The abolition of slavery recalls this other
historical
fact:
?
?
Sartre-Jean-Paul-What-is-literature¿-Introducing-Les-Temps-modernes-The-nationalization-of-literature-Black-orpheus
For example, compare "the helix of your smile thrown far away"--which is the product of a free play of the imagination as well as an invitation to reverie--with
? 312 I Black Orpheus
and the radium mines buried in the abyss of my innocence will jump by grains
into the feeding-trough of birds
and the stars' stere
will be the common name of firewood
gathered from the alluvium of the singing veins of night
in which the "disjecta membra" of the vocabulary are so organized as to allow the supposition that there is a black "Art Poe? tique. " Or read:
Our beautiful faces like the true operative power of negation.
Also read:
Seas lousy with islands cracking in the roses' fingers flame-thrower and my lightning-struck body intact.
Here we find the apotheosis of the fleas of black misery jumping in the water's hair, islands in a stream of light, cracking under the fingers of the celestial delouser: dawn with rose-colored fingers, the dawn of Greek and Mediterranean culture--snatched from the sacrosanct Homeric poems by a black thief--whose enslaved princess's fingernails are sud- denly controlled by a Toussaint L'Ouverture in order to crack the triumphant parasites of the black sea; the dawn, which suddenly rebels and is metamorphosed, which opens fire like that savage weapon of white men, the flame-thrower, the weapon of scientists, the weapon of executioners, strikes the tall black Titan with its white fire, and he arises intact and eternal in order to begin the assault on Europe and heaven. In Ce? saire, the great Surrealist tradition is realized, it takes on its definitive meaning and is destroyed: Surrealism--that European movement--is taken from the Europeans by a black man who turns it against them and gives it a rigorously defined function. I have pointed out elsewhere how the whole of the proletariat completely shut itself off from the destruc- tive poetry of Reason: in Europe, Surrealism languishes and pales, rejected by those who could have given it a transfusion
? Black Orpheus \ 313
of their own blood. But at the very moment when it is losing contact with the Revolution, it is, in the Antilles, grafted onto another branch of the universal Revolution; it develops into an enormous somber flower. Ce? saire's originality lies in his having directed his powerful, concentrated anxiety as a Negro, as one oppressed, as a militant individual, into this world of the most destructive, free, and metaphysical poetry at the moment when Eluard and Aragon were failing to give political content to their verse. And finally, negritude-object is snatched from Ce? saire like a cry of pain, of love, and of hate. Here again he follows the Surrealist tradition of objective poetry. Ce? saire's words do not describe ne? gritude, they do not designate it, they do not copy it from the outside like a painter with a model: they create it; they compose it under our very eyes. Henceforth it is a thing which can be observed and learned; the subjective method which he has chosen joins the objective method we spoke about earlier: he ejects the black soul from himself at the very moment when others are trying to interiorize it; the final result is the same in both cases. Ne? gritude is the far-away tam-tam in the streets of Dakar at night; voodoo shouts from some Haitian cellar window, sliding along level with the roadway; the Congolese mask; but it is also this poem by Ce? saire, this slobbery, bloody peom full of phlegm, twisting in the dust like a cut-up worm. This
double spasm of absorption and excretion beats out the rhythm of the black heart on every page of this collection. What then, at present, is this ne? gritude, sole anxiety of these poets, sole subject of this book? It must first be stated that a white man could hardly speak about it suitably, since
he has no inner experience of it and since European languages lack words to describe it. I ought then to let the reader encounter it in the pages of this collection and draw his own conclusions about it. But this introduction would be incomplete if, after having indicated that the quest for the Black Grail represented--both in its original intention and in its methods--the most authentic synthesis of revo- lutionary aspirations and poetic anxiety, I did not show that this complex notion is essentially pure Poetry. I shall
? 314 I Black Orpheus
therefore limit myself to examining these poems objectively as a cluster of testimonies and to pointing out some of their principal themes. Senghor says, "What makes the ne? gritude of a poem is less its theme than its style, the emotional warmth which gives life to words, which transmutes the word into the Word. " It could not be more explicitly stated that ne? gritude is neither a state nor a definite ensemble of vices and virtues or of intellectual and moral qualities, but rather a certain affective attitude toward the world. Since the beginning of this century, psychology has renounced its great scholastic distinctions. We no longer believe that the "facts" of the soul are divided into volitions or actions, knowledge or perceptions, sentiments or blind passiveness. We know that a feeling is a definite way of establishing our rapport with the world around us, that it involves a certain comprehension of this universe. It is a tension of the soul, a choice of oneself and of another, a way of going beyond the raw facts of experience; in short, a plan quite like the
voluntary act. To use Heidegger's language, ne? gritude is the Negro's being-in-the-world.
Furthermore, here is what Ce? saire tells us about it.
My ne? gritude is not a stone with its deafnessflungout against the clamor of the day
My ne? gritude is not a dead speck of water on the dead eye of the earth
my ne? gritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral
it plunges into the red flesh of the ground
it plunges into the ardent flesh of the sky
it perforates the opaque pressure of its righteous patience.
Ne? gritude is portrayed in these beautiful lines of verse more as an act than as a frame of mind. But this act is an inner determination; it is not a question of taking the goods of this world in one's hands and transforming them; it is a question of existing in the middle of the world. The relation with the universe remains an adaptation. But this adaptation is not technical. For the white man, to possess is to transform. To be sure, the white worker uses instruments which he does
? Black Orpheus \ 315
not possess. But at least his techniques are his own: if it is true that the personnel responsible for the major inventions of European industry comes mainly from the middle classes, at least the trades of carpenter, cabinetmaker, potter, seem to the white workers to be a true heritage, despite the fact that the orientation of great capitalist production tends to remove their "joy in work" from them. But it is not enough to say that the black worker uses instruments which are lent to him: techniques are also lent to him.
Ce? saire refers to his black brothers as
Those who have invented neither powder nor compass those who have never tamed either steam or electricity those who have not explored the seas and the sky . . .
But this haughty claim of nontechnicalness reverses the situation: what could pass as a deficiency becomes & positive source of wealth. A technical rapport with Nature reveals Nature as simple quantity, inertia, exteriority: Nature dies. By his haughty refusal to be homo faber, the Negro gives it life again. As if the passiveness of one of the members of the "man-nature" couple necessarily produced the others activ- ity. Actually, ne? gritude is not passiveness, since it "perfo- rates the flesh of the sky and of the earth": it is "patience," and patience appears like an active imitation of passiveness. The Negro's act is first of all an act on himself. The black man stands erect and immobilizes himself like a bird- charmer, and things come to perch on the branches of this fake tree. A magic inveigling of the world--through silence and rest--is involved here: the white man, by acting first of all on Nature, loses himself when he loses Nature; the Negro, by acting first of all on himself, claims to win Nature while winning himself.
Seized, they abandon themselves to the essence of every thing ignorant of the surfaces but seized by the movement of every
thing
heedless of counting, but playing the world's game truly the elder sons of the world
porous to all the breaths of the world . . .
? 316 I Black Orpheus
flesh of the world'sfleshpalpitating from the very movement of
the world.
Upon reading this, one can hardly help thinking of the famous distinction between intelligence and intuition es- tablished by Bergson. Ce? saire rightly calls us
Omniscient and nai? ve conquerors . . .
Because of his tools, the white man knows all. But he only scratches the surface of things; he is unaware of the duration of things, unaware of life. Ne? gritude, on the contrary, is comprehension through instinctive congeni- ality. The black man's secret is that the sources of his existence and the roots of Being are identical.
If one wanted to give a sociological interpretation of this metaphysic, one would say that an agriculturist poetry is here opposed to an engineer prose. Actually, it is not true that the black man has no techniques: the rapport between any human group and the exterior world is always technical in one way or another. And inversely, I shall say that Ce? saire is imprecise: Saint Exupe? ry's airplane folding the earth below like a carpet is a means of disclosure. However, the black man is first of all a peasant; agricultural technique is "righteous patience"; it trusts in life; it waits. To plant is to impregnate the earth; after that, you must remain motion- less and watch: "each atom of silence is a chance for ripe fruit," each instant brings forth a hundred times more than man gave, whereas the worker finds in the manufactured product only as much as he put into it; man grows along with his wheat: from minute to minute he goes beyond himself and becomes more golden; he intervenes in his watchful wait before the fragile swelling belly, only to
protect. Ripe wheat is a microcosm because the cooperation of sun, wind, and rains was needed for it to grow; a blade of wheat is both the most natural thing and the most improbable chance. Techniques have contaminated the white peasant, but the black peasant remains the great male of the earth, the world's sperm. His existence is great
? Black Orpheus \ 31 y
vegetal patience; his work is the yearly repetition of holy coitus. Creating and nourished because he creates. To till, to plant, to eat, is to make love with Nature. The sexual pantheism of these poets is undoubtedly what will impress us first of all: it is in this that they join the dances and the phallic rites of the Negro-Africans.
