Notebook of a Return to My Native Land: Cahier d'un retour au pays natal

By Aimé Césaire

André Breton called Césaire's Cahier 'nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time'. It is a seminal text in Surrealist, French and Black literatures - published in full in English for the first time in Bloodaxe’s bilingual Contemporary French Poets series. Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was born in in Basse-Pointe, a village on the north coast of Martinique, a former French colony in the Caribbean (now an overseas département of France). His book Discourse on Colonialism (1950) is a classic of French political literature. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1956) is the foundation stone of francophone Black literature: it is here that the word Négritude appeared for the first time. Négritude has come to mean the cultural, philosophical and political movement co-founded in Paris in the 1930s by three Black students from French colonies: the poets Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana; Léopold Senghor, later President of Senegal; and Aimé Césaire, who became a deputy in the French National Assembly for the Revolutionary Party of Martinique and was repeatedly elected Mayor of Fort-de-France. As a poet, Césaire believed in the revolutionary power of language, and in the Notebook he combined high literary French with Martinican colloquialisms, and archaic turns of phrase with dazzling new coinages. The result is a challenging and deeply moving poem on the theme of the future of the negro race which presents and enacts the poignant search for a Martinican identity. The Notebook opposes the ideology of colonialism by inventing a language that refuses assimilation to a dominant cultural norm, a language that teaches resistance and liberation. French-English dual language edition. Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets: 4.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Jun 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781780375571

Aimé Césaire

Aimé Césaire (1913 – 2008) was best known as the co-creator (with Léopold Senghor) of the concept of négritude. As a widely recognized and influential figure of the negritude movement, Césaire has been translated into English for over a decade.

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AIMÉ CÉSAIRE

Notebook of a Return to My Native Land Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

André Breton called Aimé Césaire’s Cahier ‘nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time’. It is a seminal text in Surrealism, in French and Black literatures, only now published in full in English for the first time.

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was born in Basse-Pointe, a village on the north coast of Martinique, a former French colony in the Caribbean. His Notebook of a Return to My Native Land is the foundation stone of francophone Black literature: it is here that the word Négritude appeared for the first time. Négritude has come to mean the cultural, philosophical and political movement co-founded in Paris in the 1930s by three Black students from French colonies: the poets Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana; Léopold Senghor, later President of Senegal; and Aimé Césaire, who became a deputy in the French National Assembly for the Revolutionary Party of Martinique and was repeatedly elected Mayor of Fort-de-France.

As a poet, Césaire believed in the revolutionary power of language, and in the Notebook he combined high literary French with Martinican colloquialisms, and archaic turns of phrase with dazzling new coinages. The result is a challenging and deeply moving poem on the theme of the future of the negro race which presents and enacts the poignant search for a Martinican identity. The Notebook opposes the ideology of colonialism by inventing a language that refusesassimilation to a dominant cultural norm, a language thatteaches resistance and liberation.

Cover painting: La Réunion (1945) by Wifredo Lam

(musée national d’art moderne, paris) © dacs,

1994

BLOODAXE CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETS

Series Editors: Timothy Mathews & Michael Worton

Mireille Rosello teaches in the department of Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Her recent publications include The Reparative in Narratives: Works of Mourning in Progress (2009), France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters (2005) and Postcolonial Hospitality: the Immigrant as Guest (2001). Her books in French include Littérature et identité créole aux Antilles, and studies of André Breton and Michel Tournier.

Annie Pritchard received an M.Phil for a thesis on French Marxism and feminism from the University of Wales, and was completing her doctoral thesis on post-structuralism and feminist ethics at the University of Illinois at the time of her tragic, early death in 1994.

Timothy Mathews is Professor of French at University College London. His books include Reading Apollinaire: Theories of Poetic Language (Manchester University Press, 1987 & 1990) and Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay in 20th Century France (CUP, 2000). He co-edited Tradition, Translation, Trauma: The Classic and the Modern (OUP, 2011) with Jan Parker, and co-translated Luce Irigaray’s Prières quotidiennes/Everyday Prayers (Larose/University of Nottingham Press, 2004) with Irigaray. The first volume in this series, On the Motion and Immobility of Douve by Yves Bonnefoy, has an introduction by him.

Michael Worton is Vice-Provost and Fielden Professor of French Language and Literature at University College London. He has published extensively on contemporary French writers, with two books on Michel Tournier, and co-edited Intertextuality (1990), Textuality and Sexuality (1993), Women’s Writing in Contemporary France (2003), National Healths: Gender, Sexuality and Health in a Cross-Cultural Context (2004), Liberating Learning (2010) and French Studies in and for the 21st Century (2011). The second volume in the Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets series, The Dawn Breakers by René Char, is introduced and translated by him.

