Cadastre by Aimé Césaire

First published: 1961 (English translation, 1973)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Cadastre was formed from elements of two earlier poetic collections: forty of the seventy-two poems published in Soleil cou coupé (1948; Beheaded Sun, 1983) and all ten of the poems in Corps perdu (1950; Disembodied, 1983)—the latter of which were illustrated with thirty-two engravings by Pablo Picasso. Increasingly conscious of the leadership role he was taking in Caribbean politics, poet Aimé Césaire revised his texts thoroughly to make them more accessible. He shortened many poems, removed obscure words and free-associative imagery, eliminated obscenity, and reduced the prominence of elitist elements that presented the poet as a visionary prophet or as a sacrificial victim whose death would help redeem his people. He also added references to the black struggle for freedom, opportunity, and justice in Africa and the United States.

Césaire was born to a middle-class family in Basse-Pointe, a small coastal town near the volcano Mont Pelé (which had erupted in 1902, destroying the city of Saint-Pierre), in the French overseas territory of Martinique, an island at the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea. He moved to the capital, Fort-de-France, in 1924. A brilliant student, Césaire was sent to the famous Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris in 1931 to prepare for admission to the elite teacher-training institution, l’École Normale Supérieure. In Paris, he befriended artist Pablo Picasso and many of the French Surrealist poets.

In 1934, Césaire and the French Guyanese poet Léon-Gontran Damas founded L’Étudiant noir (“the black student”), a newspaper that helped unite black people from France, Africa, North and South America, and the French island colonies in the international negritude movement. Along with Damas and Césaire, the third major leader of that movement was Léopold Senghor, who became a famous poet and served as the first president of the newly independent nation of Sénégal from 1961 until 1980. At the literary salon of sisters Paulette Nardal and Jane Nardal, Césaire, Damas, and Senghor met and were strongly influenced by the French-speaking poets of the Harlem Renaissance, notably Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen. The concluding chapter of McKay’s novel Banjo (1928) advocated restoring black people’s connections to their cultures of origin, thereby recovering a pride and self-respect crushed by centuries of slavery, prejudice, and white hatred.

Members of the negritude movement adopted one of two contrasting programs: either glorifying African precolonial history and values while accepting the benefits of assimilation to white European culture (a course favored by Senghor) or militantly denouncing white injustice and cruelty and insisting on black autonomy, equality, and civil rights within a white-dominated society (a course adopted by members of the Harlem Renaissance and by the Haitian Frantz Fanon). In the United States, black militancy split into separate tendencies that advocated either violent resistance (Malcolm X, before his trip to Africa) or peaceable advocacy and protest (Martin Luther King, Jr.).

A cadastre is an official, line-by-line record of the ownership of various pieces of land. For Césaire, a descendent of slaves displaced into the black diaspora, the title suggests the mental act of taking stock of one’s situation, to try to decide where one belongs. As is revealed by the gradual, fascinating development of Cadastre from two earlier poetic collections, Césaire’s poetry suggests that he felt torn between the two opposing strategies of negritude. For him, the strategies represented contrary vocations: either to pursue a cozy, Europeanized intellectual elitism as a world-class poet or to devote himself to a painful, often frustrating struggle in solidarity with his mainly poor, often illiterate black brothers from Martinique.

In principle, Césaire’s message was consistently militant, but his medium—employing an enormously rich vocabulary, complicated syntax, and surrealistic images—remained inaccessible to most readers. Most people in Martinique were unequipped to understand his masterpiece, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939, 1947, 1956; Memorandum on My Martinique, 1947; better known as Return to My Native Land, 1968), which announced his definitive return home in 1939. Until 1945, the island was ruled by Vichy government officials, who collaborated with Adolf Hitler. They tried to suppress Césaire’s journal Tropiques, which advocated full independence for the French Caribbean colonies.

After liberation, Césaire represented Martinique in the French Chamber of Deputies from 1945 to 1993, while simultaneously serving as mayor of Fort-de-France until 2001. Because he realized that the great majority of those he represented wanted to remain a part of France, Césaire reluctantly accepted the dependent status of an overseas department (D.O.M.) in 1946. Later, however, he consistently advocated for independence, despite the serious economic and military weakness of Martinique. He was a communist until 1956, when he rejected the continued Stalinization of Soviet communism (as evidenced in the invasion of Hungary by tanks and the establishment of a puppet government there in 1956). He then founded his own, autonomous Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (1958). Its newspaper, Le Progressiste, was the major source of information about Césaire’s political activities and positions. From 1978 until 1993, Césaire was also affiliated with but not integrated into the French Socialist Party.