Oho! Congo lying in your bed of forests, queen of tamed Africa May the phalli of the mountains carry your banner high
For, through my head, through my tongue, through my belly,
you are a woman,
writes Senghor. Also:
and so I shall mount again the soft belly of the dunes and the gleaming thighs of the day . . .
and Rabe? arivelo:
the earth's blood, the stone's sweat and the sperm of the world
and Laleau:
The conical drum laments under the sky
And it is the very soul of the black man
Sultry spasms of men in rut, lover's sticky sobs Outraging the calm of the evening.
Here, we are far from Bergson's chaste asexual intuition. It is no longer a matter of being congenial with life, but rather of being in love with all its forms. For the white technician, God is first of all an engineer. Jupiter orders chaos and prescribes its laws; the Christian God conceives the world through his understanding and brings it into being through his will: the relation between the created and the creator is never carnal, except for a few mystics whom the Church looks upon with a great deal of suspicion. Even so, erotic mysticism has nothing in common with fecundity: it is the completely passive wait for a sterile penetration. We are steeped in alluvium: statuettes come from the hands of
? 3i8 I Black Orpheus
the divine sculptor. If the manufactured objects surrounding us could worship their ancestors, they would undoubtedly adore us as we adore the All-powerful. For our black poets, on the contrary, Being comes out of Nothingness like a penis becoming erect; Creation is an enormous perpetual delivery; the world is flesh and the son of flesh; on the sea and in the sky, on the dunes, on the rocks, in the wind, the Negro finds the softness of human skin; he rubs himself against the sand's belly, against the sky's loins: he is "flesh of the flesh of this world"; he is "porous to all its breaths," to all its pollens; he is both Nature's female and its male; and when he makes love with a woman of his race, the sexual act seems to him to be the celebration of the Mystery of Being. This spermatic religion is like the tension of a soul balancing between two complementary tendencies: the dynamic feeling of being an erect phallus, and that more deaf, more patient, more feminine one of being a growing plant. Thus, ne? gritude is basically a sort of
androgyny.
There you are
Upright and naked
alluvium you are and remember yourself as having been but in reality you are the child of this parturient shadow feeding on lunar lactogen*
then you slowly take the form of a bole
on this low wall jumped over by the dreams of flowers and the perfume of summer at rest.
To feel, to believe that roots are pushing your feet
and running and twisting like thirsty serpents
toward some subterranean spring . . .
(Rabe? arivelo)
And Ce? saire:
Wornout mother, leafless mother, you are a. flamboyant and now wear only husks. You are a calabash tree
* "Lactogen" is a neologism in the French text as well. --Translator.
? Black Orpheus \ 319 andyouareonlyastandofcouis . . . t
This profound unity of vegetal and sexual symbols is certainly the greatest originality of black poetry, especially in a period when, as Michel Carrouges has shown, most of the images used by white poets tend to mineralize the human being. Ce? saire, on the contrary, "vegetalizes," "animalizes" sea, sky, and stones. More precisely, his poetry is a perpetual coupling of men and women who had been metamorphosed into animals, vegetables, stones, with stones, plants, and beasts metamorphosed into men. Thus the black man attests to a natural Eros; he reveals and incarnates it; to find a point of comparison in European poetry, one must go back to Lucretius, the peasant poet who celebrated Venus, the mother goddess, when Rome was not yet much more than a large agricultural market. In our time, only Lawrence seems to me to have had a cosmic feeling for sexuality. Even so, this feeling remains very literary in his works.
However, although ne? gritude seems basically to be this immobile springing-forth, a unity of phallic erection and plant growth, one could scarcely exhaust it with this single poetic theme. There is another motif running through this collection, like a large artery:
Those who have invented neither powder nor compass . . . They know the most remote corners of the country of suffering . . .
To the absurd utilitarian agitation of the white man, the black man opposes the authenticity gained from his suffer- ing; the black race is a chosen race because it has had the horrible privilege of touching the depths of unhappiness. And even though these poems are anti-Christian from beginning to end, one might call ne? gritude a kind of
t Flamboyant: a plant found in semitropical countries, especially in the Antilles; a poinciana, or peacock flower. Couis: apparently some kind of tree found in the Antilles. --Translator.
? 320 I Black Orpheus
Passion: the black man who is conscious of himself sees himself as the man who has taken the whole of human suffering upon himself and who suffers for all, even for the white man.
On the judgment day, Armstrong's trumpet will be the
interpreter of man's sufferings.
(Paul Niger)
Let us note immediately that this in no way implies a resigned suffering. A while ago I was speaking about Bergson and Lucretius; I would be tempted now to quote that great adversary of Christianity, Nietzsche, and his "Dionysianism. " Like the Dionysian poet, the Negro at- tempts to penetrate the brilliant phantasm of the day, and encounters, a thousand feet under the Apollonian surface, the inexpiable suffering which is the universal essence of man. If one wished to systematize, one would say that the black man blends with the whole of nature inasmuch as he represents sexual congeniality with Life and inasmuch as he claims he is Man in his Passion of rebellious suffering. One will feel the fundamental unity of this double movement if one considers the constantly tighter relationship which
psychiatrists establish between anguish and sexual desire. There is only one proud upheaval which can be equally well described as a desire plunging its roots into suffering or as suffering fixed like a sword across a vast cosmic desire. This "righteous patience" that Ce? saire evokes is both vegetal growth and patience against suffering; it resides in the very muscles of the Negro; it sustains the black porter going a thousand miles up the Niger under a blinding sun with a fifty-pound load balanced on his head. But if in a certain sense, one can compare the fecundity of Nature to a proliferation of suffering, in another sense--and this one is also Dionysian--this fecundity, by its exuberance, goes beyond suffering, drowns it in its creative abundance which is poetry, love, and dance. Perhaps, in order to understand this indissoluble unity of suffering, eros, and joy, one must
? Black Orpheus \ 321
have seen the black men of Harlem dance frenetically to the rhythm of "blues," which are the saddest sounds in the world. In effect, rhythm cements the multiple aspects of the black soul, communicates its Nietzschean lightness with heavy Dionysian intuitions. Rhythm--tam-tam, jazz, the "bounding" of these poems--represents the temporality of Negro existence. And when a black poet prophesies to his brothers a better future, he portrays their deliverance to them in the form of rhythm:
What?
rhythm
sound wave in the night across the forests, nothing
--or a new soul timbre
intonation
vigor
dilation
vibration which flows out by degrees into the marrow re? vulses* in its progression an old sleeping body, takes it by the waist
and spins it
and turns
and once more vibrates in its hands, in its loins, its sexual member, its thighs, its vagina . . .
But one must go still further: this basic experience of suffering is ambiguous; through it, black conscience is going to become historical. In effect, whatever may be the intolerable iniquity of his present condition, it is not to that condition that the black man first refers when he proclaims that he has touched the heart of human suffering. He has the horrible benefit of having known bondage. For these poets, most of whom were born between 1900 and 1918, slavery-- abolished half a century earlier--lingers on as a very real memory:
Each of my todays looks on my yesterday with large eyes rolling with rancor with
* Re? vulses: referring to the medical term revulsion, a counterirritant. -- Translator.
? $22 I Black Orpheus
shame
Still real is my stunned condition of the past
of
blows from knotted cords of bodies calcinated
from toe to calcinated back
of deadfleshof red ironfirebrandsof arms
broken under the whip which is breaking loose . . .
writes Damas, poet from Guiana. And the Haitian, Brierre:
. . . Often like me you feel stiffnesses Awaken after murderous centuries
And old wounds bleed in your flesh . . .
During the centuries of slavery, the black man drank the cup of bitterness to the last drop; and slavery is a past fact which neither our authors nor their fathers have actually experienced. But it is also a hideous nightmare from which even the youngest of them are not yet sure of having awakened. From one end of the earth to the other, black men--separated by languages, politics, and the history of their colonizers--have a collective memory in common. This will not be surprising if one only recalls the French peasants who, in 1789, were still aware of the panicky terrors that went back to the Hundred Years' War. Thus, when the black man goes back to his principal experience, it is suddenly revealed to him in two dimensions: it is both the intuitive seizure of the human condition and the still-fresh memory of a historical past. Here, I am thinking of Pascal, who relentlessly repeated that man was an irrational com- posite of metaphysics and history, his greatness unexplain- able if he comes from the alluvium, his misery unexplainable if he is still as God made him; that in order to understand man, one had to go back to the simple basic fact of man's downfall. It is in this sense that Ce? saire calls his race "the fallen race. " And in a certain sense I can see the rapprochement that can be made between black conscience and Christian
conscience: the brazen law of slavery evokes that law of the Old Testament, which states the consequences of the Fault.
