No More Learning

The slightest bit more pressure and that inevitable confusion between a soul's value and talent accrues to the benefit of politics. And why stop midway? Why should he who in all purity has chosen to love such and such a novelist because he resisted the enemy not choose to love some other one who is his comrade in the same party? Occasionally, judgments will interfere with each other: this bourgeois, Catholic writer should have no talent in the eyes of the leftist critic; and yet, yes, indeed he has, since he was in the Resistance. The critic will extricate himself by assigning proportions. A quivering cordiality reigns in the world of letters. Which is why I won't accuse those who compensate works on account of their political meaning--rather than the real value of their content--of cowardice. We are all more or less at this juncture now and I am not sure that those who protest the most against this state of affairs are not themselves also inspired by political motives. An author thus selected, and
promoted (occasionally in spite of himself) to the first rank, represents the underground or the prisoners of war, the Communist Party or the Christian-Democrats, everyone except himself. And how is one to know whether his prestige accrues to him from his years of exile, prison, deportation, clandestine activity, or, quite bluntly, from his talent? On that basis, to be sure, the parties consume great men at a frightening rate. In 1939 the Communist Party won Paul Nizan the Prix Interallie? ; he was the great favorite, the challenger to Aragon. He left the Party at the time of the German-Soviet Pact. He was wrong, I'm willing to admit; moreover, that doesn't concern me here. But consider: first of all he died in combat, and then he was a writer of the first rank. Today there is silence around his name; those who speak of our losses mention Pre? vost
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and Decour, never Nizan. Need we conclude that if Aragon left the Party (an absurd hypothesis, I realize), after having been Be? ranger, he would abruptly fall to the level of De? roule`de?
The entire public is an accomplice. We have just discovered to our humiliation that France will no longer play in tomorrow's world the role it played in yesterday's. In point of fact, no one is guilty: our country didn't have enough men; our subsoil was not sufficiently rich. The slippage of France, accompanied moreover by that of Western Europe, is the result of a long evolution. Had we perceived it gradually, there is no doubt that we would have adapted to it with courage; the role we are given to play remains quite fine. But the truth was revealed to us in a moment of disaster. Until 1939 our previous victory-- which had only precipitated things by decimating our population--and the brilliance of our intellectual and artistic life had papered over our actual importance. We have trouble tolerating so brutal a revelation; the shame of losing the battle of 1940 and the pain of giving up our hegemony over Europe fuse in our hearts. At times we are tempted to believe that we buried our country with our own hands; at others, we raise our heads and affirm that eternal France will never perish. In other words, in five years we have acquired a formidable inferiority complex. The attitude of the world's masters is in no way disposed to cure us of it. We recall our past greatness, and we are told that it is, precisely, past. On only one score have we surprised foreigners: they have never stopped admiring the
vitality of our literature. "How can it be? " they ask. "You were beaten, occupied, ruined, yet you've written so much! " That admiration is easy enough to explain: if the English and the Americans have produced few new works, it's because they were mobilized, and their writers dispersed to the four corners of the globe. We, on the contrary, though persecuted, hunted, and in many cases threatened with death, at least were in France, in our homes; our writers could write, if not in broad daylight, at
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least in hiding. And then Anglo-Saxon intellectuals, who form a caste apart, cut off from the rest of the nation, are always dazzled upon rediscovering in France men of letters and artists who are intimately involved in the life and affairs of the country. Finally, many of them share the opinion recently expressed to me by an English lady. "The French,,, she said, "are suffering in their pride. They have to be persuaded that they have friends in the world, and thus for the time being one should speak to them only about what one admires in them--for example, their literature. " As a result of that admiration, which is both spontaneous and accommodatingly displayed, the United States, England, and twenty other countries are showing a profound interest in our writers. Our novelists and poets have never received so many invitations--to be seen, to be heard, and also to be fed. Switzerland has fattened up a few, as has America. Great Britain will do its best. At
which point we too are beginning to take our literature seriously. Those who previously saw in it no more than a pastime for the idle or a guilty activity have now come to realize that it is an instrument of propaganda. People cling to its prestige, since it is recognized abroad. Many would prefer that we be admired for our industrial might or the number of our guns. But we are so in need of esteem that they make do in the end with an admiration of our literature. They have not stopped wishing in their hearts that France might again become the country of Turenne and Bonaparte, but in the meantime they fall back on Rimbaud or Vale? ry. In their eyes, literature becomes a surrogate activity. It was permissible to treat the writer as accursed so long as the factories were working and the generals had soldiers obeying them. Today they hastily gather up young authors and shove them into an incubator in order to transform them rapidly into great men to be sent on missions to London, Stockholm, or Washington.
