The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Aimé Césaire
guts of the strange suckling of the sea!” He then details the horrors inflicted upon slaves carried on ships surprised on the high seas after the abolition of the trade. The images of horizontality that signaled the sick colonial society at the beginning of the poem are abruptly countered by a new vertical imagery. The adverb “debout” is repeated seventeen times in strophes 107–108. We shall never know what the original conclusion of the poem was. The sole surviving edited typescript is accompanied by a manuscript conclusion that begins with the last five lines of strophe 108. In an accompanying letter to the editor of Volontés, Césaire called his new ending “more conclusive” than the one he had originally submitted for publication.2 In the penultimate strophe the speaker identifies with the mauvais nègre who calls all of nature into play during his transformation. He enjoins the spirit of the air to take over from an unreliable sun: “encoil yourself,” “devour,” “embrace,” and especially “bind me.” The images of binding by the wind (7 repetitions) complete the series begun by “devour” and “encoil.” The speaker is to be bound to his people in a sacrificial act that sanctifies the transition from individual to collective identity. If the reader has followed the multiple biblical allusions that have sustained the vehicle of this transformation, it becomes clear in the final dramatic strophe that the Holy Spirit of Christianity has been supplanted by an ancient divinity resident in the natural world. This is particularly apparent in the final image of a celestial Dove that, after ritually strangling the speaker with its lasso of stars, bears him up to the heavens. After expressing an earlier desire to drown himself in despair, the speaker utters a final sybilline phrase that brings the poem to its abrupt conclusion: “It is there I will now fish / the malevolent tongue of the night in its still verticity!”
Since 1956 readers of Aimé Césaire’s long poem have had to wrestle with what is, in effect, a palimpsest. On three occasions after the pre-original publication in Volontés, on the eve of World War II, Césaire overwrote the carefully composed poem in a new spirit and with different aims. From 1939 to 1947 Césaire reinforced the existing structure of the 1939 text at its nodal points. In January 1947 the Paris bookseller Brentano’s, who published in New York City during the war, brought out the original French-language edition of the Cahier with an English translation by L. Abel and Y. Goll. André Breton’s preface “A Great Negro Poet” was first printed in Goll’s New York magazine Hémisphères in autumn 1943, then reprinted in Tropiques the following year. A footnote to the Tropiques printing announced the imminent publication of Césaire’s poem in New York (Breton 1944). The three-year delay in publication has been the source of considerable confusion. Moreover, the New York edition never circulated in Paris and was long thought to be identical to one published in Paris by Bordas a few weeks later. Breton’s “A Great Negro Poet” also prefaced the Bordas edition, which reinforced the false assumption of identical texts. Césaire had in fact prepared the Paris edition from a different typescript (no longer extant) that he probably worked on in 1946 as his first poetry collection Les Armes miraculeuses (The Miraculous Weapons) neared publication. Although the Paris text shares the principal characteristics of surrealist metaphor with the New York original edition, it differs significantly from it. With respect to the 1939 text Césaire proceeded in 1947 by accretion, adding new elements to heighten certain effects. At strophe 29, just as the poem is about to move into the second sequence, Césaire added a new block of text, four strophes in the Brentano’s edition and two in the Bordas that are substantially identical except for the stanza breaks. (The sense of choppiness created by division into shorter strophes is a general characteristic of the Brentano’s edition, which Césaire probably did not see prior to publication.) These additions are a clear indicator of Césaire’s desire to reinforce the sense of transition and modulation at two more strategic points in the poem, both of which follow an isolated alexandrine line. It is clear from his work on the Bordas edition that Césaire continued to work on the architectonics of the 1939 “Notebook” well into 1947.3
In October 1943, after revising the Volontés text of the “Notebook,” Césaire wrote in Tropiques that to “Maintain Poetry” one had to: “defend oneself against social concerns by creating a zone of incandescence, on the near side of which, within which there flowers in terrible security the unheard blossom of the “I”; to strip all material existence in silence and in the high glacial fires of humor; whether by the creation of a zone of fire or by the creation of a zone of frozen silence; to conquer through revolt the free part where one may summon one’s self intact, such are the exigencies which for the past century have guided every poet” (Césaire 1943b). This statement of poetic purpose harmonizes perfectly with the essay on Lautréamont that Césaire had published in February 1943: “By way of the image one goes toward the infinite. Lautréamont established this as a definitive truth” (Césaire 1943a). The Brentano’s text, completed when the outcome of World War II was still in doubt, became the most searingly surrealist version of Césaire’s poem.
During the four succeeding years Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and Communist Deputy from Central Martinique to the constituent assembly of the Fourth Republic. He co-sponsored the 1946 law that transformed his native land legally from a colony to an overseas département of France. As mayor of Fort-de-France he found himself dealing with the most troublesome infrastructure problems of the rundown colonial capital he had described in such disgusting terms a decade earlier. At home he struggled with the central government’s reluctance to honor its commitments to the new département, while it introduced a new level of French-born administrators who brought with them prejudices alien to creole society. In the Chamber of Deputies he soon found himself and his colleagues on the left overwhelmed by the Gaullist majority who would do no more than was absolutely necessary to improve conditions in the former colonies. As a member of an anti-capitalist political party that had criticized the surrealist style of his first collection of poetry, The Miraculous Weapons, in 1946, he found himself duty-bound to introduce in 1947 the social issues he had eschewed in 1943. These constraints brought about one further, and major, modification of the text of the Bordas edition of the Notebook. For the first time, the poem is framed by a new initial strophe that is counterbalanced by four short strophes introduced between 108 and 109. Few readers of the Notebook realize that the powerful strophe beginning “Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it. I detest the flunkies of order …” (Césaire 1983) did not exist prior to the first Paris edition of the poem. Who is this “I” who denounces a repressive social order? Where does he come from? The interjection of this strong first-person political statement in the initial strophe of this and all subsequent versions unbalances the equilibrium so carefully established in 1939 between the anonymous throng in the first sequence and the eventual emergence of a first-person subject in the twenty-fifth strophe. New political allusions deflect the reader’s attention away from the intensely subjective character of the speaker’s transformation in the “Notebook.” The four strophes that complete this new framing device likewise mask the spiritual nature of the speaker’s quest by orienting our reading toward a quite different context. They slow down the original rapidity of the conclusion and set up constraints on meaning, effectively blocking the quest narrative that had carried the poem forward from 1939 to the Brentano’s edition early in 1947.
Whereas the two 1947 editions were revised exclusively by the addition of new material to the 1939 preoriginal, inflecting and intensifying its effects, the 1956 edition excised much of that same material and substituted for it blocks of text that would align the poem with Césaire’s new political position, which embraced the immediate decolonization of Africa in militant tones. Most notably the visible traces of a spiritual discourse were obliterated: a “catholic love” in 1939 became “love” in the New York edition, then a “tyrannical love” in the Bordas text. Onan disappeared altogether, along with the most obvious markers of the spiritual network of metaphors. The sexual metaphors that characterized the most carnal passages depicting the speaker’s union with nature were replaced by new material that emphasized the appalling condition of humble laborers. A critical examination of these extensive cuts reveals the underlying purpose of Césaire’s new approach (Arnold 2008). He removed nearly all the spiritual connotations (apocalypse, last judgment), attenuated the racialist discourse as well as several strophes that were self-consciously absurdist, and the majority of the passages marked by free associative metaphor