Aimé Césaire, Creator of Liberties (Conclusion)
The fact that these days people all over the world are talking about the death of Aimé Césaire as an event that has repercussions on the political and cultural actions now taking place in almost every corner of the planet, this is related to the way that man linked his life with those of all black people and, through them, with that of all the earth’s pariahs.
We want to say that what a young colonized man of the Antilles, educated in the European metropolis, forged as a personal project continues to be a program for a struggle that belongs to millions simultaneously grouped together and spread all over the world. And this project, that Césaire forged during the years preceding the explosion of the First World War and that he himself baptized as “negritude,” is an endeavor that involves “assuming the social and cultural consequences of being from black Africa or a descendant of black Africans.” And assuming that modality of “being in the world” – as was already said in that era – meant for the artist and politician with a vast knowledge and a stubborn will to autonomy that Césaire already was, giving himself over to a search for the paths of liberty, lost liberty or a liberty yet to be reached.
To seek liberty, as with the search for independence, is relatively easy. What is costly, as we well know, is to maintain them, to avoid above all that they be confiscated from us precisely in the name of liberty and independence. And Aimé Césaire, as an artist and politician, regardless of the genre in which he worked within both fields (poetry, drama or essays, as an artist; mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital of his island, for over 50 years, or member of the French Parliament during numerous periods, as a politician; and promoter of innumerable forums, encounters, congresses and publications, where he tended to fuse his aptitudes for accomplishment in both), was always willing to pay the necessary price for maintaining the search for liberty. In this way he adhered to the communist movement when it seemed like the only true path toward achieving the emancipation of mankind. And when it became evident that actually existing communism had become the complete opposite: the path toward the dominance of a single man over masses that are submissive to him, Césaire publicly renounced his condition as a member of the French Communist Party (“I don’t betray or deny, I want doctrines and political parties to be built to serve mankind, not for mankind to serve doctrines or political parties.” Letter of Resignation from the CP) and formed a political party in his native country and for his native country, with no pretensions other than to undertake a “Copernican revolution against that entrenched custom of political parties on the left and right, of acting for us, planning for us, thinking for us (and in this way seizing from us) the initiative in everything, which is a primary condition for exercising liberty.”
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 28 April 2008 }
Showing posts with label Aimé Césaire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aimé Césaire. Show all posts
4.25.2008
Aimé Césaire, creador de libertades (II) / Oswaldo Barreto
Aimé Césaire, Creator of Liberties (II)
With Notebook of a Return to the Native Land Aimé Césaire went back to the communitarian life of Martinique and entered the Parnassus of French poetry, with André Breton as his godfather (though not his discoverer), one of the founders of surrealism as we all know. That double condition already made him an important black man and even a guide for the black community of Martinique, as well as for black poets writing in French. But Césaire started to become the Fundamental Black Man and the great creator and attendant of liberties after his encounter with Haiti during World War II, the only independent black nation at the time.
“Haiti is the first black colony to have fought for its independence and, once that independence was achieved, to have adopted a republican regime. That happened at the end of the 18th century and yet the Haitian people are one of the most dissatisfied. Haiti fascinated me because it’s a magnifying glass through which we can view the entire Antilles as well as Africa, and if we study Haiti’s history we can become aware of all the problems of the Third World.
The fight for independence is glorious, it costs a great deal of blood and tears. It is an epic. But I would say that independence is relatively easy. After independence comes tragedy, since it is at that moment – people should already realize this – when the difficult struggle begins and the struggle for liberty takes on its true meaning. And there’s no possible alibi, since independent man has to work things out with himself alone.” (Interview with Jalid Chrabi, 1961)
At the beginning of the 1940s, during his first stay in Haiti, the Martinican poet became aware that his problem as a black man and as a poet was also the fundamental problem of all those who struggle or had struggled for independence: what to do with the liberty conquered, how to consolidate and maintain it within artistic creation and community-based life.