The abolition of slavery recalls this other historical fact:
? Black Orpheus \ 323
Redemption. The white man's insipid paternalism after 1848 resembles that of the white God after the Passion. The difference being, however, that the expiable fault that the black man discovers in the back of his memory is not his own; it belongs to the white man. The first fact of Negro history is certainly a kind of original sin; but the black man is the innocent victim of it. This is why his concept of suffering is radically opposed to white "dolorism. " If these poems are for the most part so violently anti-Christian, it is because the white man's religion is more clearly a hoax in the eyes of the Negro than in the eyes of the European proletariat: this religion wants to make him share the responsibility for a crime of which he is the victim; it wants to persuade him to see the kidnappings, the massacres, the rapes, and the tortures which have covered Africa with blood as a legitimate punishment, deserved tests. Will you say that it also proclaims equality for all men before God? Before God, yes. Only yesterday I was reading in Esprit these
lines from a correspondent in Madagascar:
I am as certain as you that the soul of a Malagasy is worth the soul of a white man . . . Just as, before God, the soul of a child is worth the soul of his father. However, if you have an automobile, you don't let your children drive it,
One can hardly reconcile Christianity and colonialism more elegantly. In opposition to these sophisms, the black man--by a simple investigation of his memory as a former slave--affirms that suffering is man's lot and that it is no less deserved for all that. He rejects with horror Christian stagnation, melancholy sensual pleasure, masochistic humil- ity, and all the tendentious inducements to his submission; he lives the absurdity of suffering in its pure form, in its injustice and in its gratuitousness; and he discovers thereby this truth which is misunderstood or masked by Christian- ity: suffering carries within itself its own refusal; it is by nature a refusal to suffer, it is the dark side of negativity, it opens onto revolt and liberty. The black man promptly
? 324 I Black Orpheus
transforms himself into history inasmuch as the intuition of suffering confers on him a collective past and assigns to him a goal in the future. Only a short while ago, he was a sheer
present surging of timeless instincts, a simple manifestation of universal and eternal fecundity. Now he calls to his colored brothers in quite another language:
Negro peddler of revolt
you have known the paths of the world ever since you were sold in Guine? e . . .
And:
Five centuries have seen you with weapons in your hands and you have taught the exploiting races
passion for liberty.
There is already a black epic:* first the golden age of Africa, then the era of dispersion and captivity, then the awakening of conscience, the heroic and somber times of great revolts, of Toussaint L'Ouverture and black heroes, then the fact of the abolition of slavery--"unforgettable metamorphosis/' says Ce? saire--then the struggle for defin- itive liberation:
You are waiting for the next call
the inevitable mobilization
for that war which is yours has known only truces
for there is no land where your blood has not flowed no language in which your color has not been insulted You smile, Black Boy,
you sing
you dance
you cradle generations
which go out at all hours to the
fronts of work and pain
which tomorrow will assault bastilles
* The French here reads geste, as in chanson de geste. Sartre is comparing the Negro epic with the themes of medieval French epic poetry. -- Translator.
? Black Orpheus \ 325
onward toward the bastions of the future in order to write in all languages
on the clear pages of all skies
the declaration of your rights unrecognized for more than five centuries . . .
Strange and decisive turn: race is transmuted into historicityy the black Present explodes and is temporalized, ne? gritude--with its Past and its Future--is inserted into Universal History, it is no longer a state, nor even an existential attitude, it is a "Becoming. " The black contri- bution to the evolution of Humanity is no longer savor, taste, rhythm, authenticity, a bouquet of primitive in- stincts: it is a dated enterprise, a long-suffering construction and also a future. Previously, the black man claimed his place in the sun in the name of ethnicqualities; now, he establishes his right to life on his mission; and this mission, like the proletariat's, comes to him from his historical position: because he has suffered from capitalistic exploita- tion more than all the others, he has acquired a sense of revolt and a love of liberty more than all the others. And because he is the most oppressed, he necessarily pursues the liberation of all, when he works for his own deliverance:
Black messenger of hope
you know all the hymns of the world
even those of the timeless building-works of the Nile.
But, after that, can we still believe in the interior homogeneousness of ne? gritude? And how can one say that it exists? Sometimes it is lost innocence which had its existence in some faraway past, and sometimes hope which can be realized only within the walls of the future City. Sometimes it contracts with Nature in a moment of pantheistic fusion and sometimes it spreads itself out to coincide with the whole history of Humanity; sometimes it is an existential attitude and sometimes the objective ensemble of Negro-African traditions. Is it being discov- ered? Is it being created? After all, there are black men who
? 326 I Black Orpheus
"collaborate"; after all, in the prefaces he writes for the works of each poet, Senghor seems to distinguish between degrees of ne? gritude. Does the poet who would be the Prophet for his colored brothers invite them to become more Negro, or does he disclose to them what they are, by a sort of poetic psychoanalysis? Is ne? gritude necessity or liberty? For the authentic Negro, is it a matter of conduct deriving from essences, as consequences derive from a principle, or is one a Negro in the way that the religious faithful are believers, that is to say, in fear and trembling, in anguish, in perpetual remorse for never sufficiently being what one would like to be? Is it a given fact or a value? The object of empirical intuition or of a moral concept? Is it a conquest of meditation? Or does meditation poison it? Is it never authentic except when unmeditated and in the immediate? Is it a systematic explanation of the black soul, or a Platonic Archetype which one can approach indefinitely without ever attaining? Is it, for black men, like our engineer's common sense, the most widely shared thing in the world? Or do some have it, like grace; and if so, does it have its chosen ones? One will undoubtedly answer this question by saying that it is all of these at once, and still other things. And I agree: like all anthropological notions, ne? gritude is a shimmer of being and of needing-to-be; it makes you and
you make it: both oath and passion. But there is something even more important in it: the Negro himself, we have said, creates a kind of antiracist racism. He wishes in no way to dominate the world: he desires the abolition of all kinds of ethnic privileges; he asserts his solidarity with the oppressed of every color. After that, the subjective, existential, ethnic notion of ne? gritude "passes," as Hegel says, into that which one has of the proletariat: objective, positive, and precise. Senghor says: "For Ce? saire, 'White' symbolizes capital, just as Negro symbolizes work. . . . When writing about the black men of his race, he is writing about the worldwide proletarian struggle. " It is easy to say, not so easy to think. And it is certainly not just by accident that the most ardent cantors of ne? gritude are also militant Marxists. Neverthe-
? Black Orpheus | 327
less, the notion of race does not mix with the notion of class: the former is concrete and particular; the latter, universal and abstract. One belongs to what Jaspers calls comprehen- sion, and the other to intellection; the first is the product of a psychobiological syncretism, and the other is a methodical construction starting with experience. In fact, ne? gritude appears like the upbeat {unaccented beat] of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of ne? gritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself, and these black men who use it know this perfectly well; they know that it aims at preparing the synthesis or realization of the human being in a raceless society. Thus, ne? gritude is for destroying itself; it is a "crossing to" and not an "arrival at," a means and not an end. A poem by Jacques Roumain, a black communist, furnishes the most moving evidence of this new
ambiguity:
Africa I have held on to your memory Africa
you are in me
Like a thorn in a wound
like a guardian mascot in the center of the village make of me the stone of your sling
of my mouth the lips of your wound
of my knees the broken columns of your humbling however
I want to be only of your race
peasant workers of all countries.
With what sadness he still retains for the moment what he has decided to abandon. With what pride as a man he will strip his pride as a Negro for other men! He who says both that Africa is in him like "a thorn in a wound," and that he wants to be only of the universal race of the oppressed, has not left the empire of afflicted consciousness. One more step and ne? gritude will disappear completely: the Negro himself makes of what was the mysterious bubbling of black blood a geographic accident, the inconsistent product of universal determinism:
? 328 I Black Orpheus
Is it all that climate extended space which creates clan tribe nation
skin race gods
our inexorable dissimilarity. *
But the poet does not completely have the courage to accept the responsibility for this rationalization of the racial concept; one sees that he limits himself to questioning; a bitter regret is visible beneath his will to unite. Strange road: humiliated and offended, black men search deep within themselves to find their most secret pride; and when they have found it at last, it challenges its own right to exist. Through supreme generosity they abandon it, just as Philoctetes abandoned his bow and arrows at Neoptolemus. Thus, the rebel Ce? saire finds the secret of his revolts in the bottom of his heart: he is of royal blood:
it is true that there is in you something which has
never been able to yield, an anger, a desire, a sadness, an impatience, in short a scorn, a violence . . . and now your veins carry gold, not mud; pride, not servitude. King you have been King in the past.
