Aimé Césaire:

a warrior in search of beauty1

Bernadette Cailler
cailler@ufl.edu
The University of Florida

ABSTRACT

This essay examines several tributes that appeared following Césaire’s

death on 17 April 2008, namely, those expressed by three major Martinican
creative writers and thinkers, Patrick Chamoiseau, Edouard Glissant, and
Raphaël Confiant. References to Guadeloupean writers Ernest Pépin’s and
Daniel Maximin’s homages are also included. Reminding the reader that
the legacy of Césaire the poet is immense, notwithstanding the disagree-
ments their authors may have had with Césaire the politician, these tributes
offer a sharp contrast with, for instance, an article published by Boukhalfa
Amazit in the Algerian journal El Watan, on 15 May 2008. While Chamoi-
seau’s text follows a lyrical vein steeped in emotion, Glissant’s development
seems to be more pedagogically oriented, tracing the historical, sociopoliti-
cal, even biographical landscapes in which Césaire’s work is rooted. Both
Glissant and Chamoiseau, however, succeed in placing the struggles of
Césaire, “le guerrier” (Chamoiseau’s term—“the warrior”), within the
poetic process itself. Indeed, the task of the warrior-poet, not only is, but
can only function as, a constant search for the unreachable, the impossible.
In his development, Chamoiseau takes the reader along a subtle journey
linking combat to life and beauty and, ultimately, to language. Aware of
the fact that the term “beauty” is neither philosophically, culturally, nor
aesthetically innocent, and that the dialectic suggested by Chamoiseau
between life and beauty is not evident, and may even seem problematic,
this essay attempts to follow such an itinerary through a close reading of
carefully selected excerpts from Césaire’s texts. In so doing, the author of
this essay is led to include a reassessment of some translated pieces, as well
as references to major interviews (with Lilyan Kesteloot, Jacqueline Leiner,
Maryse Condé) and scholarly works (Aliko Songolo, René Hénane). Along
the way the author invites the participation of several other writers and
thinkers, namely, Baudelaire, Lorand Gaspar, W. E. Du Bois, Edward Kamau
Brathwaite, Abdourahman Waberi, and Colleen Smith-Brown.

•  REsearch in african literatures, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring 2010). © 2010  •

 BER NADETTE CAILLER  •  15

“la Justice écoute aux portes de la Beauté”

“Justice listens at the gates of Beauty”
moi, laminaire . . .

A
mong the many tributes that appeared following Césaire’s death on 17
April 2008, those expressed by two other major Martinican creative writers
and thinkers, namely, Patrick Chamoiseau (“Césaire? Ma liberté” ‘Césaire?
My Freedom,’ 23/04/08) and Edouard Glissant (“Aimé Césaire, la passion du
poète” ‘Aimé Césaire, the Poet’s Passion,’ 21/04/08), are particularly compelling.
Comments made by a third major Martinican writer, Raphaël Confiant (“Fils de
Césaire à jamais” ‘For Ever, Césaire’s Sons,’ 20/04/08), are certainly not devoid of
interest either, if only because, along with his two fellow writers, he too reminds
the reader that whatever disagreements he may have had with Césaire the poli-
tician, the legacy of Césaire the poet, is immense.2 As for Guadeloupean writer
Ernest Pépin’s homage (“Poète, nous te pleurons” ‘Poet, We Mourn over Your Loss,’
23/04/08), drawing attention to facts not always enhanced or even remembered
by Césaire’s staunchest critics is not one of its lesser merits. Thus, Pépin recalls
that Césaire, whom he calls the “disconsolate advocate of departmentalization”
(“avocat inconsolé de la départementalisation”), had, since 1946, received renewed
support from the Martinican people. He adds that the departmentalization had
been accomplished in compliance with the wishes of the Left. He also points
out that the war and postwar contexts had brought about such an outcome and
that, later, Césaire had been led to perhaps “secretly” ponder the tragic pages of
the Duvalierist didactorship as well the many catastrophic events taking place
in postindependence Africa. Also worth noting is Pépin’s straightforward state-
ment opposing “the dazzling purity of saying and the compromises of doing” (“la
pureté étincelante du dire et les compromis du faire”). Among the numerous com-
ments made by Daniel Maximin—who led the memorial ceremony held in honor
of Césaire in Fort-de-France, on 20 April—the address he gave on 3 December
2008, in Bâle, at the Alliance Française, stated clearly that “ultimately, above all, it’s
poetry that constitutes his essential expression, poetry that gives one the strength to
look at tomorrow” (“c’est en définitive surtout la poésie qui constitue sa parole essen-
tielle, celle qui donne la force de regarder demain”) (Blog of the Alliance Française,
Bâle—emphasis in the original). All of these tributes offer a sharp contrast with,
for instance, an article published in the Algerian journal El Watan, on 15 May 2008:
“Réflexion. Visite guidée dans la négritude. Le mythe et le moulin. Que reste-t-il du
concept de négritude aujourd’hui ? Le souvenir d’une passion ou le témoignage
d’une époque?” (“Guided visit to Negritude. The myth and the mill. What is left
of the concept of Negritude today? The memory of a passion or the testimony of
an era?”) I regret to say that, in my opinion, the author, Boukhalfa Amazit, makes
a fundamental error. When referring to the historical context, the 1930s, which
brought the term “Negritude” into being, he writes: “Le concept, alors encore
16  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 41 Number 1

captif de la littérature et particulièrement de la poésie, n’en demeurait pas moins

