Return to My Native Land

by Aimé Césaire, Peter de Francia (Illustrator), John Berger (Translator)

A work of immense cultural significance and beauty, this long poem became an anthem for the African diaspora and the birth of the Negritude movement. With unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, a bouquet of language-play, and deeply resonant rhythms, Césaire considered this work a "break into the forbidden," at once a cry of rebellion and a celebration of black identity.

More praise:

"The greatest living poet in the French language."--American Book Review

"Martinique poet Aime Cesaire is one of the few pure surrealists alive today. By this I mean that his work has never compromised its wild universe of double meanings, stretched syntax, and unexpected imagery. This long poem was written at the end of World War II and became an anthem for many blacks around the world. Eshleman and Smith have revised their original 1983 translations and given it additional power by presenting Cesaire's unique voice as testament to a world reduced in size by catastrophic events." --Bloomsbury Review

"Through his universal call for the respect of human dignity, consciousness and responsibility, he will remain a symbol of hope for all oppressed peoples." --Nicolas Sarkozy

"Evocative and thoughtful, touching on human aspiration far beyond the scale of its specific concerns with Cesaire's native land - Martinique." --The Times

Genres: Poetry, France, Classics, Nonfiction, Race, School, Africa

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

Martinique-born poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Fernand Césaire contributed to the development of the concept of negritude; his primarily surrealist works include The Miracle Weapons (1946) and A Tempest (1969).

A francophone author of African descent. His books of include Lost Body, with illustrations by Pablo Picasso, Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, and Return to My Native Land. He is also the author of Discourse on Colonialism, a book of essays which has become a classic text of French political literature and helped establish the literary and ideological movement Negritude, a term Césaire defined as “the simple recognition of the fact that one is black, the acceptance of this fact and of our destiny as blacks, of our history and culture.” Césaire is a recipient of the International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the second winner in its history. He served as Mayor of Fort-de-France as a member of the Communist Party, and later quit the party to establish his Martinique Independent Revolution Party. He was deeply involved in the struggle for French West Indian rights and served as the deputy to the French National Assembly. He retired from politics in 1993. Césaire died in Martinique.

Reviews

[Rowena · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Vainly in the tepidity of
your throat you ripen for
the twentieth time the
same indigent solace
that we are mumblers of words.

Words? while we handle
quarters of earth, while
we wed delirious
continents, while we
force steaming gates,
words, ah yes, words!
but words of fresh blood,
words that are tidal
waves and erysipelas
and malarias and lava
and brush fires, and
blazes of flesh, and
blazes of cities . . ."


It might be odd for me to say that I enjoyed this poem. It definitely wasn't cheery and it dealt with tough subject matter. However, there was so much power and imagery in Cesaire's words it was kind of hard not to be impressed by his use of metaphor and rhythm, especially in a subject that is close to my heart: colonialism.

The poem is many things; for one, it's an angry attack on colonialism and slavery after Cesaire returned to Martinique after living in France. It also issues a wake-up call to people affected by colonialism not to accept their lot in life. Elements of the negritude movement are very evident as well. Black identity and racism are also explored.Very emotional and heartfelt.

In a way, I understand how Cesaire felt. Returning to one's native land after spending years abroad, it is only natural to wonder about the apathy of the locals, especially with the new knowledge and experiences one has gained abroad. This can lead to frustration, as this poem shows.

“And if all I know how to do is speak, it is for you that I shall speak.My lips shall speak for miseries that have no mouth, my voice shall be the liberty of those who languish in the dungeon of despair… And above all my body as well as my soul, beware of folding your arms in the sterile attitude of spectator, for life is not a spectacle, for a sea of pain is not a proscenium.”

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notebook, which Andre Benton calls "the greatest lyrical monument," was written in Paris, when Césaire was about to return to Martinique. Brevity is what first made me pick this book from my shelf. As I recover from major surgery with only a few hours of clarity a day, it seemed like the perfect, weightless book to hoist and read. Affecting it definitely is, the repetition, the word choice, the movement, force and must I add, style: "like a sob gagged on the verge of bloodthirsty burst."

At the end of daybreak, the morne crouching before bulimia on the outlook for tuns and mills, slowly vomiting out its human fatigue, the morne solitary and its shed blood, the morne bandaged in shade, the morne and its ditches of fear, the morne and its great hands of wind.

I'm reading Sontag's Against Interpretation and Other Essays in bits and pieces and I'm sure this essay collection helps with perspective, maybe even deepens my interpretation and appreciation of Césaire's spellbinding piece of art. "In spite of the amount of reflective prose poetry in it, it is more of an extended lyric or serial work than a narrative poem," the commentary notes. Whatever it is, one dares not define the complexity in its flow, the feel of its words which transcends the period in which it was written, transcends the anguish to showcase a singular piece of art that binds the reader.

