Return to My Native Land by Aimé Césaire

First published: 1939, as Cahier d’un retour au pays natal; translated as Return to My Native Land, 1968; English translation collected as Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, in Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, 1983

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

Return to My Native Land is an extended lyric meditation (1,055 lines in the original French). Aimé Césaire wrote the first version in the late 1930’s, having completed his studies in France, upon his return to his native Martinique (revised versions appeared in 1947 and 1956). Although the general mode of the poem is lyric, it mixes modes frequently. It has some epic qualities, especially evidenced by the narrator who, as an epic hero should, is trying to embody in himself the best qualities of his race. Further, about half the poem is written in prose.

The poem can be generally broken down into three parts. The first part is an examination of the poet’s native Martinique, and particularly its capital, Fort-de-France. In the second part, he reacts, often negatively, to the people and history of this land. In the third, he learns not only to accept but also to embrace the people and spirit of his native land.

Césaire is often associated with the French Surrealist poets, and even a brief glance at the poem reveals why. In the first full paragraph, he tells a cop to “Beat it”; then, in a quick rush of images, he turns toward paradises that are lost to such people as the cop, nourishes the wind while rocked by a thought, and unlaces monsters—among other things. Such images have the impossible, dreamlike quality characteristic of Surrealism, and this quality keeps up throughout the poem. Overall, the poem does have a narrative shape, which is not characteristic of Surrealism, and as these images in the beginning suggest, the overall thrust of the poem involves the speaker’s attempt to unleash the spirit of his native land which has been hidden, and imprisoned, and made to look monstrous by the subjugation of imperialism.

The key phrase in the first section of the poem (most of which is written in prose) is the phrase that begins many paragraphs, and indeed, the poem itself: “At the end of the wee hours.” Literally, this phrase refers to the time immediately before sunrise and suggests someone who has been up most of the night, throughout the wee hours. Figuratively, the phrase suggests someone on the edge of an insight that is slowly dawning. Indeed, what the reader finds in this first section is an exploration of the city which focuses on observations of how the land’s history of rule by France has twisted and distorted it.

The reference to “Josephine, Empress of the French, dreaming way up there above the nigger scum,” is a good example of the type of image to be found in this section. It refers to a statue of Josephine, robed in the manner of the Napoleonic empire, which does in fact stand in the center of the public square of Fort-de-France. The statue seems to pay no attention to the “desolate throng under the sun,” meaning the people of African descent who populate Martinique, and the populace feels no connection to her. She is a symbol of the French empire, and a reminder to the people that their culture and ethnicity is considered second class in this city.

Other recurring phrases also provide a clue to what holds the various images of this section together: “this town sprawled flat,” “this inert town,” the narrator repeats several times, to emphasize the idea that this is a town paralyzed in certain ways by colonialism. Other images of the town crawling, of life lying prostrate, and of dreams aborted also give the sense of a people struggling against a paralyzing burden.

The second section of the poem begins when the narrator thinks about going away and examines the other people he could be. In this section, the poem switches back and forth between free verse and prose. Though not all the possibilities of who he could be are examples of who he would want to be, some are. At one point, for example, he fantasizes himself returning to the “hideousness” of this land’s “sores” and presenting himself as a redeemer, someone who can speak of the freedom that the native population has never known.

This leads him to consider the grim despair of the lives of these people he would save. “Who and what are we?” he asks, and tries to give this question as large (rather than as specific) an answer as possible. He identifies with all the Africans in his past, the ones who lived lives his own European sensibilities consider pagan, as well as with a man who was dragged “on a bloodspattered road/ a rope around his neck”—a clear reference to enslavement.

This section is full of lines in which the narrator seems to be shrinking from his heritage. When he exclaims, “So much blood in my memory!” he is genuinely overwhelmed by the violence of this past. Similarly, when he says, “I may as well confess that we were at all times pretty mediocre dishwashers, shoeblacks without ambition,” he is truly troubled by how effective the colonial occupation of his land has been in aborting the dreams of his people. This disappointment with his people and his land comes to a focus when he finds himself smiling mockingly at a black whom he sees as “comical and ugly”—because he realizes he is looking at this man through the eyes of the imperialists who have controlled his country.