Never has literature been threatened by a graver danger: formal and informal powers that be, the government, newspapers, perhaps even the central banks and heavy
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industry have just discovered its might and are about to turn it to their profit. If they succeed, the writer will be able to choose--to devote himself to electoral propaganda or to enter into a special section of the Ministry of Information. Critics are concerned no longer with appreciating his works but with calculating their national importance and effectiveness; as soon as they learn how to manipulate statistics, their discipline will progress rapidly. The author, henceforth a functionary and overcome with honors, will be discreetly eclipsed by his work. At the very most, mention will be made of "Malraux's" or "ChamsonY' novel the way one speaks of Fowler's liquor or Ohm's law: as a mnemic device. On the outskirts of large cities are factories whose job is to retrieve trash; old rags burn well, provided the temperature is sufficiently high. Expanding that effort, society wants to retrieve materials for which until now it has scarcely had any use: its writers. We should be careful: among them are some rather superb
specimens of trash. What would we gain by allowing them to go up in smoke? That is not our understanding of literary commitment. There is no doubt that the written work is a social fact, and the writer before ever taking up his pen should be deeply convinced of it. He should, in fact, imbue himself with his responsibility. He is responsible for everything: lost or victorious wars, rebellions and repressions. He is the accomplice of the oppressors if he is not the natural ally of the oppressed. But not simply because he is a writer: because he is a man. He should live and desire that responsibility (and, for him, living and writing ought to be the same thing--not because art redeems life, but because life expresses itself in one's undertakings and his is to write). But he should not look back and consider his activity in order to discern what it will mean to his nephews. For him it is a matter not of knowing whether he will orient a literary movement, an "ism," but of committing himself in the present; not of foreseeing a distant future from which he would be able to
pass judgment on himself after the fact, but of desiring,
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one day at a time, the immediate future. The historian may determine that the armistice of 1940 allowed the war to be won. He may say that Germany never would have attacked the Soviet Union--which was the beginning of its defeat--if the English had already entrenched themselves by 1940 in Algiers and Bizerte. Perhaps. But these considerations could not intervene in 1940: no one could predict the German-Russian conflict in the short term, and consequently, given the actual information at our disposition, // was imperative to continue the war. In this the writer is no different from the statesman: he knows little, and he is obliged to decide on the basis of what he knows. The rest--that is, the fate of his work throughout the centuries--is the devil's part. And one ought not to play with the devil. Let us acknowledge that there is an aspect of our books that will escape us forever. Love, a career, a revolution--we begin so many undertakings in ignorance
of their outcome. Why should the writer elude the common fate? Thus it is that he ought to accept running the risk, losing himself. He is told on all sides that he was awaited. Let him know unequivocally that it's not ture. People were awating an ambassador of French thought, not a man struggling to express in words a new thought. His current notoriety is based on a misunderstanding. A great man is always awaited, because it is flattering for a nation to have produced him. But a great thought is never awaited, because it offends. Let him then accept industry's motto: create needs in order to satisfy them. Let him create the need for justice, freedom, and solidarity, and strain to satisfy these needs with his susbsequent works. Let us hope that he will be able to shake off the numerous tributes raining down on him and rediscover within himself the strength to scandalize; let him blaze paths rather than embark on national highways, even if he is furnished with a racing car. I have never believed that good literature can be made with bad sentiments. But I think that the right sentiments are never given in advance; every man has to invent them in turn. Perhaps criticism might help save
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literature if it concerned itself with understanding works rather than consecrating them. In any event, we in this forum are firmly committed to literary deflation. W e probably won't make many friends. But literature is falling asleep. The right passion--even anger--will have the good fortune perhaps to awaken it.
Translated by Jeffrey Meblman
? Black Orpheus
? Black Orpheus
wHEN YOU REMOVED the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing your praises? Did you think that when they raised themselves up again, you would
read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our fathers had forced to bend down to the very ground? Here are black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that you--like me-- will feel the shock of being seen. For three thousand years, the white man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen; he was only a look--the light from his eyes drew each thing out of the shadow of its birth; the whiteness of his skin was another look, condensed light. The white man--white because he was man, white like daylight, white like truth, white like virtue--lighted up the creation like a torch and unveiled the secret white essence of beings. Today, these black men are looking at us, and our gaze comes back to our own eyes; in their turn, black torches light up the world and our white heads are no more than Chinese lanterns swinging in the wind. A black poet-- unconcerned with us--whispers to the woman he loves:
Naked woman, black woman
Dressed in your color which is life . . .
Naked woman, dark woman,
Firmfleshedripe fruit, somber ecstasies of black wine
and our whiteness seems to us to be a strange livid varnish that keeps our skin from breathing--white tights, worn out at the elbows and knees, under which we would find real human flesh the color of black wine if we could remove them. We think we are essential to the world--suns of its harvests, moons of its tides; we are no more than its fauna, beasts. Not even beasts:
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These gentlemen from the city
These proper gentlemen
Who no longer know how to dance in the evening by moonlight Who no longer know how to walk on the flesh of their feet Who no longer know how to tell tales by thefireside. . .