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the end of the small hours: the strand of dreams and the senseless awakening on this frail
stratum of earth already humiliated by the greatness of its future when the volcanoes will erupt
and naked waters sweep away the stains ripened by the sun till nothing is left but a tepid molten
simmering pried over by sea birds.
*
At the end of the small hours: Life flat on its face, miscarried dreams and nowhere to put them,
the river of life listless in its hopeless bed, not rising or falling, unsure of its flow, lamentably
empty, the heavy impartial shadow of boredom creeping over the quality of all things, the air
stagnant, unbroken by the brightness of a single bird.

[anne larouche · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sujet intéressant mais écriture trop difficile d’accès selon moi, d’ailleurs je trouve étrange que cela me semble témoigner d’un certain élitisme? Ne faudrait-il pas que le message soit aussi fort dans ses images qu’il ne l’est actuellement, mais compréhensible sans tant de concentration? Je sais qu’il s’agit d’une façon d’extérioriser sa légitimité (ce baroquisme d’écriture) et je ne la remets pas en cause ; seulement cela m’a moins rejoint en tant que caractéristique littéraire.

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book-length poem, first published in French in 1939, that addresses the cultural identity of people of African ancestry living in the French colonial setting of Martinique. The author, Aimé Césaire, was a native of that island which is located in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies in the eastern Caribbean Sea.

The poem clearly communicates angst for people with a history of racial repression under colonial overlords. However, I am so far removed from the world he is describing that I found it difficult to comprehend its message. Thus I listened to the classroom lecture on YouTube at THIS LINK as an aide to comprehension.

In the following comments I am quoting scattered segments from the English translation of the poem. It will give you a feel for the surreal nature of its imagery and also how difficult it is to understand what's being said. They can also give a feel for how the tone of the poem transitions from powerlessness and discouragement toward a more positive and optimistic outlook on life toward the end.

An oft repeated phrase "At the brink of dawn" leads the reader to believe that perhaps something new is about to happen, but most of the poem describes never changing poverty and squaller.

My dignity wallows in puke. 

He uses the n-word freely and goes on the say negative things about the people.

I will admit that for as long as I can remember we have always been quite pathetic dishwashers, shoeshiners with no ambition, looking on the bright side, rather conscientious witchdoctors, and the only undeniable record we ever broke was at endurance under the whip…

He uses the term "negritude" which I understand to be a defiant attitude pushing against colonial norms.

my negritude is not an opaque spot of dead water over the dead eye of the earth 
my negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral 
it reaches deep down into the red flesh of the soil 
it reaches deep into the blazing flesh of the sky 
its pierces opaque prostration with its straight patience. 

Then he seems to be gathering strength to make a declaration of some sort.

Make of me representative of its blood 
make of me trustee of its rancour 
make of me a man of termination 
make of me a man of initiation 
make of me a man of meditation 
but also make of me a man of insemination 
make of me the executioner of these capital deeds 
now is the time to gird my loins like a valiant man – 

The poem's author is introspective about whether he's qualified to say all that he has to say.

Well, am I humble enough? Have I enough callouses on my knees? Enough muscle on my loins? 
To crawl in the mud. To brace oneself in the 
grease of the mud. To bear. 
Soil of mud. Horizon of mud. Sky of mud. 
Corpses of mud, oh names to warm up in the palm of a feverish breath! 

The author finds freedom in the concept of "negridom."

Negridom with its smell of fried onion rediscovers 
the sour taste of freedom in its spilt blood 
 
Negridom is standing 
 
sitting-down negridom 
unforeseenly standing 
standing in the hold 
standing in the cabins 
standing on deck 
standing in the wind 
standing under the sun 
standing in the blood 
       standing 
           and 
              free 
standing and not like a poor madwoman in its maritime freedom and poverty veering in its perfect drift and here it is: more unforeseenly standing 
standing in the rigging 
standing at the helm 
standing at the compass 
standing at the map 
standing under the stars 
 
       standing 
          and 
              free 

The poem concludes with the following final words.

rise 
rise 
I follow you, imprinted on my ancestral white cornea 
rise sky-licker 
and the great black hole where I wanted to drown a moon ago 
this is where I now want to fish the night’s malevolent tongue in its immobile revolution! 