From that moment of consciousness – as people tended to say in the realms of the Left during those 1960s we evoke so often – Césaire dedicated himself to a major struggle, on the political plane as well as on the plane of artistic creation, in order to affirm that each man, no matter his color, faith or ideology, is responsible for conquering and affirming the liberty he seeks. With his actions and his verb, Césaire dedicated himself to showing that the right to liberty is a matter of personal struggle for each individual and not something given by leaders, parties or doctrines. That one has to mistrust all of them, especially because they often stifle liberties under the well-worn pretext of defending them. Starting from these coordinates of personal responsibility and a search for liberty, we will see how Césaire built his life, his work and those of millions and millions of his contemporaries.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 24 April 2008 }
With Notebook of a Return to the Native Land Aimé Césaire went back to the communitarian life of Martinique and entered the Parnassus of French poetry, with André Breton as his godfather (though not his discoverer), one of the founders of surrealism as we all know. That double condition already made him an important black man and even a guide for the black community of Martinique, as well as for black poets writing in French. But Césaire started to become the Fundamental Black Man and the great creator and attendant of liberties after his encounter with Haiti during World War II, the only independent black nation at the time.
“Haiti is the first black colony to have fought for its independence and, once that independence was achieved, to have adopted a republican regime. That happened at the end of the 18th century and yet the Haitian people are one of the most dissatisfied. Haiti fascinated me because it’s a magnifying glass through which we can view the entire Antilles as well as Africa, and if we study Haiti’s history we can become aware of all the problems of the Third World.
The fight for independence is glorious, it costs a great deal of blood and tears. It is an epic. But I would say that independence is relatively easy. After independence comes tragedy, since it is at that moment – people should already realize this – when the difficult struggle begins and the struggle for liberty takes on its true meaning. And there’s no possible alibi, since independent man has to work things out with himself alone.” (Interview with Jalid Chrabi, 1961)
At the beginning of the 1940s, during his first stay in Haiti, the Martinican poet became aware that his problem as a black man and as a poet was also the fundamental problem of all those who struggle or had struggled for independence: what to do with the liberty conquered, how to consolidate and maintain it within artistic creation and community-based life.
From that moment of consciousness – as people tended to say in the realms of the Left during those 1960s we evoke so often – Césaire dedicated himself to a major struggle, on the political plane as well as on the plane of artistic creation, in order to affirm that each man, no matter his color, faith or ideology, is responsible for conquering and affirming the liberty he seeks. With his actions and his verb, Césaire dedicated himself to showing that the right to liberty is a matter of personal struggle for each individual and not something given by leaders, parties or doctrines. That one has to mistrust all of them, especially because they often stifle liberties under the well-worn pretext of defending them. Starting from these coordinates of personal responsibility and a search for liberty, we will see how Césaire built his life, his work and those of millions and millions of his contemporaries.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 24 April 2008 }
4.24.2008
Aimé Césaire, creador de libertades (I) / Oswaldo Barreto
Aimé Césaire, Creator of Liberties (I)
Aimé Fernand David Césaire, one of the great contemporary French poets, politician and playwright, tenacious anti-colonial fighter, born on June 26, 1913 in Basse Pointe on the northeastern end of Martinique, died on April 17 in the island’s capital, Fort-de-France.
Those words, which we find with little variation among the infinity of obituaries published in European and American newspapers, themselves justify these other words we find on the Web page: www.cesaire.org, dedicated to the funeral rites celebrated in Fort-de-France:
Le negre fondamentale s’en est allé
La Martinique et tous les damnés de la terre lui rendent hommage
(The fundamental black man has left us
Martinique and all the wretched of the earth pay homage to him)
No, the former speak of someone who has already died while the latter words, which could serve as an epitaph, speak of what Aimé Césaire was as a man and of the world he desired for his fellow humans. The Fundamental Black Man, among all the black people of the earth, those in Africa, in the United States and those belonging to the diaspora dispersed throughout the other Americas. All of them belonging to the wretched, to the condemned of the earth.
