Skip to main content
Outdated Browser

For the best experience using our website, we recommend upgrading your browser to a newer version or switching to a supported browser.

More Information

It’s December 2023. Amid the festive holiday buzz, I’m nestled inside my room in Thorigné-Fouillard, a small housing estate near Rennes, in Brittany, holding the CNRS/Présence Africaine edition of Aimé Césaire’s collected works. This volume, entitled Aimé Césaire: Poésie, Théâtre, Essais et Discours [Aimé Césaire: Poetry, Theatre, Essays and Speeches], is a definitive edition of Césaire’s multi-genre oeuvre, and a good number of its texts are yet to be translated into English. I leaf through the poet’s two earliest collections, Les armes miraculeuses (1946) and Soleil cou coupé (1948). But there’s one poem that beckons me: “Chevelure” from Soleil cou coupé. Four years ago, I embarked on translating this very poem. It was an absorbing enterprise that brought me closer to understanding why I was attracted to Césaire’s poetry, not to mention his philosophical thought, and why I kept on going back to it. My relation to his body of work feels like a life’s pursuit: I will ever keep on coming back to it. Undoubtably, Aimé Césaire is essential to the way I understand myself and my work in the world. I spend a lot of time trying to pinpoint the reasons why. In a way, the title of my latest work suggests this. The book is entitled Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits, and, as the word “engagements” might suggest, it attempts to distill some thoughts I have had in the course of my twenty-plus years of reading Césaire’s work.

I first encountered his oeuvre via the Cahier d’un retour au pays au natal [Return to My Native Land] around 1999, when I studied this text as part of my bachelor’s degree at the University of the West Indies, in Mona, Jamaica. I was a French major. This poem itself is what I characterize as “inexhaustible,” my word for describing those rare texts that you want to read again and again and which seem just as fresh and striking the tenth time you read them as the first. Recently, I’ve had to reread the Cahier in the process of writing the introduction for the Penguin Modern Classics edition of that work, which is to be published this year.

I wanted to go back to my rough translation of “Chevelure” and, hopefully, “complete” it, whatever that means. The poem is dense and requires that you pay attention to every word: the meticulous attention required by every word and phrase seems remarkable. This is to say nothing of the way the poem demands attention to rhythm—not as an adventitious extra, but as an essential aspect of the composition, a part of how it holds its meaning. I’m still thinking about this poem, about its “beautiful naked tree . . . bombarded by laterite blood,” its “invincible and spacious cockcrow,” the tree as a “vat in which we find hiding / the colloquy of the gallop and the wind.” In this poem, my mind is again ignited by the characterization of the tree as an “innocent one meandering”:

O in the savannahs of silence the faceless glories flowing from
the pistils’ hollow dark
[. . .]

all the saps that rise in the lust of the earth
all the poisons distilled by nocturnal stills in the involucre of the mallows
all the thunder of the saponarias
are like these discordant words written by the pyre’s fire on the
sublime pennons of revolt

I have rendered the title of the poem, “Chevelure,” as “Coma.” In Césaire’s poetry, it is common for an image to contain dual, or even multiple, allusions. The “chevelure” of the poem’s title is as much “a head of hair”—that’s the most obvious translation—as it is a coma, a nebulous envelope around the nucleus of a comet that gives it its fuzzy appearance when viewed through a telescope: it’s this fuzzy appearance that resembles a head of hair. As I write in chapter three of Engagements with Aimé Césaire, this duality is already embedded in the ancient Greek kometes, meaning “long-haired star.” “Telescoping images to create an organic unity of multiple facets of nature,” I explain, “the poem conflates the full hair of a woman, the comet’s gaseous atmosphere, and the hairlike canopy of a tree.” But this allusiveness is not for mere show; its philosophical purpose is world-building, the affirmation of the body’s right to be embedded within a total, vital, brimming world, a world that’s full and to which the body fully belongs, enmeshed within the weave of its relations:

innocent one traveling by, I’m under the mature forest
of a flesh that watches me. Be for us attentive and docile
the faces sleeping in the schisms’ suffocation
will awake again and render inoperative the most modern
technical inventions, the forest will remember the water and the sapwood
the way I remember the soft muzzle
of the great rivers that stagger like the blind
in search of their eyes of liquid manure
[ . . . ]

and you
land of my insolence of my graves of my waterspouts
mane mass of creepers strong hope of the shipwrecked
sleep softly at the meticulous trunk of my embrace my wife
my citadel

 

As I’ve tried to explain in my introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Return to My Native Land, Césaire’s metaphysical stance expressed in poetry, that of earthly consciousness, was deeply related to Negritude in the way he understood it: by placing the body back into the vastness of the earth, the ocean, the sky, back into the joy and exhilaration of its earth-hood, Césaire was offering an empowering understanding of Black humanity, while defining, for the white supremacist, imperialist world, a different understanding of what it means to be human. To put this differently, the way Césaire’s poetry makes us see the living world has everything to do with Negritude. Much of this imagery, this texture of language, this sensibility towards space, earth, and world, has penetrated my own poetry. Writing these lines, I realize that the yearnings that Césaire has towards trees, for example—he speaks of his “ancient pagan cult of the tree”—has certainly helped shape my own.