[leynes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Notebook of a Return to My Native Land was hard to rate. I would rate the poem itself 3 stars but since this particular edition had a brilliant and extensive introduction that I highly appreciated and from which I took so much, I had to rate it 4 stars. Mireille Rosello did a fantastic job at putting Césaire's work into its historical context and showcasing its relevance. Her analysis added much to my comprehension of the text.

Rosello took upon a very hard task: How does one commemorate the spirit of resistance of a poem that may no longer be representative of what Martinicans want today? When we read the Notebook we need not remember it nostalgically as the birth of Carribean literature, a founding moment that no criticism should ever tarnish, nor do we have to forget it altogether on the grounds that the debate has shifted. Rosello did a fantastic job at balancing her analysis – her words of praise were just as fair and founded as her harsh criticism.

Aimé Césaire's story is not only the story of his poetic and political work. It is the story of a colour and of an island. Perhaps Césaire's most significant achievement has been the successful reappropriation of the word 'nègre'. To Carribean authors, the word now has a different tonality because it is now associated with 'Négritude', which is part and parcel of their historical cultural heritage even if a second generation of thinkers has rejected some of its universalising and essentialist implications.

Césaire's generation set out about redefining the goals and the standards of a literature written by Black writers about Black people. Until the 19th century, Carribean voices were predominantly white and racist and when the first Black and mixed writers appeared, they were often imitators who hoped that their skin colour would be forgotten if they wrote like French people.

Césaire was, paradoxically, eager to leave Martinique when he went to Paris for the first time. His departure was not caused by unemployment or poverty but rather by the recognition granted to him by the metropolitan French educational system: having received a scholarship. Naturally, this also means that Césaire's vision or revision of Martinique occured while he was far away from the island.

Césaire had a love-hate relationship with his homeland. He was born on what he thought was some second-hand motherland, an island peopled by slaves uprooted from Africa often with the complicity of Africans themselves. When he met Leopold Senghor in Paris, both men had the same enemy in common: a dominant ideology which claimed that 'Black' meant inferior and that the only solution for a Black person was to be or to become as white as possible, to pass.

For a whole generation of Black students exiled in Paris, reclaiming their African heritage became a first positive step towards cultural liberation. This attempt went against the prevalent policy of assimilation, which was viewed as the only viable solution for colonised people.

The word 'black' helped colonised people to unite and to build a sense of solidarity and political identity defined by common suffering. Constituted of isolated communities with nothing in common but a past of slavery and colonisation, these English-speaking, French-speaking, American, European and African people whom history had called Blacks started pooling their resources in an attempt to 'decolonise the mind'. 'Négritude' can be seen as the representative symbol of Black Parisian writers' quest for cultural identity. Négritude did little to bridge the gap between Blacks and Whites but it provided a positive image of their race for Black people all over the world.

He was a very good nigger,

poverty had hurt his chest and back, and they had stuffed into his poor brain that a fatality no one could trap weighed on him that cannot be grabbed by the throat, that he was powerless over his own destiny; that a malicious Lord had for all eternity written prohibition laws into his pelvic nature, that he must be a good nigger, that he must sincerely believe in his baseness, with no perverse curiosity to ever check the fateful hieroglyphics.

He was a very good nigger

and it never occurred to him that he could hoe, burrow, cut anything, anything else really than insipid cane

He was a very good nigger.

In 1935, Césaire had not yet completed his studies in Paris and the return to the native land was still an abstraction. And yet, the poet was ready to write the Notebook. The first version of the long lyrical poem was eventually completed in 1938, and published in 1939.

I found it particularly interesting what Rosello had to say about the role of gender in the Notebook. It contains only one allusion to a Black woman working – the narrator's mother. One cannot but regret the remarkable absence of women in the Notebook. One of the prevailing stereotypes about Martinicans is that Black males are irresponsible, unfaithful and typically absent from the household while women assume the responsibility of raising and supporting families alone. Many analysts explain this situation as the consequence of slavery. Slave-owners made no distinction between men and women (both were considered free labour), and Black couples were not officially recognised (the owner did not hesitate to sell slaves seperately). As a result, it is generally acknowledged that Black male slaves found it impossible to protect their partners from being beaten and raped by the White Master.

I also highly appreciated the time and effort that went into the translation of Césaire's poem. Rosello stresses that the difficulty of translating reclects the complexity of the relationship between French and the Notebook's language, and many passages encourage the translator to refrain from the temptation to 'correct' Césaire's French when a form of bending remains incomprehensible or when a creole expression seems to emerge from the French. This poem subtly makes the case that linguistic 'incompetence' is a relative notion, indistinguishable, from the cultural.

