Non-Vicious Circle
20 Poems by Aimé Césaire

Blank to Fill on the Visa of Pollen

  • If there were nothing in the desert but1
  • a single drop of water dreaming far below,2
  • in the desert if there were nothing but
  • a windborne spore dreaming far above3
  • it would suffice
  • rusting of weapons, splitting of stones, anarchy of darkness4
  • desert, desert, I endure your challenge
  • blank to fill in on the visa of pollen.5

Commentary

In the title of this poem, the phrase carte voyageuse recalls the radical dislocation of African peoples via the Middle Passage, the sailing route by which slaves were brought to the New World. The underlying implication of a blanc à remplir, however, is that the voyage, in a figurative sense, is not yet complete. In the poet’s imagination exists an uncharted terrain (blanc) beyond colonialism that remains to be explored. In defiance, then, of the desert, which betokens past despair, the poet reaches for and rediscovers oases of hope. The poem, though terse, contains several major Césairean images that establish the poet’s role in nurturing the aspirations (rêve) of his uprooted people (e.g. pollen, graine volante).

  1. Désert similarly appears as a metaphor for spiritual desolation and defeatism in “Grand sang sans merci” (Great merciless blood; OC, p. 154), especially line 11: “Défaite Défaite désert grand” (Defeat, Defeat, great desert). ↩︎

  2. The dream of revolution is enough to sustain the poet in the desert. The polar terms bas and haut, terminating their respective lines, embrace a totality; that is, they have the rhetorical effect of universalizing the conditions expressed in the subjunctives. A single drop of water and a winged spore; conceived as potentially united, suffice to preserve the embryonic dream of a fructifying future. ↩︎

  3. In the Seuil edition of Ferrements, there are commas after haut and assez. ↩︎

  4. Désert gains a more concrete meaning in apposition to the images in line 6. Césaire’s apparent renunciation of an aggressive posture is not a defeatist stance, since his persona has found the strength to endure the desert’s challenge. For vrac as a symbol of a confused, meaningless existence, see 7.23-25, below. ↩︎

  5. Pollen, like the related image graine volante (flying seed; c. 1.14, above), encapsulates both the black diaspora and the poet’s hope that in the future his people will regain their roots. On the importance of plants (especially trees) in his symbolic system, Césaire (1960) has said: “This image [uprooting] obsesses me; it is fundamental. Thsi tearing up, the Martinicans want to forget about it. . . . My poetry is that of an uprooted person, and of a man who wants to take root again. And the tree that recurs with all its different names in all my poems is the symbol of that which has roots. The state of a balanced man is that of a ‘rooted’ man. Poetry is an act of taking root, in the sense in which Simone Weil, a Jewish woman and a victim of the Diaspora, understood this word.” For other variations on the pollen image, see 10.39 and 15.42-43. ↩︎