But just as not all the wretched are black, neither was Aimé Césaire just a fundamental black man. Césaire, a member of a “subaltern” race, has been what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was, a member of a ruling and hegemonic race for his time, the fundamental man. Simply and proudly, the man, without distinguishing between races, cultures or credos. Just as Goethe was fated to live through the vicissitudes that were imposed on liberty, that is, on the liberties of all men, by the French Revolution, and the actions of its defenders and its gravediggers, in this manner Césaire lived in order to face similar vicissitudes, the ones that were imposed on the liberties of the entire planet by the communist and Marxist revolutions that began in 1917, when our poet was beginning his life.
And this movement in search of the paths of liberty begins right at the start of a small book: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939):
As there are hyena-men and panther-men, I would be
a Jew-man
a Kaffir-man
a Hindu-man-from-Calcutta
a Harlem-man-who-doesn’t-vote
It was a colonized black man who began this search in a world where all black people were still colonized. Despite Haiti, as we shall see.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 23 April 2008 }
Aimé Fernand David Césaire, one of the great contemporary French poets, politician and playwright, tenacious anti-colonial fighter, born on June 26, 1913 in Basse Pointe on the northeastern end of Martinique, died on April 17 in the island’s capital, Fort-de-France.
Those words, which we find with little variation among the infinity of obituaries published in European and American newspapers, themselves justify these other words we find on the Web page: www.cesaire.org, dedicated to the funeral rites celebrated in Fort-de-France:
Le negre fondamentale s’en est allé
La Martinique et tous les damnés de la terre lui rendent hommage
(The fundamental black man has left us
Martinique and all the wretched of the earth pay homage to him)
No, the former speak of someone who has already died while the latter words, which could serve as an epitaph, speak of what Aimé Césaire was as a man and of the world he desired for his fellow humans. The Fundamental Black Man, among all the black people of the earth, those in Africa, in the United States and those belonging to the diaspora dispersed throughout the other Americas. All of them belonging to the wretched, to the condemned of the earth.
But just as not all the wretched are black, neither was Aimé Césaire just a fundamental black man. Césaire, a member of a “subaltern” race, has been what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was, a member of a ruling and hegemonic race for his time, the fundamental man. Simply and proudly, the man, without distinguishing between races, cultures or credos. Just as Goethe was fated to live through the vicissitudes that were imposed on liberty, that is, on the liberties of all men, by the French Revolution, and the actions of its defenders and its gravediggers, in this manner Césaire lived in order to face similar vicissitudes, the ones that were imposed on the liberties of the entire planet by the communist and Marxist revolutions that began in 1917, when our poet was beginning his life.
And this movement in search of the paths of liberty begins right at the start of a small book: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939):
As there are hyena-men and panther-men, I would be
a Jew-man
a Kaffir-man
a Hindu-man-from-Calcutta
a Harlem-man-who-doesn’t-vote
It was a colonized black man who began this search in a world where all black people were still colonized. Despite Haiti, as we shall see.
{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 23 April 2008 }
4.18.2008
Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)
“To defend oneself against the social by the creation of a zone of incandescence, on this side of which, inside which flourishes in terrifying security the extraordinary flower of the “I.” ”
Aimé Césaire changed my life when I came across his work at the USF library in 1990. I felt an immediate kinship with his writing, probably even more so because I read it outside of any class, undiluted by commentary or formal introductions. Although I don’t read French, Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith’s versions managed to transmit the indelible magic of his work, a translation of energies that has remained with me continuously since that initial encounter.
When I found out last year that Juan Sánchez Peláez was an avid reader of Césaire, my instincts were confirmed. Poetry, as I understand it, truly helps us create that “zone of incandescence” Césaire identifies and enacts in all his writing. What I hear in poets such as Sánchez Peláez and Césaire is a lineage of furies, hallucinations, specters and blessings. They invoke transformations that teach us how to dissolve the self and understand words as vessels, a form of communion with our inner depths and the strange universe around us.
After his death yesterday, I think of Césaire as the teacher and comrade I encountered amidst the library stacks, whose poems immediately transfixed me, providing the freedom to choose this sacred endeavor whose initial breath is resistance, then love.
“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.”
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