Formerly Europeans with divine right, we were already feeling our dignity beginning to crumble under American or Soviet looks; Europe was already no more than a geographic accident, the peninsula that Asia shoves into the Atlantic. We were hoping at least to find a bit of our greatness reflected in the domesticated eyes of the Africans. But there are no more domesticated eyes: there are wild and free looks that judge our world.
Here is a black man wandering:
to the end of
the eternity of their endless boulevards with cops . . .
Here is another one shouting to his brothers:
Alas! Alas! Spidery Europe is moving itsfingersand its phalanxes of ships . . .
Here is:
the cunning silence of Europe's night . . .
in which
. . . there is nothing that time does not dishonor.
A Negro writes:
At times, we will haunt Montparnasse and Paris, Europe and its endless torments, like memories or like malaises . . .
and suddenly France seems exotic in our own eyes. She is no more than a memory, a malaise, a white mist at the bottom of sunlit souls, a back-country unfit to live in; she has drifted toward the North, she is anchored near Kamchatka: the essential thing is the sun, the sun of the tropics and the
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sea "lousy with islands" and the roses of Imangue and the lilies of Iarive and the volcanos of Martinique. Being [l'Etre] is black, Being is made of fire, we are accidental and far away, we have to justify our mores, our technics, our undercooked paleness of our verdigris vegetation. We are eaten away to the bones by these quiet and corrosive looks:
Listen to the white world
horribly weary of its immense effort
its rebel articulations crackling under hard stars,
its steel-blue stiffnesses piercing mystical flesh
listen to its exhibitionist victories trumpeting its defeats listen to its wretched staggering with grandiose alibis Have pity on our nai? ve omniscient conquerors.
There we are,finished;our victories--their bellies sticking up in the air--show their guts, our secret defeat. If we want to crack open this finitude which imprisons us, we can no longer rely on the privileges of our race, of our color, of our technics: we will not be able to become a part of the totality from which those black eyes exile us, unless we tear off our white tights in order to try simply to be men.
If these poems shame us, however, they were not intended to: they were not written for us; and they will not shame any colonists or their accomplices who open this book, for these latter will think they are reading letters over someone's shoulder, letters not meant for them. These black men are addressing themselves to black men about black men; their poetry is neither satiric nor imprecatory: it is an awakening to consciousness. "So," you will say, "in what way does it interest us, if it is only a document? We cannot enter into it. " I should like to show in what way we can gain access to this world of jet; I should like to show that this poetry--which seems racial at first--is actually a hymn by everyone for everyone. In a word, I am talking now to white men, and I should like to explain to them what black men already know: why it is necessarily through a poetic experience that the black man, in his present condition, must first become conscious of himself; and, inversely, why black poetry in the
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French langauge is, in our time, the only great revolutionary
poetry.
It is not just by accident that the white proletariat rarely uses poetic language to speak about its sufferings, its anger, or its pride in itself; neither do I think that workers are less gifted than our bourgeois sons: "talent"--the efficacious grace--loses all meaning when one claims that it is more widespread in one class than in another. Nor is it hard work that takes away their capacity for song: slaves used to drudge even harder and yet we know of slave hymns. It must therefore be recognized that it is the present circumstances of the class struggle that keep the worker from expressing himself poetically. Oppressed by technics, he wants to be a technician because he knows that technics will be the instrument of his liberation; he knows that it is only by
gaining professional, economic, and scientific know-how that he will be able someday to control business manage- ment. He now has a profound practical knowledge of what poets have called Nature, but it is a knowledge he has gained more through his hands than through his eyes: Nature is Matter for him--that crafty, inert adversity that he works on with his tools; Matter has no song. At the same time, the present phase of his struggle requires of him continual, positive action: political calculation, precise forecasting, discipline, organization of the masses; to dream, at this point, would be to betray. Rationalism, materialism, positivism--the great themes of his daily battle--are least propitious for the spontaneous creation of poetic myths. The last of these myths--the famous ''Upheaval*'--has with- drawn under the circumstances of the struggle: one must take up the matter that is most urgent, gain this and that position, raise this salary, decide on that sympathy strike or on some protest against the war in Indochina: efficiency alone matters. And, without a doubt, the oppressed class must first find itself. This self-discovery, however, is the
exact opposite of a subjective examination of oneself: rather, it is a question of recognizing--in and by action--the
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objective situation of the proletariat, which can be deter- mined by the circumstances of production or of redistribu- tion of property. Unified by an oppression which is exerted on each and every one, and reduced to a common struggle, workers are hardly acquainted with the inner contradictions that fecundate the work of art and that are harmful to the praxis. As far as they are concerned, to know themselves is to situate themselves within the context of the great forces that surround them; it requires them to determine both their exact position in their class and their function in the Party. The very language they use is free from the slight loosening of the screws, the constant frivolous impropriety, the game of transmissions which create the poetic Word. In their business, they use well-defined technical terms; and as for the langauge of revolutionary parties, Parain has shown that it is pragmatic: it is used to transmit orders, watch- words, information; if it loses its exactness, the Party falls apart. All of this tends more and more rigorously to
eliminate the subject; poetry, however, must in some way remain subjective. The proletariat has not found a poetry that is sociological and yet finds its source in subjectivity, that is just as subjective as it is sociological, that is based on ambiguous or uncertain language, and that is nevertheless as exalting and as generally understood as the most precise watchwords or as the phrase "Workers of all countries, unite" which one reads on doors in Soviet Russia. Lacking this, the poetry of the future revolution has remained in the hands of well-intentioned young bourgeois who found their inspiration in their personal psychological contradictions, in the dichotomy between their ideal and their class, in the uncertainty of the old bourgeois language.