For further details of the Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets series, please see pages 8 and 149 of this book.

BLOODAXE CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETS: 4

AIMÉ CÉSAIRE

Notebook of a Return to My Native Land

Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

Translated by

MIREILLE ROSELLO

with ANNIE PRITCHARD

Introduction by

MIREILLE ROSELLO

CONTENTS

Title Page

General Editors’ Preface

Introduction by mireille rosello:

Aimé Césaire and the Notebook of a Return to My Native Land in the 1990s

1. Father and Sons

2. A Poet, a Colour, an Island

3. Martinique today

Cultural and Political Context

1. Negrophilia: a ‘Rediscovery’ of Africa by Europe and the United States

A sudden interest in Black art

Black characters in literature

Ethnology

A sense of the diaspora

2. Anti-colonial literature written in French

Journals and Literary reviews

Notebook of a Return to My Native Land

3. The Return to a ‘native’ ‘land’

Foundation of Tropiques

Surrealism and Breton’s ‘A Great Black Poet’

Communism and Negritude

Negritude and/or Feminism?

4. After the Notebook: the poetics and politics of Negritude

Césaire’s work after the Notebook

From the Notebook to the Town Hall

Césaire’s Notebook

1. The Coinage of the word ‘négritude’ and its role in the Notebook

2. ‘Creole’ vs. French

3. ‘Rare words’: Competent and incompetent readers?

4. Cultural marooning: Césaire’s appropriation of style and idioms

5. Martinican French with no ‘exotic’ flavour

6. Reversal of Western values

7. Whiteness as evil

8. Colonialism as disease

9. The creation of new heroes

Selected Bibliography

Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

Notebook of a Return to My Native Land

Translator’s Note

Glossary

About the Author

Copyright

BLOODAXE CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETS

France has been a dominant force in the development of European culture over the past hundred years. It has made essential contributions and advances not just in literature but in all the arts, from the novel to film and philosophy; in drama (Theatre of the Absurd), art (Cubism and Surrealism) and literary theory (Structuralism and Poststructuralism). These very different art forms and intellectual modes find a dynamic meeting-point in post-war French poetry.

Some French poets are absorbed by the latest developments in philosophy or psychoanalysis. Others explore relations between poetry and painting, between the written word and the visual image. There are some whose poetry is rooted in Catholicism, and others who have remained faithful to Surrealism, and whose poetry is bound to a life of action or political commitment.

Because it shows contemporary French poetry in a broader context, this series will appeal both to poetry readers and to anyone with an interest in French culture and intellectual life. The books themselves also provide an imaginative and exciting approach to French poets which makes them ideal study texts for schools, colleges and universities.

The series has been planned in such a way that the individual volumes will build up into a stimulating and informative introduction to contemporary French poetry, giving readers both an intimate experience of how French poets think and write, and an informed overview of what makes poetry important in France.

GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE

The Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets series aims to bring a broad range of post-war French poetry to as wide an English-speaking readership as possible, and it has specific features which are designed to further this aim.

First of all, each volume is devoted to a complete, unabridged work by a poet. This is designed to maintain the coherence of what a poet is trying to achieve in publishing a book of poems. We hope that in this way, the particular sense of a poet working within language will be highlighted. Secondly, each work appears in parallel translation. Finally, each work is prefaced by a substantial essay which gives a critical appreciation of the book of poetry, of its place in its author’s work, as well as an account of its social and intellectual context.

In each case, this essay is written by an established critic with a love of French poetry. It aims not only to be informative, but also to respond in a lively and distinctive way to the pleasures and challenges of reading each poet. Similarly, the translators, often poets in their own right, adopt a range of different approaches, and in every case they seek out an English that gives voice to the uniqueness of the French poems.

Each translation in the series is not just faithful to the original, but aims to recreate the poet’s voice or its nearest equivalent in another language: each is a translation from French poetry into English poetry. Each essay seeks to make its own statement about how and why we read poetry and think poetry. The work of each poet dovetails with others in the series to produce a living illustration of the importance of poetry in contemporary French culture.

T.M.

M.W.

INTRODUCTION

Aimé Césaire and the Notebook of a Return to My Native Land in the 1990s

In 1992, Martinique and the rest of the world celebrated Aimé Césaire’s eightieth birthday, the birthday of a larger-than-life giant whose international fame casts such a shadow over his very own achievement that his literary work is in great danger of being made into a museum piece. One year later, in 1993, the poet and politician announced that he would not run for re-election: after 47 years as Mayor of Fort-de-France and Representative of Martinique at the French national assembly, Césaire was putting an end to his political career.

