A work of immense cultural significance and beauty, this long poem became an anthem for the African diaspora and the birth of the Negritude movement. With unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, a bouquet of language-play, and deeply resonant rhythms, Césaire considered this work a "break into the forbidden," at once a cry of rebellion and a celebration of black identity.
More praise:
"The greatest living poet in the French language."-
"Martinique poet Aime Cesaire is one of the few pure surrealists alive today. By this I mean that his work has never compromised its wild universe of double meanings, stretched syntax, and unexpected imagery. This long poem was written at the end of World War II and became an anthem for many blacks around the world. Eshleman and Smith have revised their original 1983 translations and given it additional power by presenting Cesaire's unique voice as testament to a world reduced in size by catastrophic events." —
"Through his universal call for the respect of human dignity, consciousness and responsibility, he will remain a symbol of hope for all oppressed peoples." — Nicolas Sarkozy
"Evocative and thoughtful, touching on human aspiration far beyond the scale of its specific concerns with Cesaire's native land — Martinique." —
1.0 — создание файла и вёрстка (sibkron)
This is not a free adaptation of Césaire’s work; neither, however, is it a completely literal translation. The poem is important because of its thinking content. The thinking is both political and poetic. Politically it is a poem of revolutionary passion and irony. Poetically its images have a physical and often sexual resonance. It is always in respect to this double content that we have sought and worked upon an English version. In close reading the original poem is sometimes obscure, and necessarily this obscurity remains in the translation; but in French this obscurity is only a detail to the lucid passion of the whole. We hope that this balance, or the equivalent of it, has been preserved for the English-language reader.
We wish to thank the following whom we consulted whilst working on this translation: Dorothy Baker, Jean-Paul Clébert, Peter Levi, Adrian Mitchell, Simone Mohr, Henri Stierlin, and Alain Tanner.
Anna Bostock, John Berger
October 1968
At the end of the small hours …
Get away, I said, you bastard of a cop, swine get away. I hate the livery of order and the fish-hooks of hope. Get away foul ju-ju, bedbug of a monk. Then I turned to dream for him and his lost ones’ paradises more calm than the face of a woman telling lies. Rocked there on the breath of inexhaustible thought, I fed the wind, set monsters free and heard a river of turtledoves and savannah clover rising on the far side of disaster: a river in my depths as deep as the brazen twentieth storey is high: a river to protect me against the corruptions of the dusk that are paced day and night by a damned venereal sun.
At the end of the small hours abud with the frail light of coves, hungry, hail-marked with smallpox, blown to bits by alcohol, the Antilles shipwrecked in the mud of this bay, wickedly shipwrecked in this town of dust.
At the end of the small hours: the last, deceiving sorry scab on the wound of the waters; the martyrs who refuse to bear witness; the fading flowers of blood scattered on the futile wind like the screeches of chattering parrots; an old life’s ingratiating smile, lips apart in deserted anguish, an old wretchedness decomposing in silence beneath the sun; an old silence broken by tepid pustules, the dreadful zero of our reason for living.
At the end of the small hours: the strand of dreams and the senseless awakening on this frail stratum of earth already humiliated by the greatness of its future when the volcanoes will erupt and naked waters sweep away the stains ripened by the sun till nothing is left but a tepid molten simmering pried over by sea birds.
At the end of the small hours: this town, flat, displayed, brought down by its common sense, inert, breathless under its geometric burden of crosses, forever starting again, sullen to its fate, dumb, thwarted in every degree, incapable of growing as the sap of its earth would have it grow, set upon, gnawed, reduced, cheating its own fauna and flora.
At the end of the small hours: this town, flat, displayed …
And in this town a clamouring crowd, a stranger to its own cry as the town, inert, is a stranger to its own movement and meaning, a crowd without concern, disowning its own true cry, the cry you’d like to hear because only that cry belongs to it, because that cry you know lives deep in some lair of darkness and pride in this disowning town, in this crowd deaf to its own cry of hunger and misery, revolt and hatred, in this crowd so strangely garrulous and dumb.
In this disowning town, this strange crowd which does not gather, does not mingle: this crowd that can so easily disengage itself, make off, slip away. This crowd which doesn’t know how to crowd, this crowd so perfectly alone beneath the sun: this crowd like a woman whose lyrical walk you have noticed but who suddenly calls upon a hypothetical rain and commands it not to fall; or makes the sign of the cross without visible reason; or assumes the sudden grave animality of a peasant woman urinating on her feet, stiff legs apart.
In this disowning town, this desolate crowd under the sun which rejects everything expressive, affirmative or free in the daylight of the earth which is its own earth. Which rejects Josephine, Empress of the French, dreaming high above the niggers. Rejects the liberator bound in his liberation of white stone. Rejects the conquistador. Rejects this contempt, this freedom, this daring.
At the end of the small hours: this disowning town and its wake of leprosies, consumption, famines, its wake of fears crouching in the ravines, hoisted in the trees, dug out of the soil, rudderless in the sky, piled together. This disowning town and its fumaroles of anguish.
At the end of the small hours, the forgotten Heights which have forgotten how to jump.
At the end of the small hours, the malarial blood of the Heights, wearing the shoes of worry and docility: reversing the sun of its own feverish pulse.
At the end of the small hours, the banked fire of the Heights, like a sob gagged before it breaks out in blood; the fire awaiting a spark that hides and denies itself.
At the end of the small hours, the Heights squatting in front of hunger pains, wary of thunderbolts and potholes, slowly vomiting their exhaustion of men, the Heights alone in their pool of blood, their bandages of shade, their gutters of fear, their great hands of wind.
At the end of the small hours, the famished Heights, and no one knows better than this dismal bastard of a hill, this Morne, why the suicide abetted by his epiglottis killed himself by rolling back his tongue to swallow it; why a woman looks like she is floating in the Capot river (her luminously dark body obedient to her navel’s command) and she is only a patch of ringing water.
