Non-Vicious Circle
20 Poems by Aimé Césaire

Magique

  • avec une lèche de ciel sur un quignon de terre
  • vous bêtes qui sifflez sur le visage de cette morte
  • vous libres fougères parmi les roches assassines
  • à l’extrême de l’île parmi les conques trops vastes pour leur destin
  • lorsque midi colle ses mauvais timbres sur les plis tempétueux de la louve
  • hors cadre de science nulle

  • et la bouche aux parois du nid suffète des îles englouties comme un sou

  • avec une lèche de ciel sur un quignon de terre
  • profète des îles oubliées comme un sou
  • sans sommeil sans veille sans doigts sans palancre

  • quand la tornade passe rongeur du pain des cases

  • vous bêtes qui sifflez sur le visage de cette morte
  • la belle once de la luxure et la coquille operculée
  • mol glissement des grains de l’été que nous fûmes
  • belles chairs à transpercer du trident des aras
  • lorsque les étoiles chancelières de cinq branches
  • trèfles au ciel comme des gouttes de lait chu
  • réajustent un dieu noir mal né de son tonnerre

Incantation

  • with a sliver of sky on a hunk of earth
  • you brutes sniffling on this dead woman’s face
  • you free ferns among the cutthroat rocks1
  • at the margin of an island among conchs too large for their lot
  • when noontide glues its worthless stamps to the storming ripples of the she-wolf
  • beyond the pale of science null and void2

  • and blocks her at the walls of the nest suffet of islands engulfed like small coin3

  • with a sliver of sky on a hunk of earth
  • prophet of islands overlooked like small coin4
  • without sleeping or waking without fingers or tackle5

  • when the hurricane comes gnawing at the bread of the hovels

  • you brutes sniffling on this dead woman’s face
  • chic leopard of lust and operculate shell6
  • soft gliding of summer berries we once were
  • sleek flesh to be pierced by the beak of the macaw7
  • when the five-branched chieftain stars8
  • clovers in the sky like drops of fallen milk9
  • restore a black god misbegotten of his thunder10

Commentary

This poem opened the collection Soleil cou coupé, originally published in 1948 and later republished, along with the collection Corps perdu, under the title Cadastre in 1961 (Hale/Veron 1961/4 CADASTRE). Its later version, unlike those of several other poems in the revised edition, Cadastre, is free from textual excisions.

The gory image that Césaire chose as the title for his earlier collection is an emblematic tag, the final line of Apollinaire’s “Zone”, the first poem of Alcools (Apollinaire 1956, pp.39-44; for analyses of its transformations in successive versions of the poem, see Décaudin 1965,p.89; Apollinaire 1965, pp.213-14. Apollinaire’s dawn sun splashing its bloodred colors across the sky shares features of Césaire’s many images of violent death and resurrection. An earlier version of Apollinaire’s lines (Décaudin 1965, p.81) provides a further connection with Césaire’s themes by linking the sun to violence directed against the poor and outcast: “Le soleil est là c’est un cou tranché / Comme l’auront peut-être un jour quelques-uns des pauvres que j’ai rencontrés / Le soleil me fait peur, il répand son sang sur Paris” (“The sun is there it’s a sliced throat / As perhaps one day will suffer some of the poor whom I have met / The sun frightens me, it spills its blood all over Paris”). Whether or not Césaire knew this version, his commitment to the blacks of colonial Martinique would have led him to identify Apollinaire’s assassinated sun of the modern metropolis with oppressed classes and races.