contestataire” ‘The concept, still captive of literature and, in particular, of poetry,
nonetheless remained a contesting force.’ I believe that whoever has not under-
stood (accepted?) that Césaire’s Negritude is forever “captive” of the creative poetic
process has grasped neither its depth nor its enduring value. It is actually rather
odd that, in contradiction with such a negative judgment passed on the literary
and mind-searching aspect of Negritude, later, in his article, Amazit deplores, and
rightly so, what he calls the “politicization” of Negritude, if and when presented
as a “regal road” towards African liberation and statehood, a politicization that
he sees as “fatal” to its survival. In fact, quoting several of its critics (Fanon, Ki-
Zerbo, Sekou Touré .  .  .), along with a development including comments on or
implied references to the three “founders,” up to the end of his argument, and
echoing other critics, Amazit regrettably suppresses the importance of Negritude
in its poetic dimension and even its importance as an embodiment of culturally
complex and diverse ways of being-in-the-world for people of African birth or
ancestry: in Césaire’s case, a culturally very complex Caribbean way of being.
William Butler Yeats’s well-known line—“How can we know the dancer from the
dance?” (“Among School Children”)—will suffice here to evoke the reality of that
Negritude that, whatever color one’s skin might have been, was to nurture Césaire
the Martinican, both as human being and poet. Indeed, nothing could have been
further from his mind than a Negritude transformed into a “school,” a “church,”
a “theory,” as he made clear many times, thus, for instance, in his 1971 interview
with Lilyan Kesteloot: “Je suis pour la négritude du point de vue littéraire et
comme éthique personnelle, mais je suis contre une idéologie fondée sur la négri-
tude” ‘I am for Negritude from the literary point of view and as personal ethics,
but I am against an ideology founded on Negritude’ (Aimé Césaire 235). I do not
doubt, actually, that some promoters of “Negritude”—including Senghor—were
responsible for the “unfortunate” evolution so strongly berated by Amazit. How-
ever, ultimately, one can ask, what sort of understanding, true understanding of
the irreplaceable, lasting part played by the verbal arts, more generally, by artistic
creativity in people’s daily lives, does the rather flippant view of creative literature,
especially poetry, expressed in the first lines of his article, imply?
Going back to the tribute paid by Césaire’s Martinican fellow writers, while
Chamoiseau’s text follows a lyrical vein steeped in emotion, Glissant’s develop-
ment seems to be more pedagogically oriented, tracing the historical, sociopolitical,
even biographical landscapes in which Césaire’s work is grounded. Both Glissant
and Chamoiseau, however, succeed in placing the struggles of Césaire, “le guer-
rier” (Chamoiseau’s term, “the warrior”), the rebel, at war with slavery and its
memory, at war with colonization, oppression, and injustice, within the poetic
process itself. If Césaire’s writings are characterized by a lifelong attentiveness not
only to his island but to the world at large, concomitantly and essentially, each text
of his is anchored, to use Chamoiseau’s own words, in “the resolute interrogation
of the poetic mystery” (“l’interrogation résolue du mystère poétique”). Chamoi-
seau’s lyrical meditation suggests most convincingly that there exists a closely
knit tie between the dream of an “essential” poem and the “warrior”’s struggle, in
particular his growing awareness, as years went by, that each small victory over
despair and alienation was/is bound to remain precarious and limited. For both
 BER NADETTE CAILLER  •  17

the rebel and the poet, working represents a constant search for the unreachable,
the impossible:

Si tous les poètes connaissent l’amertume de l’échec—l’amertume si précieuse

de ne jamais atteindre au cœur de poésie, au poème essentiel—, Césaire l’a
éprouvée avec une acuité singulière. Cette amertume s’est amplifiée chez lui de
cet échec que vivait le rebelle.

If all poets know the bitterness of failure—the bitterness, so precious, which

comes from never getting to the heart of poetry, to the essential poem—, Césaire
felt such bitterness with exceptional acuteness. This bitterness became increased
in him through the failure experienced by the rebel.

Hence, in both Glissant and Chamoiseau, the term “tragic” applied to Cés-
aire’s poetics. Let me insist: a tragic poetics inseparable from and necessary to both
the rebel and the poet. Although Confiant is not really correct when he states—and
I am paraphrasing him here—that the immense melancholy pervasive in Césaire’s
work has rarely been stressed by critics, his remarks corroborate such emphasis
on the tragic.3 At the end of his tribute he notes that, often hidden as it may be to
the superficial eye, such overriding melancholy reveals a man as preoccupied by
his own people’s destiny, as he is by “the true meaning of human existence” (“le
sens véritable de l’existence humaine”). Far from being obsessed, throughout his
life, with the fantasmatic image of an absent Africa, as hasty readings of his work
have suggested, Césaire’s writings constantly bear the mark of a deep love for the
island people, for the Martinican soil, its trees, fauna, flora, volcanic landscape,
for so many other specific elements of his own milieu. In fact, dreaming, as poets
do, about the ancestral land of Africa, at a time and in the circumstances with
which all readers have become familiar, never impeded Césaire from acquiring
knowledge of and concern for the predicaments, the suffering, the failures, and
the strength present in many other regions of the world: Africa, yes, but also, Haiti,
the Americas, and other lands. Not so long ago, in a powerful chapter entitled “La
poésie,” published in La cohée du Lamentin (2005), Glissant commented most perti-
nently on Césaire’s lifelong engagement with le Tout-Monde. Coming from Glissant,
such comments are no trivial signs of appreciation: as we know, in his own poet-
ics, the opposition between “profondeur” (“depth”) and “étendue” (“expansion”),
between one’s small world and the whole world at large, appears to be a poetic,
therefore, a sociopolitical and human deadend.
Following this brief incursion into the three Martinican writers’ homage,
I would now like to concentrate one moment on what appears to be the crux of
Chamoiseau’s argument, an argument that, until the end, remains poetic in its
wording, in its vision. He writes: “Le magnifique combat césairien s’est toujours
effectué du côté de la vie. Je veux dire: du bord de la beauté.” This language is not
easy to translate: “du côté de la vie” could be “from the side . . . ” and/or “on the
side of life”; “du bord de la beauté” could translate as “from the side of beauty” and/
or “with beauty on board,” or even “aboard beauty,” the ship of beauty (a phrase
reminiscent of Césaire’s own famous line “amour, mon seul sampang . . .” (“love,
my only sampan . . .”), from “Batouque,” Les armes miraculeuses (Miraculous Weap-
ons), CP 146–53).4 So, let me try the following translation: “Césaire’s magnificent
combat has always proceeded with life on its side. I mean: aboard beauty.”
18  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 41 Number 1

By linking these two terms together, as if they were the two sides of an equa-
tion—life is beauty—Chamoiseau sets up a dialectic that, after all, knowing what
life is all about, particularly within the context of oppression and injustice, may
not be as convincing as a careless ear might believe. In an important interview
conducted in Fort-de-France between Maryse Condé and Césaire, some time after
the colloquium that she, Condé, had organized at New York University in honor
of the poet’s ninetieth birthday (2003) and, actually, with the African continent
in mind, Condé asked him what he could possibly tell young Caribbean people
to encourage them to keep the faith. While admitting that he did not have any
particular “method” at hand, Césaire responded that letting oneself be over-
whelmed by despair was out of the question, adding that despair meant refusing
life, and he urged his interlocutor to “pay attention to the poetic image”; he then
added: “through it, the deepest world is revealed. This is why the poetic image is
miraculous”:

Je ne connais pas la méthode. On a la foi ou on ne l’a pas, mais moi, je refuse

de désespérer de l’Afrique. Ce serait refuser d’espérer, tout simplement. C’est
enraciné, fondamental. Je connais tous les malheurs qui sont arrivés. Je ne les nie
pas, je suis extrêmement lucide, mais je refuse de désespérer parce que déses-
pérer, c’est refuser la vie. Il faut garder la foi. Attention à l’image poétique: elle
est révélatrice du monde le plus profond. Voilà pourquoi elle est miraculeuse.

I do not know the method. One has the faith or doesn’t have it, but as for myself,
I refuse to give up on Africa. That would be giving up on hope altogether.
Hope is rooted, fundamental. I know all the misfortunes that have happened. I
don’t deny them, I am extremely clear-sighted, but I refuse to despair because
despairing is refusing life. One must keep the faith. Pay attention to the poetic
image: through it the deepest world is revealed. That is why the poetic image
is miraculous.

In an attempt to articulate some aspects of this dialectic between life and

beauty with some degree of relevance, we have to admit in the first place that
the word “beauty,” which I have the audacity of taking up here, is certainly not
innocent, either philosophically, culturally, or aesthetically. Should I use it with
a capital “B,” with a small “b”? Should I use the singular or the plural, whether
I may be thinking of culture, art, language, the world? And what about the title
I have chosen for this essay: “a warrior in search of beauty”? Doesn’t such a title
have an old-fashioned, rather romantic ring to it? Am I not opening the screen of
imagination to the hackneyed image of the brave knight rescuing some beautiful
creature from the dragon’s teeth?
Pursuing my reading of Chamoiseau’s work, I came upon a passage reso-
nant with relevant connotations regarding the topic I am now considering. In Un
dimanche au cachot, a complex piece of fiction published in 2007, witnessing the
endurance and dignity of an imprisoned young female slave named L’Oubliée
(The Forgotten One), one character engages in a meditation on the dehumanization
process suffered by many in plantation societies and, in an attempt to define the
core of humanity that some, many, probably, managed—manage—to retain in the
midst of the most atrocious conditions, he finally resorts to the term “beauty.” In
this character’s voice, we read the following:
 BER NADETTE CAILLER  •  19

La beauté est toujours neuve, c’est son signe. Elle se renouvelle et renouvelle tou-
jours, et c’est pourquoi on ne saurait la définir. Elle ne peut entraîner ni tyrannie
ni barbarie, quand on la cherche toujours et qu’on ne l’arrête pas. De la chercher
toujours vous confie à la grâce, cette grâce en nous comme elle fut chez Mozart,
cette grâce partout comme une légèreté. Qui vit avec la beauté vivra haut, vivra
neuf, verra toujours passer l’inhumain et le crime, ne sera aveugle à aucune
tragédie. Car la beauté quand on la cherche toujours n’est jamais dans un contre
de la vie, jamais hors d’une plénitude de vie, elle demande au contraire que l’on
soit dans la vie, attentif à toutes ses plénitudes . . .

Beauty is always new, such is its sign. It renews itself and always brings about
something new, and that is why it remains undefinable. When sought after
and left unrestrained beauty can give rise neither to tyranny nor to barbarity.
Whoever will persevere in the pursuit of beauty will find grace, grace as Mozart
knew it, grace, featherlight and ever-present. Whoever lives with beauty will
live high, will live anew, will always witness inhumanity and crime, and will
never be blind to tragedies. Indeed, when sought after unremittingly, beauty
is never in a counterposition to life, never cut off from the fullness of life; on
the contrary, it demands of us that we be at the heart of life, attentive to all its
appeals . . . (280–81)5

This passage, I believe, deserves full attention within the context of the dreamed
alliance between life and beauty that I am trying to modestly explore today.
It now seems useful to remind ourselves that Césaire, as an intellectual raised
in the French School system, had read what Europeans called—and still call—in
philosophy, the “Classics,” in addition to more recent thinkers including Nietzsche,
Bergson, Jung, Freud, Frobenius, Bachelard, Alain, Louis Lavelle, and others.
Regarding poetry, in the important essay “Poésie et connaissance” (“Poetry and
Knowledge”), published in the January 1945 issue of Tropiques, we read about his
profound interest in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Apollinaire,
and, prominently, André Breton. My purpose here is not to try and measure his
debt to one French poet or the other, but rather to contemplate again some lines
of his, pregnant with the kind of creativity through which he, Césaire, took the
tools he had at hand to forge his own approach to “poetic knowledge.” As Glissant
so appropriately stated in his recent tribute, Césaire is a Surrealist because his
word is grounded in his negritude, and not because Surrealism helped him find
his Negritude. Among the happy complicities that Glissant sees between Western
modern poetics and what he calls “des poétiques nègres” (“black poetics”), not
surprisingly, he mentions the power of rhythm and of the “merveilleux” (“the
marvelous”). He also mentions humor, as well as, of course, the close, intimate
rapport to the land, indeed, to the world. Let us also note that under Glissant’s
pen, the term “démesure” (“measurelessness”), which he also applies to Césaire’s
work, does not refer to any lack of rigor or terseness in the texts. Not only does such
“démesure” point to the immensity of the universe Césaire embraces in his vision,
but also, I believe, to the immensity of the dream Césaire had in him regarding
human relationships. With respect to Césaire’s affiliation to Surrealism, I will also
mention briefly that in his excellent book entitled Aimé Césaire: une poétique de la
découverte, Aliko Songolo analyzes the poet’s use of Surrealism in detail, in con-
junction with the complicities shown in his texts with various aspects of African
20  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 41 Number 1