My translation of “Chevelure” remains unfinished, despite my revisiting it. Much more attention is required of my rough draft before I can feel that I’ve done justice to the poem. What sort of line breaks do I need? What sort of liberties can I take with the syntax, while honoring the spirit of the work? Perhaps my translation will occupy the page’s space in quite a different way from the original. Those are just some of the questions I keep in mind. As I sit in the room in Thorigné-Fouillard, I keep flipping through Les armes miraculeuses, thinking that I may find a poem that conveys the impulses I’ve described above, while being less challenging to translate. With this thought in mind, I stumble upon the short poem “N’ayez point pitié de moi,” from Les armes miraculeuses; it seems to fit the bill. I render the title as “Fear Me No Longer.” This is my tentative translation:

smoke marshes!

the rupestrian images of the unknown
turn away from me the dusky silence
of their laughter

smoke oh marshes urchin heart
dead stars made sweet by my marvelous
hands surge from the pulp of my eyes

smoke smoke!
the fragile darkness of my voice erupts
with flamboyant cities
and the irresistible purity of my hand
calls from afar from my very far heritage
the victorious zeal of acid in the flesh
of life—marshes—

like a viper born from the blond force
of astonishment.

What was highlighted by the act of translating this poem was the importance of incantation, an essential quality in the work. How do I render that in the translation? Here, I’m asking similar questions to the ones elicited by my work on “Chevelure.” Does rendering incantation properly require changes in syntax and form? So far, formwise, things have stayed basically the same, but it was important to preserve at least the anaphora in the poem. Furthermore, I removed all capitals and commas. Capitalization seemed to work against the sensual porosity evoked by this poem. Equally, the physical control enacted by commas seemed antithetical to the language, which wanted, I thought, to free itself from punctuation.

One phrase that struck me was “la pureté irresistible de mes mains,” which I translate as “the irresistible purity of my hand.” It felt very Césairean, meaning that it reflected a quality in his work that I’ve wanted to absorb into mine (through alchemy, rather than imitation, of course). It felt like a way of characterizing what poetry means, or what it is to live in poetry (as Césaire can be seen as doing). This way of living in poetry might suggest a belief that the poet’s word, symbolized by the hands in this case, is needed, essential to the world. There is in it also the idea of poetry doing, and that saying and doing are inseparable—that, together, they form one organic gesture. Poetry is about belief—not in a religious sense, because “poetry” is a metaphysic all on its own. I suppose that’s where the “purity” comes in. Beyond the idea that there is something pure about the poetic vocation itself, it also evokes to me some desire to get beyond History, to reckon with the deep roots of a self that goes beyond the present, or beyond an existing sociopolitical framework of time, a framework in which that self has not been thought (been able to be thought) outside of its relation to the imposing set of ideas we now refer to as race. There’s, for the poet, an idea of thinking the self in relation to its own deep roots, rather than in relation to whiteness, which must mean thinking outside of History. It is here that narrative and the storytelling of “who am I?” calls as much on myth and the stories suggested or told by the cosmos—the marshes, their dark, mysterious waters; the images of caves; the cycle of decay and rebirth; the power of the land—as much as any story that we call “History.” I feel that “History” can’t contain the river that we call “Us,” we, the people whom whiteness scattered to the lands of the New World. History cannot contain our story. It never could. In translating, I feel the poetry suggesting to me that language—the language of poetry—does a better job of carrying this story, the story of what this poet feels he is. All of this, I feel, is distilled in this phrase: “la pureté irrésistible de mes mains.”

Another thing that strikes me is that, though the poetry is rooted in the earth, in what surrounds it (it is responding, perhaps, to something that the poet can physically see—the marshes, perhaps), it has a very large scale: it speaks of a vast range of landscapes, but more than that, it produces the sensation of width and depth within the body. It evokes landscapes, lost and dreamed-of worlds, but it is also itself an act of world-building. There is distance in the poetry. Césaire’s poems feel at once intimate (fleshly) and cosmically vast, as if they’ve always meant to join what’s near to what’s very far, or long, or deep, in space and time: in this case, the marshes to the stars. That’s what the poetry is: joining, clasping. It highlights the fact that we—each, one tiny node of being—are in infinite width and infinite depth. Over and over, that’s what the poetry show us, and in doing so, it is never tiring, because it can also never fully show it. Attempting to show it is like measuring the width of language itself—it’s an impossible task but nonetheless one that calls one to pursue it. Engaging the impossible is the stake behind Césaire’s poetry. For him, poetry is always about seeing yourself in relation to a vastness. Does that mean seeing “self” as not a fixed thing as much as a pursuit? I think, maybe.