But he immediately thrusts aside this temptation:
There is a law that I cover up with a chain unbroken
as far as the confluence of fire which violates me
which purifies me and burns me with my prism of amal- gamated gold . . . I shall perish. But one. Whole.
It is perhaps this ultimate nudity of man that has snatched from him the white rags that were concealing his black armor, and that now destroys and rejects that very armor; it is perhaps this colorless nudity that best symbolizes ne? gritude: for ne? gritude is not a state, it is a simple going-beyond-itself, it is love. It is when ne? gritude re- nounces itself that it finds itself; it is when it accepts losing
* Although the poem itself and Sartre's interpretation of it suggest that there should be a question mark here, there is none in the text from which this was translated. --Translator.
? Black Orpheus \ 329
that it has won: the colored man--and he alone--can be asked to renounce the pride of his color. He is the one who is walking on this ridge between past particularism--which he has just climbed--and future universalism, which will be the twilight of his ne? gritude; he is the one who looks to the end of particularism in order to find the dawn of the universal. Undoubtedly, the white worker also becomes conscious of his class in order to deny it, since he wants the advent of a classless society: but once again, the definition of class is objective; it sums up only the condition of the white worker's alienation; whereas it is in the bottom of his heart that the Negro finds race, and he must tear out his heart. Thus, ne? gritude is dialectical; it is not only nor above all the blossoming of atavistic instincts; it represents "going beyond" a situation defined by free consciences. Ne? gritude is a sad myth full of hope, born of Evil and pregnant with future Good, living like a woman who is born to die and who feels her own death even in the richest moments of her life; it is an unstable rest, an explosive fixity, a pride which renounces itself, an absolute that knows it is transitory: for whereas it is the Announcer of its birth and of its death agony, it also remains the existential attitude chosen by free men and lived absolutely, to the fullest. Because it is tension between a nostalgic Past into which the black man can no longer enter completely and a future in which it will be replaced by new values, ne? gritude adorns itself with a tragic beauty that finds expression only in poetry. Because it is the living and dialectical unity of so many opposites, because it is a Complex defying analysis, ne? gritude is only the multiple unity of a hymn that can reveal both it and the flashing beauty of the Poem which Breton calls "explosante-fixe" Because any attempt to conceptualize its
various aspects would necessarily end up showing its relativity--even though it is lived in the absolute through royal consciences--and because the poem is an absolute, it is poetry alone that will allow the unconditional aspect of this attitude to be fixed. Because it is subjectivity written in the objective, ne? gritude must take form in a poem, that is
? 330 I Black Orpheus
to say, in a subjectivity-object; because it is an Archetype and a Value, it will find its most transparent symbol in aesthetic values; because it is a call and a gift, it will make itself heard and offer itself only by means of a work of art which is both a call to the spectator's liberty and absolute generosity. Ne? gritude is the content of the poem, it is the poem like a thing of the world, mysterious and open, obscure and suggestive; it is the poet himself. One must go still further; triumph of Narcissism and Narcissus* suicide, tension of the soul beyond culture, beyond words and beyond all psychic facts, luminous night of unknowing, deliberate choice of the impossible and of what Bataille calls "torture*' [supplice], intuitive acceptance of the world and refusal of the world in the name of "the law of the heart," double contradictory postulation, demanding retraction, expansion of generosity--ne? gritude is, in essence, Poetry. For once at least, the most authentic revolutionary plan and the purest poetry come from the same source.
And if the sacrifice is achieved one day, what will happen then? What will happen if, casting off his ne? gritude for the sake of the Revolution, the black man no longer wishes to consider himself only a part of the proletariat? What will happen if he then allows himself to be defined only by his objective condition? If, in order to struggle against white capitalism, he undertakes to assimilate white technics? Will the source of poetry run dry? Or in spite of everything, will the great black river color the sea into which it flows? That does not matter: each era has its poetry; in each era, circumstances of history elect a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch, by creating situations that can be expressed or that can go beyond themselves only through Poetry. Some- times the poetic e? lan coincides with the revolutionary e? lan, and sometimes they diverge. Let us greet today the historic chance that will permit black men to
shout out the great Negro cry so hard that the world's foundations will be shaken. 3
Translated byJohn MacCombie
? Notes
A Note on the Texts
Index
? Notes
What Is Literature?
i. At least in general. The greatness and error of Klee lie in his attempt to make a painting both sign and object.
2. I say 'create', not 'imitate', which is enough to squelch the bombast of M. Charles Estienne, who has obviously not understood a word of my argument and who is dead set on tilting at shadows.
3. This is the example cited by Bataille in Expe? rience inte? rieure.
4. If you wish to know the origin of this attitude towards language, the following are a few brief indications.
Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait. In reality, the human act, governed by needs and urged on by the
useful, is, in a sense, a means. It passes unnoticed, and it is the result which counts. When I extend my hand in order to take up my pen, I have only a fleeting and obscure consciousness of my gesture; it is the pen which I see. Thus, man is alienated by his ends. Poetry reverses the relationship: the world and things become inessential, become a pretext for the act which becomes its own end. The vase is there so that the girl may perform the graceful act of filling it; the Trojan War, so that Hector and Achilles may engage in that heroic combat. The action, detached from its goals, which become blurred, becomes an act of prowess or a dance. Nevertheless, however indifferent he might have been to the success of the enterprise, the poet, before the nineteenth century, remained in harmony with society as a whole. He did not use language for the end which prose seeks, but he had the same confidence in it as the prose-writer.
With the coming of bourgeois society, the poet puts up a common front with the prose-writer to declare it unliveable. His job is always to create the myth of man, but he passes from white magic to black magic. Man is always presented as the absolute end, but by the success of his enterprise he is s_cked into a utilitarian collectivity. The thing that is in the background of his act and that will allow transition to the myth is thus no longer success, but defeat. By stopping the infinite series of his projects like a screen, defeat alone returns him to himself in his purity. The world remains the inessential, but it is now there as a pretext for defeat. The finality of the thing is to send man back to himself by blocking the route. Moreover, it is not a matter of arbitrarily introducing defeat and ruin into the course of the world, but rather of having no eyes for anything but that. Human enterprise has two aspects: it is both success and failure. The dialectical scheme is inadequate for reflecting upon it. We must make our vocabulary and the frames of our reason more supple. Some day I am going to try to
? 334 I Notes to Page 34
describe that strange reality, History, which is neither objective, nor ever quite subjective, in which the dialectic is contested, penetrated, and corroded by a kind of antidialectic, but which is still a dialectic. But that is the philosopher's affair. One does not ordinarily consider the two faces of Janus; the man of action sees one and the poet sees the other. When the instruments are broken and unusable, when plans are blasted and effort is useless, the world appears with a childlike and terrible freshness, without supports, without paths. It has the maximum reality because it is crushing for man, and as action, in any case, generalizes, defeat restores to things their individual reality. But, by an expected reversal, the defeat, considered as a final end, is both a contesting and an appropriation of this universe. A contesting, because man is worth more than that which crushes; he no longer contests things in their 'little bit of reality', like the engineer or the captain, but, on the contrary, in their 'too full of reality', by his very existence as a vanquished person; he is the remorse of the world. An appropriation, because the world, by ceasing to be the tool of success, becomes the instrument of failure. So there it is, traversed by an obscure finality; it is its coefficient of adversity which serves, the more human in so far as it is more hostile to man. The defeat itself turns into salvation. Not that it makes us yield to some 'beyond', but by itself it shifts and is metamorphosed. For example, poetic language rises out of the ruins of prose. If it is true that the word is a betrayal and that communication is impossible, then each word by itself recovers its individuality and becomes an instrument of our defeat and a receiver of the incommunicable, It is not that there is another thing to communicate; but the communication of prose having miscarried, it is the very meaning of the word which becomes the pure incommunicable. Thus, the failure of communication becomes a suggestion of the incommunicable, and the thwarted project of utilizing words is succeeded by the pure disinterested intuition of the word. Thus, we again meet with the description which we attempted earlier in this study, but in the more general perspective of the absolute valorization of the defeat, which seems to me the original attitude of contemporary poetry. Note also that this choice confers upon the poet a very precise function in the collectivity: in a highly integrated or religious society, the defeat is masked by the State or redeemed by Religion; in a less integrated and secular society, such as our democracies, it is up to poetry to redeem them.