Despite the energetic way they both have of drumming on his cropped skull, neither the teacher in his classroom nor the priest at catechism can get a single word from this half-asleep nigger child because his famished voice has been sucked down into the marsh of hunger (a-word-a-single-word and you-can-forget-about-Queen-Blanche-of-Castile, a-word-a-single-word, just-look-at-the-little-savage-he-doesn’t-know-a-single-one-of-God’s-ten-commandments)
for his voice has lost its mind in the marshes of hunger
and there is nothing, nothing to be got out of the little good-for-nothing
nothing but a hunger which can no longer climb the tackle of his voice
a heavy, flabby hunger
a hunger buried in the deepest heart of the Hunger of the famished Morne
At the end of the small hours, this nondescript beach for wrecks, the exacerbated odour of corruption, the monstrous sodomies of the host and the slaughterer, the unscalable ship’s prow of prejudice and stupidity, the prostitutions, hypocrisies, lusts, betrayals, lies, swindles, concussions — the breathlessness of petty cowardice, the wheeze of gushing enthusiasm, the greeds, hysterias, perversions, the harlequinades of misery, cripplings, itches, rashes, the luke-warm hammocks of degeneration.
This is the pageant of comic scrofulous swellings, of festers begun by the strangest microbes, of poisons without known antidote, of pus from old wounds, of unforeseen fermentations in rotting bodies.
At the end of the small hours, the great still night, the stars more dead than a burst balafong,
the monstrous bulb of the night, germinated from all our meanness and renunciations.
And our gestures, idiotic and mad, trying to bring back the golden shower of privileged moments, the umbilical cord redrawn in its frail splendour, the bread and wine of complicity, the bread, the wine, the blood of a true wedding.
My far distant happiness which makes me aware of my true misery: a lumpy road plunging into a hollow where it scatters a handful of huts: a tireless road charging at full speed towards a hill at whose top it is brutally drowned in a stagnant pool of dwarfish houses, a road madly climbing, recklessly descending, and the wooden wreck comically hoicked up on tiny cement legs which I call ‘our home’, its hairdo of galvanized iron buckling in the sun like a drying hide, the dining room, the rough floor with its glistening beads of nails, the rafters of pine and shadow which run across the ceiling, the ghostly chairs of straw, the grey light of the lamp, varnished and quick with cockroaches, the lamp buzzing till it hurts …
At the end of the small hours, this most essential country restored to my greed which wants no foggy tenderness but is the twisted sensual concentration of the Morne’s fat nipple with the accidental palm tree as its hardened germ, the jerking spunk of the streams, the great hysterical tongue of the sea from Trinité to Grande Rivière.
Then time passed by quickly, very quickly.
August when the mango trees sport moons: September — midwife of cyclones: October — burning sugarcane, November which purrs in the stills. And now Christmas beginning.
Its coming was first felt in the prickling of desires, a thirst for new tenderness, the budding of vague dreams, then suddenly it took wing in the violet silk rustle of its great wings of joy, and over the borough it plunged down and burst open the life inside the huts like an over-ripe pomegranate.
Christmas was not like other holidays. It did not want to run in the streets, dance in the public squares, straddle wooden horses, take advantage of the crush to pinch women, throw fireworks in the face of tamarisks. Christmas had agoraphobia. What it wanted was a day of continual bustle and preparation and kitchen-work, a day of cleaning and anxiety
in-case-there’s-not-enough,
in-case-we-run-short,
in-case-they-think-it-dull,
then in the evening a small church, not intimidating, allowing itself to be filled benevolently with laughter and whispers, confidences, declarations of love, rumours, and the keen, throaty discords of the choir leader, and hearty men and tarty girls and homes with their entrails stuffed with succulence, no counting pennies today, and the town now nothing but a bouquet of songs, it is good to be inside, to eat well and drink with warmth, blood sausage two fingers thin like a twisty stalk, or blood sausage broad and thick, the mild sort tasting of wild thyme, the hot kind blazing with spice, scalding coffee sweet aniseed cordial milk punch, rums of liquid sun, and good things to eat which brand your mucous membranes or distil them to delight or weave fragrances across them, when somebody laughs, when another sings, and the refrains spread like coconut palms as far as you can see:
ALLELUIA
KYRIE ELEISON … LEISON … LEISON
CHRISTE ELEISON … LEISON … LEISON
Not only the mouths are singing, but hands, too, feet, buttocks, genitals, the whole fellow creature flowing in sound, voice and rhythm.
When the joy reaches the highest point of its ascent, it bursts like a cloud. The songs do not stop, but anxious and heavy they roll now along valleys of fear and tunnels of anguish, through the fires of hell.
Everyone tries to tweak the tail of the nearest devil until imperceptibly fear is abolished in the fine sand of dreams, and you live truly in a dream, drinking and shouting and singing in a dream, and dozing in a dream with eyelids like rose petals, the daylight comes velvety like the sapodilla berry, the smell of liquid manure from the coconut palm, the turkeys picking off their red pimples in the sun, the obsession of the bells, and the rain,
the bells … the rain …
ringing, ringing, ringing …
At the end of the small hours, this town, flat, displayed …
It crawls on its hands without the slightest wish ever to stand up and pierce the sky with its protest. The backs of the houses are afraid of the fire-truffled sky, their foundations are afraid of the drowning mud. Scraps of houses that have settled to stand between shocks and undermining. And yet this town advances. Every day it grazes further beyond the tide of its tiled corridors, shame-faced blinds, sticky courtyards, dripping paintwork. And petty suppressed scandals, petty shames kept quiet and petty immense hatreds knead the narrow streets into lumps and hollows where the gutter pulls a face among the excrement …
At the end of the small hours: life flat on its face, miscarried dreams and nowhere to put them, the river of life listless in its hopeless bed, not rising or falling, unsure of its flow, lamentably empty, the heavy impartial shadow of boredom creeping over the quality of all things, the air stagnant, unbroken by the brightness of a single bird.
At the end of the small hours: another house in a very narrow street smelling very bad, a tiny house within its entrails of rotten wood shelters rats by the dozen and the gale of my six brothers and sisters, a cruel little house whose implacability panics us at the end of every month, and my strange father nibbled by a single misery whose name I’ve never known, my father whom an unpredictable witchcraft soothes into sad tenderness or exalts into fierce flames of anger; and my mother whose feet, daily and nightly, pedal, pedal for our never-tiring hunger, I am even woken by those never-tiring feet pedalling by night and the Singer whose teeth rasp into the soft flesh of the night, the Singer which my mother pedals, pedals for our hunger night and day.
