No More Learning

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 . . . Au contraire, un e? tagement curieusement respirable s'ope`re re? el mais au niveau. Au Niveau gazeux de l'organisme solide et liquide, blanc et noir jour et nuit. "--Translator.
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"Le? gitime De? fense" says Senghor, "was more a cultural movement than a review. Starting from the Marxist analysis of the society of the "Islands," it discovered, in the Antilles, descendants of African Negro slaves, who had been kept in the dulling condition of the proletarian for three centuries. It affirmed that only surrealism could deliver him from his taboos and express him in his entireness. "
However, if one compares Le? ro with Ce? saire, one cannot help being struck by their dissimilarities, and this compar- ison may allow us to measure the abyss that prevents a black revolutionary from utilizing white surrealism. Le? ro was the precursor; he invented the exploitation of surrealism as a "miraculous weapon" and an instrument for reconnaissance, a sort of radar with which one probes the depths of the abyss. But his poems are student exercises, they are mere imitations: they do not go beyond themselves; rather, they close in on each other:
The ancient heads of hair
Glue to the branchesfloorsof empty seas
Where your body is only a memory
Where Spring trims its nails
Helix of your smile thrown far away
On the houses we will have nothing to do with . . .
"The helix of your smile," "the spring which trims its nails": we recognize in these the preciousness and gratuitous- ness of surrealistic imagery, the eternal process that consists of throwing a bridge between two extremely unrelated or separated terms and hoping--without really believing--that this "throw of the dice" will uncover some hidden aspect of Being. It does not seem to me that, either in this poem or in the others, Le? ro demands the liberation of the black man: at the very most he lays claim to a categorical liberation of the imagination. In the completely abstract game, no combina- tion of words evokes Africa even remotely. If these poems were taken out of the anthology and the name of their author hidden, I would defy anyone at all, white or black, not to attribute them to a European contributor to La Re? volution
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surre? aliste or Le Minotaure. The purpose of Surrealism is to rediscover--beyond race and condition, beyond class, behind the fire of language--dazzling silent darknesses which are no longer opposed to anything, not even to day, because day and night and all opposites are blended in them and suppressed; consequently, one might speak of the impassiveness and the impersonality of the Surrealist poem, just as there is a Parnassian impassiveness and impersonal- ity.
A poem by Ce? saire, on the contrary, bursts and wheels around like a rocket; suns turning and exploding into new suns come out of it: it is a perpetual going-beyond. It is not a question of the poem's becoming part of the calm unity of opposites, but rather of making one of the opposites in the "black-white" couple expand like a phallus in its opposition to the other. The density of these words thrown into the air like stones from a volcano is found in ne? gritude, which is defined as being against Europe and colonization. What Ce? saire destroys is not all culture but rather white culture; what he brings to light is not desire for everything but rather the revolutionary aspirations of the oppressed Negro; what he touches in his very depths is not the spirit but a certain specific, concrete form of humanity. With this in mind, one can speak here about engaged and even directed automatic writing, not because there is any meditative intervention but because the words and images perpetually translate the same torrid obsession. The white Surrealist finds within himself the trigger; Ce? saire finds within himself the fixed inflexibility of demands and feeling. Le? ro's words are feebly organized around vague
general themes through expansion and a relaxing of logical ties; Ce? sair's words are pressed against each other and cemented by his furious passion. Between the most daring comparisons and between the most widely separated terms runs a secret thread of hate and hope. 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
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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
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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
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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
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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 . . .
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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:
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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
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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.
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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?