Césaire

Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land), first published in 1939, and now re-issued as a Penguin classic in John Berger and Anna Bostock’s 1969 translation, opens with a speaker surveying a landscape characterised by inertia and flatness, and a town ‘flat, displayed, brought down’.¹ The voice looks at it all with desolation. At first, the speaker is himself at a low ebb, emaciated by the harrowing violences of racial capitalism and by his own disdain of the homeland he rejects. The poem stages the thickening of that first person as he overcomes contempt, alienation and anger over the course of a long, free verse meditation on consciousness, life and transformation. By the end of the poem the consciousness is towering, a huge expansion of personhood become planetary, with ‘ocean hands’,² ‘the enormous lung of cyclones’³ and a ‘gigantic seismic pulse’.⁴ Consciousness and character are plastic here: the speaker is hard to pin down, volatile, emotionally unpredictable. By turns mocking, bitter, angry, desperate and knowing, he impersonates, ventriloquises and rejects the racist stereotypes (both the propositions of formal race philosophy and everyday prejudices) that fix people in place and overdetermine them. He wants to – and does, in the end – break out of the moulds offered by colonial society and its desire to ‘tame’, as he puts it again and again.

‘There are two ways to lose yourself,’ Césaire wrote elsewhere, ‘by walling yourself up in the particular or by diluting yourself in the universal.’⁵ And indeed, for all that the psychic ...