At the end of the small hours, my father, my mother, and over them the house which is a shack splitting open with blisters like a peach-tree tormented by blight, and the roof worn thin, mended with bits of paraffin cans, this roof pisses swamps of rust onto the grey sordid stinking mess of straw, and when the wind blows, these ill-matched properties make a strange noise, like the sputter of frying, then like a burning log plunged into water with the smoke from the twigs twisting away.… And the bed of planks from which my race came, all my race from this bed of planks on its legs of kerosene drums, a bed with elephantiasis, my grandmother’s bed with its goatskin and its dried banana leaves and its rags, a bed with nostalgia as a mattress and above it a bowl full of oil, a candle-end with a dancing flame and on the bowl, in golden letters, the word MERCI.
A disgrace, Paille Street,
a disgusting appendage like the private parts of this town, whose sea of grey-tiled roofs extends to left and to right all along the colonial road; whereas here there are only roofs of straw, stained brown by sea-spray, worn thin by the wind.
Everyone despises Paille Street. It’s there that the young people of the town are led astray. It’s there that the sea especially dumps its refuse, its dead cats and its dogs. For the street ends on the beach, and the beach is not enough to satisfy the foaming rage of the sea. A misery, this beach of rotting garbage, the furtive rumps of creatures relieving themselves, and the sand black, dismal, black sand such as you never saw, the sea-scum slides over it, yelping, and the sea hits hard at this beach like a boxer, or rather the sea is a great dog licking and biting the shins of the beach, and in the end the biting dog will surely devour this beach and Paille Street along with it.
At the end of the small hours, the rising wind of the past, of broken faith, of an undefined duty slipping away … and those other small hours, the early morning of Europe …
To leave.
As there are hyena-men and panther-men,
so I shall be a Jew man
a Kaffir man
a Hindu-from-Calcutta man
a man-from-Harlem-who-hasn’t-got-the-vote
Famine man, curse man, torture man, you may seize him at any moment, beat him, kill him — yes, perfectly fine to kill him — accounting to no one, having to offer an excuse to no one
a Jew man
a pogrom man
a whelp
a beggar
but can you kill Remorse with its beautiful face like that of an English lady stupefied at finding a Hottentot’s skull in her soup tureen?
I want to rediscover the secret of great speech and of great burning. I want to say storm. I want to say river. I want to say tornado. I want to say leaf, I want to say tree. I want to be soaked by every rainfall, moistened by every dew. As frenetic blood rolls on the slow current of the eye, I want to roll words like maddened horses like new children like clotted milk like curfew like traces of a temple like precious stones buried deep enough to daunt all miners. The man who couldn’t understand me couldn’t understand the roaring of a tiger.
Rise, phantoms, chemical-blue from a forest of hunted beasts of twisted machines of jujube-trees of rotten flesh of a basket of oysters of eyes of a lacework of lashes cut from the lovely sisal of human skin I would have words huge enough to contain you all and you too stretched earth
drunken earth
earth great sex raised in the sun
earth great delirium of the phallus of God
earth risen wild from the sea’s locker with a bunch of cecrops in your mouth
earth whose surfing face I must compare to the mad and virgin forests
that I would wish to wear as countenance before the undeciphering eyes of men.
One mouthful of your milk-spurt would let me discover always the distance of a mirage on earth — a thousand times more native, golden with a sun that no prism has split open — a fraternal earth where all is freed, my earth.
To leave. My heart was throbbing with an insistent desire to give. To leave … I would arrive sleek and young in that country, my country, and I would say to that country whose clay is part of my flesh: “I have wandered far and I am coming back to the lonely ugliness of your wounds.”
I would come to that country, my country, and I would say to it: “Kiss me without fear … And if I do not know what to say, it is still for you that I speak.”
And I would say to it:
“My mouth shall be the mouth of misfortunes which have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those which break down in the prison cell of despair.”
And, coming, I would say to myself:
“Beware, my body and soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle, because a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, because a man who cries out is not a dancing bear.”
Now I have come.
Once more this limping life before me, no not this life, this death, this death without sense or piety, this death where there is no majesty, the gaping pettiness of this death, this death which limps from pettiness to pettiness; little greeds heaped on top of the conquistador; little flunkeys heaped on top of the great savage; little souls shovelled on top of the three-souled Caribbean
and all those pointless deaths
absurd beneath the spatter of my ripped conscience
tragically pointless, lit by just one phosphorescent noctiluca
and myself alone with the apocalypse of monsters
who suddenly strut across the stage of the small hours
only to capsize and fall silent
an election of hot ashes, of downfall and collapse.
Again an objection! only one, let it be only one: I have no right to assess life by this black hand’s span; to reduce myself to this little ellipsoidal nothing trembling four fingers above the line. I, a man, have no right to deny creation like this. Let me be contained between latitude and longitude.
At the end of the small hours,
male thirst and persistent desire,
I am cut off from the fresh oases of fraternity
Such meek nothingness is like a splinter under my nail
This horizon is too sure and nervous as a gaoler.
Your last triumph, tenacious crow of Treason.
These are mine: these few gangrenous thousands who rattle in this calabash of an island. And this too is mine: this archipelago arched with anxiety as though to deny itself, as though she were a mother anxious to protect the tenuous delicacy with which her two Americas are separated; this archipelago whose flanks secrete for Europe the sweet liquid of the Gulf Stream; this archipelago which is one side of the shining passage through which the Equator walks its tightrope to Africa. My island, my non-enclosure, whose bright courage stands at the back of my polynesia; in front, Guadeloupe split in two by its dorsal ridge and as wretched as we ourselves; Haiti where negritude rose to its feet for the first time and said it believed in its own humanity; and the comic little tail of Florida where they are just finishing strangling a Negro; and Africa gigantically caterpillaring as far as the Spanish foot of Europe: the nakedness of Africa where the scythe of Death swings wide.
My name is Bordeaux and Nantes and Liverpool and New York and San Francisco
not a corner of this world but carries my thumb-print
and my heel-mark on the backs of skyscrapers and my dirt
in the glitter of jewels!
Who can boast of more than I?
