Non-Vicious Circle
20 Poems by Aimé Césaire

BLues de la pluie

  • Aguacero
  • beau musicien
  • au pied d’un arbre dévêtu
  • parmi les harmonies perdues
  • près de nos mémoires défaites
  • parmi nos mains de défaite
  • et des peuples de force étrange
  • nous laissions pendre nos yeux
  • et natale
  • dénouant la longe d’une douleur
  • nous pleurions

Raining Blues

  • Aguacero1
  • great blues player
  • at the foot of a denuded tree2
  • amidst lost harmonies
  • close to our defeated memories
  • amidst our hands of defeat3
  • and peoples of alien power
  • we let our eyes hang down4
  • and loosening the rein
  • of our native travail5
  • we wept.6

Commentary

In this compact lyric, Psalm 137:1-4 functions as a paradigm for black enslavement and cultural deprivation: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” As during the Babylonian captivity the Jews were forced by their captors to sing, so the uprooted blacks of the diaspora must perform their blues in a context of grief and cultural alienation. Several West Indian poets have since explored the suggestive analogy between the Jewish and black diasporas (see Brathwaite 1967). Black popular culture in the New World has long drawn on the Bible and biblical stories to portray the experience of subjugation; a contemporary Jamaican reggae song, “By the Rivers of Babylon,” paraphrases this very passage in a Rastafarian idiom.

  1. Lines 1-2: Aguacero is Spanish for a heavy downpour of rain. The apposition of aguacero and beau musicien underlines the link between blues and rain expressed in the poem’s title. ↩︎

  2. “Arbre dévêtu” (“denuded tree”) alludes to the words of the psalm:”We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof,” and to Césaire’s recurrent metaphor of the tree as signifying ancestral stock. Compare “bel arbre nu” in “Chevelure” (“Locks”; OC, p. 232). “Harmonies perdues” nostalgically recalls the African musical heritage. ↩︎

  3. Lines 5-6: Compare Psalm 137:5, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” The succession of participles terminating consecutive lines (dévêtu, perdues, défaites, défaite), with their heavy reiteration of the sound dé, evokes a blues sonority. ↩︎

  4. The expression “pendre nos yeux” is not only the kind of striking image dear to surrealist poetics but also an ironic transposition of the scriptural phrase “hanged our harps.” ↩︎

  5. Lines 9-10: The adjective natale is difficult to construe because normal word order has been violated, making it unclear which noun the adjective is intended to modify. In this bending of the language, Césaire brings to the fore two complementary connotations of natale. First, the word’s exposed position at the end of a line emphasizes its meaning, native,” in antithesis to étrange two lines up. Second, these lines boldly invert the commonplace “douleur natale” (birth pangs). The situation is further complicated (and enriched) by the intervening longe, a competing candidate for the noun natale modifies: Caribbean blacks inherit their “native reins” by being born into the historical context of slavery and its aftermath. (For Césaire’s pervasive image of the enslaved black as a horse, see the commentary to 6.8, below). For more on this passage, see Davis 1977, pp. 136-37. ↩︎

  6. Césaire has converted a cliché of neoromantic poetry (cf. Paul Verlaine’s “il pleure dans mon cœur / comme il pleut sur la ville” [it cries in my heart / as it rains on the town]) into a powerful metaphor of the blues as the cultural expression of a subjugated people. The tone of the poem’s ending diverges in one crucial respect from the final modulation of the psalm. Whereas the psalmist ends on a note of anger and vengeful imprecation (“O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones”), Césaire sustains instead the mood of grief that is the very signature of the blues. ↩︎