Recognizing this, he is forced to recognize the extent to which he has been participating in the victimization of his native land simply through accepting the values and customs that the French have imposed on them, and he vows to change. “I will deck my natural obsequiousness with gratitude,” he says, meaning that he will no longer bow to the values he has been taught (those values that tell him that the Martinicans of African descent can be viewed as second-class citizens) but will actively embrace his people, happy for who they are.

This last third, with its revolutionary spirit of optimism, contains the lines that were to become central to the artistic and political negritude movement of the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s: “My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of the day . . ./ my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral/ it takes root in the red flesh of the soil/ it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky.” That is to say, his negritude, his blackness, is not a weapon nor a construct to hide behind; rather, it is something organic and alive and a part of the land in which he lives.

From this point on, the tone of the poem is one of almost unbounded acceptance of his land, his people, and his heritage. The pain of “the shackles/ the rack . . ./ the head screw,” which is the type of pain that earlier in the poem seemed almost overwhelming, is not denied here, but it is seen as pain that can be accepted. The work of man, he sees, “has only begun,” and though this presages more hard work ahead, it is a fundamentally positive thing because it means that the present order, in which blacks in his land feel the need to bow down not only to whites, but to white culture, is a temporary and passing order. “The old negritude,” he says several times, “progressively cadavers itself”—meaning the old sense of what it means to be black is dying. The work that the last third of this poem announces as begun, is the work of celebrating all the forms and contradictions of the new negritude (meaning the new way of being a black person) that is being created.

Forms and Devices

One use of form in this poem that a reader cannot help but notice is the way the poem mixes prose and free-verse passages. In the first section, when the narrator is providing a general overview, the dominant mode is prose; in the second, when he is wrestling with his own sensibility, prose and verse are mixed; and in the last section, when he is trying to achieve a new sensibility, the dominant mode is verse.

A closer look at this movement in the poem provides some insight into what the poet is doing. Many of the verse passages, especially early in the poem, are actually lists of images or people. The prose passages also contain such lists, but putting these lists into verse seems to be a way of focusing on each individual item in the list, as if the narrator is trying to clarify his thoughts by examining them closely. As the poem continues, free verse becomes the dominant mode of discourse, as if to call attention not only to what is being talked about, but the language itself. The implication seems to be that this new creative spirit of negritude the narrator is trying to achieve is an inherently poetic spirit, one that will take strength from the rhythms and sounds of language.

A dominant metaphor holding the poem together is the image of an awakening. As already mentioned, the phrase “At the end of the wee hours” implies not only a town that is about to awake but also an artistic sensibility that is on the verge of awakening to the realities of living in an imperialist society. As the poem progresses, he awakens not only to the reality of the history of enslavement, brutality, and cultural subjugation that the people of his native land have endured but also to the vitality of their spirit. While at the beginning of the poem the town is viewed as inert, toward the end the town is viewed as lively and the people as dancing. Not only has the town come awake but the speaker’s sensitivity to the life of the town has also awakened.

Although there are passages (especially some of the prose passages) in which the narrator seems to be Césaire himself, it would be a mistake to assume that the narrator of this poem can, in all cases, be identified as Césaire. Rather, it might be more correct to say that this is a narrator who speaks for Césaire. That is to say, Césaire the poet has created a persona that embodies his own sensibility. To complicate this further, one of the ways that he expresses his sensibility is by speaking of the whole history of his people as contained in himself (as Walt Whitman often did in his poetry). This comes through especially in passages such as the one that begins by discussing “tadpoles hatched” by his “prodigious ancestry” and goes on to list the dead places of his soul that have been created by the uprootings and violence suffered by his ancestors.