Non-Vicious Circle
20 Poems by Aimé Césaire

Commonplace1

  • Commonplace the cake of night decorated with tiny firefly2 candles
  • commonplace a row of palms to fan3 my most subdued thoughts
  • commonplace the dish of heaven served up by magi decked in red pepper4
  • commonplace the green young poinsettia hand curled up outside of its pogrom gloves5
  • Hope O Hope6
  • when the wave unrolls its bundle of lianas of all smells
  • and tosses them all at the necks of squinting horses
  • when the bay7 lets grow its dread salt locks all plaited with the rarest mucilage of fish and algae
  • Hope soar8 majestic Eagle-owl
  • dance Hope and stomp and cry among the shark-suckers’
  • seductive spells, and strange bellowing below that
  • caimans make before an impending earthquake9

Commentary

This poem has a tripartite movement whose segments are defined by syntax and theme. To open, lines 1-4 comprise four noun phrases all introduced by the adjective quelconque. The central position (lines 5-8) constitutes the fulcrum of the poem, which, as in “Magique,” is demarcated by the repeated temporal conjunction lorsque (lines 6 and 8). The closing section (lines 9-10), is controlled by imperatives (plane, danse, piétine, crie), that express the poem’s rousing admonition. The figurative connotations of earthquakes in Césaire’s poetry as a whole (see poem 11) establish that the exhortation climaxing in the final line is to political and spiritual revolution. The stasis of the poem’s first portion is transformed into the dynamic upheaval of the third through a transition effected by the symbolic revolutionary agents of lianas, horses, and bay. 1 - 4.

  1. Lines 1-4: Quelconque (“commonplace”) denotes a general category: the banal, the ordinary, the commonplace. The repetition of this word at the beginning of each of the first four lines is part of a taxonomic strategy typical in Césaire verse: the unvarying inverted predicate introduces members of a thematic set. The absence of verbs and the presence, in most cases, of noun phrases underscore the items’ shared identity, in contrast to the discrete integrity of the diverse subjects (gateau, rangée, plat, main). As superimposed metaphors for colonial relationships, the items may be said to function as signs within an overall grammar of Césairean lyric. ↩︎

  2. Fireflies, in this context, represent a subdued state with sporadic, minor outbursts (note that they are associated with petites bougies [“tiny candles”]). For a contrasting conception, see 10.21. ↩︎

  3. “Palmiers à éventer” (“Palms to fan”) may be deliberately ambiguous: since some palms have fanlike leaves, the image is appropriate for cooling fans in a tropical heat, but éventer may also express the opposite effect of “fanning” a flame. As in line 1, contained power is represented here in “pensées les mieux tues.” For violent thoughts that are latent or suppressed, see also 19.15 and 20.1-2. ↩︎

  4. The creole “dressing” of the quotidian sky-dish served by the magician (who read the stars, according to the Christmas legend) is manifest in its hot seasoning—a marvelous metaphor for local assimilation of colonial institutions. ↩︎

  5. In addition to the color contrast of green and a red like spilt blood, Césaire may bethinking of the fact that the poinsettia is named after a nineteenth-century American diplomat, as another plant, the poinciana, is named after the seventeenth-century French West Indian governor De Poinci. Gloves were standard items of ceremonial dress for colonial governors and their entourages, even in hot climates. I have chosen “pogrom gloves’ to convey the “banality of evil,” in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase (Arendt 1963). ↩︎

  6. Personified Hope also appears in Tragédie, p. 42, a passage on the emotional vagaries of a people’s revolution. ↩︎

  7. The anse (bay) becomes transported, as in the vigorous overture to “Samba” (OC, p. 236): “Tout ce qui d’anse s’est aglutiné pour former tes seins” (“All that from the bay congealed to form your breasts”). On the locally preserved archaic denotation of this word and its occurrence as a toponymic, see Davis 1977, pp. 139-40. Césaire’s choice of imagery in “crinière de sel godronnée” (“dread salt locks”) has proved prophetic, for the “dreadlocks” of contemporary Rastafarians and their imitators have become a common pan-Caribbean (and even pan-American) fad among disenfranchised black youth. ↩︎

  8. To the positive emblem of a majestic bird of Hope embodying black aspirations, contrast the negative winged predator, also hovering (the verb planer [“hover”]) occurs in both poems), that represents the patrolling colonialist at the end of “Comptine.” Ornithological symbols of this kind form a network of correspondences throughout Césaire’s poetry (on which see especially Walker 1979, pp. 103-8). ↩︎

  9. Lines 8-10: According to legend, shark-suckers can stop or slow down ships—thus their name “remora,” from Latin remorari (“delay”). (See GLE, under *remora.) If Césaire is consciously or unconsciously thinking of slave ships, then the remora may function as an aggressive image within the general purview of decolonization. The phrase “les attentions charmantes” (“seductive charms”) may also mask an etymological play, since the verb charmer originally signified”to cast a spell on” (from the Latin carmen, “incantation, song”). The caiman (a name derived from the Carib word acayouman) is a South American andAntillean reptile, akin to the crocodile, which inhabits rivers andlakes (see GLE under caïman for an illustration). In this context, itsnoise is a premonition of the upheaval signified by the closing image.During the Haitian revolution, an important historical prototype forCésaire (see Cahier, p. 51), one of the meeting places of the conspiringslaves was known as “Bois Caïman” (“Caiman Wood”) ↩︎