Césaire's endless reinvention of French is also a reminder that whenever the colonised were accused of speaking broken French, they were in fact being broken by the language. They were not 'scratching' French (as the idiom goes), rather, French was 'scratching' their throats, literally, painfully.

The Notebook does not only criticise exotic renderings of Martinique, it also speaks a language, a Martinican-French capable of proposing a new description of the island and of its suspiciously stereotypical palm trees and exotic food. In the Notebook, Carribean flora and fauna, food and customs are meticulously named, but most of the time, the resulting vision is unexpectedly violent and sordid. What is good and beautiful and desirable for the coloniser may be a plague for the colonised. The narrator of the Notebook does not marvel at the exotic West Indian cuisine. His allusions to food function as a reminder of the most crucial concern of a poverty-stricken people: hunger.

The narrator does not only refute the narratives invented by colonialism about his native land, he also strives to rewrite his own version of History: colonialist history is not simply the opposite of a transcendal truth, it is a selection of events, of heroes which add up to a coherent vision: 'History' is used to justify the coloniser's politics.

I would highly recommend checking out Césaire's work, and educating oneself on the Négritude movement. It's essential if one wants to understand most Black literature of the early 20th century.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

And neither the teacher in his classroom, nor the priest at catechism will be able to get a word out of this sleepy little picaninny, no matter how energetically they drum on his shorn skull, for starvation has quicksanded his voice into the swamp of hunger (a word-one-single-word and we-will-forget-about-Queen-Blanche-of-Castille, a word-one-single-word, you-should see-this-little-savage-who-doesn't-know-any-of-God's-Ten-Commandments),

for his voice gets lost in the swamp of hunger,
and there is nothing, really nothing to squeeze out of this little brat,
other than a hunger that can no longer climb to the rigging of his voice,
a sluggish flabby hunger,
a hunger buried in the depths of the Hunger of this famished morne.

I would certainly suggest anyone interested in this get the bilingual edition, even in your french is as bad as mine...

An important-and-still-powerful yell of anger and love and frustration and sorrow

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the end of the small hours: Life flat on its face, miscarried dreams and nowhere to put them,
the river of life listless in its hopeless bed, not rising or falling, unsure of its flow, lamentably
empty, the heavy impartial shadow of boredom creeping over the quality of all things, the air
stagnant, unbroken by the brightness of a single bird.

When Aimé Fernand David Césaire came to study in Paris at the age of 19, he's said to have fled from the colonial misery and narrowness-mindedness of Martinique into the vastness of a world that did not seem less oppressive to him at first. But it was the distance to his 'native land' that allowed him to get closer to his roots apparently.
Together with fellow poets Léopold Sedhar Senghor and Léon Damas he founded the student magazine L’Étudiant Noir (The Black Student) in which Césaire first coined the term nègritude. A term which turned into a synonym for the celebration of shared black identity and self-confidence as a counter to French colonialist racism and a legacy of consequential self-hatred.

my negritude is not a stone,
nor deafness flung out against the clamor of the day
my negritude is not a speck of dead water
on the dead eye of the earth
my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral

it plunges into the red flesh of the soil
it plunges into the blazing flesh of the sky
my negritude riddles with holes
the dense affliction of its worthy patience

In 1939, a avant-garde magazine first published a poem that wrote literary history. Return to my Native Land (Cahier d'un retour au pays natal) by Aimé Césaire is autobiographical poem, essay and a poetic manifesto deeply influenced by surrealism.
I don't think I've ever quite read anything alike. It is an angry attack on colonialism, a comment on identity shaped through the experience of slavery and oppression yet at times it is also playfully gentle and stunningly beautiful in the way it evokes a landscape - inner and outer, the way it plays with language and let's the words be driven forward by a hypnotic rhythm that at times has the strength of a tidal wave. To quote Sartre: “A Césaire poem explodes and whirls about itself like a rocket, suns burst forth whirling and exploding like new suns—it perpetually surpasses itself.” Very true.

I want to rediscover the secret of great speech and of great burning. I want to say storm. I want to say river. I want to say tornado. I want to say leaf, I want to say tree. I want to be soaked by every rainfall, moistened by every dew. As frenetic blood rolls on the slow current of the eye, I want to roll words like maddened horses like new children like clotted milk like curfew like traces of a temple like precious stones buried deep enough to daunt all miners. The man who couldn’t understand me couldn’t understand the roaring of a tiger.

