Non-Vicious Circle
20 Poems by Aimé Césaire

Dead at Dawn

  • A fighter he blows upon embers1
  • his face manhandled by the night
  • whence his lips curled and hissing like serpents2

  • fail to conjure a body tortured in limbo3

  • Black man in whom the will of fire lives on4
  • when ravaging insects rampage in his hunger

  • and only the embers of his eyes have truly caught

  • A small ember he is one who5
  • from his frail shell and in a forest standing up
  • against the clerical plot of leached soils bears a leaping shaft6
  • in a secret so open that no one believed it7

Commentary

When revising this poem for Cadastre, Césaire made two textual excisions (for details, see below on lines 5-7 and 8-9). One, the deletion of a line between present lines 6 and 7, modified the stricter symmetry of the first version, which consisted of three four-line strophes (Soleil, p. 116). Despite his prunings, the poem remains exceptional for its balanced form (quatrain, tercet, quatrain) and for its comparatively orthodox rhythm, which sometimes approaches the alexandrine (see, e.g., lines 5 and 7). Among Césaire’s other poems, only “Le griffon” (below, 18) approaches the relatively even pulse of “Mort à l’aube.”

The poem celebrates the spirit of a revolutionary fighter who has died for the cause liberation. Throughout Césaire’s poetry, dawn is emblematic of the liminal period between past oppression and future liberation (see Cahier and two early poems form Armes, “Poème pour l’aube” [Poem for the dawn] and “Conquête d’une aube” [Conquest of a dawn]; OC, pp. 97 and 111).

  1. Repetitions of the metaphor tison (ember) are the vertebrae of the poem’s symbolic structure. The word appears prominently in each of the three strophic sections, with increasingly complex connotations. In the opening quatrain, the embers are presented as separate from the fighter who blows upon them; as the poem progresses, however, embers and man fuse into one. ↩︎

  2. Snakes are numinous beings in West African religion and in the related Vodun cults of the Antilles; for Césaire, they represent the chthonic African being (see also 7.6, below). For the serpent’s other connotations in Césaire (e.g. violence and sexuality), see Kesteloot 1962, pp. 46-47. Trompe seems to connote both the curve of the lips and the sound that they “trumpet.” By its similarity to tromper, it may also evoke the notion of deceit, which, despite the traditional attribute of the snake in Judeo-Christian mythology, is not pejorative in this context. ↩︎

  3. One of the rhetorical functions of this eulogy is to rescue the anonymous hero from oblivion (oubli). Césaire does not conceive of oblivion in absolute terms, however: for him it is a storehouse of hidden reserves that the poet can summon to his aid (see 11.20-21, below). ↩︎

  4. Lines 5-7: Between lines 6 and 7, the following line occurs in the Soleil version: “quand ses pieds diminuent ses orteils en troncons de vers nus” (when his feet peter out his toes become stumps of naked worms). The excised line makes brutally explicit the process of putrefaction that overtakes the corpse of the fighter. By omitting it, the poet has retained undiminished the impression of vital transformation in death. The evolution of the ember image substantiates the idea of life in death; in the middle tercet the fire is relocated within the man, reflecting his burning will. ↩︎

  5. Lines 8-9: The transfiguration of the ember here reaches its apogee as the fire coalesces with the sap in the trunk of the tree that represents the ancestral spirit. (On the relation of fut, “shaft,” to Césaire’s key image of the ancestral tree trunk, see Davis 1977, pp. 142-43.) The first version of line 8 conveyed more explicitly some further ramifications of the conceit. “mince tison il est celui qui par toutes les veines du sang” (A small ember he is one who through all the veins of the blood), creating the equation fire = will = blood = sap, all from “Des crocs” (Hooks; OC, p. 159), “sang qui monte dans l’abre de chair” (blood that rises in the tree of flesh), and 12.3, below. ↩︎

  6. Many tropical and subtropical soils are plagued by leaching, a washing away of essential nutrients that render them virtually useless for agriculture. Here, lateritic soils (characteristically red in color) stand for the general devastation wrought by colonialist regimes. By miraculously shooting upward in such degraded soil, the tree, which symbolizes the African heritage, carries (porte) the hope of cultural revival. ↩︎

  7. The epithet clair (bright, open) continues the metaphor of the luminous internal fire of the spirit. ↩︎