The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Aimé Césaire
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sacrifice for her children and the father’s moods alternating between “melancholy tenderness” and “towering flames of anger.” The transition from the first to the second sequence involves a shift of focus away from the sickness of colonial society to the speaker’s own delusions. He alludes in strophe 29 to “betrayed trusts” and “uncertain evasive duty.” He imagines his own heroic return to the island: “I would arrive sleek and young in this land of mine and I would say to this land …” In the course of the second sequence the speaker comes very gradually to a realization of his own alienation as a consequence of colonial education. Moral prostration and a diminished sense of self are related directly to the colonial process and its cultural institutions. The same strophe includes the long narrative segment devoted to the old black man on the streetcar. Césaire multiplies signifiers of blackness that clearly denote both his physical and moral self. Centuries of dehumanization have produced a “masterpiece of caricature.” Structural symmetry in the 1939 “Notebook” is important here. The streetcar scene in the second sequence calls to mind the scene representing the speaker’s family shack in the initial sequence. Both serve to bring a sharper focus to their respective themes: first physical, then moral degradation.
The third sequence introduces a series of interrogations about the meaning of blackness or negritude in the context of the speaker’s alienation from those values he will posit as African. From this point onward the speaker adopts a prayerful attitude that is signaled formally by ritual language: “O” (twice in strophe 64) and “Eia” (twice in strophe 66). Numerous commentators have located “Eia” in Greek tragedy, but it occurs in the Latin missal as well. In both instances these are formal devices that lend gravity to the litany of characteristics Césaire enumerates in strophes 64–66 by means of the anaphora “those who” (7 times), “my Negritude” (3 times), “it takes root / breaks through” (3 times, further extending the litany of “my Negritude”). These three strophes and the one that follows immediately (67) afford a positive response to the negative characteristics of colonized peoples in strophe 61. In this new sequence Césaire evokes the “Ethiopian” peoples of Africa, whose fundamental difference from Hamitic peoples he learned from Leo Frobenius’s book on African civilization. Suzanne Césaire described these traits in Tropiques:
Ethiopian civilization is tied to the plant, to the vegetative cycle. // It is dreamlike, mystical and turned inward. The Ethiopian does not seek to understand phenomena, to seize and dominate exterior reality. It gives itself over to living a life identical to that of the plant, confident in life’s continuity: germinate, grow, flower, fruit, and the cycle begins again (S. Césaire 1941).
In the third sequence Césaire sets up a contrapuntal structure in which the Ethiopian characteristics of sub-Saharan Africans, as the Césaires understood them, are set over against a Splengerian evocation of European decadence in strophes 39 and 70. This structure brings about a reversal of attitude on the part of the speaker, who in strophe 61 could see only the negative connotations of these same characteristics. The beginning of his own personal transformation shows him that these peoples are “truly the eldest sons of the world” and, indeed, the “flesh of the world’s flesh pulsating with the very motion of the world.”
A dozen strophes, from 80 to 91, detail the sufferings of African slaves ripped from their home cultures to toil, suffer, and die in the plantations of the Americas from Brazil through the West Indies to the southern United States. Names of diseases are enumerated like rosary beads, in strophe 87, before the speaker intones a litany of the punishments permitted by the Black Code that governed slaves’ lives until abolition in 1848. The network of religious allusion in which his denunciation of slavery is couched has gone largely unnoticed. Kesteloot, in a monograph intended for student readers of the poem, saw in “I accept … I accept … totally, without reservation …” a textual allusion to Christ on the cross speaking to God the Father (Luke 22:42). In the phrase “Look, now I am only a man …” she heard a satirical echo of Pontius Pilate giving Jesus over to rabbinical judgment (John 19:5). Whether or not one accepts these specific interpretations, the phrase “my race that no ablution of hyssop mixed with lilies could purify” clearly recalls the text of Psalm 51:7. In “my race ripe grapes for drunken feet” Kesteloot heard an echo of Isaiah 63:3, and in “my queen of spittle and leprosy …” one of Mathew 27:30 (Kesteloot 1983). What matters here is not the precise intertext but rather the spiritual tone of supplication and prayer by which the speaker takes upon himself the sins of the past and prepares to expiate them. His intention is messianic rather than specifically christic. To put it in terms of I. A. Richards’s theory of metaphor, the vehicle here is biblical, but the tenor relates to spiritual renewal of the race (Richards 1936). It is probable that Césaire used this technique to give voice to Du Bois’s double consciousness. His goal is to create for colonized blacks in the French empire a version of Alain Locke’s New Negro. Like many modernists in the English-speaking world, he used the language of religion—or, more accurately, a comparative mythology that includes the Bible—to elaborate a vocabulary and syntax of spiritual renewal. In this sense, his relationship to Catholicism is an aspect of countermodernism (Walker 1999). As the penultimate sequence of the “Notebook” comes to its climax, the speaker prepares to undergo a profound transformation. Stanzas 88 and 89 present the geography of suffering black humanity, the latter strophe replying directly to the claims made by “scientific” racism in strophe 52 in the context of the speaker’s assimilationist delirium. His infernal descent hits bottom in strophe 90: “and the Negro every day more base, more cowardly, more sterile, less profound, more spilled out of himself, more separated from himself, more wily with himself, less immediate to himself.” The isolated line that constitutes strophe 91 reiterates the spiritual motif of sacrifice: “I accept, I accept it all.” This is the goal of the process of anagnorisis. With self-awareness comes a new knowledge of what is at stake. The speaker must, in conclusion, reach a position that transcends the colonial deadend.
The speaker’s spiritual renewal opens with a pietà. The body of his country, its bones broken, is placed in his despairing arms. In strophe 92 the life force overwhelms him like some cosmic bull that lends its regenerative power. The initially bizarre image of the speaker spilling his seed upon the ground like the biblical Onan invites the reader to consider a far more primitive scene of the fecund earth being impregnated by the speaker’s sperm. The round shape of the mornes, which early on had assumed a symbolic role in the geography of the island, now becomes the breast whose nipple is surrounded by a new life-giving force. The entire island becomes a living, sexualized being that responds to the speaker’s firm embrace. Cyclones are its great breath, and volcanoes contain the seismic pulse of this mother goddess with whom the speaker breaks the taboo of incest. The consequences of this life-giving embrace are immediate and profoundly transformative. Already in strophe 93 the island is standing erect, side by side with her lover-son who through strophe 96 will denounce the centuries-old process of pseudomorphosis.
A parenthesis is in order here. Pseudomorphosis was readily identifiable in 1939 as a key word in the lexicon of Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West was much discussed between the two world wars. After 1945 Spengler was denounced as a forerunner of Nazi ideology and quickly forgotten. To our knowledge no critic of Césaire has ever seen its crucial function in the “Notebook.” By including this technical term toward the end of the third sequence of his long poem, Césaire named the process by which the speaker and his island society had come to be physically ill, morally prostrate, and ideologically deluded. In Césaire’s view colonial society had been impeded from developing its own original forms and institutions by the imposition of French cultural norms on a population transported from Africa. Négritude as it is presented in the poem did not yet exist in 1939, still less was it the harbinger of any movement, as readers of the post-1956 text would have it. Négritude is posited in the poem as the ideal result of a dramatic transformative process that must overthrow the old behaviors (la vieille négritude) so that a new black humanity (negritude in its positive sense) could emerge. Consequently the meanings attaching to nègre and its compounds in the “Notebook” run the gamut from extremely negative to supremely positive. To render meaningfully the dialectical process that the speaker undergoes in the third and fourth sequences of the poem we have had to use words that are not acceptable today in civil discourse in English.
Césaire