Virginia. Tennessee. Georgia. Alabama
Monstrous putrefactions of revolts
coming to nothing,
putrid marshes of blood
trumpets ridiculously blocked
Red earth, blood earth, blood brother earth.
Mine too a small cell in the Jura,
the snow strengthens the small cell with white bars
the snow is a white gaoler who stands guard
in front of a prison
This man is mine
a man alone, imprisoned by whiteness
a man alone defying the white cries of a white death
(TOUSSAINT, TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE)
a man who fascinates the white
sparrow-hawk of white death
a man alone in the sterile sea of white sand
an old nigger standing upright against the waters of the sky
Death describes a shining circle above this man
death is a gentle star above his head
death, driven mad, blowing in the ripe cane plantation of his
arms
death galloping through the prison like a white horse
death gleaming like a cat’s eyes in the dark
death hiccuping like water underneath the Reefs
death is a wounded bird
death wanes
death vacillates
death is a shady scavenger
death expires in a white pool of silence.
At the four corners of these small hours
swellings of the night
convulsions of rigid death
stubborn fate
upright cries of the mute earth
will not the splendour of this blood explode?
At the end of the small hours these countries whose past is uninscribed on any stone, these roads without memory, these winds
without a log.
Does that matter?
We shall speak. We shall sing. We shall shout.
Full voice, great voice, you shall be our good and our guide.
Words?
Ah yes, words!
Reason, I appoint you wind of the evening.
Mouth of authority, be the whip’s corolla.
Beauty, I name you petition of stone.
But ah! my hoarse contraband laughter
Ah! my saltpetre treasure!
Because we hate you, you and
your reason, we claim kinship with
dementia praecox with flaming madness
with tenacious cannibalism
Treasure? let us count it
the madness that remembers
the madness that screams
the madness that sees
the madness that unchains itself
And you know the rest
That 2 and 2 make 5
that the forest mews like a cat
that the tree pulls chestnuts out of the fire
that the sky smoothes its beard
etcetera etcetera …
Who are we and what? Admirable
question!
By looking at trees
I have become a tree
and this tree’s long feet
have dug great hollows of poison in the earth
have dug huge cities of bones
by thinking of the Congo
I have become a Congo noisy with forests
and rivers
where the whip cracks like a great
banner
the banner of the prophet
where the water goes
likwala likwala
where the lightning of anger hurls a green
axe and herds wild boars
of putrefactions into the beautiful violent precincts
of the nostril.
At the end of the small hours the sun that
coughs and spits its lungs out
At the end of the small hours
a little line of sand
a little line of muslin
a little line of maize
At the end of the small hours
a great gallop of pollen
a great gallop of a little line of
little girls
a great gallop of colibris
a great gallop of daggers to plunge
into the earth’s breast.
Angel customs officers who
mount guard by the entrances of the waves
over all that is forbidden
I declare my crimes and say that there is nothing to say in my
defence.
Dances. Idols. Relapses.
I too have murdered
God with my idleness
my words my gestures my obscene songs
I have worn parrot feathers and
musk-cat skins
I have worn down the patience of missionaries
I have insulted the benefactors of humanity.
Defied Tyre. Defied Sydon.
Adored the Zambezi.
The expanse of my perversity confounds me.
Yet why continue to hide
in the impenetrable wild
my beggar’s living zero
Why not, disregarding all lessons in nobility,
strike up
the horrible jumping
of my Bantu ugliness?
voom roh oh
voom roh oh
to charm snakes to conjure up
the dead
voom roh oh
to hold back the rain to cross
the tides
voom roh oh
to stop the shadows turning
voom roh oh to let my own skies
open
— On a road I am a child chewing
a sugar-cane root.
— On a blood road being dragged
I am a man with a rope around my neck.
— Upright in the middle of an immense circus
on my black forehead is a crown of thorn-apple.
Voom roh
Fly away
higher than quivering higher
than witches towards other stars
when no one gives them a thought
the fierce exaltation of forests
and mountains uprooted
islands in chains for a thousand years!
voom roh oh
let the promised time come again
and the bird that knew my name
and the woman who had a thousand names
fountain and sun and tears
and her hair like young fish
and her steps my climates
and her eyes my seasons
days without harm
nights without offence
stars of confiding
wind of complicity
But who lays hands on my voice? who flays
my voice? Stuffing my throat with a thousand bamboo hooks.
A thousand sea-urchin
needles. You filthy remnant of a world.
You filthy small hours. You filthy hate.
It’s you, burden of an insult and a hundred years of
the whip. A hundred years of my
patience, a hundred years of my effort
simply not to die.
Roh oh
we sing of poisonous flowers
bursting in meadows of fury;
skies of love struck by clots of blood;
epileptic mornings; the white
burning of abyssal sands, the sinking
of wrecked ships in the middle of nights rent by
the smell of wild beasts.
What can I do?
I must begin.
Begin what?
The only thing in the world that’s worth beginning:
The End of the World, no less.
Flan
o flan of the appalling autumn
where new steel grows and undying
concrete
flan o flan
where the air rusts in great patches of
evil laughter
where water which is pus slashes
at the great cheeks of the sun
I hate you
Women are still seen with madras cloth
round their loins rings in their ears
smiles on their mouths babies
at their breast and all the rest of it:
ENOUGH OF THIS OUTRAGE!
Now for the great defiance
diabolical impulses
the insolent
nostalgic drift of red moons
green lights and yellow fevers!
Twenty times over
in the tepid warmth of your throat
you will develop and entertain the same poor
comfort that we are no more than
mutterers of words
and you do it in vain.
Words? We are handling
quarters of the world, we are marrying
delirious continents, we are breaking down
steaming doors,
words, ah yes, words! but
words of fresh blood, words which are
tidal waves and erysipelas
malarias and lavas and bush-fires,
and burning flesh
and burning cities …
Know this well:
I never play except at the millennium
I never play except at the Great Fear
Accommodate yourself to me. I won’t
accommodate myself to you!
I have been seen snatching,
with a grand gesture of the brain,
a cloud that is too red
or a caress of rain,
or a prelude of wind,
yet do not be unduly reassured:
I break open the yolk-bag
that separates me from myself
I force the great waters that gird me with blood.