Thus the image is more than an assertion of Césaire’s place in the surrealist tradition, of which “Zone” is an early landmark: it is central to his poetic project. The black poet takes up precisely where his French predecessor leaves off:

  • Tu marches vers Auteuil tu veux aller chez toi à pied
  • Dormir parmi tes fétiches d’Océanie et de Guinée
  • Ils sont des Christ d’une autre forme et d’une autre croyance
  • Adieu Adieu
  • Soleil cou coupé
  • You walk towards Auteuil you want to go home on foot
  • To sleep among your fetishes from Oceania and Guinea
  • They are Christs of another form and another faith
  • They are inferior Christs of obscure hopes
  • Farewell Farewell
  • Sun cut throat

For the French poet, the significance of the “inferior Christs of obscure hopes” is ambiguous: are they merely proof of the universality of aspiration, or are they a source of regeneration? Although Apollinaire was one of the earliest European modernists to appreciate African and “primitive” art (later a major point of convergence between European avant-garde aesthetics and antiassimilationist Third World students in Paris during the 1930’s and 1940’s), his deliberate exoticism is a far cry from Césaire’s passionate yet complex welcome of Guinea and the murdered sun as sources of identity and cultural restoration.

Instead of regarding the assassinated sun merely as an image of death, Césaire takes his place at the opposite point on the Osirian cycle of death and rebirth by beginning his collection with a programmatic incantation to revive the Martinican island-corpse. The incantatory effect is achieved by a gamut of rhythmic devices, such as the repetition of whole lines and single words in successive lines. The poems magical transformation is orchestrated syntactically by three centrally positioned temporal clauses (introduced by lorsque, line 5; quand, line 11; and lorsque, line 16), which climax each of the three “strophic” devisions. In its imagistic movement from prostration to restitution, the poem recalls the overall structure of the Cahier. (For an earlier variation by Césaire on the bloody sun, see “Tam-tam I” [Tam-tam I; OC, p. 120], dedicated to the surrealist writer Benjamin Péret: “à même le sang de soleil brisé” [even the blood of sun shattered].)

  1. Lines 1-3: The prostrate female corpse personifies Martinique in the grip of spiritual and socioeconomic inertia (cf. Cahier, pp. 42-43). The images of death and violence in lines 2-3 are consonant with the overall title of the earlier collection. ↩︎

  2. Magic and science, nonrational and rational modalities of knowledge and control, are conceived as antithetical in the mytho-poeic ssytem of negritude (see Cahier, pp. 53-54). In his epistemological essay “Poésie et connaissance” (Poetry and knowledge), Césaire has stated that the natural sciences offer a superficial and impoverished view of the world: “Physics classifies and explains, but the essence of things eludes it. The natural sciences classify, but the quid proprium of things eludes them. As for mathematics, what eludes its abstract and logical activity is the real. In sum, scientific knowledge numbers, measures, classifies, and kills.” (Césaire 1945a, p. 157.) In contrast, poetic knowledge is intrinsically rich and furnishes an antidote to the reductionism of science: “Man, unsatisfied, next looked elsewhere for salvation, which exists here in abundance. And man, little by little, became aware that besides this scientific and undernourished knowledge there existed another sort of knowledge. A knowledge that satiates.” (Ibid, p. 158.) In this polarization, magic is aligned with poetry. ↩︎

  3. Though the syntax of this line admits of two different constructions, with bouche as either noun or verb, the latter is probable (see Davis 1977, pp. 138-39). For a close parallel to the construction with the verb, see 9.6-7, below: “lorsque la vague déroule son paquet de lianes de toute odeur/et toutes les lance […]” (italics added) (“when the wave unrolls its bundle of lianas of all smells/and tosses them all […]. The rare word suffète derives from the Latin transliteration of the title of an ancient Carthaginian magistrate (suffes – cp. Hebrew shopet (“judge”). The facts that Carthaginian power was sea-based and that it was eventually overwhelmed by its Roman rival add to the appropriateness and poignancy of Césaire’s lines. Moreover, the Punic milieu is a link with Césaire’s modernist predecessors, since Flaubert’s historical novel Salammbô is set in ancient Carthage in the third century B.C. Salammbô, the novel’s heroine, attracted Mallarmé – a poet Césaire studied with great interest. (See Fowlie 1953, p. 126.). On the metaphor in îles englouties, see the statement on cultural submersion in Césaire 1959a, p. 67: “If ‘the empire’ is depersonalization, a gradual engulfment [engloutissement] in anonymity, the passage to nation status can only be for a community the leap of individualization.” ↩︎