cultures. However, when analyzing the distantiation Césaire was eventually

going to establish between his poetry and Surrealist techniques, as he became
more and more involved in political, historical, and communal concerns, Songolo
emphasizes that Césaire’s poetics of revolt, as well as “une mythologie nègre du
Nouveau Monde” (“a New World black mythology,” 146, 153) continued to bear
fruits in his activities as playwright, historian, and politician. In fact, if I read
Songolo correctly, such an analysis places Césaire’s entire work within a complex
creative process in which birth of the “subject,” birth of the “word,” and rooted-
ness into the world as nature, history, and even cosmos, can actually be subsumed
under the neologism “Negritude.”
A few years ago, in a short piece of research, I tried to establish some link
between the Césaire of “Poetry and Knowledge” and the thought of another major
poet of our time, Lorand Gaspar, who happens to be a medical doctor, a surgeon
and who, for a number of years now, has also been a researcher in neuroscience.6
In that piece of research, I asked myself a number of questions that I believe,
remain relevant to today’s reflection. Suffice it to recall here that, in the first part
of his essay, Césaire separates categorically scientific thought (especially physics
and mathematics) from poetic thought, and this, incidentally, in contrast with
Gaspar’s research and convictions. For Césaire, scientific knowledge reaches phe-
nomena only, whereas poetry goes deeper into the “essence of things” (“l’essence
des choses”). One of the first tenets we find in the essay reads as follows: “Quant
à la mathématique, ce qui échappe à son activité abstraite et logicienne, c’est le
réel” (“As for mathematics, what eludes its abstract and logic-oriented activity,
is reality itself”).7 Most of us, today, know or suspect that the relation of math-
ematics to reality is an extremely complex subject. Césaire’s election of poetry as
a tool superior—rather than complementary—to science regarding the acquisi-
tion of knowledge (my emphasis), will not appear very convincing nowadays, I
believe, to the lay person but, even more, to thinkers who are seriously engaged
in scientific and/or artistic work. If, today, on the one hand, we look with doubt,
even irony, at a simplistic separation between rational and emotional approaches
to what surrounds us, on the other hand, in relation to the notion of beauty, we
cannot ignore the impact that age-long concerns with such concepts as harmony,
proportion, rhythm, chaos, finitude, or infinitude have had on our human lives.
Dreamers of all stripes, scientists, architects, creative writers, artists, musicians . . .
have certainly participated in such wonderings for thousands of years. Thus, it is
not inappropriate to evoke the mathematical ratio known as the Golden Ratio, or
Section, whose formulation dates back to Euclid, with roots planted farther back
in time, going back to Plato’s love for mathematics, to the Pythagorean circles,
or, as some have argued, to the ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, or Indian worlds.
Contemporary scientists have actually confirmed that such a ratio can be found
in many natural elements, such as, for instance, in the detailed structures of a tree
leaf, of the sunflower, of the daisy, of the rose petal arrangement, of the pinecone,
in the shape of the starfish, in the spiral of the nautilus seashell, in the spiral of
galaxies and, actually, in non-Euclidean fractal geometry.8 Césaire’s quest for what
he calls “les grandes communications” (“the great communications”) (Cahier d’un
retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to my Native Land], CP 42–43), a reference
present in Chamoiseau’s homage—not surprisingly so—and his devotion to
both the creative process and “knowledge,” or, rather, to the creative process as
 BER NADETTE CAILLER  •  21

knowledge, may contain an implicit, albeit unconscious denial of his depreciative

view of mathematics and science.
Furthermore, before closing his argument, in “Poetry and Knowledge,” Cés-
aire suggests that modern science tends perhaps to confirm, or be in keeping with
some of the poets’ intuitions, although he does not add anything more precise.
He writes: “. . . à tout prendre, la science moderne n’est peut-être que la vérifica-
tion pesante de quelques folles images lancées par des poètes” (“.  .  . all things
considered, modern science is perhaps only the ponderous verification of some
bold images put forward by poets”).9 I suspect that although he may have had
contemporary physics in mind, he may even have felt more strongly attuned to
modern research in “psychology” and neuroscience. As René Hénane, himself a
medical doctor, has demonstrated in his two books, respectively entitled: Aimé
Césaire. Le chant blessé. Biologie et poétique, and Césaire et Lautréamont. Bestiaire et
métamorphose, it is also striking that Césaire’s work is replete with biomedical
terms—one thousand three hundred nineteen, as counted by Hénane (Césaire et
Lautréamont 34).10 On the other hand, we remember that, in a well-known inter-
view Césaire had with Jacqueline Leiner (published as an introduction to the 1978
edition of Tropiques), he claimed that he did not like the word “biological”; but I
believe that when using this term, Césaire was simply referring to the dangers of
a race-oriented approach to human life, as opposed to a culture-oriented approach.
In fact, several sections from Cahier show Césaire close to those, Gaspar included,
who, nowadays, speak in terms of the “biology of consciousness.” In Cahier, we
read “enroule-toi, vent autour de ma nouvelle croissance/pose-toi sur mes doigts
mesurés / je te livre ma conscience et son rythme de chair” (“coil, wind, around my
new growth/light on my cadenced fingers / to you I surrender my consciousness
and its flesh-made rhythm”11) and “lie-moi de tes vastes bras à l’argile lumineuse/
lie ma noire vibration au nombril même du monde” (“bind me with your vast
arms to the luminous clay/bind my black vibration to the very navel of the world”)
(CP 82–85). There is no doubt that, for Gaspar, poetic writing, which allows the
writer to explore multiple cerebral resources (resources that are far from being
all “rational”), correlatively, leads such a writer to a greater knowledge of the self
and of the world. Such thoughts are indeed present in Césaire’s essay “Poetry
and Knowledge,” as well as in his whole work. At the deepest level of Césaire’s
endeavor, lies the strong conviction, even more, intimation that: a) there exists a
fraternal bond between minerals, plants, animals, humans, and even the cosmos,
and that: b), to paraphrase one of his well known “Propositions,” poetry places
the human being both at the core of oneself and at the core of the universe. We
remember his praise of trees, which, for him, are closer than humans to the vital
impulse; but we also remember that, for him, poets are closer to trees than other
people because they, the poets, have a stronger bond to the “universal concert.”
What Bergson would have called the “élan vital” (“vital impulse)], a notion very
much present, as I understand, in Africa-rooted cultures, someone like Gaspar,
among other contemporary thinkers, associates with the long road that, from
inert matter and its ever-threatening disorder, was going to lead to the “unlikely
order” of life (“l’ordre improbable,” Approche de la parole 25–94). Gaspar reminds
his reader that there is not a single element (“matériau”) that did not pre-exist the
emergence of life, but that new assemblages, new syntactical structures would find
their ways, step after step, along the chain of life. As he writes so beautifully, one
22  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 41 Number 1