Poetry is a case of the loser winning. And the genuine poet chooses to lose, even if he has to go so far as to die, in order to win. I repeat that I am talking of contemporary poetry.
? 312 I Black Orpheus
and the radium mines buried in the abyss of my innocence will jump by grains
into the feeding-trough of birds
and the stars' stere
will be the common name of firewood
gathered from the alluvium of the singing veins of night
in which the "disjecta membra" of the vocabulary are so organized as to allow the supposition that there is a black "Art Poe? tique. " Or read:
Our beautiful faces like the true operative power of negation.
Also read:
Seas lousy with islands cracking in the roses' fingers flame-thrower and my lightning-struck body intact.
Here we find the apotheosis of the fleas of black misery jumping in the water's hair, islands in a stream of light, cracking under the fingers of the celestial delouser: dawn with rose-colored fingers, the dawn of Greek and Mediterranean culture--snatched from the sacrosanct Homeric poems by a black thief--whose enslaved princess's fingernails are sud- denly controlled by a Toussaint L'Ouverture in order to crack the triumphant parasites of the black sea; the dawn, which suddenly rebels and is metamorphosed, which opens fire like that savage weapon of white men, the flame-thrower, the weapon of scientists, the weapon of executioners, strikes the tall black Titan with its white fire, and he arises intact and eternal in order to begin the assault on Europe and heaven. In Ce? saire, the great Surrealist tradition is realized, it takes on its definitive meaning and is destroyed: Surrealism--that European movement--is taken from the Europeans by a black man who turns it against them and gives it a rigorously defined function. I have pointed out elsewhere how the whole of the proletariat completely shut itself off from the destruc- tive poetry of Reason: in Europe, Surrealism languishes and pales, rejected by those who could have given it a transfusion
? Black Orpheus \ 313
of their own blood. But at the very moment when it is losing contact with the Revolution, it is, in the Antilles, grafted onto another branch of the universal Revolution; it develops into an enormous somber flower. Ce? saire's originality lies in his having directed his powerful, concentrated anxiety as a Negro, as one oppressed, as a militant individual, into this world of the most destructive, free, and metaphysical poetry at the moment when Eluard and Aragon were failing to give political content to their verse. And finally, negritude-object is snatched from Ce? saire like a cry of pain, of love, and of hate. Here again he follows the Surrealist tradition of objective poetry. Ce? saire's words do not describe ne? gritude, they do not designate it, they do not copy it from the outside like a painter with a model: they create it; they compose it under our very eyes. Henceforth it is a thing which can be observed and learned; the subjective method which he has chosen joins the objective method we spoke about earlier: he ejects the black soul from himself at the very moment when others are trying to interiorize it; the final result is the same in both cases. Ne? gritude is the far-away tam-tam in the streets of Dakar at night; voodoo shouts from some Haitian cellar window, sliding along level with the roadway; the Congolese mask; but it is also this poem by Ce? saire, this slobbery, bloody peom full of phlegm, twisting in the dust like a cut-up worm. This
double spasm of absorption and excretion beats out the rhythm of the black heart on every page of this collection. What then, at present, is this ne? gritude, sole anxiety of these poets, sole subject of this book? It must first be stated that a white man could hardly speak about it suitably, since
he has no inner experience of it and since European languages lack words to describe it. I ought then to let the reader encounter it in the pages of this collection and draw his own conclusions about it. But this introduction would be incomplete if, after having indicated that the quest for the Black Grail represented--both in its original intention and in its methods--the most authentic synthesis of revo- lutionary aspirations and poetic anxiety, I did not show that this complex notion is essentially pure Poetry. I shall
? 314 I Black Orpheus
therefore limit myself to examining these poems objectively as a cluster of testimonies and to pointing out some of their principal themes. Senghor says, "What makes the ne? gritude of a poem is less its theme than its style, the emotional warmth which gives life to words, which transmutes the word into the Word. " It could not be more explicitly stated that ne? gritude is neither a state nor a definite ensemble of vices and virtues or of intellectual and moral qualities, but rather a certain affective attitude toward the world. Since the beginning of this century, psychology has renounced its great scholastic distinctions. We no longer believe that the "facts" of the soul are divided into volitions or actions, knowledge or perceptions, sentiments or blind passiveness. We know that a feeling is a definite way of establishing our rapport with the world around us, that it involves a certain comprehension of this universe. It is a tension of the soul, a choice of oneself and of another, a way of going beyond the raw facts of experience; in short, a plan quite like the
voluntary act. To use Heidegger's language, ne? gritude is the Negro's being-in-the-world.
Furthermore, here is what Ce? saire tells us about it.
My ne? gritude is not a stone with its deafnessflungout against the clamor of the day
My ne? gritude is not a dead speck of water on the dead eye of the earth
my ne? gritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral
it plunges into the red flesh of the ground
it plunges into the ardent flesh of the sky
it perforates the opaque pressure of its righteous patience.
Ne? gritude is portrayed in these beautiful lines of verse more as an act than as a frame of mind. But this act is an inner determination; it is not a question of taking the goods of this world in one's hands and transforming them; it is a question of existing in the middle of the world. The relation with the universe remains an adaptation. But this adaptation is not technical. For the white man, to possess is to transform. To be sure, the white worker uses instruments which he does
? Black Orpheus \ 315
not possess. But at least his techniques are his own: if it is true that the personnel responsible for the major inventions of European industry comes mainly from the middle classes, at least the trades of carpenter, cabinetmaker, potter, seem to the white workers to be a true heritage, despite the fact that the orientation of great capitalist production tends to remove their "joy in work" from them. But it is not enough to say that the black worker uses instruments which are lent to him: techniques are also lent to him.
Ce? saire refers to his black brothers as
Those who have invented neither powder nor compass those who have never tamed either steam or electricity those who have not explored the seas and the sky . . .
But this haughty claim of nontechnicalness reverses the situation: what could pass as a deficiency becomes & positive source of wealth. A technical rapport with Nature reveals Nature as simple quantity, inertia, exteriority: Nature dies. By his haughty refusal to be homo faber, the Negro gives it life again. As if the passiveness of one of the members of the "man-nature" couple necessarily produced the others activ- ity. Actually, ne? gritude is not passiveness, since it "perfo- rates the flesh of the sky and of the earth": it is "patience," and patience appears like an active imitation of passiveness. The Negro's act is first of all an act on himself. The black man stands erect and immobilizes himself like a bird- charmer, and things come to perch on the branches of this fake tree. A magic inveigling of the world--through silence and rest--is involved here: the white man, by acting first of all on Nature, loses himself when he loses Nature; the Negro, by acting first of all on himself, claims to win Nature while winning himself.
Seized, they abandon themselves to the essence of every thing ignorant of the surfaces but seized by the movement of every
thing
heedless of counting, but playing the world's game truly the elder sons of the world
porous to all the breaths of the world . . .
? 316 I Black Orpheus
flesh of the world'sfleshpalpitating from the very movement of
the world.
Upon reading this, one can hardly help thinking of the famous distinction between intelligence and intuition es- tablished by Bergson. Ce? saire rightly calls us
Omniscient and nai? ve conquerors . . .
Because of his tools, the white man knows all. But he only scratches the surface of things; he is unaware of the duration of things, unaware of life. Ne? gritude, on the contrary, is comprehension through instinctive congeni- ality. The black man's secret is that the sources of his existence and the roots of Being are identical.
If one wanted to give a sociological interpretation of this metaphysic, one would say that an agriculturist poetry is here opposed to an engineer prose. Actually, it is not true that the black man has no techniques: the rapport between any human group and the exterior world is always technical in one way or another. And inversely, I shall say that Ce? saire is imprecise: Saint Exupe? ry's airplane folding the earth below like a carpet is a means of disclosure. However, the black man is first of all a peasant; agricultural technique is "righteous patience"; it trusts in life; it waits. To plant is to impregnate the earth; after that, you must remain motion- less and watch: "each atom of silence is a chance for ripe fruit," each instant brings forth a hundred times more than man gave, whereas the worker finds in the manufactured product only as much as he put into it; man grows along with his wheat: from minute to minute he goes beyond himself and becomes more golden; he intervenes in his watchful wait before the fragile swelling belly, only to
protect. Ripe wheat is a microcosm because the cooperation of sun, wind, and rains was needed for it to grow; a blade of wheat is both the most natural thing and the most improbable chance. Techniques have contaminated the white peasant, but the black peasant remains the great male of the earth, the world's sperm. His existence is great
? Black Orpheus \ 31 y
vegetal patience; his work is the yearly repetition of holy coitus. Creating and nourished because he creates. To till, to plant, to eat, is to make love with Nature. The sexual pantheism of these poets is undoubtedly what will impress us first of all: it is in this that they join the dances and the phallic rites of the Negro-Africans.