Throughout Cadastre, Césaire’s poems are characterized by long lines of variable length, without rhymes, inspired by earlier models such as the Bible and the works of Walt Whitman, Paul Claudel, and Saint-John Perse. This form suggests poetic freedom and creative energy. To compensate for the resulting irregularity, Césaire uses many verbal repetitions: sometimes of entire lines but more often of a word or phrase at the beginning of a series of lines (anaphora) or at the ends (epiphora). For example, anaphora appears in twenty-six of the forty-three lines of “Ex-voto pour un naufrage” (“Ex-voto for a Shipwreck”): The poem repeats tam-tam or tam-tams fourteen times, je five times, Roi four times, and roulez three times.

As he also does in Return to My Native Land, Césaire in Cadastre frequently adopts a sarcastic tone while seemingly accepting humiliation, oppression, and injustice for himself and his people. Bizarre, dehumanizing metaphors (“I am the king’s sunshade”) suggest the process of enslavement. The speaker implicitly associates himself with subhuman or monstrous beings. He continually alludes to physical or mental suffering, including dismemberment evoked by mentioning separate body parts—especially internal organs. Suggesting that the sleeping giant of the oppressed black peoples has the potential to awake to violent rebellion, Césaire frequently refers to convulsive disturbances in nature—downpours, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions—as well as human dreams of revenge.

Césaire deploys a rich vocabulary of the names of plants and animals from various continents, and of place names and heroes’ names from throughout the lands of the black diaspora. These lands include Africa, from which tens of millions of slaves were taken, and the Americas, where they were forced to labor on plantations as chattels of whites and mulattoes, and the role of such lands in Cadastre reflects the poet’s sense of solidarity with the international black community. Césaire’s international vocabulary is evident in poems from Beheaded Sun that include “Mississipi” [sic], “Blues de la pluie” (“Raining Blues,” Harlem), and “Ex-voto for a Shipwreck” (denouncing forced labor in the diamond mines of South Africa and praising the great Zulu warrior chief Chaka). “Depuis Akkad, depuis Elam, depuis Sumer” (“Since Akkad, Since Elam, Since Sumer”) refers to ancient Babylonia, where captive slaves were known in 2,100 b.c.e., while “Ode à la Guinée” (“Ode to Guinea”) pays tribute to the legendary African ancestral home of displaced slaves.

The poems of Disembodied denounce the oppression of black people in generalized terms. These include “Mot” (“Word”) and the work’s title poem, which both focus on the racial slur nègre as a concentrated emblem of white racism and cruelty. In the concluding “Dit d’errance” (“Lay of the Rover”), the poet takes on himself all the sufferings of his race, but in the four previous poems—“Disembodied,” “Ton portrait” (“Your Portrait”), “Sommation” (Summation), and “Naissances” (“Births”)—the poetic self fuses with nature, becoming transformed. Like a nature god, the poetic voice sends forth the river, the tides, and the ocean and then summons the entire Caribbean archipelago to gather around him. Time returns to free him, and he plants the magical tree that heralds a new world.

A. James Arnold has demonstrated at length that, during his reworking of the earlier collections to combine them in Cadastre, Césaire downplayed the European and Judeo-Christian elements of his extensive Parisian education, such as references to the Babylonian captivity of the Jews in Revelation 13-18, which disguised imperial Rome as Babylon, the Great Whore. “Disembodied” remains Césaire’s strongest, most triumphant affirmation of negritude in the double sense of the power and beauty of African civilization and the undying resolve of members of the contemporary black diaspora to achieve autonomy.

Bibliography

Arnold, A. James. Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. One of the best, most comprehensive studies of Césaire’s art and ideas, of the evolution of the collections of verse that became Cadastre, and of ways that the key poems in that work function as apocalyptic visions.

Césaire, Aimé. Lost Body. Introduced and translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. New York: Braziller, 1986. Makes available, for the first time since the publication of a limited edition of 219 copies in 1950, the record of the collaboration between Césaire and Pablo Picasso, who contributed thirty-two engravings to accompany the ten poems. Césaire and Picasso were communist militants until 1956. Bilingual edition.

Hurley, E. Anthony. “Link and Lance: Aspects of Poetic Function in Césaire’s Cadastre—An Analysis of Five Poems.” L’Esprit Créateur 32, no. 1 (Spring, 1992): 54-68. Closely reads five of the poems collected in Cadastre in order to draw conclusions about the “poeticness” of Césaire’s poetry.

Scharfman, Ronnie Leah.“Engagement” and the Language of the Subject in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1987. Provides sensitive close readings of three poems from the two parts of Cadastre: “Totem” from Beheaded Sun and “Word” and “Disembodied” from Disembodied. Scharfman’s Lacanian psychoanalytical reading nuances Arnold’s interpretation in terms of a conventional heroic-quest narrative, but at the cost of dissociating Césaire’s poems from their social and historical context.

Suk, Jeannie. Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Césaire, Glissant, Condé. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Reads Césaire and two other francophone Antilles writers as existing on the margins of postcolonialism and therefore useful for understanding what does and does not count as postcolonial, as well as the political and cultural meanings and uses of that term.