On Aimé Césaire

Too often writers who have no such claim on the quality are hailed as daring, risky, while consequently the reading public (us) seeks out those ugliest of inanities believing ourselves daring for reading them. Thus we continue to stoke our bankrupt culture and it stokes us and we and everyone around us and the earth devolve exponentially. But in Césaire I find a writer who deserves to be called daring. Not for his politics, or his fearlessness about speaking them, though I admire him for both. Also not for his poetics, exactly, and all that they entail, though those too push against the boundaries of what we deem poetry may do. What is daring about Aimé Césaire, or at least of Return to my Native Land, is that he risks beauty. While speaking confusion, and frustration, and emptiness, and anger, the poem is unabashedly lyric and this is truly dangerous. By making the other beautiful, we risk exoticizing and/or, as my spell check suggests: eroticizing. We risk whitewashing our politics or worse – elevating the common or non-privileged experience to a position of poetic authority that it does not often posses.

But Césaire does neither. Unlike the later Eden, Eden, Eden, which shares with it the passionate commitment to expose the brutality of colonialism, colonial regimes, colonial wars, but which, for all its microscopic intensity, lacks intimacy, Return to my Native Land is both startling and moving. We see a peasant woman “urinating on her feet, stiff legs apart;” a suicide who “abetted by his epiglottis killed himself by rolling back his tongue to swallow it;” and churchgoers on Christmas where “Not only the mouths are singing, hands too, feet, buttocks, genitals, the whole fellow creature flowing in sound, voice and rhythm.” In Return to my Native Land we are not observers, as Aimé Césaire never is. We are painfully and ecstatically present and – like every participant, both welcomed and implicated.