of these syntaxes, written in the human body in a particularly complex fashion,

retains in its cells the salt and water of the sea. More modest than Césaire, I sup-
pose, Gaspar sees the poetic quest for the “perfect” poem as an attempt to build
a fragile bridge between what he calls the “corps-cerveau” (“body as brain”), or
the “pensée-langage” (“thought as language”) and the world. Language, of course,
does not, cannot express reality, but proposes fugitive, imperfect attempts at
suggesting its most puzzling while compelling manifestations.
Here, again, at the heart of this discussion, we can certainly hear Chamoi-
seau’s voice. The mystery of poetry around which Chamoiseau has built his tribute,
is the mystery of reality itself, whose grasp, for us, on planet Earth, is confined to
the perceptions afforded by the kind of body we have. But both Césaire, the non-
scientist-poet, and Gaspar, the poet-scientist, suggest or demonstrate in one piece
of work or the other that disorder and order, death and life, venom and antivenom
(here, I am paraphrasing a well known line from Césaire’s poem “Naissances”
(“Births”), from Corps perdu [Lost Body]),12 not only interact constantly in our lives
and in the world around us, but, in the first place, interact constantly in our own
bodies and are, therefore, in a sine qua non dialectic regarding the arduous task of
opening a small window onto the “real.” For the poet and the scientist alike, what
we call “human logic” no doubt falls short of providing any clear-cut certainty.
In the last part of his book (see note 8), most interestingly, Mario Livio draws the
reader’s attention to the relative value of some widely shared assumptions, and
points to areas where, indeed, poetic mind and scientific mind cannot but meet.
Thus, as a way of making the reader quickly grasp what he means, he explains that,
for an intelligence that would approach the surrounding world with fluidity rather
than solidity as a basic assumption, one plus one, for instance, may not equal two.
The example he gives is the following: add one drop of water to one drop of water;
the result is one drop of water, not two. We can also think, of course, in terms of
non-Euclidean and Euclidean geometries, in terms of curves rather than straight
lines. Or, as Césaire put it in a well known passage from Cahier:

Et vous savez le reste

Que 2 et 2 font 5
que la forêt miaule
que l’arbre tire les marrons du feu
que le ciel se lisse la barbe
et caetera et caetera . . .

And you know the rest

That 2 and 2 are 5
that the forest miaows
that the trees pluck the maroons from the fire
that the sky strokes its beard
etc., etc. (CP 50–51)

There is in Césaire one line that, among many others, has always puzzled
me. You will find this line on the same page as the lines just quoted, a bit earlier in
the text. Chamoiseau actually quotes this line in his homage: “Beauté je t’appelle
pétition de la pierre.” First, let me mention two well-known translations, as well as
 BER NADETTE CAILLER  •  23

Abiola Irele’s explanatory paragraph. In my opinion, Emile Snyder’s literal transla-

tion seems to be most sensible (although I could have done without the comma):
“Beauty, I call you the petition of the stone” (Cahier 72–73). On the other hand, I
am not sure that Annette Smith and Clayton Eshleman’s rendition—which reads
as follows: “Beauty I call you the false claim of the stone” (CP 49)—is attuned to
the ambiguity of the line. As for Irele’s explanatory paragraph, in his first words,
he points to “a reference to the classical ideal of beauty in Western civilization” as
can be found “in stone and marble statues”; he adds that “the black poet rejects
this ideal of a universal aesthetic norm, seeing in it rather the expression of an
unmoving and lifeless principle.” In his opinion, “pétition de la pierre” echoes
Baudelaire’s famous line “Je suis belle, ô mortels, comme un rêve de pierre” from
the poem “La beauté,” Spleen et Idéal (“I am beautiful, oh mortals! Like a dream
of stone”—“Beauty,” Spleen and Ideal). Irele also sees in this line a reminiscence
of the Latin phrase “petitio principii,” “used in logic to describe an argument
that does not advance beyond its premise,” a suggestion closer to Eshleman and
Smith’s rendition (Aimé Césaire 11). In any case, if I understand Irele, in this line,
Césaire would evoke and refute Baudelaire in the same gesture. If we continue to
read Baudelaire’s poem, for instance, two lines from the second stanza: “Je hais
le mouvement qui déplace les lignes, / et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris,”
(“I hate any movement that breaks the line / And I never cry and I never laugh”),
such an ideal Platonic-like Beauty, indeed, does not belong to Earth, and is not
part, cannot be part of human emotions and tragedies. No doubt, this poem can
be usefully chosen in contrast with the nature—rooted sense of beauty we find
in Césaire, although I could not tell whether he had this poem in mind when he
wrote his own page. It is also interesting that whereas in the segment “rêve de
pierre” (“dream of stone”), the preposition “de” probably means “made of,” the
same preposition in Césaire, followed by the article “la” (“the”), may signal the
dynamic aspiration of “the stone” to promote the advent of beauty in the world,
that sort of beauty that, if we remember the lines that follow, in Cahier, will disturb
and challenge a certain type of thinking and preconceived order. I tend to see the
possible rapprochement with Baudelaire, therefore, in a light somewhat different
from Irele’s own interpretation. Actually, if we continue to look at the immedi-
ate context of Césaire’s line, a little earlier in the text, we read: “Au bout du petit
matin ces pays sans stèle, ces chemins sans mémoire, ces vents sans tablette. /
Qu’importe ?” (“At the end of the wee hours this land without a stele, these paths
without memory, these winds without a tablet / So what ?” CP 48–49), then, in
the segment “the petition of the stone,” we could hear a request from the mineral
realm to welcome in anything deemed beautiful the visible traces of a human story
steeped in memory and language.13
However, going back to Baudelaire for a minute, we cannot forget that in
another famous poem, “Hymne à la Beauté” (“Hymn to Beauty”), there is no
inevitable paradisiacal image associated with Beauty that, here, in the poet’s
imagination, irony not excluded, may very well come from Hell. Moreover, power-
ful as Baudelaire’s love of Art (with a capital A) was, didn’t he project in some of
his imperishable verse the most poignant, tragic, pathetic, fluid, transient aspects
of human life, and this, with compassion? (See, for instance, in Tableaux parisiens
[Parisian Scenes] “Les petites vieilles” [“The little old women”], “La servante au
grand cœur [. . .]” [“The Big-Hearted Servant (. . .)”], and other poems).
24  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 41 Number 1