Like the white worker, the Negro is a victim of the capitalist structure of our society. This situation reveals to him his close ties--quite apart from the color of his skin-- with certain classes of Europeans who, like him, are opposed; it incites him to imagine a privilege-less society in which skin pigmentation will be considered a mere fluke. But even though oppression itself may be a mere
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fluke, the circumstances under which it exists vary according to history and geographic conditions: the black man is a victim of it because he is a black man and insofar as he is a colonized native or a deported African. And since he is oppressed within the confines of his race and because of it, he must first of all become conscious of his race. He must oblige those who have vainly tried throughout the centuries to reduce him to the status of a beast, to recognize that he is a man. On this point, there is no means of evasion, or of trickery, no "crossing line" that he can consider: a Jew--a white man among white men--can deny that he is a Jew, can declare himself a man among men. The Negro cannot deny that he is Negro, nor can he claim that he is part of some abstract colorless humanity: he is black. Thus he has his back up against the wall of authenticity: having been insulted and formerly enslaved, he picks up the word "nigger" which was thrown at him like a stone, he draws himself erect and proudly proclaims himself a black man, face to face with white men. The unity which will come eventually, bringing all oppressed
peoples together in the same struggle, must be preceded in the colonies by what I shall call the moment of separation or negativity: this antiracist racism is the only road that will lead to the abolition of racial differences. How could it be otherwise? Can black men count on a distant white proletariat--involved in its own struggles--before they are united and organized on their own soil? And furthermore, isn't there some need for a thorough work of analysis in order to realize the identity of the interests that underlie the obvious difference of condition? The white worker benefits somewhat from colonization, in spite of himself: low as his standard of living may be, it would be even lower if there were no colonization. In any case, he is less cynically exploited than the day laborer in Dakar or Saint-Louis. The technical equipment and industrialization of the European countries make it possible for measures of socialization to be immediately applicable there; but as seen from Senegal or the Congo, socialism seems more than
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anything else like a beautiful dream: before black peasants can discover that socialism is the necessary answer to their present local claims, they must learn to formulate these claims jointly; therefore, they must think of themselves as black men.
But this new self-discovery is different from that which Marxism tries to awaken in the white worker. In the European worker, class consciousness is based on the nature of profit and unearned increment, on the present conditions of the ownership of the instruments for work; in brief, it is based on the objective characteristics of the position of the proletariat. But since the selfish scorn that white men display for black men--and that has no equivalent in the attitude of the bourgeois toward the working class--is aimed at the deepest recesses of the heart, black men must oppose it with a more exact view of black subjectivity, consequently race consciousness is based first of all on the black soul, or, rather--since the term is often used in this anthology--on a certain quality common to the thoughts and conduct of Negroes which is called ne? gritude.
There are only two ways to go about forming racial concepts: either one causes certain subjective characteristics to become objective, or else one tries to interiorize objectively revealed manners of conduct; thus the black man who asserts his ne? gritude by means of a revolutionary movement immedi- ately places himself in the position of having to meditate, either because he wishes to recognize in himself certain objectively established traits of the African civilizations, or because he hopes to discover the Essence of blackness in the well of his heart. Thus subjectivity reappears: the relation of the self with self; the source of all poetry, the very poe- try from which the worker had to disengage himself. The black man who asks his colored brothers to "find them- selves" is going to try to present to them an exemplary image of their ne? gritude and will look into his own soul to grasp it. He wants to be both a beacon and a mirror; the first revolutionary will be the harbinger of the black soul, the herald--half prophet and half follower--who will
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tear Blackness out of himself in order to offer it to the world; in brief, he will be a poet in the literal sense of vates. Furthermore, black poetry has nothing in common with heartfelt effusions: it is functional, it answers a need which is defined in precise terms. Leaf through an anthology of contemporary white poetry: you will find a hundred different subjects, depending upon the mood and interests of the poet, depending upon his position and his country. In the anthology which I am introducing to you here, there is only one subject that all the poets attempt to treat, more or less successfully. From Haiti to Cayenne, there is a single idea: reveal the black soul. Biack poetry is evangelic, it announces
good news: Blackness has been rediscovered.