It's is easy to get lost in those sentences because one ends up marvelling at the words, the surreal, lustrous and lush language and the idiosyncratic terminology that Césaire employs. The poem brims with a wondrous catalogue of geographical, zoological, biological terms like noctiluca, coccinella, syzygy, uvula and holothurian to just name a few, which must have been a challenge for any translator I believe. John Berger and Anne Bostock, both language artists who translated this beautifully often decided to replace those terms with more familiar, less alienating synonyms, if available. It certainly helps making the text more approachable. I wonder whether by doing so, they've risked for those passages to loose some of their strange appeal and their (deliberate?) alienating nature. But this is a minor question mark. What remains is a sense of having discovered a poetic treasure, and the certainty to be picking this up time and time again.

With many thanks to Netgalley and Archipelago for the ARC.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The lack of a full five is simply because you should read the bilingual edition instead, or the unexpurgated one - but, to be honest, anything is better the nothing at this point

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

"And above all, my body as well as my soul, beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for a life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear..."

[Aberjhani · Rating 5 out of 5]

A PRODUCT OF LITERARY FUSION

Aime Cesaire's Return to My Native Land, one of the great prose-poetry works of the twentieth century, was parented by not one but three literary movements: the Negritude movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and French surrealism.

The book's very rich suffusion of cultural and political nuances may be attributed to the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude movement while its linguistic dexterity and philosophical daring would have to acknowledge some allegiance to French surrealism. The result is a masterful examination of a soul simultaneously created by and torn between two cultural sensibilities: the European and the African.

Like James Baldwin, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon in their various works, Cesaire in Return to My Native Land take racism and class oppression to task at the same time that he delves most deeply into the greater nature of the human condition itself.

Aberjhani
author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
and Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black

[Old Man JP · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book length epic poem that has become a classic. It is not an easy read to decipher because of the heavy usage of metaphor and symbolism but it is Aime Cesaire's attempt to portray the experience of the descendants of Africans who were brought to the Americas as slaves. It is an attempt to express his own self-identity as well as cultural identity and, in doing so, swings from anger to hope. The book was written at the time that Cesaire was returning to his native Martinique after a living in France for years.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

i pray for aime cesaire's translators

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

This epic poem by Martinican poet, playwright and politician, Aimé Césaire leaps off the page with rhythmic intensity. Sings when read aloud. It explodes with nostalgia, sadness, anger, and a powerful call to political and cultural affirmation for his people, the survivors of slavery and colonial oppression and racism (which he termed Negritude). One can easily appreciate why it became a rallying cry for the African diaspora. He relies on the repetition of key phrases, vivid, often visceral and surreal imagery this poem is not only a tribute to his hometown and a call to action, but a profound anti-colonial statement that is now, 85 years after its first appearance and almost 70 years after its final French edition, more important than ever.
This recent edition of the 1969 translation by John Berger and Anna Bostock is edited and introduced Jamaican writer and scholar Jason Allen-Paisant. He writes of his personal connection to this work, its relation to his own life and body, and his increasing understanding and regard for Césaire's work which he has studied closely.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2025/02/14/i-...

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5

My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of the day
my negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earth's dead eye
my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it takes root in the red flesh of the soil
it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky
it breaks through opaque prostration with its upright patience.

Yet another super short classic that translators and editors and introduction writers did their best to ruin. Unlike On the Abolition of All Political Parties, it's more obvious what they're attempting to suppress: the very negritude they take such pains to carefully explain with a two paragraph end note justifying their usage of the "n-word". Contradictory, is it not? Aimé Césaire, the purported founder of negritude, poet, political party founder, mayor, a spark of hope in the swamp of Nazism, reduced to not being "agenda laden", as if deep seated and brilliant resistance to a genocidal prescription that spread worldwide and birthed a field of thought all its own could have come across without careful and critical "agenda laden" inspirations. I suppose, then, that all the work of Fanon and hooks and Morisson was done for shits and giggles, and the only worth of it all is whatever apolitical strippings can be put into their place. I'm grateful that I was able to get a copy of this for so cheap, but I could've done with less conflicting trappings.

And above all, my body as well as my soul, beware of assuming the sterile aspect of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear...

Beyond all that, there's the text itself. I wasn't as wowed by it as others have been, but that may be because of I've encountered so many of its descendants and other filterings down the line from past to present. Not only the veins of Creole and Francophone postcolonialism that I've tackled in the classroom, but American Horror Story's "Coven" and The Book of Night Women and Kanye West's "Black Skinhead", all drawing on a hatred that is not their own and bending and breaking it into something that white people can never touch, all are here. This is why, when 'Notebook of a Return to the Native Land' is compared to white works, I can't take such commentary seriously. Aimé Césaire would've used whatever was at hand to compose what he needed to compose, and the fact that surrealism in the face of colonial fascism happened to cross his path is a matter of coincidence, not solidification. Unless one is making a comparison to previous black-written works, I find it hard to suspend my disbelief.