I and nobody else reserve my place
on the last train
of the last tidal wave.
I and nobody else give tongue
to the last anguish
I and I alone
procure for myself with a flute
the first drops of virginal milk!
And now to be done
with the sun (it is not strong enough to go
to my strong head)
with the floury night laying its golden
eggs of uncertain fireflies
with the shock of hair trembling at the cliff-top
where the winds leap like troops of salty shifting horses
Exoticism, my pulse tells me, is no fit food
As I leave Europe
the irritation of its own cries
the silent currents of despair
as I leave timid Europe
who can only find its feet in boasts
I wish for that egoism which is beautiful
which runs risks
and my ploughing reminds me of a ship’s relentless prow.
How much blood there is in my memory. In my memory are
lagoons.
They are covered with death’s heads. They are not covered with
water lilies.
In my memory are lagoons. On their banks no women’s
loincloths are laid out.
My memory is surrounded by blood. My memory
has its belt of corpses.
A volley of rum warmly lacing
our wretched revolts, sweet eyes swooning
drunk with a drink of ferocious liberty
(niggers-are-all-the-same, I tell you
they-have-every-vice-every-conceivable-vice, I’m telling you that
nigger-smell-makes-the-cane-grow
it’s like the old saying:
beat-a-nigger-and-you-feed-a-nigger)
among the rocking chairs
with my mind upon the voluptuous horse-whip
I go back and forth, an unappeased foal
Or else quite simply how they love us!
Gay and obscene, and to be rid of boredom, very hot on jazz.
I can do the soft-shoe, the Lindy-hop and the tap dance.
And for a special treat the muted trumpet of our cries wrapped
in wah-wah.
Wait.… Everything’s in order. My good angel grazes in neon
lights.
I swallow sticks. My dignity
wallows in vomit
Sun, Angel Sun, curly-headed Angel of the Sun,
O leap across the sweet greenish fluid
of the waters of shame!
But I have come to the wrong witch-doctor.
On this exorcised earth, abandoned to the bias of its own aim, precious and evil, a voice cries, slowly getting hoarse, vainly, vainly hoarse,
and there is nothing, only the piled-up dung of our lies.
Not replying.
What madness to dream of the marvellous dancer leaping
beyond all that is contemptible!
Indeed the white man is a great warrior
hosannah to the master, the castrator of Negroes!
Victory! Victory! I say the vanquished are content.
Foetid gaiety and songs of mud.
As a result of an unforeseen happy conversion I now respect
my repellent ugliness.
On St John the Baptist’s Day, as soon as there is some shade, hundreds of horse-dealers congregate in the township of Gros-Morne. And the street they meet in is called De Profundis Street. At least the name gives some warning of what Death will deliver from its lower depths. And it is truly from Death that the astonishing cavalcade comes, from Death in its thousand mean local forms (hunger pains uneased by Para grass, drunken addiction to the distilleries). The impulsive worn-out nags that come from Death push their way into Life which opens like a flower. And what galloping! what whinnying! what sincere pisses! what amazing defecations! “A spirited horse, difficult to mount!” “A grand mare with fine fetlocks!” “A plucky foal nobly proportioned.” And the salesman, cunning, proud with a watch-chain across his waistcoat, pretends that the regular swellings caused by obliging wasps, the obscene stings of ginger, the charitable flow of a bucketful of sugared water, are proof of genuine sturdiness, youthful ardour, full udders.
I refuse to pass my swellings off for authentic glories. And I laugh at my old childish imaginings.
No, we have never been amazons at the court of the King of Dahomey, nor the princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor doctors at Timbuctoo when Askia the Great was king, nor architects at Djenné, nor Madhis, nor warriors. We do not feel in our armpits the itch of those who once carried the lance. And because I have sworn to conceal nothing of our history (I who admire nothing so much as a sheep grazing of an afternoon in its own shadow), I wish to confess that we were always quite undistinguished dishwashers, small-time shoeshiners, at the very most fairly conscientious witch-doctors, and the only record we hold is our staying power in wrangling over trifles …
For centuries this country repeated that we are brute beasts; that the human heartbeat stops at the gates of the black world; that we are walking manure hideously proffering the promise of tender cane and silky cotton, and they branded us with red-hot irons and we slept in our shit and we were sold in public squares and a yard of English cloth and salted Irish meat were cheaper than us and this country was quiet, calm, saying that the spirit of God was in his acts.
We, vomit of the slave-ship
We, hunted meat of Calabar.
Plug your ears?
We, stuffed to bursting with the swell, with squalls with
inhaled fog!
Forgive me, partner whirlwind!
I hear rising from the hold chained curses, gasps of the dying, the sound of one who is thrown into the sea … the baying of a woman giving birth … the scrape of fingernails advancing on throats … the sneer of the whip … the prying of vermin among weary bodies …
Nothing can rouse us to noble desperate adventure.
Amen. Amen.
I am of no nationality ever contemplated by the chancelleries.
I defy the craniometer. Homo sum, etc.
And may they serve and betray and die.
Amen. Amen. It was written in the shape of their pelvis.
And I, and I,
I who sang with clenched fist
You must be told the length to which I carried cowardice.
In a tram one night, facing me, a Negro.
He was a Negro tall as a pongo who tried to make himself very small on a tram seat. On that filthy tram seat he tried to abandon his gigantic legs and his starved boxer’s trembling hands. And everything had left him, was leaving him. His nose was like a peninsula off its moorings; even his negritude was losing its colour through the effects of a perpetual tanner’s bleach. And the tanner was Poverty. A great sudden long-eared bat whose claw-marks on that face were scarred, scabby islands. Or perhaps Poverty was a tireless workman fashioning some deformed cartridge. You could see clearly how the industrious malevolent thumb had modelled a lump of the forehead, pierced two tunnels — parallel and disturbing — through the nose, drawn out the disproportion of the upper lip, and by a masterstroke of caricature had planed, polished, varnished the smallest, neatest little ears in all creation.
He was an ungainly Negro without rhythm or measure.
A Negro whose eyes rolled with bloodshot weariness.
A Negro without shame, and his big smelly toes sniggered in the deep gaping lair of his shoes.