Oho! Congo lying in your bed of forests, queen of tamed Africa May the phalli of the mountains carry your banner high
For, through my head, through my tongue, through my belly,
you are a woman,
writes Senghor. Also:
and so I shall mount again the soft belly of the dunes and the gleaming thighs of the day . . .
and Rabe? arivelo:
the earth's blood, the stone's sweat and the sperm of the world
and Laleau:
The conical drum laments under the sky
And it is the very soul of the black man
Sultry spasms of men in rut, lover's sticky sobs Outraging the calm of the evening.
Here, we are far from Bergson's chaste asexual intuition. It is no longer a matter of being congenial with life, but rather of being in love with all its forms. For the white technician, God is first of all an engineer. Jupiter orders chaos and prescribes its laws; the Christian God conceives the world through his understanding and brings it into being through his will: the relation between the created and the creator is never carnal, except for a few mystics whom the Church looks upon with a great deal of suspicion. Even so, erotic mysticism has nothing in common with fecundity: it is the completely passive wait for a sterile penetration. We are steeped in alluvium: statuettes come from the hands of
? 3i8 I Black Orpheus
the divine sculptor. If the manufactured objects surrounding us could worship their ancestors, they would undoubtedly adore us as we adore the All-powerful. For our black poets, on the contrary, Being comes out of Nothingness like a penis becoming erect; Creation is an enormous perpetual delivery; the world is flesh and the son of flesh; on the sea and in the sky, on the dunes, on the rocks, in the wind, the Negro finds the softness of human skin; he rubs himself against the sand's belly, against the sky's loins: he is "flesh of the flesh of this world"; he is "porous to all its breaths," to all its pollens; he is both Nature's female and its male; and when he makes love with a woman of his race, the sexual act seems to him to be the celebration of the Mystery of Being. This spermatic religion is like the tension of a soul balancing between two complementary tendencies: the dynamic feeling of being an erect phallus, and that more deaf, more patient, more feminine one of being a growing plant. Thus, ne? gritude is basically a sort of
androgyny.
There you are
Upright and naked
alluvium you are and remember yourself as having been but in reality you are the child of this parturient shadow feeding on lunar lactogen*
then you slowly take the form of a bole
on this low wall jumped over by the dreams of flowers and the perfume of summer at rest.
To feel, to believe that roots are pushing your feet
and running and twisting like thirsty serpents
toward some subterranean spring . . .
(Rabe? arivelo)
And Ce? saire:
Wornout mother, leafless mother, you are a. flamboyant and now wear only husks. You are a calabash tree
* "Lactogen" is a neologism in the French text as well. --Translator.
? Black Orpheus \ 319 andyouareonlyastandofcouis . . . t
This profound unity of vegetal and sexual symbols is certainly the greatest originality of black poetry, especially in a period when, as Michel Carrouges has shown, most of the images used by white poets tend to mineralize the human being. Ce? saire, on the contrary, "vegetalizes," "animalizes" sea, sky, and stones. More precisely, his poetry is a perpetual coupling of men and women who had been metamorphosed into animals, vegetables, stones, with stones, plants, and beasts metamorphosed into men. Thus the black man attests to a natural Eros; he reveals and incarnates it; to find a point of comparison in European poetry, one must go back to Lucretius, the peasant poet who celebrated Venus, the mother goddess, when Rome was not yet much more than a large agricultural market. In our time, only Lawrence seems to me to have had a cosmic feeling for sexuality. Even so, this feeling remains very literary in his works.
However, although ne? gritude seems basically to be this immobile springing-forth, a unity of phallic erection and plant growth, one could scarcely exhaust it with this single poetic theme. There is another motif running through this collection, like a large artery:
Those who have invented neither powder nor compass . . . They know the most remote corners of the country of suffering . . .
To the absurd utilitarian agitation of the white man, the black man opposes the authenticity gained from his suffer- ing; the black race is a chosen race because it has had the horrible privilege of touching the depths of unhappiness. And even though these poems are anti-Christian from beginning to end, one might call ne? gritude a kind of
t Flamboyant: a plant found in semitropical countries, especially in the Antilles; a poinciana, or peacock flower. Couis: apparently some kind of tree found in the Antilles. --Translator.
? 320 I Black Orpheus
Passion: the black man who is conscious of himself sees himself as the man who has taken the whole of human suffering upon himself and who suffers for all, even for the white man.
On the judgment day, Armstrong's trumpet will be the
interpreter of man's sufferings.
(Paul Niger)
Let us note immediately that this in no way implies a resigned suffering. A while ago I was speaking about Bergson and Lucretius; I would be tempted now to quote that great adversary of Christianity, Nietzsche, and his "Dionysianism. " Like the Dionysian poet, the Negro at- tempts to penetrate the brilliant phantasm of the day, and encounters, a thousand feet under the Apollonian surface, the inexpiable suffering which is the universal essence of man. If one wished to systematize, one would say that the black man blends with the whole of nature inasmuch as he represents sexual congeniality with Life and inasmuch as he claims he is Man in his Passion of rebellious suffering. One will feel the fundamental unity of this double movement if one considers the constantly tighter relationship which
psychiatrists establish between anguish and sexual desire. There is only one proud upheaval which can be equally well described as a desire plunging its roots into suffering or as suffering fixed like a sword across a vast cosmic desire. This "righteous patience" that Ce? saire evokes is both vegetal growth and patience against suffering; it resides in the very muscles of the Negro; it sustains the black porter going a thousand miles up the Niger under a blinding sun with a fifty-pound load balanced on his head. But if in a certain sense, one can compare the fecundity of Nature to a proliferation of suffering, in another sense--and this one is also Dionysian--this fecundity, by its exuberance, goes beyond suffering, drowns it in its creative abundance which is poetry, love, and dance. Perhaps, in order to understand this indissoluble unity of suffering, eros, and joy, one must
? Black Orpheus \ 321
have seen the black men of Harlem dance frenetically to the rhythm of "blues," which are the saddest sounds in the world. In effect, rhythm cements the multiple aspects of the black soul, communicates its Nietzschean lightness with heavy Dionysian intuitions. Rhythm--tam-tam, jazz, the "bounding" of these poems--represents the temporality of Negro existence. And when a black poet prophesies to his brothers a better future, he portrays their deliverance to them in the form of rhythm:
What?
rhythm
sound wave in the night across the forests, nothing
--or a new soul timbre
intonation
vigor
dilation
vibration which flows out by degrees into the marrow re? vulses* in its progression an old sleeping body, takes it by the waist
and spins it
and turns
and once more vibrates in its hands, in its loins, its sexual member, its thighs, its vagina . . .
But one must go still further: this basic experience of suffering is ambiguous; through it, black conscience is going to become historical. In effect, whatever may be the intolerable iniquity of his present condition, it is not to that condition that the black man first refers when he proclaims that he has touched the heart of human suffering. He has the horrible benefit of having known bondage. For these poets, most of whom were born between 1900 and 1918, slavery-- abolished half a century earlier--lingers on as a very real memory:
Each of my todays looks on my yesterday with large eyes rolling with rancor with
* Re? vulses: referring to the medical term revulsion, a counterirritant. -- Translator.
? $22 I Black Orpheus
shame
Still real is my stunned condition of the past
of
blows from knotted cords of bodies calcinated
from toe to calcinated back
of deadfleshof red ironfirebrandsof arms
broken under the whip which is breaking loose . . .
writes Damas, poet from Guiana. And the Haitian, Brierre:
. . . Often like me you feel stiffnesses Awaken after murderous centuries
And old wounds bleed in your flesh . . .
During the centuries of slavery, the black man drank the cup of bitterness to the last drop; and slavery is a past fact which neither our authors nor their fathers have actually experienced. But it is also a hideous nightmare from which even the youngest of them are not yet sure of having awakened. From one end of the earth to the other, black men--separated by languages, politics, and the history of their colonizers--have a collective memory in common. This will not be surprising if one only recalls the French peasants who, in 1789, were still aware of the panicky terrors that went back to the Hundred Years' War. Thus, when the black man goes back to his principal experience, it is suddenly revealed to him in two dimensions: it is both the intuitive seizure of the human condition and the still-fresh memory of a historical past. Here, I am thinking of Pascal, who relentlessly repeated that man was an irrational com- posite of metaphysics and history, his greatness unexplain- able if he comes from the alluvium, his misery unexplainable if he is still as God made him; that in order to understand man, one had to go back to the simple basic fact of man's downfall. It is in this sense that Ce? saire calls his race "the fallen race. " And in a certain sense I can see the rapprochement that can be made between black conscience and Christian
conscience: the brazen law of slavery evokes that law of the Old Testament, which states the consequences of the Fault.