Presences it is not on your back that I will make peace with the world.

Grad school, if I get it, will require one or two languages outside the Anglo pale, and should that happen, I fully intend to return to this in the bilingual unexpurgated form. This won't guarantee I get all the puns and references and whatnot (anyone who tells you it's possible to be completely and utterly fluent as conveyed by all the intersections of race and class and gender and sexuality in a language is lying to you), but it'll be a start. It's certainly what this work and Aimé Césaire deserve, as while they're rightfully famous in their own regard, it is a specific kind fame, as displayed by the relative neglect of them on this site. A little at a time, then.

Know this:
the only game I play is the millennium
the only game I play is the Great Fear

[Zuberino · Rating 4 out of 5]

কার্লোস ফুয়েন্তেস এক ইন্টারভিউয়ে বলেছিলেন ক্যারিবিয়ান সাহিত্য সম্পর্কে - "There is a culture of the Caribbean, I would say, that includes Faulkner, Carpentier, García Márquez, Derek Walcott, and Aimé Césaire, a trilingual culture in and around the whirlpool of the baroque which is the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico." উক্ত পাঁচজনের মধ্যে তিনজনই আমার অত্যন্ত প্রিয় লেখক - কার্পেন্তিয়ের আর গার্সিয়া মার্কেসের গদ্য যত ভালোবাসি, ওয়ালকটের কবিতা তার চেয়ে বিন্দুমাত্র কম বাসি না। বলা বাহুল্য, ফুয়েন্তেসের এহেন মন্তব্যের পরে এইমে সেজেয়ার সম্পর্কে ব্যাপক কৌতূহল জেগে উঠেছিল - তার এই বইটা কিনেও রেখেছিলাম আয়েশে আস্বাদন করবো বলে। করোনার এই ক্রান্তিকালে সুযোগ চলে এলো - আজকে সারাদিন টুকরো টুকরো করে পড়ে শেষ করলাম স্বদেশ প্রত্যাবর্তনে কৃষ্ণ কবির স্বগতোক্তি।

নেগ্রিচূড (negritude) আন্দোলনের অন্যতম প্রবক্তা সেজেয়ার, শব্দটিও তারই সৃষ্টি। ক্যারিবিয়ান দ্বীপপুঞ্জে ফরাসি পতাকাতলে তার জন্ম, মার্তিনিক নামক উপনিবেশে। তার অনুজ ফানোঁ গদ্যে কালো মানুষের মনের মুক্তির কথা বলেছিলেন, ৩০০ বছরের দাসত্বের ফলে আমাদের ভেতর স্তরে স্তরে জমে ওঠা সর্বাঙ্গীন হীনমন্যতা ঝেড়ে মুছে ফেলার কথা বলেছিলেন। সেজেয়ারের মত তিনিও মার্তিনিকের মানুষ ছিলেন।

সেজেয়ারের বাবা মা দরিদ্র কৃষ্ণাঙ্গ - বস্তির শীর্ণ কুটিরে গাদাগাদি করে থাকা আর মায়ের অনবরত পা-চালানো সিঙ্গার মেশিনে দিনরাত সেলাই-ফোঁড়াই কাজের এক অদ্ভুত বিবরণ আছে কবিতার শুরুর দিকে। তবে কাজটি কেবল আংশিক ভাবেই আত্মজীবনীমূলক। কবিতার মূল সুর প্রতিবাদের, চার শতক জুড়ে দাসত্ব নামক অকথ্য অত্যাচারের বিরুদ্ধে গগনবিদারী আর্তচিৎকার। মূল সুর আত্মপক্ষ সমর্থনের - কৃষ্ণ শরীর আর মননকে যেই আধুনিক ইউরোপীয় পুঁজিবাদী সভ্যতা পদে পদে খারিজ করে দেয়, হেয় প্রতিপন্ন করে, শ্বেত শরীর বা মনের চেয়ে নিকৃষ্ট গণ্য করে, সেজেয়ার তার বিরুদ্ধে অক্লান্ত সোচ্চার। বরং তিনি বলেন এই পৃথিবীকে আগলে রেখেছে অত্যাচারিত শোষিত বঞ্চিত কালোরাই ("truly the eldest sons of the world / open to all the breaths of the world")