But there may be no such thing as retirement for the author of the Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. Heroes don’t retire. And neither do myths. Even if Césaire has stepped down from what was becoming a dangerously stable pedestal, it may be too late for him to shed his identity as a phenomenal public figure, or to move away from the glaring lights that both his devoted followers and angry critics turn on him. For better or for worse, he has become a monument, an institution and above all, a symbolic Father figure. Poetic father, ideological father, political father, Césaire could not escape the loaded family metaphor if he wanted to: history is trying to reduce him to one mythic original moment. As disturbing as it may be, powerful layers of discourse, self-generating echoes do not hesitate to impose on him the paternity of Caribbean literature in French, the paternity of Negritude, the paternity of the whole island. And naturally, transforming Césaire into a ‘Father’ is a powerful invitation to reproduce vaguely Freudian or even more vaguely Biblical narratives. What does one predictably do to a Father: murder him if one is a rebellious son, worship him if one is a faithful son. Raphaël Confiant, one of his most violent detractors ironically calls him the ‘Nègre fondamental’ (the Fundamental Negro), placing the poet-leader on the list of twentieth-century great Liberators and would-be Messiahs.

1.   Father and Sons

And this is how Caribbean writers are forced into a rather reductive model, forced to make up their minds as to whether they will love or hate the Patriarch, show their admiration or disrespect, follow his path or betray him. There seems to be only one alternative, one possible vision of how the next generation of Caribbean thinkers and writers can relate to Césaire and to his work: betrayal or faithfulness.

The phenomenon has recently acquired a rather bitter momentum with the emergence and increasing popularity of a group of Caribbean writers who have adopted ‘créolité’ as a key-word and who are more and more often presented as Césaire’s rebellious sons. When they published Éloge de la créolité / In Praise of créolité in 1989, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant and Jean Bernabé did not give up on the family metaphor: they made a point of declaring themselves ‘sons of Césaire’ even as they expressed their desire to move away from some of the tenets of Negritude and embrace a more global and less essentially racial theory of créolité. Perhaps because of Patrick Chamoiseau’s recent Goncourt prize, or because ‘créolité’ is an idea whose time has come, or because labels, like ‘négritude’, ‘antillanité’ or ‘créolité’, make good soundbites, the media tend to cast oil on the fire of what is becoming a rather violent debate. When Confiant publishes an analysis of the link between the poet’s work and the politician’s career, journalists, literary critics and well-known authors seize the opportunity to polarise the debate, expressing horror at the ungrateful son’s arrogant blasphemy, or praising his courage and independence.

On the one hand, it is too easy to suggest that this violent quarrel is in bad taste and that we should be more serene about the whole situation: resentment and anger are valuable symptoms, symptoms of a complex dysfunctionality, and it would be arrogant to judge the amount of passion generated by Césaire’s literary and political work as a misguided form of energy. On the other hand, the filial metaphor is becoming dangerously transparent and as an hegemonic interpretive grid, it is completely undesirable: it is almost unavoidable that Césaire’s influence will continue to pervade most Caribbean texts and readers cannot afford to be confined within a ‘for’ or ‘against’, ‘kill the father’ or ‘love the father’ model. It should be possible both to recognise a spiritual debt to the Notebook and to express reservations about the ideological and political repercussions of negritude; it should be possible not to choose between the ‘faithful son’ or ‘rebellious son’ label, if only (and this remark is only half a joke) for female authors. As for cultural critics, they may have to resist the temptation of placing Caribbean texts in one camp, or worse, of asking their authors to side for or against Césaire.

Daniel Maximin’s work may be a case in point. As one of the editors of Césaire’s Complete Works, he will of course be identified as a meek and faithful son who would rather sacrifice his own voice to protect that of the Father. Yet, Daniel Maximin’s own work tells a remarkably more complicated story: Isolé Soleil / Lone Sun, his first novel, was partly a rewriting of the Notebook. Its characters and narrators endlessly quote Césaire’s poetry, but sometimes they dispense with inverted commas, or they comment on its power, on its relevance. They appropriate rather than recite Césaire’s voice, both recognising the immensity of their debt and refusing to let their homage become uncritical admiration. Influenced by the work of French feminist Hélène Cixous, Lone Sun is a rich dialogue between the present and the past, between races and between genders, between the Notebook and all subsequent Caribbean texts.

In the midst of the controversy, Césaire has mostly remained silent, which is not to say that silence, in his case, is not one of the most powerful ways of responding to criticism: many times, Césaire has claimed that he does not want to be dragged into a polemic, but more and more, it seems that his desire for neutrality is unrealistic. Presented by his biographers Roger