The abolition of slavery recalls this other historical fact:
? Black Orpheus \ 323
Redemption. The white man's insipid paternalism after 1848 resembles that of the white God after the Passion. The difference being, however, that the expiable fault that the black man discovers in the back of his memory is not his own; it belongs to the white man. The first fact of Negro history is certainly a kind of original sin; but the black man is the innocent victim of it. This is why his concept of suffering is radically opposed to white "dolorism. " If these poems are for the most part so violently anti-Christian, it is because the white man's religion is more clearly a hoax in the eyes of the Negro than in the eyes of the European proletariat: this religion wants to make him share the responsibility for a crime of which he is the victim; it wants to persuade him to see the kidnappings, the massacres, the rapes, and the tortures which have covered Africa with blood as a legitimate punishment, deserved tests. Will you say that it also proclaims equality for all men before God? Before God, yes. Only yesterday I was reading in Esprit these
lines from a correspondent in Madagascar:
I am as certain as you that the soul of a Malagasy is worth the soul of a white man . . . Just as, before God, the soul of a child is worth the soul of his father. However, if you have an automobile, you don't let your children drive it,
One can hardly reconcile Christianity and colonialism more elegantly. In opposition to these sophisms, the black man--by a simple investigation of his memory as a former slave--affirms that suffering is man's lot and that it is no less deserved for all that. He rejects with horror Christian stagnation, melancholy sensual pleasure, masochistic humil- ity, and all the tendentious inducements to his submission; he lives the absurdity of suffering in its pure form, in its injustice and in its gratuitousness; and he discovers thereby this truth which is misunderstood or masked by Christian- ity: suffering carries within itself its own refusal; it is by nature a refusal to suffer, it is the dark side of negativity, it opens onto revolt and liberty. The black man promptly
? 324 I Black Orpheus
transforms himself into history inasmuch as the intuition of suffering confers on him a collective past and assigns to him a goal in the future. Only a short while ago, he was a sheer
present surging of timeless instincts, a simple manifestation of universal and eternal fecundity. Now he calls to his colored brothers in quite another language:
Negro peddler of revolt
you have known the paths of the world ever since you were sold in Guine? e . . .
And:
Five centuries have seen you with weapons in your hands and you have taught the exploiting races
passion for liberty.
There is already a black epic:* first the golden age of Africa, then the era of dispersion and captivity, then the awakening of conscience, the heroic and somber times of great revolts, of Toussaint L'Ouverture and black heroes, then the fact of the abolition of slavery--"unforgettable metamorphosis/' says Ce? saire--then the struggle for defin- itive liberation:
You are waiting for the next call
the inevitable mobilization
for that war which is yours has known only truces
for there is no land where your blood has not flowed no language in which your color has not been insulted You smile, Black Boy,
you sing
you dance
you cradle generations
which go out at all hours to the
fronts of work and pain
which tomorrow will assault bastilles
* The French here reads geste, as in chanson de geste. Sartre is comparing the Negro epic with the themes of medieval French epic poetry. -- Translator.
? Black Orpheus \ 325
onward toward the bastions of the future in order to write in all languages
on the clear pages of all skies
the declaration of your rights unrecognized for more than five centuries . . .
Strange and decisive turn: race is transmuted into historicityy the black Present explodes and is temporalized, ne? gritude--with its Past and its Future--is inserted into Universal History, it is no longer a state, nor even an existential attitude, it is a "Becoming. " The black contri- bution to the evolution of Humanity is no longer savor, taste, rhythm, authenticity, a bouquet of primitive in- stincts: it is a dated enterprise, a long-suffering construction and also a future. Previously, the black man claimed his place in the sun in the name of ethnicqualities; now, he establishes his right to life on his mission; and this mission, like the proletariat's, comes to him from his historical position: because he has suffered from capitalistic exploita- tion more than all the others, he has acquired a sense of revolt and a love of liberty more than all the others. And because he is the most oppressed, he necessarily pursues the liberation of all, when he works for his own deliverance:
Black messenger of hope
you know all the hymns of the world
even those of the timeless building-works of the Nile.
But, after that, can we still believe in the interior homogeneousness of ne? gritude? And how can one say that it exists? Sometimes it is lost innocence which had its existence in some faraway past, and sometimes hope which can be realized only within the walls of the future City. Sometimes it contracts with Nature in a moment of pantheistic fusion and sometimes it spreads itself out to coincide with the whole history of Humanity; sometimes it is an existential attitude and sometimes the objective ensemble of Negro-African traditions. Is it being discov- ered? Is it being created? After all, there are black men who
? 326 I Black Orpheus
"collaborate"; after all, in the prefaces he writes for the works of each poet, Senghor seems to distinguish between degrees of ne? gritude. Does the poet who would be the Prophet for his colored brothers invite them to become more Negro, or does he disclose to them what they are, by a sort of poetic psychoanalysis? Is ne? gritude necessity or liberty? For the authentic Negro, is it a matter of conduct deriving from essences, as consequences derive from a principle, or is one a Negro in the way that the religious faithful are believers, that is to say, in fear and trembling, in anguish, in perpetual remorse for never sufficiently being what one would like to be? Is it a given fact or a value? The object of empirical intuition or of a moral concept? Is it a conquest of meditation? Or does meditation poison it? Is it never authentic except when unmeditated and in the immediate? Is it a systematic explanation of the black soul, or a Platonic Archetype which one can approach indefinitely without ever attaining? Is it, for black men, like our engineer's common sense, the most widely shared thing in the world? Or do some have it, like grace; and if so, does it have its chosen ones? One will undoubtedly answer this question by saying that it is all of these at once, and still other things. And I agree: like all anthropological notions, ne? gritude is a shimmer of being and of needing-to-be; it makes you and
you make it: both oath and passion. But there is something even more important in it: the Negro himself, we have said, creates a kind of antiracist racism. He wishes in no way to dominate the world: he desires the abolition of all kinds of ethnic privileges; he asserts his solidarity with the oppressed of every color. After that, the subjective, existential, ethnic notion of ne? gritude "passes," as Hegel says, into that which one has of the proletariat: objective, positive, and precise. Senghor says: "For Ce? saire, 'White' symbolizes capital, just as Negro symbolizes work. . . . When writing about the black men of his race, he is writing about the worldwide proletarian struggle. " It is easy to say, not so easy to think. And it is certainly not just by accident that the most ardent cantors of ne? gritude are also militant Marxists. Neverthe-
? Black Orpheus | 327
less, the notion of race does not mix with the notion of class: the former is concrete and particular; the latter, universal and abstract. One belongs to what Jaspers calls comprehen- sion, and the other to intellection; the first is the product of a psychobiological syncretism, and the other is a methodical construction starting with experience. In fact, ne? gritude appears like the upbeat {unaccented beat] of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of ne? gritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself, and these black men who use it know this perfectly well; they know that it aims at preparing the synthesis or realization of the human being in a raceless society. Thus, ne? gritude is for destroying itself; it is a "crossing to" and not an "arrival at," a means and not an end. A poem by Jacques Roumain, a black communist, furnishes the most moving evidence of this new
ambiguity:
Africa I have held on to your memory Africa
you are in me
Like a thorn in a wound
like a guardian mascot in the center of the village make of me the stone of your sling
of my mouth the lips of your wound
of my knees the broken columns of your humbling however
I want to be only of your race
peasant workers of all countries.
With what sadness he still retains for the moment what he has decided to abandon. With what pride as a man he will strip his pride as a Negro for other men! He who says both that Africa is in him like "a thorn in a wound," and that he wants to be only of the universal race of the oppressed, has not left the empire of afflicted consciousness. One more step and ne? gritude will disappear completely: the Negro himself makes of what was the mysterious bubbling of black blood a geographic accident, the inconsistent product of universal determinism:
? 328 I Black Orpheus
Is it all that climate extended space which creates clan tribe nation
skin race gods
our inexorable dissimilarity. *
But the poet does not completely have the courage to accept the responsibility for this rationalization of the racial concept; one sees that he limits himself to questioning; a bitter regret is visible beneath his will to unite. Strange road: humiliated and offended, black men search deep within themselves to find their most secret pride; and when they have found it at last, it challenges its own right to exist. Through supreme generosity they abandon it, just as Philoctetes abandoned his bow and arrows at Neoptolemus. Thus, the rebel Ce? saire finds the secret of his revolts in the bottom of his heart: he is of royal blood:
it is true that there is in you something which has
never been able to yield, an anger, a desire, a sadness, an impatience, in short a scorn, a violence . . . and now your veins carry gold, not mud; pride, not servitude. King you have been King in the past.