Thinking through these translations has not only enabled me to realize how much Césaire’s poetry has influenced the texture of my own but how much it has shaped my sensibility as an artist. I’m thinking here, obviously, of the central place that organic processes and the living world occupy in my writing. More particularly, however, what my work has absorbed from Césaire’s is the paradoxical idea that, at a certain level, the world is and must remain unavailable to us. In other words, part of the power of the living world and of our connection to it is its ability to not be fully yielded to us. I’ve been reflecting recently on a small French language publication by the German philosopher Harmut Rosa entitled Rendre le monde indisponible [Rendering the World Unavailable], in which he writes,

modernity’s individual and institutional quest to make the world available [. . .], with ever greater access, produces paradoxical collateral effects that can be described, with Marx, as alienation rather than as assimilation, with Adorno and Lukács as reification rather than vitalization, with Arendt as world-loss rather than world-gain, with Blumenberg as illegibility rather than understanding, and with Weber as disenchantment rather than inspiration. Modernity runs the risk of no longer hearing the world and, for this precise reason, no longer encountering itself [ . . .] It has become incapable of allowing itself to be interpellated and reached. (My translation)

It’s not the fact of having access to things, but of entering into resonance with them,” he continues, “the fact of being able to elicit their response [. . .] and then engaging in turn with this response, that constitutes, for human beings, the fundamental mode of being-in-the-world in its living form.”

Without my realizing it, rendering the world unavailable is one of the key lessons that Césaire’s poetry had emphasized for me. Needless to say, I could find thoughts and words by many a great poet that resonate with this—Juan L. Ortíz, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kamau Brathwaite, Wisława Szymborska . . . the list is endless—because poetry, I believe, arises out of the very paradox that lies in this idea: our yearning to penetrate the world, to be one with it, is sustained by its capacity to be unyielded to us, by its ability to retain its opacity. Everything addresses us, is a “you” to us: nothing is passive, existing as reserve for our needs. This, of course, is the great challenge that confronts late modernity, in which capitalists use every toolkit under the sun to ensure that everyone keeps exploiting and consuming as much as they possibly can, augmenting an insatiable desire to make every bit of the world useable. In the introduction to Engagements with Aimé Césaire, entitled “Thinking with Spirits: An Unlearning,” I write that the work speaks,

about the possibility of a form of pedagogy built on the affirmation of impenetrability, rather than on the smart, speculative I [. . .] What is the language through which we think about what it means to ‘be alongside’ something we don’t know, that we perhaps can’t know, ‘or that a particular register of knowledge [doesn’t make] available’[1] to us? In an era of totalist surveillance, mappability, and knowability, which radically (re)shape the relationships our bodies have to the living world, a politics of impenetrability [. . .] asks for vulnerability yet unimagined by an acquisitive, entrepreneurial, “individual” order of being. They ask for understandings of our mutual entanglement with the living world. Indeed, they ask for understanding that we are more than “individuals” (from the Latin individuum, meaning “indivisible”), but in fact porous, traversed, spread, that we are rock, we are water, we are tree, we are land.

I want to end with an extract from an autofictional work in progress in which my protagonist, Lemké (another nod to Césaire), takes a walk along the granite coast of Trébeurden, Brittany. It shows the extent to which this line of thinking around our relationship to the unavailable traverses my work:

There’s the exposed, upturned roots of a pine tree blown down in a recent storm. At a glance, these roots resemble sharp knife blades; they’ve intertwined with the granite rock present on the coastline, so much that they seem to have fissured the rock as the tree fell, tearing off the part of it that had bonded with the tree itself. Things seem to have existed under pressure in the darkness for some time. As usual, he’s been interested in what he can’t see. What he can never see often seems far more interesting to him than the things he might see.

Césaire helps me to articulate, as the book’s blurb says, a “politics of the self,” to reinvent the grounds for being human under conditions of coloniality. Indeed, he enables a language and grammar that reflect the stakes of what it means to make a life under conditions of permanent crisis.


[1] Claire Schwartz, “Civil Service,” in Between the Covers: Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction and Poetry. Online, 1 September 2022. https://tinhouse.com/podcast/claireschwartz-civil-service/.