Tracing the païdeuma in Aimé Césaire’s poetry: From ‘Solar Throat Slashed (Soleil Cou-Coupé)’ to ‘Cadaster (Cadastre)’

Abstract

In his book Aime Cesaire: Une traversee paradoxale du siecle , the creoliste Raphael Confiant (1993) harshly criticizes the apparent disassociation between the former deputees revolutionary poetics and his moderate, even ineffectual, political policies. Other critics, including Auguste Armet (1973) and Lilyan Kesteloot (1992) also note the paradox between the poet's inspiration of the African independence and American Black Power movements and his failure to achieve autonomy for his own island nation of Martinique. James Arnold (1981:269) argues that the new independence of African nations of the early 1960s, in contrast with the lack of political change in Martinique, brought about a crisis for the negritude prophet of political revolution that led him to abandon poetry for the theater. In his discussion of Cesaire's (1967) play A Season in the Congo (Une saison au Congo), Jacques Corzani (1978:17) writes that the poet-turned-playwright seemed to have renounced the term and the ideology of negritude beginning in 1971. I believe that Cesaire underwent an even earlier disillusionment with negritude as a worldwide movement of black liberation. The term first appeared in 19391 in Cesaire's (1983) Notebook of a Return to the Native Land ( Cahier d'un retour au pays natal), but by the early 1960s the poet realized that the literary and political movement that negritude had engendered was being superseded. It was during this critical period that Cesaire edited his 1948 collection of poetry Solar Throat Slashed (Soleil cou-coupe) for its republication in the 1961 volume Cadaster (Cadastre) (both in Cesaire 1983).