In the early part of this essay, I questioned how evident or even pertinent
was Chamoiseau’s bold proposition that holds that, in Césaire, life and beauty are
inseparable, one from the other. Again, within the context of Césaire’s own world,
own people, we know, indeed, that life has not always been “beautiful.” And yet,
the more time I spend reading Césaire, the more I understand how enlightened
this association between life and beauty is. We could devote many hours pursu-
ing this line of thought. Césaire’s poetry, in multiple ways, evokes a time/space
where death in its numerous dimensions and occurrences, through torture of the
body, torture of the spirit, torture of the tongue, death actually dies, thanks to
many people’s endurance, fortitude, and commitment. Let us recall the Toussaint
Louverture passage from Cahier, often quoted and celebrated, where, I repeat,
death dies, but only because some human beings accept their own death, now or
tomorrow, while rebelling against other people’s suffering and death. And here,
we are confronted with the difficult, no longer very fashionable idea, perhaps,
that the “beauty” of life, the fullness of life, and the potential “perfection” of a
poem may have something to do with truth, disorderly, muddy, unpredictable,
uncertain, tragic, as that truth may often look and sound. Again, the short excerpt
from Chamoiseau’s Un dimanche au cachot, which I quoted earlier, comes to mind,
and may help us grasp better the full dimension of Césaire’s “Sixth Proposition”
in “Poetry and Knowledge,” which states that “Poetic truth has as its sign beauty”
(“La vérité poétique a pour signe la beauté”). Could we turn this statement around
and also read it as meaning: “Poetic beauty has as its sign truth”?
Let us also call to mind, rapidly, so many Afro-American, Afro-Caribbean
“sorrow songs,” a term I am borrowing from the Souls of Black Folks by W. E. Du Bois.
From transmission to transformation, through the power of dancelike rhythms,
hand-clapping, foot-tapping, with their constant, insistent call-and-response
structures, with or without the help of musical instruments, many of these songs
constitute untamed affirmations of life and beauty, beauty in life, not despite
sorrow but from the depth of sorrow.14 Many of us have heard these marvelous
rhythmical lines from “Jou’vert,” a poem written and chanted by the Barbadian
poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite:

So
bambalula bambulai
bambalula bambulai

stretch the drum

tight hips will sway

stretch the back

tight whips will flay . . .

bambalula bambulai
bambalula bambulai

fangs of lightning
strike and

bite the bitter

world of stone
 BER NADETTE CAILLER  •  25

and sorrows

bambalula bambulai
bambalula bambulai

but the sorrows

burn to ashes

grey rocks
melt to pools

of lashes
sweat and flowers

bloom along the way [. . .]

In a poem from moi, laminaire . . . (I, laminaria . . .), by Césaire, entitled “la
Justice écoute aux portes de la Beauté” (“Justice listens at the gates of Beauty”),
we read:

la tache de beauté fait ici sa tâche

elle sonne somme exige l’obscur déjà
et que la fête soit refaite
et que rayonne la justice
en vérité la plus haute

the taint of beauty here does its toil already

it rings summons demands the obscure
and may the feast be festive again
and may justice be as radiant
as the highest truth15

It is noteworthy, perhaps, that in the poem title, and only in the title, “Justice” and
“Beauty” appear respectively with a capital “J” and a capital “B,” a choice uncom-
mon in Césaire’s texts, a choice that, however, I am not tempted to associate with
any metaphysical or abstract notion of the “good,” of the “beautiful.” Throughout
his work, the poet speaks about our lives and tells us that, in this life, there is no
beauty, no truth without a concern for justice, a thirst for justice.
Who was Aimé Césaire, that warrior in search of beauty? Honest minds will
have to acknowledge that his sustained meditation on the interrelationship of all
aspects of life, his love for and attachment to stones, birds, trees, volcanoes, con-
tinents and, conjointly, the love and bond he felt for and with his fellow human
beings, most especially for and with many suffering brethren at home and at
large, the love and respect he felt for, as he put it so memorably in his first play Et
les chiens se taisaient (And the Dogs Were Silent), “the blood-kiss of the severed head
to the silver plate” (“le baiser de sang de la tête coupée au plat d’argent,” 3.117 ),16
all this and more place Césaire’s œuvre as a teaching poetic force, not behind us
but with us and ahead of us. It is no wonder that his determination and capacity
to face human tragedies with open eyes, co-substantial with a lifelong search for
beauty, have found multiple echoes in many other creative minds of our time. Thus,
26  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 41 Number 1