অস্বীকার করবো না যে সেজেয়ারের কাব্য অনেকটাই দুর্বোধ্য, সুরিয়ালিস্ট, হেঁয়ালি ঘেঁষা। জলবৎ তরলং স্টাইলের তিনি বিশেষ ধার ধরেন না - স্বচ্ছ-স্পষ্ট পংক্তিগুলো আন্দোলিত করে, কিন্তু তার চেয়ে দ্বিগুন তিনগুন যে গূঢ় রহস্যঘেরা পংক্তি, সেগুলো ততটাই ধাঁধায় ফেলে। তবে সেজেয়ার আদতে কি বলতে চাইছেন তার দিকে নজর নিবদ্ধ থাকলে ধীরে অতি ধীরে একটি বহুমুখী চিত্র গড়ে উঠতে পারে। মহৎ কবিতা একবার না হাজার বার আস্বাদন করা যায় - ওয়ালকটের মতোই সেজেয়ারের কাছেও বারবারই ফিরে আসতে হবে সে কারণে।

পুনশ্চ - ষাট সত্তর দশকে দুর্মর সাহসে পেঙ্গুইন বিংশ শতাব্দীর সেরা কবিদের ধরে ধরে অনুবাদ করে সহজলভ্য সংস্করণে পাঠকের কাছে নিয়ে আসার প্রচেষ্টা চালিয়েছিল। মূলত ইউরোপ থেকে গোটা চল্লিশেক কবি, কিন্তু তার মাঝে রুশ ইহুদি ক্যারিবিয়ান আর দক্ষিণ আমেরিকার কবিতাও বাদ যায়নি। সেই সংস্করণই পড়লাম প্রয়াত জন বার্জার আর আনা বোস্টোক-এর অনুবাদে।

[Frank Keizer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geweldige tekst, maar er is een probleem: de vertaling is niet goed. Dat is erg jammer, want daardoor is deze sleuteltekst niet toegankelijk in het Nederlands. Ik hoor sommigen denken: maar dan lees je het toch in het Engels? En dat kan. Maar een Engelse vertaling verrijkt het Nederlands niet.

[Bob Jacobs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wat een absolute bom van een gedicht. Een dikke vijftig pagina’s aan rijke, hallucinante, geladen beelden en taal. Identiteit, kolonialisme, geschiedenis, … Césaire fileert het allemaal op geheel eigen wijze.

En te zeggen dat ik een paar weken geleden niet eens wist dat Césaire ook een dichter was.

[Nada Elshabrawy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Que de sang dans ma mémoire! Dans ma mémoire sont des lagunes.

Incroyable!

[Eliana Rivero · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Challenge 2016.
37. Un libro de una cultura con la que no estás familiarizada/eres indiferente.

Y ahora estamos en pie, mi país y yo, con los cabellos al viento, con mi mano pequeña ahora en su puño enorme, y la fuerza no está en nosotros sino por encima de nosotros, en una voz que perfora la noche y la audiencia como la penetrabilidad de una avispa apocalíptica. Y la voz pronuncia que Europa durante siglos nos ha cebado con mentiras e inflado con pestilencias, pues no es cierto que la obra del hombre ha culminado que nada tenemos que hacer en el mundo que parasitamos al mundo que nos basta marchar al mismo paso del mundo sino que la obra del hombre apenas acaba de empezar y al hombre le queda por conquistar toda prohibición inmovilizada en los rincones de su fervor y ninguna raza tiene el monopolio de la belleza, de la inteligencia, de la fuerza y hay lugar para todos al encuentro de la conquista y ahora sabemos que el sol gira alrededor de nuestra tierra iluminando la parcela fijada por nuestra sola voluntad y que toda estrella cae del cielo a la tierra a nuestra voz de mando ilimitada.

[meeners · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I would say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews. I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words turned into mad horses into fresh children into clots into curfew into vestiges of temples into precious stones remote enough to discourage miners. Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.

[Vapula · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I was hiding behind a stupid vanity destiny called me
I was hiding behind it and suddenly there was a man on the ground,
his feeble defenses scattered,
his sacred maxims trampled underfoot, his pedantic rhetoric
oozing air through each would.
there was a man on the ground
and his soul is almost naked
and destiny triumphs in watching this soul which
defied its metamorphosis in the ancestral slough."

Absolutely fantastic work. An essential convergence of surrealism and decoloniality upon a guttural, wrenching landscape of poiesis

[une lectrice quelque part · Rating 3 out of 5]

C’est un livre que j’avais beaucoup apprécié et trouvé très instructif. Il a été mon premier de Césaire. Je l’avais trouvé très hermétique et plus difficile à comprendre qu’il en avait l’air. La plume m’avait un peu déroutée. Au fil du temps j’ai compris que je n’aimais pas sa plume en tant que poète . Elle me fait beaucoup penser à Baudelaire que je déteste. C’est tout simplement un avis personnel. Malgré tout le livre est quand même très bien . Mais je ne pas sûre que je le relirais un jour .

