Non-Vicious Circle
20 Poems by Aimé Césaire

Earthquake

  • all those tall walls of dream
  • of sides, communities of soul1
  • collapsed
  • fallen hollow and the soiled aftermath2 resonant with thought3
  • you and me: what then of you and me?4
  • More or less the story of the family refugees from the catastrophe:5
  • “in the old snake smell of our blood we fled
  • from the valley; the village pursued us with stone lions roaring at our heels.”
  • Slumber, grim slumber, grim awakening for the heart
  • yours on top of mine crockery chipped piled up high in the pitching hollow
  • of meridians.
  • Shall I try words? Rubbing them to conjure up the formless
  • like night insects their deluded elytra?
  • snared snared snared really and truly snared
  • snared snared snared
  • rolled over thrown down
  • all for nought
  • save for the sheer persistence misconstrued
  • of our real names, our miraculous names
  • till now in the reserve of a dormant
  • oblivion.

Commentary

Like the volcanoes with which Césaire’s metaphorical landscape abounds (see Kunene 1969, pp. 14-15), earthquakes are a recurrent image of sociopolitical upheaval (as in 9.10, above). The earthquake of this poem’s title may allude generally to contemporary political evens in Martinique in the 1950s—events that culminated in Césaire’s disenchantment with, and resignation from, the French Communist party (Kesteloot 1962, pp. 64-65; Césaire 1956b). On the whole, the dominant mood of the poem is disillusionment, though this is qualified, if not overcome, in the last four lines.

  1. This line contains a play on parties (political parties) and patries (fatherlands). ↩︎

  2. Aftermath (sillage) is at times a positive symbol for Césaire; see the commentary to 3.18, above. Here the wake has become soiled, although it still resounds with the pristine idea inherent in the dream. ↩︎

  3. Lines 1-4: The opening lines contain several striking parallels, in sentiment as well as diction and imagery, with a moving passage in the Tragédie (Act 1, scene 5), in which Metellus, a slave who has revolted against the Christophe regime in Haiti, expresses his profound disillusionment with the revolution’s aftermath. See especially the lines “nous allions fonder un pays / tous entre soi […] je veux tomber comme un rêve hors parage!” (We were going to found a country / between us all […] I want to fall like a discarded dream; Tragédie, pp. 45-46). The specific image of pans (the sections or surfaces of walls), conveying the ruin of a lofty ideal, also appears in the speech of Christophe that immediately follows Metellus’s last words, before his execution: “des grands pans de ce pays” (the great walls of this country) and “des pans de mur calcinés” (calcinated wall faces; both Tragédie, p. 46). These parallels suggest that Christophe’s Haiti is meant to prefigure the failure of the dream of national reconstruction throughout the Caribbean. It is ironic that Haiti, the positive model for rebellion in Poem 10, should also provide the negative model for contemporary fratricidal struggle. ↩︎

  4. Nous deux refers to the situation of the poet vis-à-vis his intended audience (see also 6.10-13, above, where the same phrase introduces a description of the relationship in terms of erotic union within a shared servitude). ↩︎

  5. Désastre signifies the great black catastrophe of the slave trade. In “Désastre tangible” (Tangible disaster; Œuvres Complètes, p. 221), volcanic imagery, evoking the eruption of Mt. Pelée, replaces other cataclysmic models, such as hurricane and earthquake. ↩︎