  4. The noun phrases in lines 7 and 9 are rhythmically and grammatically parallel. The prophet, like the suffet, is to be identified with the poetic persona, who often assumes a mantic role in Césaire’s poems. The idea of the poet’s prophetic function has, of course, deep roots in both African and European traditions. ↩︎

  5. The Cadastre version of this line reads doigt, whereas OC carries the plural doigts. ↩︎

  6. Most of the animals in Césaire’s voluminous symbolic bestiary are tropical; however, the provenance of “once de la luxure” is apparently the first canto of Dante’s Inferno, a poem that Césaire knew in the original (see the commentary to “Spirales,” poem 3 below). Dante’s spotted leopard (Inferno 1.33) stands for worldly pleasure and the city of Florence, among other things. Césaire’s once (Felix uncia) is grayish white with black spots: in addition to sensual pleasure, it may denote the parlous condition of Martinique. The she-wolf of line 5 may be part of this quasi-allegorical complex, since in the same passage (Inferno 1.49) Dante encounters a wolf. Dante’s beasts derive ultimately from Jeremiah 5:6, “Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities: every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces.” This source in prophecy is congruent with the tone and stance of Césaire’s poem as a whole. On coquille operculée, see “Tombeau de Paul Eluard” (The tomb of Paul Eluard; OC, p. 188): “selon la bouche operculée de ton silence / et l’amnistie haute des coquillages” (congruent with the operculated mouth of your silence / and the elevated amnesty of shells). ↩︎

  7. The ara is a tropical parrot or macaw—brightly colored and having an enormous, hooked beak—native to the rain forests of South America and the Caribbean. (For an illustration, see GLE under ara.) ↩︎

  8. As at the conclusion of the Cahier, stars figure prominently in the vision of redemption for the black man (see also 3.20 below). “Etoiles chancelières de cinq branches” may be a conscious or unconscious alteration of Apollinaire’s “étoile à six branches” (“star of six branches”cn) in “Zone” (Apollinaire 1959, p. 40), which refers to Christ as an example of a resurrected god. Thanks to an elasticity in grammar, chancelières functions as an adjective modifying étoiles rather than as a noun, but Césaire may also intend a play on the verb chanceler (totter, be unsteady), with the idea of uncertain, flickering starlight. “Chieftain” in my translation is also a noun made to work as an epithet; it retains the courtly connotation of “chancellor” but transfers it to an African setting appropriate to the restoration of a black god. ↩︎

  9. “Gouttes de lait chu” (“drops of fallen milk”) combines reference to the Milky Way with the image of a lost, nurturing mother figure. Césaire sometimes presents his myth of a culture detached from its African matrix in the image of a deprived suckling infant; see, for example, “La Loi est nue” (The law is naked; OC, p. 219), “de qui ai-je jamais soutiré autre femme / qu’un long cri et sous ma traction de lait / qu’une terre s’enfuyant blessée” (from whom I have taken away other spouse than / a long cry and while drawing my milk / than a refugee land wounded), and 16.9, below. The “five-branched star” (sometimes referred to as the “pentagram”) has multifarious religious symbology in a variety of cultures in the Old World (Africa and Europe). For Césaire, its emblematic pertinence to this poem is linked to its cosmographic function among the Serer, a Senegalese tribal group, to which his intimate friend and colleague, Léopold Senghor, belonged. Senghor was a co-founder, along with Césaire, of the philosophy of négritude, which the “Incantation” seeks to promote through its programmatic vision of a revitalization of dormant African cultural values. ↩︎

  10. “Un dieu noir” (“a black god”) should be understood in a generic sense: instead of pinpointing a particular sky god associated with thunder (such as the Yoruba deity Ogun), the phrase evokes the entire Afro-Caribbean socioreligious experience. In the context of procreating thunder, the expression, mal né serves as an ironic reversal of the opposite idiom, bien né (well born). Césaire discusses the implications of reclaiming genealogical rights in a passage dealing with Sekou Touré’s proud proclamation of his descent (Césaire 1965; p. 121). ↩︎