Non-Vicious Circle
20 Poems by Aimé Césaire

One Potato, Two Potato

  • It’s this thin film on the sea’s1
  • unsettled backwash of wine
  • it’s this high rearing up of earth’s horses2
  • halted at the very last second from leaping across the abyss3
  • it’s this black sand churned up when the gulf hiccups4
  • it’s this obstinate snake crawling out of the wreck5
  • this gulp of stars thrown up as firefly cake6
  • this stone on the ocean dislodging from its foam7
  • a trembling hand for birds of passage
  • here Sun and Moon8
  • form the two cogwheels cunningly engaged
  • of a fierce Time to grind us
  • it’s this ill-being
  • this excrement
  • this sobbing of coral
  • it’s pouncing from the memorable sky
  • right onto the lure of our hearts red at dawn9
  • this predatory beak rending the unfriendly breast
  • mire
  • and
  • quagmire
  • It’s this hawk emblazoning the noonday sky of our black hearts, hovering over10
  • this ransack11
  • this sack

  • this farago

  • this land

Commentary

The title of this poem designates a type of children’s rhyme used to select, by a process of elimination, a particular member of a group as “it” in an ensuing game. The child who recites the comptine typically points to each player (including himself) in turn as he sings or recites the ditty. An example in English (from which I have derived my tite) is “One potato, two potato, three potato, four, five potato, six potato, seven potato more!” (for a French example, consult GLE under comptine.)

The poem’s title provides a key to its formal organization. With the exception of lines 10-12, which bifurcate it, the poem consists of a series of predications, each introduced by the demonstrative ce. The demonstrative corresponds, mimetically, to the pointing finger of the player who performs the ditty in the children’s ritual. The climax of the predications is the isolation of a single player, cette terre. The poem thereby reduces itself to one item set apart from the rest of the array, a segregation reflected in the visual spacing of the final lines (23-26). The preceding items are not simply canceled out, however, for as a taxonomic sequence of metaphors describing life in colonial Martinique they both compete wiht and complement each other, forming a comprehensive background for the final, selected term. Césaire often uses such catalogues (e.g., in “Barbare” [Barbarian, OC, p. 255]. “Cheval,” [OC, p. 252], and 9.1-4, below). As a focusing device, the comptine and related forms that employ the catalogue device are similar, at a deep level, to the priamel (from the Latin praeambulum; fc. English “preamble”). For an insightful analysis of the device in Greek literature, see Bundy 1962, pp. 4-6.

  1. Lines 1-2: Césaire’s poetry contains many synonyms for the “eddy” or “undertow,” expressed here in remous. Such words designate the aftermath of slavery and transplantation in ambiguous terms: contrast the negative connotations of the image in this context with its positive meaning in 3.18, above. The metaphor of the sea as wine may be an echo of the Homeric formula “wine-dark sea.” ↩︎

  2. For the image of the horse, see the commentary to 6.8, above. ↩︎

  3. Gouffre, like abîme in the following line, is a conventional infernal metaphor in European poetry from Dante to Baudelaire (see Auerback 1959). The horses’ halt at the edge of the gulf may suggest the inhibition of the colonized when confronted with the necessity of a leap into freedom (cf. 10.61-64, below). ↩︎

  4. Large stretches of the beaches in Martinique and many other islands in the Lesser Antilles are made up of black volcanic sand. The racial color symbolism applied to the sand ramifies the connections between displaced blacks and the sea made throughout Césaire’s poetry (see also Cahier, p. 48). On the rare relfexive use of sabouler, see Littré (3), which gives the connotation “to be in a state of disarray or disturbance.” In addition, one cannot rule out a subtle acoustic play on sablre and sabouler. ↩︎

  5. Shipwreck (naufrage) is a recurrent emblem of the forcible transplantation of blacks to the New World (see hte commentary to poem 15, below). Césaire (1960) has said of the overall significance of the image: “There is an idea to which I am very attached. It’s the idea of continuity. Martinique is a land of shipwreck in the Odyssey of History.” From the cultural shipwreck emerges the persistent serpent—a powerful portrayal of black survival. ↩︎

  6. See 9.1 and commentary, below. Since there the fireflies seem to represent subdued energies, here the regurgitation of the stars as fireflies may highlight the process of spiritual decline. ↩︎

  7. Elochant comes from the archaic verb élocher (dislodge, dislocate); see Littré. ↩︎

  8. Lines 10-12: Although these three lines interrupt the count of players, the gnomic reference to Time (note the capitalization of Soleil, Lune, and Temps) expresses the circularity inherent in the game: the cunningly joined wheels of the sun and moon roll together in a seemingly endless process. This image of a machine that is also a ferocious beast contains as well a topical reference to spiritually pulverizing aspects of Antillean life, such as the exploitation of factory workers in the sugar industry. The verb engrener, which I have rendered as “engaged,” bears a second meaning that cannot be reproduced in English: “to put corn in the mill-hopper.” “Grind” (moudre) in the following line is congruent with this interpretation. ↩︎

  9. Lines 17-18: Césaire often uses a bird of prey to present figuratively the imperialist stance. ↩︎

  10. The predatory bird, depicted by synecdoche above, now is elaborated more fully as an icon of the relation between colonizer and colonized. ↩︎

  11. Lines 23-26: As in the children’s comptine, once “it” has been chosen the items previously denominated are not discarded but remain as participants in the ensuing game—here a brutal sociopolitical game in which the country will continue to be a co-player, if only as privileged scapegoat. With four monosyllabic nouns the poet brings the poem to a crescendo and halts the ever-narrowing circle on the rhyme-elected player, cette terre. In retrospect, therefore, “Comptine” may be read as a series of attempts to characterize, by the technique of counting; the existential terrain of the contemporary ill-being of the island. In my translation, “sack” and “ransack” attempt to preserve the momentum of reduction, as well as the auditory qualities of the original, by duplicating Césaire’s use of a similar jingle in “cage / et / marécage” a few lines earlier. His playfulness with sound echoes and endemic feature of children’s rhymes. ↩︎