[Talon Shuffler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book because it was on our recommend reading sources from this past semester and it was really good. It was an interesting read because this book has been involved in positive and negative discourse but at the end of the day you can’t deny that this book has had an influential impact. The main thick of this book is the context that surrounds it and then the book part is a long poem that is visceral and poignant when reading. (Not the exact dates I read it but I just know I read it in May and June basically.)

[Ocean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Césaire isn't the most accessible writer. Parts of the poem was hard to decipher for me, it sure broadened my vocabulary. I had to listen to a few analysis on youtube to fully grasp this if I'm honest but once I did I adored this poem. Beautiful, brilliant and liberating. Necessary reading for all black folks.

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a terrific poem. No wonder it blew the socks off Andre Breton, while he was holed up in Martinique, having fled the Nazis, trying to get to the States.

And it is thanks to Breton partly, that Cesaire's work has come to be championed.

Cesaire is a voice for the voiceless, not only those of his homeland but for all Black people. He did not invent the term 'Negritude' but he was the one who spearheaded this 'movement' more than any other. Both the Negritude movement including Cesaire and the Surrealists (under Breton & co.) influenced each other. And the rest is history. And Cesaire went on to inspire one of the greatest (still partly unknown) African-American poets of the 20th Century, Bob Kaufman.

This bilingual edition was a real joy to read. Having studied French when I was younger, I was able to make my way through parts of the text but I was so glad to have the English translation on the opposing page because of Cesaire's numerous 'coinages', which even metropolitan French people would have trouble understanding.
And the poetry is searing, brilliant, on fire. You can feel his rage, his frustration, his bitterness, sometimes shot through with scathing irony, at other times, he goes straight for the jugular.

The only thing I didn't like about this particular edition was the large number of typos and grammatical errors. I was stunned by how many there were; the final editing job was not up to par, one could say. This is a minor gripe of course as the poetry itself is the main course and anyone with any kind of ear or receptivity for poetry, will undoubtedly enjoy this book.
If I was teaching modern French poetry, this would definitely be on the course.
Highly recommended and highly enjoyable.

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

"At the end of the small hours: this town, flat, displayed, brought down by its common sense..."

Against the hate and exoticism Europeans unleashed for centuries on Caribbean and African lands, this haunting litany, this rhapsodic celebration of Cesaire's native Martinique, a place where "the daylight comes velvety like the sapodilla berry, the smell of liquid manure from the coconut palm" is more than glorious locales. It is a dream inside a nightmare, a poem in which the very language is breaking the shackles of colonization, a triumphant release from the strangling grammars of oppression:

This man is mine
a man alone, imprisoned by whiteness
a man alone defying the white cries of a white death

Cesaire rejects violence and hatred. He writes, "do not make of me that man of hate for whom I have only hate." In one of the most impassioned and passionate poems of the twentieth century, Cesaire awakens in us a sense of hope and justice. Looking to heal the wounds of centuries, Cesaire reminds the reader that "no race holds a monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength." It is a courageous visionary mind that drives this poem, and a necessary and urgent voice. Highly recommended for all readers, not just poets.

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

A rallying monument of a book that became a foundational text for postcolonial thought. Drawing upon a lyrical mixture of Negritude, Surrealism, new words, old forms, idiosyncratic language, Césaire constructs a lush, violent landscape of colonised Martinique: its beauty, its bodily horror, its tortured past as well as the Edenic vision of a possible future. This 1939 edition preserves some of the spiritual and surreal elements that Césaire later removed; he altered the text to emphasise the sociopolitical aspects that matched his own intellectual and political journey. Unfortunately, the introduction of this edition is flat and distant, focusing too much on prosody where general context and analyses might have benefited a reader new to Césaire's work.

[Sceox · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good.

What can I do?

I must begin.

Begin what?

The only thing in the world that's worth beginning:
The End of the World, no less.

words, as yes, words! but
words of fresh blood, words which are
tidal waves and erysipelas
malarias and lavas and bush-fires,
and burning flesh
and burning cities...

Know this well:
I never play except at the millennium
I never play except at the Great Fear

[Tana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aime Cesaire is brilliant and beautiful. This prose poem shows a trajectory of self acceptance by moving from individual experience to universal experience. It is unpredictable in form, and highlights the varying black experience.