Surrealist Refugees in the Tropics
Illustration by Ansellia Kulikku. Jacqueline Lamba docks in Martinique in 1941. Peggy Guggenheim has paid her fare from Marseilles. Jacqueline is fleeing World War II with her husband, André Breton, and their daughter, Aube. They will stay in Martinique for three weeks, ostensibly at the Lazaret internment camp, a former leper colony, on their way to America. Where better to spread the Surrealist creed than the US, its citizens fixated on child actress Shirley Temple and Charles Lindbergh’s advice to Congress on Hitler? André, the pope of Surrealism, will later write propaganda for the US government-funded radio program Voice of America.
Jacqueline is swimming nude in a burlesque aquatics show when she first meets André. Her brother has urged her to read his work. Cafe Cyrano at Place Blanche, his haunt, is on her way to the pool. She takes a table and waits, hard at work with a pen. Sketching or writing? She has already published art in magazines. André has another way of describing their first meeting: “wild chance.” He immortalizes it in L’amour fou (Mad Love). He has already written Nadja, about his ten-day affair with (and rejection of) Léona Camille Ghislaine Delcourt, who predicts the future and believes in intuition and miracle. After their affair, Delcourt is arrested and incarcerated as a madwoman for the rest of her life.
A number of the refugees, including André and his family, are released from the internment camp because the Fort-de-France shopkeepers say they’re being deprived of a source of income. Local students who promise to show André around turn out to be working for the police.
Aube needs a ribbon. André visits a haberdashery and instead buys a copy of the publication Tropiques. He is stunned by its contents. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he writes, “but what was being said here was what had to be said, not only as well as it could be said but as loudly as it could be.” This is the first issue of the literary magazine, which insists that Surrealism illuminates the colonial situation. Its fourteen issues are edited primarily by Suzanne Roussy Césaire (“ingenuous flames you who lick a rare heart”) and her husband Aimé Césaire (“a human cauldron heated to the boiling point”), and become internationally influential. André declares that Tropiques spells out the great hope for European exhaustion—not Surrealism, but Négritude.
Surrealism: a twentieth-century avant-garde movement in art and literature. André, however, fails miserably at most of his love affairs, writes more manifestos and prose than poetry, and banishes those who deviate from those manifestos.