However, this ne? gritude, which they wish to fish for in
their abyssal depths, does not fall under the soul's gaze all by itself: in the soul, nothing is gratuitous. The herald of the black soul has gone through white schools, in accordance with a brazen law which forbids the oppressed man to possess any arms except those he himself has stolen from the oppressor; it is through having had some contact with white culture that his blackness has passed from the immediacy of existence to the meditative state. But at the same time, he has more or less ceased to live his ne? gritude. In choosing to see what he is, he has become split, he no longer coincides with himself. And on the other hand, it is because he was already exiled from himself that he discovered this need to reveal himself. He therefore begins by exile. It is a double exile: the exile of his body offers a magnificent image of the exile of his heart; he is in Europe most of the time, in the cold, in the middle of gray crowds; he dreams of Port-au-Prince, of Haiti. But in Port-au-Prince he was already in exile; the slavers had torn his fathers out of Africa and dispersed them. And all of the
poems in this book--except those which were written in Africa--show us the same mystical geography. A hemisphere: in the foreground--forming the first of three concentric circles--extends the land of exile, colorless Europe; then comes the dazzling circle of the Islands and of
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childhood, which dance the roundelay around Africa; the last circle is Africa, the world's navel, pole of all black poetry--dazzling Africa, burnt, oily like a snake's skin, Africa of fire and rain, torrid and tufted; Africa--phantom flickering like a flame, between being and nothingness, more real than the "eternal boulevards with cops" but absent, beyond attainment, disintegrating Europe with its black but invisible rays; Africa, an imaginary continent. The extraordinary good luck of black poetry lies in the fact that the anxieties of the colonized native have their own grandiose and obvious symbols which need only to be gone into deeply and to be meditated upon: exile, slavery, the Africa-Europe couple and the great Manichaean division of the world into black and white. This ancestral bodily exile represents the other exile: the black soul is an Africa from which the Negro, in the midst of the cold buildings of white culture and technics, is exiled. And ever-present but concealed ne? gritude haunts him, rubs against him; he himself rubs up against its silky wing; it palpitates
and is spread throughout him like his searching memory and his loftiest demands, like his shrouded, betrayed child- hood, and like the childhood of his race and the call of the earth, like the swarming of insects and the indivisible sim- plicity of Nature, like the pure legacy of his ancestors, and like the Ethics that ought to unify his truncated life. But if he turns around to look squarely at his ne? gritude, it vanishes in smoke; the walls of white culture--its silence, its words, its mores--rise up between it and him:
Give me back my black dolls, so that I may play with them My instinct's simple games
that I may remain in the shadow of its laws
cover up my courage
my audacity
feel me as me
me renewed through what I was yesterday
yesterday
without complexity
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yesterday
when the uprooting hour came . . .
they have ransacked the space that was mine
However, the walls of this culture prison must be broken down; it will be necessary to return to Africa some day: thus the themes of return to the native country and of re-descent into the glaring hell of the black soul are indissolubly mixed up in the vates of ne? gritude. A quest is involved here, a systematic stripping and anasce`se* accompanied by a continual effort of investigation. And I shall call this poetry "Orphic" because the Negro's tireless descent into himself makes me think of Orpheus going to claim Eurydice from Pluto. Thus, through an exceptional stroke of poetic good luck, it is by letting himself fall into trances, by rolling on the ground like a possessed man tormented by himself, by singing of his angers, his regrets, or his hates, by exhibiting his wounds, his life torn between "civilization" and his old black substratum; in short, by becoming most lyrical, that the black poet is most certain of creating a great collective poetry. By speaking only of himself, he speaks for all Negroes; it is when he seems smothered by the serpents of our culture that he is the most revolutionary, for he then undertakes to ruin systematically the European knowledge he has acquired, and this spiritual destruction symbolizes the great future taking-up of arms by which black men will destroy their chains. A single example will suffice to clarify this last remark.
In the twentieth century, most ethnic minorities have passionately endeavored to resuscitate their national languages while struggling for their independence. To be able to say that one is Irish or Hungarian, one must belong to a collectivity which has the benefit of a broad economic and political autonomy; but to be Irish, one must also think Irishy which means above all: think in Irish. The specific traits of a Society correspond exactly to the untranslatable
* The ascetic's movement of interiorization. --Translator.