Poverty, it has to be said, had taken great pains to finish him off. She had hollowed the eye socket and painted it with a cosmetic of dust and rheum.
She had stretched the empty space between the solid hinge of the jaws and the bone of an old, worn cheek. On this she had planted the shiny little bristles of several days’ beard. She had maddened the heart and bent the back.
And the whole thing added up to a perfectly hideous Negro, a peevish Negro, a melancholy Negro, a slumped Negro, hands folded as in prayer upon a knotty stick. A Negro shrouded in an old, threadbare jacket. A Negro who was comical and ugly, and behind me women giggled as they looked at him.
He was COMICAL AND UGLY.
COMICAL AND UGLY, for a fact.
I sported a great smile of complicity …
My cowardice rediscovered!
I bow to the three centuries which support my civil rights and my minimized blood.
My heroism, what a joke!
This town suits me to perfection.
My soul is supine. Like this town, supine
in the dirt and mud.
This town, my face of mud.
I demand for my face the dazzling prize
of being spat upon!
Being such as we are, can the rush of virility, the limb of victory,
the large-clodded plain of the future, belong to us?
I prefer to admit that I have babbled generously, my heart in my
brain like a drunken knee.
My star now the funeral hawk
And on this ancient dream my cannibal cruelties:
(bullets in the mouth thick saliva
our heart daily busts with meanness
the continents break the frail moorings of isthmuses
lands explode along the fatal division of rivers
and now it is the turn of these Heights
which for centuries have stifled back their cry
to quarter the silence
and the people
courage leaping
and our bodies dismembered
in vain by the most refined tortures
a hotter-headed life spurting from this dung
like a bullock’s-heart tree unexpected among decaying
breadfruit!)
On this ancient dream within myself my cannibal cruelties
Destiny was calling me
and I hid behind a stupid vanity:
here’s a man forced to the ground, his feeble defences
scattered,
his sacred maxims trampled underfoot, his pedantic
declamations
farting through every lesion
here’s a man forced to the ground
and his soul is naked
and destiny triumphs as it looks upon
this once defiant soul
moulting in the ancestral mud-pit.
I say that it is well so.
My back shall make a victory out of its whipping sores.
I shall trim my natural obsequiousness with acknowledgements
of gratitude
and my enthusiasm will outclass the silver-braided flummery of
that postillion in Havana, lyrical baboon, pimp of the
splendours of servitude.
I say that this is well.
I live for the greater flatness of my soul
for the greater limpness of my flesh.
Warm small hours of ancestral heat and fear
I tremble now as we all tremble when our submissive blood
sings in the madrepore.
Look at the tadpoles of my prodigious ancestry hatched inside me!
Those who invented neither gunpowder nor compass
those who tamed neither steam nor electricity
those who explored neither sea nor sky
but those who know the humblest corners of the country of suffering
those whose only journeys were uprootings
those who went to sleep on their knees
those who were domesticated and christianized
those who were inoculated with degeneration
tom-toms of empty hands
inane tom-toms of resounding wounds
burlesque tom-toms of emaciated treachery
Warm small hours of ancestral heat and fears
jettison my pilgrim wealth and
my authentic lies
But what strange pride suddenly fires me?
come colibri
come sparrow-hawk
come horizon-crack
come dog-faced baboon
come dolphins
a pearl-bearing revolt breaking the shell of the sea
come plunge of islands
come days of dead fish disintegrating
in quicklime of birds of prey
come ovaries of water where the future moves its little heads
come wolves who gaze in the savage orifices
of the body
when my moon meets your sun at the ecliptic inn
Beneath my uvula’s reserve
wild boars lair
Under the grey stone of daylight
your eyes
a quivering conglomerate of ladybirds
Within the gaze of disorder
swallow of mint and broom melts
to be born again in the tidal wave of your light
(O lullaby my words
the child who does not know
the map of spring has always to be drawn again)
grasses will swing for the cattle
sweet vessel of hope
alcoholic swell of the sea
the sharpened stones of the never-seen rings
will cut the stalks of the glass organ of evening
strewing zinnias
and coryanthes
over the ultimate width of my fatigue
and you, from the foundation of your light,
choose, star, to draw like a lemur
from the unfathomable sperm of man
the undared form
which the quivering womb carries like an ore!
o well-disposed light
o fresh source of light
those who invented neither gunpowder nor compass
those who tamed neither steam nor electricity
those who explored neither sea nor sky
but without whom the earth would not be the earth
We the hump growing more benign
as more and more the earth abandons its own
we the silo
storing to ripen
all of the earth that belongs most to the earth
my negritude is not a stone,
nor deafness flung out against the clamour of the day
my negritude is not a speck of dead water
on the dead eye of the earth
my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it plunges into the red flesh of the soil
it plunges into the blazing flesh of the sky
my negritude riddles with holes
the dense affliction of its worthy patience.
Heia for the royal Kailcedrate!
Heia for those who have never invented anything
those who never explored anything
those who never tamed anything
those who give themselves up to the essence of all things
ignorant of surfaces but struck by the movement of all things
free of the desire to tame but familiar with the play of the world
truly the eldest sons of the world
open to all the breaths of the world
fraternal territory of all breaths
undrained beds of the waters of the world
flesh of the flesh of the world pumping with the very movement of the world
Warm small hours of ancestral virtues
Blood! Blood! all our blood roused by the male heart of the sun
those who know the femininity of the moon with her body of oil
the rapture of reconciliation between antelope and star
those who continue to live in the germination of grass!
Heia perfect circle of the world and the fitness of agreement!
Listen to the white world
appallingly weary from its immense effort
the crack of its joints rebelling under the hardness of the stars
listen to the proclaimed victories which trumpet their defeats
listen to their grandiose alibis (stumbling so lamely)
Pity for our conquerors, all-knowing and naïve!
Heia for the reincarnation of tears and the worst pain brought back again
those who never invented anything
those who never tamed anything
Heia for joy
heia for love
heia for the reincarnation of tears and the worst pain brought back again
And here at the end of the small hours is my virile prayer
that I may hear neither laughter nor crying, my eyes
upon this city which I prophesy as beautiful.
