Césaire |
In his book The Poetry of Aime Cesaire (Ed. Honore Champion, 2011, 624p) academic Senegalese Papa Samba Diop reminds us that the path of the great poet Aime Cesaire is inseparable from those of his two companions Leopold Sedar Senghor and Leon Damas Gontran. And to illustrate how the author of Notebook of a Return to My Native Land was one of the loudest voices, the University of flipping through all his poetry together by Daniel Maximin and Gilles Carpentier in a book published in 1994 by Editions du Seuil [1] .
What is thus characterized Césaire's poetry? It is a poetry of "territory", but "national roots." Césaire speaks for the voiceless, and even if the song comes from a Negro, it affects all be reduced to injustice, inferiority and lessening. Poetry becomes the "miraculous weapons" of these "wretched of the earth." Each book will be published by Césaire one key factor in the process of the writer in order to regain what other civilizations have violated or do not recognize the black world. In this spirit, Notebook of a return home is an act of dissent, awareness of a people who missed her cry, the cry of revolt. Weapons miraculous, highly influenced by the book Surrealism, operate a break with all poetry "pure rhetoric". This is opposed to this, the constraints of colonial rule. Cadastre recommends to "break all the chains, whether physical or symbolic," while Soleil Cou Coupe covers several themes dear to the author: the symbols of the serpent, the "astral geomancy and overdetermination , "" Firefly as fertilizing element of poetic alchemy ... "Here, as stated Papa Samba Diop, the song crosses the border "to the borders of China and India." The collection Fittings, published in 1960 condemned the "abduction" of space - the Caribbean - and advocates the "historical and cultural roots." Me, laminar appeared in 1982 when the poet enters its sixty-ninth year. Writing is alleviated, but the rejection of the bid remains sustainable. The "old lion" has kept her claws and does not kick the ass.
These major collections - which must be added the scattered texts and accompanied by extra editions of new texts - based a work whose structure and substance take stock of obsessive dreams to a reality that requires continual struggle. It is a work crossed by both nostalgia and utopia, and the epic chronicle, the religious and the wonderful hymn to Martinique and "serenade to the Universal."
Papa Samba Diop For 's voice cracked Césaire, cosmic, collective rhythm, memory, liturgical and sacred, with an accuracy of verb that shows knowledge of the language entomological "masters". Hence the plurality of registers from the "insults" to the "nonsense" to achieve a "writing of the Apocalypse".
In sum, this first part of the book emphasizes a work-oriented geographic space (the Caribbean Islands) and confronted with the colonial history (Martinique have been linked to the crown of France from 1674). To achieve the universal dimension - and thus leave the insular - Cesaire convene constantly places of history and myths of world civilizations. Cosmogony and history are African, so the land of reconciliation, of homecoming. And Africa, in this work sprawl, is understood in a broader sense, since the poet based on the emblematic figures of the black world as Patrice Lumumba (Congo) or Toussaint L'Ouverture (Haiti) or the African American space. Such an approach is necessarily responsible for "policy" of engagement and whose accents were already evident from the first author's text, the Notebook of a return home .
The second part of the book familiarizes us with the "lexicon of Césaire's poetry." We discover the words, myths, phrases or places currents through the poetic world of Cesaire. Organized alphabetically, the entries we recall the original meaning of such words and phrases and the use made by Césaire in his various collections. For example the word "negritude" as Césaire in his employ Book, page 23: " same misery and that we, Haiti where negritude stood up for the first time and she said believed in his humanity. " Or, on the same page of the book, "Nantes": "And I tell myself Bordeaux and Nantes and Liverpool and New York and San Francisco / not a piece of this world does my fingerprint. "
Book salutary Poetry of Aimé Césaire Papa Samba Diop opens new perspectives in understanding the work of a poet whose words still resonate and continue to resonate because it redefines our humanity. And so goes the world and us
Alain Mabanckou
( A longer version of this article is published in Magazine Literary March 2011, number 506 )
[1] Aime Cesaire: The Poetry , edition prepared by Daniel Maximin and Gilles Carpentier. Paris, Seuil, 1994, 546 pages.