to name only one author, no reader could possibly miss the fact that, in Moisson
de crânes: textes pour le Rwanda, Abdourahman Waberi repeatedly uses Césaire as
an intertext. Waberi’s gesture is bold, subtle, as well as historically relevant. We,
the readers, know that, in his denunciation of human cruelty, while never oblivi-
ous of the tricontinental African tragedy rooted in the Middle Passage, Césaire
constantly breaks out of the binary categories within which, however, people of
African birth or ancestry have for so long been imprisoned: North/South, White/
Black, Civilized/Un-(or Less-)Civilized, etc. His poetry would make no sense oth-
erwise. When Waberi, the poet, wishes to conjure up the machete blows inflicted
from neighbor to neighbor, from brother to sister, he quotes a passage from Et les
chiens se taisaient telling about the (black) Rebel hunting down the (white) Master
(Moisson de crânes 31). And, of course, at the same time, beyond the Rebel figure
killing his oppressor, how many acts of barbarity perpetrated by the Master-class
people appear to the reader’s mind? Such a deliberate choice of words, Césaire’s
worldwide known words, shows as much finesse and clairvoyance on Waberi’s
part, as it stands as a powerful testimony to Césaire’s far-reaching Imaginaire. Not
only does Waberi’s text create forceful images of the Rwandan horrific season of
agony, also, it ought to remind or teach readers that Césaire’s Rebel and Master
were indeed close neighbors who, not infrequently, shared family members.
Waberi’s text helps remind readers that all humans are indeed neighbors, so often
embarked on sordid journeys of hatred and death, neighbors whose life stories
could have explored, could explore other routes, could have pursued and could
pursue other ends, if only true reason had prevailed, and did prevail, day after day.
Having learned so much from Césaire, any of us should know and may
declare that his Negritude cannot be divorced from his poetic dream; that this
poetic dream, far from transcending history, or rather histories and their respec-
tive cultures, embraces many of them. Césaire’s poetic dream does not, cannot
erase, or allow anyone to forget and put aside the crimes, the evils of the past, nor,
I wish to stress, those of the present. Far from it. The tragicity of Césaire’s voice is
only commensurable with the tenacity of his faith in life and in human creativity
(again, I call readers’ attention to his 2003 interview with Maryse Condé).17 Blaming
Césaire the politician for not having fully met the dream of Césaire the poet makes
sense only if one does not try to remember what artistic creativity is all about, as,
indeed, Chamoiseau’s homage reminds us. In a concluding paragraph, not devoid
of irony, he, Chamoiseau remarks that “useless” as poets may be, and this, he adds,
“is so much the better” (“A quoi servent les poètes ? A rien, et c’est tant mieux”),
poets, indeed, help us to live, dream, and fight without ever “offending beauty”
(“sans jamais offusquer la beauté”).18 Actually, thinking of a possible translation for
“offusquer,” I have wondered whether we could not also include its Latin etymology,
“offuscare,” whose meaning is closer to the English verb “to obfuscate.” If such an
interpretation is possible, Chamoiseau’s choice of words may project the twofold
connotation of not offending and not being blind to—or suppressing?—beauty.
Before closing his homage, and quoting René Char, Chamoiseau reminds the
reader that a poet ought not to leave “proofs,” but “traces” of his/her passage; only
traces keep the dream alive, and thus, liberate our minds (“René Char disait qu’un
poète ne doit pas laisser des preuves de son passage, mais des traces car ‘seules les
traces font rêver’. Seules les traces nous libèrent”). Some of us might be tempted to
suggest that, throughout his tribute, and in a very honest gesture, Chamoiseau is
 BER NADETTE CAILLER  •  27

perhaps struggling with his inner contradictions, calling himself “a bastard son”
(“un fils bâtard”), he who has always positioned himself far from Césaire’s politics
(“moi qui me suis toujours tenu loin de sa politique”). Contradictions? Let me dare
another remark here: I personally understand fully, perhaps even better than I
did in the past, why the best creative minds in Martinique and Guadeloupe could
quarrel with Césaire the politician, while offering to the world the most powerful
interpretations of his poetic work, impressing upon readers, trying to impress upon
readers, not so much the conviction but the intimate knowledge that art is never
an illustration, an application of an “idea,” but a creative endeavor, a search which,
consciously and unconsciously, brings about new ways of dreaming, thinking,
and desiring; new ways which, some day, might inspire people to actually create
different options in their societies and for their daily lives. This is what Glissant
meant, I believe, when he wrote: “La poésie . . . enfante des bouleversements qui
nous changent” (“Poetry . . . gives birth to upheavals that change us”) (La cohée du
Lamentin 108). To be noted, the recent Manifeste pour les ‘produits’ de haute nécessité
(Manifesto for the highly necessary ‘products’) signed—and circulated on the internet
as early as 16 February 2009–- by a group of creative writers and intellectuals from
Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guiana, and Reunion, Glissant and Chamoiseau included,
resounds with strongly Cesairean echoes:

Nous appelons à une haute politique, à un art politique, qui installe l’individu,
sa relation à l’Autre, au centre d’un projet commun où règne ce que la vie a de
plus exigeant, de plus intense et de plus éclatant, et donc de plus sensible à la
beauté.

We call for a high-minded politics, for a political art, one that will place each
individual, his relation to the Other, at the center of a common project where
what in life is most demanding, most intense, most radiant and, therefore, most
responsive to beauty, will prevail.

Césaire was one of those rare human beings who, through an exceptional
intelligence and a lifelong commitment, through his spoken words and writings
was able to create dialogues, communication, relations, where there could have
been only, in Chamoiseau’s own words (such assertions being echoed in Pépin’s
tribute): “short-sighted rebellions” (“des rébellions bornées”) and “the blind fangs”
grown out of a narrow sense of identity (“des crocs identitaires aveugles”); in other
words, where there could have been only noise, frustration, sterility, even hatred,
and ultimately silence. As Glissant has stated so often in one way or the other, he or
she who has known alienation and deprivation at their peaks will be particularly
gifted for communication and relationships with others, that is, if hardships do not
crush him or her to death. All that Césaire was, all that he is, will remain, through
his work, but also, of course, through the memories so many people have of him,
the enduring, immense gift of the Caribbean nations to the whole world. Who was
Aimé Césaire, the warrior-poet? or, rather, let me now reformulate this question:
who are the Aimé Césaires of this world? Who are those mortal, imperfect, indis-
pensable “warriors” in search of fragile, and yet, resilient and unabatable beauties,
beauties so often embodied in limping, maimed, thirsty, hungry, sick bodies? As
a concluding thought and response, let me borrow a vivid, and all-encompassing
line from the Jamaican poet Colleen Smith-Brown: “I am the tree you chopped.”
28  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 41 Number 1