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locutions of its language. The fact that the prophets of ne? gritude are forced to write their gospel in French means that there is a certain risk of dangerously slowing down the efforts of black men to reject our tutelage. Having been dispersed to the four corners of the earth by the slave trade, black men have no common language; in order to incite the oppressed to unite, they must necessarily rely on the words of the oppressor's language. And French is the language that will furnish the black poet with the largest audience, at least within the limits of French colonization. It is in this goose-pimply language--pale and cold like our skies, and which Mallarme? said was "the neutral language
par excellence, since our spirit demands an attenuation of variegation and of all excessively brilliant color"--in this language which is half dead for them, that Damas, Diop, Laleau, Rabe? arivelo are going to pour the fire of their skies and of their hearts; it is through this language alone that they can communicate; like the sixteenth-century scholars who understood each other only in Latin, black men can meet only on that trap-covered ground that the white man has prepared for them. The colonist has arranged to be the eternal mediator between the colonized; he is there--always there--even when he is absent, even in the most secret meetings. And since words are ideas, when the Negro declares in French that he rejects French culture, he accepts with one hand what he rejects with the other; he sets up the enemy's thinking-apparatus in himself, like a crusher. This would not matter: except that this syntax and vocabulary--forged thousands of miles away in another epoch to answer other needs and to designate other objects--are unsuitable to furnish him with the means of speaking about himself, his own anxieties, his own hopes. The French language and French thought are analytic. What would happen if the black spirit were above all synthetic? The rather ugly term "ne? gritude" is one of the few black contributions to our dictionary. But after all, if this "ne? gritude" is a definable or at least a describable concept, it must subsume other more elementary concepts
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which correspond to the immediate fundamental ideas directly involved with Negro consciousness. But where are the words to describe them? How well one understands the Haitian poet's complaint:
This obsessing heart which does not correspond To my language, or to my customs,
And on which encroach, like a clinging-root, Borrowed feelings and the customs
Of Europe, feel this suffering
And this despair--equal to no other--
Of ever taming with words from France This heart which came to me from Senegal.
It is not true, however, that the black man expresses himself in a "foreign" language, since he is taught French from childhood and since he is perfectly at ease when he thinks in the terms of a technician, of a scholar, or of a politician. Rather, one must speak about the slight but patent difference that separates what he says from what he would like to say, whenever he speaks about himself. It seems to him that a Northern Spirit steals his ideas from him, bends them slightly to mean more or less what he wanted; that white words drink his thoughts as sand drinks blood. If he suddenly gorges himself, if he pulls himself together and takes a step backward, there are the sounds lying prostrate in front of him--strange: half signs and half things. He will not speak his ne? gritude with precise, efficacious words which hit the target every time. He will not speak his ne? gritude in prose. As everyone knows, every
poetic experience has its origin in this feeling of frustration that one has when confronted with a language that is supposed to be a means of direct communication.
The reaction of the speaker frustrated by prose is in effect what Bataille calls the holocaust of words. As long as we can believe that a preestablished harmony governs the relation- ship between a word and Being, we use words without seeing them, with blind trust; they are sensory organs, mouths, hands, windows open on the world. As soon as we experience a first frustration, this chattering falls beyond us;
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we see the whole system, it is no more than an upset, out-of-order mechanism whose arms are still flailing to INDICATE EXISTENCE in emptiness; in one fell swoop we pass judgment on the foolish business of naming things; we understand that language is in essence prose, and that prose is in essence failure; Being stands erect in front of us like a tower of silence, and if we still want to catch it, we can do so only through silence: "evoke, in an intentional shadow, the object tu by allusive words, never direct, reducing themselves to the same silence. "1 No one has better stated that poetry is an incantatory attempt to suggest Being in and by the vibratory disappearance of the word: by insisting on his verbal impotence, by making words mad, the poet makes us suspect that beyond this chaos which cancels itself out, there are silent densities; since we cannot keep quiet, we must make silence with language. From Mallarme? to the Surrealists, the final goal of French poetry seems to me to have been this autodestruction of language. A poem is a dark room where words are knocking themselves about, quite mad. Collisions in the air: they ignite each other with their fire and fall down in flames.
It is in this perspective that we must situate the efforts of the "black evangelists/' They answer the colonist's ruse with a similar but inverse ruse: since the oppressor is present in the very language that they speak, they will speak this language in order to destroy it. The contemporary European poet tries to dehumanize words in order to give them back to nature; the black herald is going to de-Frenchify them; he will crush them, break their usual associations, he will violently couple them
with little steps of caterpillar rain
with little steps like mouthfiils of milk
with little steps like ball-bearings
with little steps like seismic shocks 2 Yams in the soil stride like gaps of stars . . .