But he immediately thrusts aside this temptation:
There is a law that I cover up with a chain unbroken
as far as the confluence of fire which violates me
which purifies me and burns me with my prism of amal- gamated gold . . . I shall perish. But one. Whole.
It is perhaps this ultimate nudity of man that has snatched from him the white rags that were concealing his black armor, and that now destroys and rejects that very armor; it is perhaps this colorless nudity that best symbolizes ne? gritude: for ne? gritude is not a state, it is a simple going-beyond-itself, it is love. It is when ne? gritude re- nounces itself that it finds itself; it is when it accepts losing
* Although the poem itself and Sartre's interpretation of it suggest that there should be a question mark here, there is none in the text from which this was translated. --Translator.
? Black Orpheus \ 329
that it has won: the colored man--and he alone--can be asked to renounce the pride of his color. He is the one who is walking on this ridge between past particularism--which he has just climbed--and future universalism, which will be the twilight of his ne? gritude; he is the one who looks to the end of particularism in order to find the dawn of the universal. Undoubtedly, the white worker also becomes conscious of his class in order to deny it, since he wants the advent of a classless society: but once again, the definition of class is objective; it sums up only the condition of the white worker's alienation; whereas it is in the bottom of his heart that the Negro finds race, and he must tear out his heart. Thus, ne? gritude is dialectical; it is not only nor above all the blossoming of atavistic instincts; it represents "going beyond" a situation defined by free consciences. Ne? gritude is a sad myth full of hope, born of Evil and pregnant with future Good, living like a woman who is born to die and who feels her own death even in the richest moments of her life; it is an unstable rest, an explosive fixity, a pride which renounces itself, an absolute that knows it is transitory: for whereas it is the Announcer of its birth and of its death agony, it also remains the existential attitude chosen by free men and lived absolutely, to the fullest. Because it is tension between a nostalgic Past into which the black man can no longer enter completely and a future in which it will be replaced by new values, ne? gritude adorns itself with a tragic beauty that finds expression only in poetry. Because it is the living and dialectical unity of so many opposites, because it is a Complex defying analysis, ne? gritude is only the multiple unity of a hymn that can reveal both it and the flashing beauty of the Poem which Breton calls "explosante-fixe" Because any attempt to conceptualize its
various aspects would necessarily end up showing its relativity--even though it is lived in the absolute through royal consciences--and because the poem is an absolute, it is poetry alone that will allow the unconditional aspect of this attitude to be fixed. Because it is subjectivity written in the objective, ne? gritude must take form in a poem, that is
? 330 I Black Orpheus
to say, in a subjectivity-object; because it is an Archetype and a Value, it will find its most transparent symbol in aesthetic values; because it is a call and a gift, it will make itself heard and offer itself only by means of a work of art which is both a call to the spectator's liberty and absolute generosity. Ne? gritude is the content of the poem, it is the poem like a thing of the world, mysterious and open, obscure and suggestive; it is the poet himself. One must go still further; triumph of Narcissism and Narcissus* suicide, tension of the soul beyond culture, beyond words and beyond all psychic facts, luminous night of unknowing, deliberate choice of the impossible and of what Bataille calls "torture*' [supplice], intuitive acceptance of the world and refusal of the world in the name of "the law of the heart," double contradictory postulation, demanding retraction, expansion of generosity--ne? gritude is, in essence, Poetry. For once at least, the most authentic revolutionary plan and the purest poetry come from the same source.
And if the sacrifice is achieved one day, what will happen then? What will happen if, casting off his ne? gritude for the sake of the Revolution, the black man no longer wishes to consider himself only a part of the proletariat? What will happen if he then allows himself to be defined only by his objective condition? If, in order to struggle against white capitalism, he undertakes to assimilate white technics? Will the source of poetry run dry? Or in spite of everything, will the great black river color the sea into which it flows? That does not matter: each era has its poetry; in each era, circumstances of history elect a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch, by creating situations that can be expressed or that can go beyond themselves only through Poetry. Some- times the poetic e? lan coincides with the revolutionary e? lan, and sometimes they diverge. Let us greet today the historic chance that will permit black men to
shout out the great Negro cry so hard that the world's foundations will be shaken. 3
Translated byJohn MacCombie
? Notes
A Note on the Texts
Index
? Notes
What Is Literature?
i. At least in general. The greatness and error of Klee lie in his attempt to make a painting both sign and object.
2. I say 'create', not 'imitate', which is enough to squelch the bombast of M. Charles Estienne, who has obviously not understood a word of my argument and who is dead set on tilting at shadows.
3. This is the example cited by Bataille in Expe? rience inte? rieure.
4. If you wish to know the origin of this attitude towards language, the following are a few brief indications.
Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait. In reality, the human act, governed by needs and urged on by the
useful, is, in a sense, a means. It passes unnoticed, and it is the result which counts. When I extend my hand in order to take up my pen, I have only a fleeting and obscure consciousness of my gesture; it is the pen which I see. Thus, man is alienated by his ends. Poetry reverses the relationship: the world and things become inessential, become a pretext for the act which becomes its own end. The vase is there so that the girl may perform the graceful act of filling it; the Trojan War, so that Hector and Achilles may engage in that heroic combat. The action, detached from its goals, which become blurred, becomes an act of prowess or a dance. Nevertheless, however indifferent he might have been to the success of the enterprise, the poet, before the nineteenth century, remained in harmony with society as a whole. He did not use language for the end which prose seeks, but he had the same confidence in it as the prose-writer.
With the coming of bourgeois society, the poet puts up a common front with the prose-writer to declare it unliveable. His job is always to create the myth of man, but he passes from white magic to black magic. Man is always presented as the absolute end, but by the success of his enterprise he is s_cked into a utilitarian collectivity. The thing that is in the background of his act and that will allow transition to the myth is thus no longer success, but defeat. By stopping the infinite series of his projects like a screen, defeat alone returns him to himself in his purity. The world remains the inessential, but it is now there as a pretext for defeat. The finality of the thing is to send man back to himself by blocking the route. Moreover, it is not a matter of arbitrarily introducing defeat and ruin into the course of the world, but rather of having no eyes for anything but that. Human enterprise has two aspects: it is both success and failure. The dialectical scheme is inadequate for reflecting upon it. We must make our vocabulary and the frames of our reason more supple. Some day I am going to try to
? 334 I Notes to Page 34
describe that strange reality, History, which is neither objective, nor ever quite subjective, in which the dialectic is contested, penetrated, and corroded by a kind of antidialectic, but which is still a dialectic. But that is the philosopher's affair. One does not ordinarily consider the two faces of Janus; the man of action sees one and the poet sees the other. When the instruments are broken and unusable, when plans are blasted and effort is useless, the world appears with a childlike and terrible freshness, without supports, without paths. It has the maximum reality because it is crushing for man, and as action, in any case, generalizes, defeat restores to things their individual reality. But, by an expected reversal, the defeat, considered as a final end, is both a contesting and an appropriation of this universe. A contesting, because man is worth more than that which crushes; he no longer contests things in their 'little bit of reality', like the engineer or the captain, but, on the contrary, in their 'too full of reality', by his very existence as a vanquished person; he is the remorse of the world. An appropriation, because the world, by ceasing to be the tool of success, becomes the instrument of failure. So there it is, traversed by an obscure finality; it is its coefficient of adversity which serves, the more human in so far as it is more hostile to man. The defeat itself turns into salvation. Not that it makes us yield to some 'beyond', but by itself it shifts and is metamorphosed. For example, poetic language rises out of the ruins of prose. If it is true that the word is a betrayal and that communication is impossible, then each word by itself recovers its individuality and becomes an instrument of our defeat and a receiver of the incommunicable, It is not that there is another thing to communicate; but the communication of prose having miscarried, it is the very meaning of the word which becomes the pure incommunicable. Thus, the failure of communication becomes a suggestion of the incommunicable, and the thwarted project of utilizing words is succeeded by the pure disinterested intuition of the word. Thus, we again meet with the description which we attempted earlier in this study, but in the more general perspective of the absolute valorization of the defeat, which seems to me the original attitude of contemporary poetry. Note also that this choice confers upon the poet a very precise function in the collectivity: in a highly integrated or religious society, the defeat is masked by the State or redeemed by Religion; in a less integrated and secular society, such as our democracies, it is up to poetry to redeem them.
Poetry is a case of the loser winning. And the genuine poet chooses to lose, even if he has to go so far as to die, in order to win. I repeat that I am talking of contemporary poetry.