Notes
1. This essay is based on a keynote address presented at the University of the West
Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados (Colloquium on Aimé Césaire, October 15–17,
2008). I wrote it with a special thought for two pioneers in the field of Cesairean Studies:
Lilyan Kesteloot and Jacqueline Leiner (who died in Spring 2008). As indicated, I have
sometimes modified some translations. I myself have translated some excerpts from
several addresses, interviews, or other publications still untranslated from French, but
have kept the French titles for books still untranslated to this day.
2. In his homage, Glissant actually does not make any reference to his own criti-
cism of Negritude or to some characteristics of Césaire’s political stands or practical
choices, as he does elsewhere. See, for instance, Cailler, “Relire: ‘ma bouche sera la
bouche. . . .’ ” As for Confiant, there is actually ample evidence that he, too, appreciates
Césaire’s poetic caliber. What, in the past, had surprised me, at least when reading Une
traversée paradoxale du siècle, was what seemed to be a refusal, on his part, to envisage a
hiatus, at any time, between the poet-politician’s words and various concrete actions
of his.
3. In Aimé Césaire: une traversée paradoxale du siècle, Confiant actually quotes Cailler
as a critic who writes about Césaire’s “immense tristesse” (“immense sadness”) (91).
See also writings by Arnold, Songolo, and Hénane, for instance.
4. For this essay, I am using Aimé Césaire. The Collected Poetry, translated, with
an introduction and notes by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith; also, the 1971
Présence Africaine bilingual edition of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal with a preface
by André Breton, translation by Emile Snyder. I am also using Lyric and Dramatic
Poetry (1946–82) by Aimé Césaire, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith
(bilingual edition). Introduction by A. James Arnold. This book includes translations
of Poésie et connaissance, Et les chiens se taisaient, and moi, laminaire . . .
5. The metatextual excerpt from Un dimanche au cachot I am quoting here appears
as a note written by the porcelain seller—a freemason abolitionist, also called “the
visitor,” who eventually will identify himself as Victor Schœlcher (308). Re: B. Cailler,
“Un dimanche au cachot (Patrick Chamoiseau, 2007): Analysis of a Palimpsest,” a paper
presented at the 2009 African Literature Association Meeting, The University of Ver-
mont, Burlington, April 15–18, and published at MondesFrancophones.com (31/08/09).
Recently, I translated this article into French.
6. Born in 1925 in Marosvásárhely, in eastern Transylvania (now Tîrgy-Mures
in Romania), from a family of Hungarian, German, and Armenian descent, Gaspar
writes in French. Of particular interest for this essay, see: Approche de la parole suivi de
Apprentissage avec deux inédits ; “Sciences, Philosophie et Arts,” Cahier Lorand Gaspar;
“Chemins de vie et de pensée. Entretien avec Lorand Gaspar, 1995–2005” (Madeleine
Renouard); also, Cailler, “Chassé-croisé entre Aimé Césaire et Lorand Gaspar: de
‘Poésie et connaissance’ (1945) à Approche de la parole (1978).”
7. I have modified the published translation, and chosen “logic-oriented beauty”
instead of “logical activity,” L&D Poetry xIii.
8. We recall that at the time of the collaboration between Leonardo da Vinci and
the mathematician and Franciscan friar Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli (c1445–1517), such
a mathematical ratio came to be known as “the divine proportion.” This ratio is sym-
bolized by the Greek letter Phi and transcribed in the number 1.618034. . . . In his book
entitled The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World’s Most Astonishing Number, Mario
Livio, the astrophysicist, debunks a number of myths associated with the Golden Ratio
(although not strongly enough according to at least one reviewer, George Markowsky:
“In some cases, he does an effective job of debunking nonsense, but in others his
debunking is halfhearted.” Notices of the AMS 2005: 345), some of these myths being
linked to semimystical views, some with imprecise mathematical calculations (for
 BER NADETTE CAILLER  •  29

instance, with respect to Egyptian pyramids or the Parthenon). Livio constructs his
analysis along historical lines as well as various domains of exploration: from math-
ematics to natural phenomena, to various crafts—such as the making of a violin—and
to the arts, including poetry. Regarding this last domain, the arts, his research inves-
tigates whether unconscious or conscious uses of this ratio can be found in a selected
number of architectural structures, paintings, sculptures, poems, and other artifacts.
He concludes, however, that there is strong evidence that the artists whose works have
survived time, and have continued to elicit interest, are those who have not felt bound
by such academic restraints.
9. Again, I have modified the published translation: “. . . on the whole modern
science is perhaps only the pedantic verification of some mad images spewed out by
poets,” L&D Poetry Iii.
10. As early as Spring 1977, in number 3 of Cahiers Césairiens, Gérard Georges Pigeon
had published a most interesting article entitled “Le rôle des termes médicaux, du
bestiaire et de la flore dans l’imagerie césairienne.”
11. Eschleman and Smith had chosen “conscience” and “fleshy rhythm” (83). I
believe both expressions are inadequate: “conscience” implies a moral dimension in
English; “fleshy” evokes fatness, plumpness. We also read “conscience” in Snyder’s
translation, but for “rythme de chair,” we have the literal rendition “rhythm of flesh,”
which is preferable (153).
12. “l’anti-venin en rosace terrible équilibrera l’antique venin” [Translators’ rendi-
tion: “the antivenom shall balance the antique venom in an awesome rose window,”
CP 250–51. My suggestion: “awesome the rose-shaped antivenom will counterpoise
the antique venom.”]
13. We know how central the stone motif—as engraved memory, trace . . . —is in
Chamoiseau’s work: see L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse, avec un entre-dire d’Edouard
Glissant, and Un dimanche au cachot.
14. See Cailler, “The Afro-Caribbean Sorrow Song: Transmission and Trans­-
formation.”
15. My translation. Here is the translators’ rendition:
the taint in beauty here performs her task
she rings for summons demands the obscure already
that the feast be restored
that justice beam
indeed above everything (L&D Poetry 36)
When, in January 2009, I read L’intraitable beauté du monde: adresse à Barack Obama
by Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, I noticed that the title of this poem
appears on p. 29.
16. This translation is mine. The text in L&D Poetry reads as follows: “my brother
the bloody kiss of the severed head in the silver dish” (67).
17. See my analysis of “Calendrier lagunaire” [“Lagoonal Calendar”] in “Césaire ou
la fidélité: réflexions sur un poème de Noria.” Césaire requested that an excerpt from
this poem be inscribed on his tombstone. It was read in its entirety by Daniel Maxi-
min on 3 December 2008, at the Alliance Française in Bâle. See also my other article
“Crevasse, métaphore vive du texte. Réflexions sur un poème de moi, laminaire.”
18. See, in Chamoiseau’s Biblique des derniers gestes, the most interesting exchanges
between Césaire as character and the dying protagonist Bodule-Jules, the embodiment
of all freedom fighters. In this work, Césaire the poet stands as a powerful source of
inspiration for the oppressed and seekers of justice. See note 2 above: Cailler, “Relire:
‘ma bouche sera . . .’ ”
30  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 41 Number 1

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32  •  Research in African Liter atures • Volume 41 Number 1

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