Only when they have regurgitated their whiteness does he adopt them, making of this ruined language a solemn,
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sacred super-langauge, Poetry. Only through Poetry can the black men of Tenanarive and of Cayenne, the black men of Port-au-Prince and of Saint-Louis, communicate with each other in private. And since French lacks terms and concepts to define ne? gritude, since ne? gritude is silence, these poets will use "allusive words, never direct, reducing themselves to the same silence'' in order to evoke it. Short-circuits of language: behind the flaming fall of words, we glimpse a great black mute idol. It is not only the black man's self-portrayal that seems poetic to me; it is also his personal way of utilizing the means of expression at his disposal. His position incites him to do it: even before he thinks of writing poetry, in him the light of white words is refracted, polarized, and altered. This is nowhere more manifest than in his use of two connected terms, "white" and "black," that cover both the great cosmic division of day and night
and the human conflict between the native and the colonist. But it is a connection based on a hierarchical system: by giving the Negro this term, the teacher also gives him a hundred language habits which consecrate the white man's rights over the black man. The Negro will learn to say "white like snow" to indicate innocence, to speak of the blackness of a look, of a soul, of a deed. As soon as he opens his mouth, he accuses himself, unless he persists in upset- ting the hierarchy. And if he upsets it in French, he is already poetizing: can you imagine the strange savor that an expression like "the blackness of innocence" or "the darkness of virtue" would have for us? That is the savor which we taste on every page of this book, when, for example, we read:
Your round, shining, black satin breasts . . . this white smile
of eyes
in the face's shadow
awaken in me this evening
deaf rhythms . . .
which intoxicate, there in Guine? e, our sisters
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black and naked
and inspire in me
this evening
black twilights heavy with sensual anxiety for
the soul of the black country where the ancients are sleeping
lives and speaks
this evening
in uneasy strength, along the small of your back . . .
Throughout this poem, black is color; better still, light. Its soft diffuse radiance dissolves our habits; the black country where the ancients are sleeping is not a dark hell: it is a land of sun and fire. Then again, in another connection, the superiority of white over black does not express only the superiority that the colonist claims to have over the native: more profoundly, it expresses a universal adoration of day as well as our night terrors, which also are universal. In this sense, these black men are reestablishing the hiararchy they have just upset. They don't want to be poets of night, poets of vain revolt and despair: they give the promise of dawn; they greet
the transparent dawn of a new day.
At last, the black man discovers, through the pen, his baleful sense of foreboding:
Nigger black like misery
one of them, and then another, cries out:
Deliver me from my blood's night . . .
Thus the word black is found to contain all Evil and all Good; it covers up almost unbearable tension between two contradictory classifications: solar hierarchy and racial hier- archy. It gains thereby an extraordinary poetry, like
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self-destructive objects from the hands of Duchamp and the Surrealists; there is a secret blackness in white, a secret whiteness in black, a vivid flickering of Being and of Nonbeing which is perhaps nowhere expressed as well as in this poem of Ce? saire's:
My tall wounded statue, a stone in its fore- head; my great inattentive dayfleshwith pitiless spots, my great night flesh with day spots.
The poet will go even further. He writes:
Our beautiful faces like the true operative power of negation.
Behind this abstract eloquence evoking Lautre? amont is seen an extremely bold and subtle attempt to give some sense to black skin and to realize the poetic synthesis of the two faces of night. When David Diop says that the Negro is "black like misery," he makes black represent deprivation of light. But Ce? saire develops and goes into this image more deeply: night is no longer absence, it is refusal. Black is not color, it is the destruction of this borrowed clarity which falls from the white sun. The revolutionary Negro is negation because he wishes to be complete nudity: in order to build his Truth, he must first destroy others' Truth. Black faces--these night memories which haunt our days-- embody the dark work of Negativity which patiently gnaws at concepts. Thus, by a reversal which curiously recalls that of the humiliated Negro--insulted and called "dirty nig-
ger" when he asserts his rights--it is the privative aspect of darkness that establishes its value. Liberty is the color of night.
Destructions, autos-da-fe of language, magic symbolism, ambivalence of concepts: all the negative aspects of modern poetry are here. But it is not a matter of some gratuitous game. The black man's position, his original "rending," the
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alienation that a foreign way of thinking imposes on him, all oblige him to reconquer his existential unity as a Negro--or, if you prefer, the original purity of his plan-- through a gradual asce`se, beyond the language stage. Ne? gritude--like liberty--is a point of departure and an ultimate goal: it is a matter of making ne? gritude pass from the immediate to the mediate, a matter of thematicizing it. The black man must therefore find death in white culture in order to be reborn with a black soul, like the Platonic philosopher whose body embraces death in order to be reborn in truth. This dialectical and mystical return to origins necessarily implies a method. But this method is not presented as a set of rules to be used in directing the spirit. Rather, it becomes onewith whoever applies it; it is the dialectical law of successive transformations which lead the Negro to coincidence with himself in ne? gritude. It is not a matter of his knowing, or of his ecstatically tearing himself away from himself, but rather of both discovering and becoming what he is.
