Non-Vicious Circle
20 Poems by Aimé Césaire

Fetters

  • The voyage1 constricts takes away all passage

  • only the mist2 keeps its hands free to lead the town back to port in a litter of rigging

  • and you it is a wave that brings you before my feet
  • that very same boat3 without fail in the half-light of a half-slumber

  • I knew it always

  • hold me tight round my shoulders round my loins

  • slaves

  • hear their whinnying4 lukewarm foam
  • muddy creekwater this grief then nothing
  • where you and I in the thighs of night sticky now as ever
  • slaves stashed away with heavy hearts
  • all the same my love all the same we press on
  • slightly less heartsick in our pitching vessel

Commentary

The poem that gives its name to the 1960 collection Ferrements appears there in initial, programmatic position (see Hale 60/280). Accordingly, it conveys an ethos that is at the core of Césaire’s rhetorical stance, a profound empathy between the persona of the lyrist and his intended audience, the black ex-slaves of Martinique. The title plays on the near-homonym ferments (fermentations), also the title of a poem within the collection (see Hale 60/280). Although the idea of “fermentation” is subtly developed in the erotic imagery of the second half of the poem, “fetters” is clearly appropriate for a group of poems dealing with the psychosocial effects of slavery and colonialism. On the intertextual affinities in its programmatic aspects with the Mallarmé poem, “Salut”, see Davis (19??).

  1. The rare word périple is a French transliteration of the Greek for “circumnavigation.” Here it alludes to the expedition of Hanno, a Carthaginian admiral who explored the West African coast ca. 500 B.C. His voyage recorded in The Periplus of Hanno, a Greek paraphrase of an original Punic text (on its historical significance, see Cary and Warmington 1929, pp. 47-52; Carpenter 1973, pp. 81-100). In “Ferrements,” the ancient and somewhat fabulous periplus fuses with the historically more recent Middle Passage. ↩︎

  2. On the mist, see 10.1-8, which describes a mist composed of emblems of enslavement, including ferrements. Here it is ironic that the mist “keeps its hands free,” because its very persistence implies continued subjugation. Palanquin has two main connotations: (1) “reef tackle” (nautical; diminutive of palan) and (2) “palanquin” (Oriental litter. My English rendition attempts to include both. ↩︎

  3. The apparition of a slave ship on a voyage provides the setting for the poem’s imagery and movement of ideas. Apostrophized in the previous line (“et toi”), the vessel becomes by metonymy its contents, the slaves whom the poet-lover seeks to embrace. The dim ambience of “dans le demi-jour d’un demi-sommeil” recalls a refrain from the Cahier, “au bout du petit matin” (“at the end of foreday morning”), which refers to the liminal existence of the assimilated colonial. On the symbolism of the wave, see the commentary on 10.90-92. ↩︎

  4. Hennissement (whinnying) is an excellent example of Césaire’s use of the horse as a metaphor for the supposed vigor of the black experience. The entire poem “Cheval” (Horse, OC, p. 252) elaborates this emblem, which is so copiously represented elsewhere in Césaire’s poems, for example: “Je frappe, je brise, toute porte je brise et hennissant, absolu, cervelle, justice, enfance je me brise” (“I knock, I break, through every door I break and whinnying, pure, brain, justice, childhood, I break through myself”; (from “Intimité marine”: “Marine intimacy,” OC, p. 174) and “Ësprit sauvage cheval de la tornade […] en moi tu henniras cette heure”(“spirit wild horse of te tornado […] in me you will whinny this moment”)(from “Saison âpre”: “Harsh season”], OC, p. 167). The origin of the horse metaphor may be the Haitian Vodun conception of the possessed person as a horse that the god mounts (see Métraux 1959, pp. 120-21). ↩︎