Give me the sorcerer’s savage faith
give my hands the power to mould
give my soul the temper of the sword
I will stand firm. Make of my head a prow
and of myself make neither a father
nor a brother nor a son
but the father, the brother, the son
do not make me a husband, but the lover of this unique people
Make me rebellious against all vanity but docile to its genius
like the fist of our extended arm!
Make me the steward of its blood
make me the trustee of its rancour
make me a man of ending
make me a man of beginning
make me a man of harvesting
but also make me a man of sowing
make of me its executioner
the time has come to gird my loins like a man of courage—
But at the execution let my heart preserve me from all hate
do not make of me that man of hate for whom I have only hate
I was born of this unique race
yet knowing my tyrannical love you know
it is not by hatred of other races that I prosecute for mine.
All that I would wish is
to answer the universal hunger
the universal thirst
to prescribe at last this unique race free
to produce from its tight intimacies the succulence of fruit
Look. The tree of our hands is for all!
It is converting the wounds which were cut in its trunk
the soil works
and among the branches heady sweet blossoms of haste
But before I set foot in these future orchards
let me deserve them on the encircling sea
give me my heart while waiting for land
on the sterile ocean
where the taut sail promises and soothes
on the changeable ocean
give me the obstinacy of the proud canoe
and its seafaring power
Here advancing, climbing and falling on the pulverized tide,
here dancing the sacred dance in front of the greyness of the town
here roaring out a vertiginous
galloping the
Strongly with a plough stroke twenty times repeated
the paddle divides the water
the canoe jibs at the force of the blade
instantly swerves tries to flee
the paddle coaxes and brings it round
the canoe surges forward
a shiver down the spine of the wave
the sea foams at the mouth and scolds
like a sleigh the canoe beaches on the sand.
At the end of these small hours my virile prayer
give me the muscles of that canoe on the furious sea
give me the authentic gaiety of the
Look, I am nothing but a man now, no degradation, no spit in the face disturbs me,
I am nothing but a man who accepts, there is no more anger
(he has in his heart only an immense love which burns)
I accept … I accept … entirely without reservation …
my race which no ablution of hyssop mingled with lily can ever purify
my race gnawed by blemishes
my race ripe grapes from drunken feet
my queen of spit and leprosies
my queen of whips and scrofulae
my queen of squamae and chloasmae
(O royalty whom I have loved in the far gardens of spring lit by chestnut candles!)
I accept. I accept.
The flogged Negro who says “Sorry, Master”
and the twenty-nine legally permitted strokes of the whip
and the cell four feet high
and the branched yoke of iron
and the hamstringing of my runaway courage
and the red-hot fleur-de-lys from the smoking brands
bleeding on the soft flesh of my shoulder
And the kennel of Monsieur VAULTIER MAYENCOURT where
I barked for six dog months
and Monsieur BRAFIN
and Monsieur de FOURNIOL
and Monsieur de la MAHUDIERE
and the yaws
the watch-dog
the suicide
the promiscuity
the boot
the stocks
the wooden horse
the shackles
the headband
Am I humble enough? Have I enough callouses on my knees?
Enough muscle in the back?
To crawl in the mud. To struggle in the grease of mud. To carry.
Earth of mud. Horizon of mud. Sky of mud.
Those who died of the mud, o names to be feverishly warmed by breathing upon them in the palm of the hand!
Siméon Piquine, who had never known his father or mother; whom no town hall had ever registered, and who all his life went searching for his name.
Grandvorka — of whom I know only that he died, crushed to death one evening at harvest time; it was his job, it seems, to throw sand under the wheels of the advancing locomotive so that it could move on when the going was bad.
Michel who wrote me signing strangely:
Michel Deveine, address
Exelié Vaté Congolo Lemké Boussolongo—
where is the healer
to suck with thick lips the obstinate
secret of the poison
at the root of the open wound?
where’s the gentle witch-doctor to unwind from your ankles the clammy warmth of the deadly iron rings?
You are here and I will not make my peace while the world is on your backs.
Islands that are scars upon the water
islands that are evidence of wounds
crumbled islands
formless islands
islands that are waste paper torn up and strewn upon the water islands that are broken blades driven into the flaming sword of the sun
I cast your form
formless islands
on water obedient to the currents of my thirst
absurdly I cast your overthrow and my defiance.
Stubborn reason will not prevent me.
Ringed islands, only lovely keel
I caress you with my ocean hands. I swing you round
with my trade-wind words. I lick you
with my algae tongues.
I raid you without thought of gain.
The furred swamp of death!
The fragments of shipwrecks! I accept!
At the end of the small hours, lost pools,
stray smells, stranded hurricanes, dismasted boats, old wounds, rotten bones, blurs, chained volcanoes, ill-rooted deaths, bitter cries. I accept!
And also my racial geography: the map of the world made for my use, coloured not with the arbitrary colours of schoolmen but with the geometry of my spilt blood, I accept
and the definition of my biology, no longer miserably confined to a facial angle, to a type of hair, to a nose sufficiently flattened, to a pigmentation sufficiently melanous, negritude is no longer a cephalic index or a plasma or a soma;
we are measured with the compasses of suffering
and the Negro every day lower, more cowardly, more sterile, less profound, more spent beyond himself, more separate from himself, more cunning with himself, less straight to himself,
I accept, I accept it all
and far from the palatial sea which breaks under a weeping syzygy of blebs
the body of my country marvellously recumbent in my despairing hands
its bones shaken, and in its veins blood pausing like
the drop of vegetable milk hesitant at the wound of the bulb …
And now suddenly strength and life attack me like a bull the wave of life streams over the nipple of the Morne, veins and veinlets throng with new blood, the enormous lung of cyclones breathing, the fire hoarded in volcanoes, and the gigantic seismic pulse beats the measure of a living body within my blaze.
Upright now, my country and I, hair in the wind, my hand small in its enormous fist and our strength not inside us but above in a voice that bores through the night and its listeners like the sting of an apocalyptic wasp. And the voice declares that for centuries Europe has stuffed us with lies and crammed us with plague, for it is not true that:
the work of man is finished
we have nothing to do in the world
we are the parasites of the world
our job is to keep in step with the world.
The work of man is only just beginning
It remains for him to conquer
at the four corners of his fervour
every rigid prohibition.
