Читать книгу Resolutely Black - Aimé Césaire - Страница 7

It may surprise readers that in France, in the early 2000s, Aimé Césaire was barely known and read outside academic circles. To some, his name was synonymous with the French policy of assimilation, which translated into greater dependency and increased inequalities in the larger French Republic. This is due to the role he played in pushing through the law of departmentalization in 1946, which transformed former slave colonies into overseas departments at a time when colonized peoples were fighting for independence. Although I agree with critics of this law, I was nonetheless surprised that Césaire’s other works – his Discourse on Colonialism, his 1956 letter of resignation from the French Communist Party (a scathing critique of the French left’s indifference to race, which still resonates today), his biography of Toussaint Louverture, his speeches at the National Assembly, where he had always fought French racist and neocolonial policies – was forgotten. To me, Césaire remained a prominent figure of anticolonialism. He was also familiar to me on a more personal level. Both my paternal grandfather and my father worked closely with him, the former having fought with him to end the colonial status of Guadeloupe, Guiana, Martinique, and Réunion, and the latter in the 1970s to counter the French colonial policies that continued to reign in these lands. I had often seen him at political meetings in Paris but we were never close. Shocked by his increasing marginalization in France, I wrote him a letter in July 2004. I brought up his ties to my family and asked if I could interview him. Ten days later, I received a phone call from his assistant. She told me Césaire was surprised I wasn’t there yet, of course he was willing to talk to me, and, given his age, I should waste no time.

A few days later, I was on my way to Fort-de-France, Martinique. Over the course of several mornings, we met in his office where he had served as mayor for 56 years. This man, with whom I was talking for the first time on a one-to-one basis, was extremely gracious, at once attentive and aloof, shy and friendly, interested but also absent at times. I handed him a few books. He took an immediate interest in two recently reprinted Greek and Latin classics. He had always loved literature from this period, especially Greek tragedies, and nothing had changed. However, he didn’t show too much enthusiasm for the books on history and art. He was quick to ask me exactly what I hoped to achieve and had a hard time believing these interviews would be of interest to anyone. That his writing continued to resonate with people was unthinkable to him, and he was very surprised to hear that the students I had then at Goldsmiths College in London studied his work closely and quoted from it, especially Discourse on Colonialism and Journal of a Homecoming.¹ I told him about the fervor surrounding his work in the United States and that I had heard experts from around the world – Japan, Germany, and the Anglophone Caribbean – discuss it at length at a conference at New York University. This made him smile. I made it clear that he was known, admired, and respected throughout the world. People valued his opinions, his take on matters. Sure, in France he wasn’t the established figure he was elsewhere, but did that surprise him? “No,” he told me, nor did he seem concerned to remedy this. Césaire was skeptical, even disdainful, of awards, recognition, glory. He had chosen to live in Martinique, turning down several opportunities that would have granted him more money or a lavish lifestyle. He was happy on his island. He repeated this several times. However, his feelings toward the French Antilles hadn’t always been so charitable: “to talk about the history of the Antilles, my desire to leave the Antilles for good, I mean, this place on the margins of history, this unspeakable pit of hunger, misery and oppression.”² He had both rejected a romanticized fantasy of the tropical islands, which the famous opening of his Journal of a Homecoming describes as “the starving Antilles, the Antilles pockmarked with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited with alcohol, run aground in the mud of this bay, in the dust of this town ominously grounded,”³ and expressed a deep attachment to Martinique, the “geometric center of love and morality,” as Michel Leiris put it.⁴ Just like Leiris, he sympathized with the people of Martinique, and were it not for this “affective motivation,” he wouldn’t have had any reason to take an interest in “the fate of the cane field worker over that of the dockers in Rouen.”⁵ He also experienced, he said, the anxiety of isolation: “I wasn’t a calm person … I had that Antillean anxiety.”⁶ An anxiety symptomatic of the “unease of a people whose fate is no longer in their own hands, who feel like a mere accessory in a drama of which they should be the protagonist.”⁷ He expressed this again to me in these terms: “My dear friend, it isn’t easy being Antillean. I’m sure it isn’t easy being Réunionese, but that’s the way it is, and we have to assume this with courage, dignity, and, if need be, pride.”

