmore, Le nègre inconsolé 214, last paragraph.
5. In his introduction to Cahier d’un retour au pays natal Irele also points out that
the tree plays a different role once it has reached its plenitude: “. . . [I]t
embraces the earth and everything above it in its representation of the total
spatial context of life. [. . .] The immediate affective value of the tree as an
image of rootedness is thus extented by its messianic import, the connotation
it assumes of an exultant upsurge ot the life force” (lxviii).
6. And the growth of other “pollen bearing thoughts” is bound to mirror
Césaire’s own conflictual relationship to others’ postulates and philosophies.
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Mireille Rosello 89

Legacies also create divisions if not rivalries. Regardless of the more or less
palatable struggle for power that any leader’s departure triggers, it is probably
desirable that intellectual dissensions occur among different interpretations of
his work: for a good overview of more or less conflictual dialogues over
Césaire’s accomplishments, see Théodore.
7. The image is used by Césaire himself in the poem he wrote for Depestre and
republished in Noria (“Le verbe marronner / A René Despestre” 368-371): the
narrator imagines a dialectical tension between the form and the (revolution-
ary) content of the poem and warns his friend about the
[. . .] détour dialectique
par quoi la forme prenant sa revanche
comme un figuier maudit étouffe le poème (370)
[. . .] the dialectical
backlash by which the form taking its revenge
chokes the poems like an accursed fig tree (371)
8. In Le métier à métisser, Depestre writes: “Un jour j’ai découvert à l’île Maurice le
banian, cet arbre sacré du Sud-Est asiatique dont les racines ont la faculté,
après un premier développement en tronc unique, de redescendre à la terre
nourricière pour s’assurer d’autres remontées à la lumière. Mon identité-banian
situe ma vie et mon aventure de poète à l’inverse de l’exil” ‘I once discovered
the banyan in Mauritius. The roots of this sacred tree from Southeast Asia first
develop as a unique trunk then send shoots back to the nourishing earth to
ensure other future ascents towards the light. My banyan-identity inscribes my
life and my poetic adventure as the reverse of exile’ (14).
9. As Toumson remarks, it is not so much the duality of Césaire’s career that is
remarkable (he points out that Malraux and Aragon—and we may add
Senghor—followed the same path), but “c’est la manière dont ces identités en
viennent, alternativement à se superposer et à s’opposer, c’est leur combinai-
son qui a quelque chose d’insolite, d’absolument inattendu chez Césaire” ‘it is
the way in which those identities are alternately superimposed or opposed, it
is their combination that is incongruous, completely unexpected in Césaire’
(“Jubilé” 19).
10. As late as March 1957, press conferences held by the FLN are still not broad-
cast on French radio and journalists’comments reveal that the word “indépen-
dance” is still taboo: it is described as an “obsessive slogan” that “intoxicates”
the orator (see Stora and Tristan, 22 Mar. 1957).
11. In his review, Delas addresses the trilogy, L’or des îles (Paris: Laffont, 1996), Le
sang du volcan (Paris: Laffont, 1997), and Les héritiers du paradis (Paris: Laffont,
1998). The quotation is from Volume 3, p. 243).
12. See Confiant 253 for a quotation of the speech Césaire delivered at the
National Assembly in 1978.
13. In an interview included in the Césaire’s filmed biography, Une voix pour l’his-
toire, Roger Garaudy remembers that when he heard Césaire’s declarations at
the National Assembly, he was struck by this man who “remained a poet in his
speeches and in his political life.” Some of Césaire’s interventions are apparently
branded in Garaudy’s memory as he proceeds to quote the then young deputy’s
words: “Vous avez par le colonialisme fait de ces âmes sèches qui flamberont au
feu de toutes les révoltes” ‘Through colonialism you have manufactured these
dried souls that will burn in the flame of all revolts’ (Palcy, episode 2).
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90 Research in African Literatures

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