Aime Cesaire

Return to my Native Land

Translators’ Note

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

Return to my Native Land

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 lambi

galloping the lambi all the way to the irresolute Heights

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 lambi of good news!

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 Abandoned Quarter. And you their living brothers:

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!

a note on the art

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.

Content

Aime Cesaire
Return to my Native Land

Translators’ Note

Return to my Native Land

a note on the art