Non-Vicious Circle
20 Poems by Aimé Césaire

Spirals

  • we ascend1
  • locks of the hanged of cassias2
  • (the executioner having forgotten to perform their last toilette)
  • we ascend
  • elegant hands hanging ferns and waving farewells inaudible to all
  • we ascend
  • cannas tear their hearts out precisely at the point where the phoenix is
  • reborn from the peak of its consuming flame
  • we ascend3
  • we descend
  • imbaubas conceal their faces4
  • and their dreams in their skeletal phosphorescent hands
  • the circles of the funnel narrow more and more rapidly5
  • we are at the bottom of hell
  • we crawl we float
  • we coil more and more crowded in the gulfs of the earth
  • in human hate
  • in racial hatred
  • and the undertows of the abyss lead us back6
  • within a bundle of lianas7
  • of stars and shivers8

Commentary

Dante’s Inferno constitutes a point of departure (in metaphysical as well as literary terms) for the movement of thought and feeling in this short masterpiece. Césaire’s knowledge of Dante in the original is attested in Senghor’s reminiscences, quoted in Nathan 1967, p. 5: “He would have been able to undertake the examination [agrégation]in literature, naturally, but also in philosophy, history, geography, English, or Italian. As I recall, he used to read Dante in the original.” Spirales, like the circles of Dante’s hell, suggest cycles of regress without the overall progress of the pilgrim. Spiral revolutions thus encompass polarities in ways amenable to surrealist and Marxist thought, both philosophical systems based on the interplay of opposites and their eventual reconciliation of synthesis. The poet’s journey (imagined as representing the fate of his ethnic community) mediates between the spiritual antitheses of up and down, depression and elation, hell and redemption. In this respect, “Spirales” presents in miniature the complex upward movement of the Cahier. In discussion the Algerian writer Jean Amrouche, Césaire has stated his belief that a poet must synthesize opposing modes of being (1963, p.188): “ ‘Upstream,’ ‘downstream,’ we are dealing with two posts of time that the poet must maintain if he is to remain faithful to the mission of poetry.”

  1. Lines 1-8: The upward trajectory of the poem takes the voyagers through a montane landscape (fougères, canéfices, balisiers). Césaire has given us his own explication of some of the plant names: “the canéfice mentioned in Spirales is a tree; it is also known as the cassier. It has large yellow leaves, of a sun-colored yellow, and its fruit is a huge, purplish black pod, used for medicinal purposes. The balisier resembles the banana tree, but it has a red heart in its center that truly has the sape of a heart. (Césaire 1960, p. 23) The balisier also carries political significance for Césaire, since it was adopted as the official emblem of his party. ↩︎

  2. Lines 2-3: Hanged cassias (along with the underlying association of hair and foliage) also appear in “Elégie” (Elegy, OC, p. 272): “les belles boucles noires des canéfices qui sont des / mûlâtresses / très fi&egraveres dont le cou tremble un peu sous la guillotine” (the lovely black curls of cassias which are / mulatto women / haughty women whose necks tremble a little under guillotine). ↩︎

  3. Lines 8-11: The ascending loop of hte spiral takes place on land and reaches its apex in fire; the downward turn is a precipitous plunge into the watery depths, signifying, among other things, the unconscious. For Césaire, the plunge is not merely into his own psyche, but also into that of his race (see pp. 17-18). The poet appears as deep diver in an affiliated infernal context in “Marais nocturne” (Night swamp; OC, p. 245): “Ce sont les scaphandriers de la réclusion qui reviennent à la surface remiser leur tête de plomb et de verre, leur tendresse” (There are the deep-sea divers of solitude who return to the surface to put by their heads of lead and glass, their devotion). ↩︎

  4. The botanical reference to Cecropia peltata (also known as the imbauba), which has a variety of local names in the anglophone world (e.g., snakewood and trumpet, see Wijk 1911). To quote Césaire (1960, p. 23): “The cecropias have the form of silvery hands, yes, like the palm of a black person.” ↩︎

  5. Lines 12-13: The circles of hell contract as the bottom approaches. In Dante, the last circlet of Cocytus is occupied by Satan and by persons who are guilty of betraying their masters and benefactors (Inferno 34). ↩︎

  6. Thanks to the “undertow” (a redemptive symbol in Césaire), the poet excapes from the infernal abyss. At this juncture, the spiral begins to reascend. Compare the role of sillage (wake, wash) in “La parole aux oricous” (The oricous’ turn to speak; OC, p. 218): “don le sillage rare est un lac à se mettre debout sur les chemins de déchant des nixes orageuses” (whose precious wake is a lake to be set up on the descant pathways of supporting hurricanes). For the meaning of nixe, see p. 22, above. ↩︎

  7. An upward motion returns, so does the montane flora of the poem’s beginning. Lianas are tropical vines that typically grow on the tree-covered slopes containing the last vestiges of rain fores in the Antilles. Césaire (1945b) includes them in the sequence of symbols spelled out in his remarks on Wilfredo Lam: “forest, marsh, monster, night, flying pollen grains, rain, liana, epiphyte, serpent, fear, leap, life.” ↩︎

  8. In the last line of Dante’s Inferno the poet and his guide Virgil, on leaving hell, immediately gain a vision of the stars in the opposing hemisphere: “e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle” (and thence we emerged, again to see the stars; 34-139). As in “Magique” (1.16-18), stars figure in Césaire’s vision of a transfigured world free from human rancor. In combination with the poet’s conception of himself as a shamanistic mediator between high and low, they also appear in the paradoxical closing line of “Ode à la Guinée,” (12.17)—a symbolic nexus comparable to the overall mythos of “Spirales.” ↩︎