The city shut down at noon, its streets empty and quiet. In La Savane, a large park along the wharf, we saw the headless, paint-smeared statue of Empress Josephine. The French officials had given up on replacing the head, since each time they tried to fix it, the next night it would go missing again. Lining the park’s western edge, on Rue de la Liberté, we strolled past the faded glory of the Bibliothèque Schoelcher, the Musée d’Archéologie Précolombienne et Préhistoire de la Martinique and the Pavillon Bougenot, built in the colonial style. Césaire was very proud of his city, especially the neighborhoods he had modernized by bringing in water and electricity and creating a sewage system. Every Thursday afternoon his driver would take him for a ride through the mountains and along the coast. He invited me to join him. He came with his driver to pick me up and brought with him two books: one on the island’s flora so that he could name the flowers and plants we’d see; the other a work of philosophy since I had asked him about his influences when he was younger. He had the driver stop on several occasions for me to admire a particular view, plant, or tree. He’d tell me the names of the various communes and explain the ties their elected officials had with his party, the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM). We drove up Mount Pelée, which was draped in fog. He expressed his admiration for this place. People would recognize him and greet him with respect from afar. Césaire didn’t come across as someone who would provoke a casual attitude in you. With a distinguished elegance of times past, he wore a suit and tie every day, and no one would dare think you’d ever catch him in a T-shirt and shorts. We drove back down toward the city of Saint-Pierre where he showed me around. The destruction of this city in a matter of minutes on May 8, 1902 from a volcanic eruption at Mount Pelée remains a significant date for Martinique. Historians speak of a death toll of 28,000 – people suffocated, charred, burned alive – a city covered in ash, a boiling sea where those fleeing the lava sought refuge only to drown, an unbearable heat and stench the following days, corpses in the streets and along the port, buildings in ruins. The city known as the “Paris of the Caribbean” for its theaters, its cultural and social life, became a ghost city in no more than a few minutes. This catastrophe robbed the city of its splendor and prestige, which it would never regain. Today it’s a small village that forfeited its status as the capital to Fort-de-France after its destruction. Césaire showed me what remained of the theater, then asked his driver to turn down Fonds-Saint-Denis where a kapok tree stood spreading its majestic branches at the juncture of two roads. Its charred trunk was a reminder of its having been a victim of the 1902 volcanic eruption. But, 50 years later, buds appeared and it started to blossom and grow. Césaire often came to admire this tree, which, more than a century old, didn’t just survive a catastrophe but, with its new growth, proved nature’s indifference to catastrophes. These are the places he liked to visit, letting his mind wander, jotting down lines of poetry, lost in contemplation.

Every morning, between nine and noon, we’d sit down for our interview. He’d tire quickly, due in part to his age but also to the long life he had lived. He had said and written so much, what was there left to explain, justify, defend, argue? “My poetry speaks for me,” he said on more than one occasion. But I wanted to talk about his political work, his less “visible” activity, which hadn’t received as much attention: his analysis of French colonialism. Although rather surprised by this interest initially, he indulged me and also asked me many questions about Africa. After learning that I went there often, that I knew South Africa quite well, he wanted me to talk more about it. Our conversations were unstructured, at times bewilderingly so. They carried on for a few days but then it became clear it was time to leave. I understood that Césaire had told me everything he had wanted to tell me.