No race holds a monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength
there is room for all at the meeting-place of conquest
we know now
that the sun revolves round our earth illuminating the plot
which we alone have selected
that every star falls at our command from the sky to the earth
without limit or cease.
Now I see what the ordeal means: my country is the “spear of the night” of my ancestral Bambaras. It shrinks and its desperate blade retracts if it is offered chicken-blood; its temper wants the blood of man, the fat of man, the liver of man, the heart of man and not the blood of chickens.
Thus I too seek for my country not hearts of dates but hearts of men pumping manly blood so that men may enter the silver cities by the great trapezoidal gate, my eyes sweep the acres of my native country and I count the wounds with a kind of gladness as I pile them on top of one another like rare species and the account is constantly lengthened by the contemptible being unexpectedly and newly minted.
There are those who never get over being made in the likeness of the devil and not in the likeness of God, there are those who think that to be a Negro is like being a second-grade clerk, waiting for better things and the prospect of promotion; there are those who have capitulated before themselves; those who say to Europe: “See, I know how to bow and scrape as well as you, and like you I can pay my respects, I am different from you in nothing; pay no attention to my black skin; it’s the sun that has burnt it.”
There is the Negro pimp and the Negro Askari: all zebras shake themselves in their own fashion so that their stripes may fall into a dew of fresh milk.
And in the midst of all this I say Hurrah! my grandfather is dying, Hurrah! little by little the old negritude is turning into a corpse. There’s no denying it: he was a good nigger. The Whites say he was a good nigger, a really good nigger, his good master’s good Negro. And I say Hurrah!
He was a very good nigger.
Misery beat him front and back, they shoved into his brain the idea that he could never trick his own oppressive fate, that he had no power over his own destiny; that an unkind Lord had for all eternity written prohibitions into the nature of his pelvis. To be a good nigger he must believe honestly in his unworthiness and never feel any perverse curiosity to check those fateful hieroglyphics.
He was a very good nigger
and it did not occur to him that he might ever hoe and dig and cut anything except the insipid cane.
He was a very good nigger.
And they threw stones at him, bits of scrap iron,
broken bottle ends, but neither these stones
nor this iron nor those bottles …
O quiet years of God on this clod of an earth
and the whip argued with the swarming flies over the sweet dew of our wounds.
I say Hurrah! more and more the old negritude
is turning into a corpse
the undone horizon is pushed back and stretched
Between the torn clouds a sign by lightning:
the slave-ship is splitting open … Its belly in spasm ringing with noises.
The cargo of this bastard suckling of the seas is gnawing at its bowels like an atrocious tapeworm
Nothing can drown the threat of its growling intestines
in vain the joy of the sails filled out like a purse full of doubloons
in vain the tricks allowed by the fatal stupidity of the police frigates
in vain does the captain have the most troublesome
nigger hanged from the yard-arm, or thrown
overboard, or fed to his mastiffs.
In their spilt blood
the niggers smelling of fried onion
find the bitter taste of freedom
and they are on their feet the niggers
the sitting-down niggers
unexpectedly on their feet
on their feet in the hold
on their feet in the cabins
on their feet on deck
on their feet in the wind
on their feet beneath the sun
on their feet in blood
on their feet
and
free
on their feet and in no way distraught
free at sea and owning nothing
veering and utterly adrift
surprisingly
on their feet
on their feet in the rigging
on their feet at the helm
on their feet at the compass
on their feet before the map
on their feet beneath the stars
on their feet
and
free
and the cleansed ship advances fearless upon the caving waters
Gobs of our shame rot away.
By the belling sea at noon
by the sun in the bud at midnight
to the sparrow-hawk who holds the keys of the east I speak
by the disarmed day
by the stone’s throw of rain
to the squall who keeps watch in the west I speak
to the white dog of the north, to the black snake of the south
I speak to the two who complete the girdle of the sky
to cross one more sea
oh one more sea to cross
so that I may invent my lungs
so that the prince may be silent
so that the queen may make love to me
to kill one more old man
to set free one more madman
so that my soul may shine bark shine
bark bark bark
so that the owl may hoot, my lovely curious angel.
The master of laughter?
The master of fearful silence?
The master of hope and despair?
The master of idleness? The master of dance?
It is I!
and for this, O Lord,
men with weak necks are accorded
deadly triangular calm
But for me my dances
my bad nigger dances
the breaking-the-yoke dance
the jailbreak dance
the it-is-beautiful-and-good-and-lawful-to-be-a-Negro dance
for me my dances and may the sun bounce on the racquet of my hands
no, the unequal sun is no longer sufficient
let me address the wind
Wrap yourself around my new growth
lie on my measured fingers
I give you my conscience and its beat of flesh
I give you the fires which grill my weakness
I give you the chain-gang
I give you the marsh
I give you the Intourist of the triangular circuit
wind consume
I give you my quick words
consume and wrap
and as you wrap kiss me with a violent trembling
kiss me until I am the furious WE
kiss, kiss US
but also bite
bite to draw blood from our blood!
kiss, my purity is bound to yours alone
but then kiss
like a field of just filaos
in the evening
our variegated purities
bind me, bind me without remorse
bind me with your vast arms to the luminous clay
bind my black resonance to the very navel of the world
bind me, bind me, bitter fraternity
strangle me with your lasso of stars, then rise
Dove
rise
rise
rise
It is you I follow, follow
stamped on my eye’s ancestral white cornea
Rise licker of the sky
and the great black
hole where I wished to drown myself by another moon
it is there that I would fish
for the night’s evil tongue in its seized swirl!
Peter de Francia (1921–2012) loved charcoal, for “the wonderful way you go between tone and line” and its adaptability, essential for these crowded, complex drawings. They encompass the whole microcosm of Césaire’s island, from the visceral squalor of the shanty town to an underlying nobility of vision. The revolutionary protest, surrealist imagery, and close description of the text are well matched by de Francia’s monumental, charged visual language.
This series dates from 1977–79. The first two were included in the 1977 retrospective at the Camden Arts Centre, London, and New 57 Gallery, Edinburgh; more were shown at the Institute of Cultural Relations, 1978, and since.
The frontispiece is an original work by John Berger.