Césaire causes the images of statue and island to converge (“poussée en plein océan”). In addition to his primary reference to Martinique, Césaire may also obliquely allude to Hearn’s origin on the Greek island Leucadia (Santa Maura), whose name is reflected in the pen name Lafcadio. ↩︎

Assault by the elements is one aspect of the topos of the poem as a perennial monument; compare Horace, Odes 3.30: “Exegi monumentum aere perennius . . . quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens / possit diruere” (I have set up a monument more lasting than bronze . . . which neither the greedy rainshower nor the uncontrolled east wind / can destroy). ↩︎

For the liana as a general symbol, see the commentary to 3.19, and 9.6. The specific bond between lianas and blood has a basis in Martinican ethnobotany; the so-called “blood-liana,” which secretes a reddish substance, was popularly believed to incarnate the the heart of a zombie. A passage in Hearn’s novel Youma (Hearn 1890, pp. 132-33) dramatizes this folk belief:

The child had plucked a sombre leaf, and was afraid,–something so strange had trickled upon her fingers.
—”It is only the blood-liana,” said Youma: “they dye with it.” . . .
—”But it is warm,” said the child–still full of fear . . . Then both became afraid because of a heavy pulsing sound, dull as the lest flappings of a cannon-echo among the mornes. And the light began to fail,–dimmed into a red gloom, as when the sun dies.
—”It is the tree!” gasped Mayotte,–”the heart of a tree!”
But they could not go: a weird numbness weighed their feet to the ground.
And suddenly the roots of the tree bestirred with frightful life, and reached out writhing to wrap about them;–and the end of the roots and the ends of the limbs had eyes . . . And through the ever-deepening darkness came the voice of Gabriel, crying,–”It is a Zombi!–I cannot cut it!”

By causing the heart of Hearn to converge, metaphorically, with the heart of the tree, Césaire pays the ultimate homage to an ethnographer: subject and object merge as one. He also incorporates Hearn figuratively into the African spiritual cosmos, foreshadowing the conclusion of the poem. The exclamation in line 4 may refer to the complex linguistic situation of the French Antilles, in which, an African element (“grande phrase de terre sensuellle”) interacts with a French-based creole (“si bégayée aux mornes”). In a broader sense, it suggests the contrast between the grandeur of the West African heritage and its impoverishment in Martinique. ↩︎

The first published version of the poem did not contain the series of questions (“Et . . . l’Enfer?”). The increment introduces a more complex rhetorical perspective, for the voice of the interlocutor mimics the English words of a character in Hearn’s Youma. In the novel, set in Martinique during a slave rebellion, a sorcerer (quimboiseur) exhorts the insurgent blacks to partake of his magic potion (p. 152): “Who will drink it, the Soul of a Man?–the spirit of Combat?–the Essence of Falling to Rise?–the Heart-Mover?–the Hell-breaker? . . . Andy they clamored for it, swallowed it–wasps and the gunpowder and the alcohol,–drinking themselves into madness.” By his quote, Césaire endows Hearn’s work with a new significance: the African witch doctor’s art, though reduced to the bizarre utterances of a West Indian sorcerer, still retain a surreal potency. (I have supplied missing quotation markes before en boire, line 4.) ↩︎

In a moment of insight, the eulogist sees his own cultural heritage through the eyes of the sympathetic foreign observer, thus bearing witness to Hearn’s enduring contribution. There is a special poignancy in the choice of imagery because of Hearn’s abnormal eyes: “In his life . . . Hearn had felt himself to be marked off from the rest of mankind by his small stature, his strange appearance and especially by his uneven eyes, one blind, marbled, and sunken in his skull, the other myopic and protruding, so that it looked like the single eye of an octopus.” (Cowley 1949, p. 6) ↩︎

The scenes sketched in this segment are typical of Martinican legend, belief, and daily life. Yé, for instance, is a prominent figure in the folklore of the island; his escapades are analagous to those of tricksters, such as Anansi the spider or Compé Lapin, in African and West Indian folktales (see Condé 19778; Laurent and Césaire 1976). For Hearn’s record of a tale about this figure, see “Yé and the Devil,” Hearn 1891, pp. 400-401. An encapsulated folktale involving Nanie Rosette appears in Youma (Hearn 1890, p 46): “the story of Nanie Rosette, the greedy child, who sat down upon the Devil’s Rock and could not get up again, so that her mother had to hire fifty carpenters to build a house over her before midnight.” Ajoupa, in line 16, is creole “hut.” ↩︎

These lines were added in the later version of the poem. Lines 21-23 reflect a concern for the inadequate local reception of Hearn’s work; an important aim of Césaire’s encomium is to counteract that neglect. ↩︎

The apostrophe is fundamentally ambiguous: it refers both to Hearn, as an avid foreign investigator, and to his creation, the sorcerer who cries out the questions quoted in lines 4-7. As the sorcerer had extended his cask to the eager slaves, so the poet empathetically offers his “redundant jug” to his addressee. With this symbolic gesture, Césaire generously pays deference to Hearn’s contribution to negritude (“le noir verbe mémorant / Moi moi moi), for in recognizing Hearn’s work as an authentic transcription, he recognizes his own identity and rediscovers his blackness. The verb mémorant probably carries an etymological play on its Latin root (from memorare, “tell, relate”): hence my translation “reciting.” ↩︎

In the earlier version, this clause was written in the third person: “de lui on connut que sa patience fut faite” (one recognized that his patience was molded”). As Hale points out (p. 355), a major consequence of the grammatical alteration is “to reduce the distance between the poet and the past, between the poet and Lafcadio Hearn.” One might add that the poet’s affinity with the statue is grounded in this shared virtue of patience. The signification of the term in Césaire’s moral system embraces the connotation, derived from the Latin root (patior), of “suffering” and “endurance” ; see “Patience des signes” (Patience of signs; OC, p. 164). ↩︎

Although Hearn is figuratively placed in the colonizer’s position—the ship’s cabin—the shipwreck caused by the storm (and implied in démâté) is compensated by the maternal nurture of léché d’orchidées. Thus the stranger Hearn is initiated into the spiritual landscape of the Antilles—an initiation preceded by a naufrage. ↩︎