There are many reasons I had wanted to interview him. First of all, I wanted to remind people of the role Césaire played for the generation of women and men responsible for dismantling colonialism, a role I judged too soon forgotten. He was also, as I said, someone I had heard about throughout my childhood. He knew my grandfather, Raymond Vergès, very well, the two of them having worked together to transform the colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and Guiana into French departments. Then his work as a deputy of Martinique and leader of the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais made him a familiar name around the house and at political gatherings. He was close with other politicians from Réunion and his party collaborated with leftist parties from the overseas departments on initiatives to democratize the political, social, and cultural life of these territories. I was very familiar with two of his texts: Journal of a Homecoming and Discourse on Colonialism, which I deemed essential reading for understanding decolonization. In short, Césaire was a well-known figure whom I held in great esteem and for whom I had the utmost respect. Once I began talking about my idea to interview Césaire, many people in France, however, claimed to be unfamiliar with his writing and his work. Or they simply thought he had died. I wasn’t too surprised. This was symptomatic of France’s opinion of the overseas departments, whose culture and history remained poorly understood, evoked only in passing with offhand and vague comments. I wished to interview him because I was struck by his relevance for our contemporary moment, which went against popular opinion with its fixation on Frantz Fanon, Patrick Chamoiseau or Édouard Glissant, all important writers who should be appreciated without eclipsing Césaire. In Césaire’s work, being black is a historical phenomenon, one tied directly to Africa and the diaspora of its people. It isn’t a trait, but a perceived difference that adds another dimension to one’s experience, which, though neither better nor worse than that of others, can’t ignore the genealogy of forced slavery, of deportation, of life on the plantation and the birth of new societies whose memory of these events is still very much with us.

As the history of slavery and the slave trade finally emerged as topics of public debate, the time seemed right to return to the texts and speeches of a man who had devoted so much of his thinking to these matters, a man who received a French public school education but on an island that was still colonized by former slaveholders, a man who was later a student in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure, that temple of the French elite. His biography of Toussaint Louverture, his plays, his speeches, and the place Haiti occupies in his work speak to the importance of this history in his writing.⁸ Césaire brought a fresh perspective to debates on the slave trade and slavery, calling attention to the profoundly brutal and inhumane nature of these practices and deeming their consequences irreparable. In this respect, he stood out from others who were calling for reparations, which he feared could turn an event with innumerable consequences into a tidy sum. Césaire’s writing on colonialism also became increasingly relevant in light of other developments in France, such as the law passed in 2005 that required schools to address the benefits of colonization, or the emergence of “Indigènes de la République,”⁹ or the reexamination of France’s past by a growing body of works and documentaries.

I didn’t want to encourage a nostalgic reading of Césaire. Rather, I sought to bring renewed attention to a voice that bore witness to a century, to the fall of colonial empires and to the questions raised by their collapse, to the writing of the history of the “voiceless,” to the vanished of the non-European world.

These interviews present a distillation of Césaire’s thinking on a variety of issues. He told me several times, “I’ve said everything,” to which I didn’t really know how to respond. And then all of a sudden, he’d light up again and read long excerpts from his poems or from one of his plays, or he’d give a lively and detailed response to one of my questions. He had in effect said a lot and, as he liked to recall, he was a poet first. His profoundly original mind, his mental universe shows how he occupied several worlds at once and entertained relations both deeply felt and reimagined with each on a local and global scale. He looked weary, weary from having to explain himself so much over the years and from having been so poorly understood. I could understand this. He’d rather go for a walk on his island, he told me, and see people who didn’t ask him to explain himself but were just happy to talk about the weather, or plants, or other mundane matters. One day, after driving all over the island, he took my hand and told me how hard it was to grow old. He was losing control over his own body, he said. I didn’t know what to say. Speaking openly and honestly about the body’s decline is a taboo he clearly didn’t mind breaking. I was taken aback.

This man known throughout the world kindly responded to people’s requests and welcomed with the utmost courtesy students, artists, politicians, journalists, and even tourists who came to greet him. And he never forgot to ask about their lives as well, especially Martinicans eager to meet him: the person who waited in front of his office to introduce to him his French-born granddaughter, or the one who crossed paths with him in the street and asked him how he was doing. This man whom Martinicans always called “Papa Césaire” – an expression his friend Michel Leiris rightly judged a relic of African cultures where respect and esteem for a well-considered individual elicited the use of a parental term, which the French, for their part, perceived as a symptom of the backwardness of Antilleans – never cut himself off from the world, but didn’t want to be called upon to justify himself. And yet he was kind enough to respond to my questions, which dealt neither with his poetry nor his plays, but rather with more general topics: slavery and reparations, the French Republic and structural racism, the solitude of power.