There are two convergent means of arriving at this primordial simplicity of existence: one is objective, the other subjective. The poets in our anthology sometimes use one, sometimes the other, and sometimes both of them together. In effect, there exists an objective ne? gritude that is expressed by the mores, arts, chants, and dances of the African populaces. As a spiritual exercise, the poet will prescribe allowing himself to be fascinated by primitive rhythms, letting his thoughts run in traditional forms of black poetry. Many of the poems included here are called tam-tams, because they borrow from the nighttime tambou- rine players a percussive rhythm which is sometimes sharp and regular, sometimes torrential and bounding. The poetic act, then, is a dance of the soul; the poet turns round and round like a dervish until he faints; he has established his ancestors' time in himself, he feels it flowing with its peculiar violent pulls; he hopes to "find" himself in this rhythmic pulsation; I shall say that he tries to make himself "possessed" by his people's ne? gritude; he hopes that the
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echoes of his tam-tam will come to awaken timeless instincts sleeping within him. Upon leafing through this collection, one will get the impression that the tam-tam tends to become & genre of black poetry, just as the sonnet or the ode was a genre of our poetry. Others, like Rabemanan- jara, will be inspired by royal proclamations. Still others will draw from the popular well of the Haintenys. The calm center of this maelstrom of rhythms, chants, shouts, is the poetry of Birago Diop, in all its majestic simplicity: it alone is at rest because it comes directly from Griot narratives and oral tradition. Almost all the other attempts have something contorted, taut, and desperate about them because they aim at becoming a part of folkloric poetry rather than emanating from it. But however far he may be from "the black country where ancestors sleep," the black man is closer than we are to the great period when, as Mallarme? says, "the word creates Gods. " It is partically impossible for our poets to resume some closeness with popular traditons: ten centuries of scholarly poetry separate them from such traditions. Furthermore, folkloric inspiration is drying up: at the very best, we could only imitate its simplicity from a distance.
The black men of Africa, on the contrary, are still in the great period of mythical fecundity, and French-language black poets are not just using their myths as a form of diversion as we use our epic poems:* they allow themselves to be spellbound by them so that the end of the incantation, ne? gritude--magnificently evoked--may surge forth. This is why I call this method of "objective poetry" magic, or charm.
Ce? saire, on the contrary, chose to backtrack into himself. Since this Eurydice will disappear in smoke if Black Orpheus turns around to look back on her, he will descend the royal road of his soul with his back turned on the bottom of the grotto; he will descend below words and meanings-- "in order to think of you, I have placed all words on the
* Sartre uses the word chansons for what I have translated as "epic poems. " He is referring, of course, to the medieval French epic poems, the chansons de geste. --Translator.
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mountain-of-pity"--below daily activities and the plan of "re? pe? tition/' even below the first barrier reefs of revolt, with his back turned and his eyes closed, in order finally to touch with his feet the black water of dreams and desire and to let himself drown in it. * Desire and dream will rise up snarling like a tidal wave; they will make words dance like flotsam and throw them pell-mell, shattered, on the shore.
Words go beyond themselves; and just as the old geography is done for, the high and the low [words] do not allow diversion either toward heaven or toward earth . . . On the contrary, they operate on a strangelyflexiblerange at one level: on the gaseous Level of an organism both solid and liquid, black and white day and night. t
One recognizes the old surrealistic method (automatic writing, like mysticism, is a method: it presupposes an apprenticeship, exercises, a start along the way). One must dive under the superficial crust of reality, of common sense, of reasoning reason, in order to touch the very bottom of the soul and awaken the timeless forces of desire: desire which makes of man a refusal of everything and a love of everything: desire, the radical negation of natural laws and of the possible, a call to miracles; desire which, by its mad cosmic energy, plunges man back into the seething breast of Nature and, at the same time, lifts him above Nature through the affirmation of his Right to be unsatisfied. Furthermore, Ce? saire is not the first Negro to take this road. Before him, Etienne Le? ro had founded Le? gitime De? fense.
* Sartre seems to have confused his images here, since Orpheus was instructed not to look back while he was ascending from Hades, after he had retrieved Eurydice from Pluto. --Translator.
t The French notion of "automatic writing" was so completely untrans- latable that I have tried simply to give an English approximation of its sense. For those who care to consult the original French text, it runs as follows: "Les mots se de? passent, c'est bien vers un ciel et une terre que le haut et le bas ne permettent pas de distraire, c'en est fait aussi de la vieille ge? ographie . . .