Aimé Césaire and the Syntax of Influence

� RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer 2005). © 2005 �

Aimé Césaire and the Syntax of Infl uence

BRENT HAYES EDWARDSRutgers University

ABSTRACT

Much of the criticism on Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal focuseson the poem’s linguistic innovation, especially its use of neologism. This paper considers the poem’s syntax, its unusual and sometimes disorienting ways of organizing the links between sentence elements and between individual po-etic lines. In this regard, the Cahier’s recourse to anaphora is one of its featuresthat has had the most infl uence on the work of other African diasporic writers. Looking in detail at the function of anaphora in the poem, especially in thecrucial lines defi ning the term négritude, I suggest that Césaire’s use of formalrepetition is related both to his translation of a poem by Sterling Brown, andto his reading of Hegel’s concept of “negative determination.” I then read the ways a Césairean poetics of anaphora is appropriated, translated, and revisedby other New World black writers, including Edward Kamau Brathwaite, C. L. R. James, and Will Alexander.

It is by now a commonplace to note that one of the most crucial aspects of Aimé Césaire’s writing is his unique approach to poetic form, what one might call the “syllabic intelligence” (Brathwaite, “History of the Voice” 263) at evidence in his

work—that is, the striking ways his writing handles, rends, and ignites language into regions of resonance that exceed or veer from the mundane. Most often this is-sue has been approached through criticism that highlights what James Clifford hastermed Césaire’s “poetics of neologism,” his recourse to vertiginous lexicographicalprovocations, his predilection for combing the recesses of the dictionary to unearththe word-work that thickens his verse (homonyms, foreign language grafts, invented words, obscure idioms, rare and technical terms, especially botanical and biologi-cal designations) (see Eshleman and Smith 26). This approach tends to focus one’s attention on the most discrete level, the individual word, as a way to track the indis-pensable function of what Césaire calls “l’image révolutionnaire, l’image distante” (“Poésie et connaissance” 166) / “the revolutionary image, the distant image” (“Poetry

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2 � RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES

and Knowledge” 27) in the poetry. In what follows I am going to attempt to pull out from this morphemic focus, in order to ask instead how one might theorize a Cés-airean syllabic intelligence at the level of syntax. It would mean moving beyond the particular word, its resonance and force, in order to take account of the joints of the poem, the ways it propels particular images into juxtaposition, echo, and transforma-tion. Or in Césaire’s own language: “l’image relie l’objet: achève, en me montrant la face inconnue, d’accuser sa singularité, mais par la confrontation et la révélation deses rapports; défi nit non plus son être mais ses potentialités . . .” ‘the image binds the object: achieves, in showing me its unknown side, the accusation of its singularity,but through the confrontation and the revelation of its relations; defi nes no longer its being but its potentialities’ (“La poésie” 5).

Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith have noted that “Césaire’s syntax is dis-jointed in an erudite Mallarmean way, partly as the result of his often unbounded lyricism,” and they stress the hypotactic and anaphoric qualities of so much of his verse, with “each clause introducing a dependent clause, the sequence building up to the last clause which usually brings a climactic opening or an ironical juxtaposition” (25). At the same time, they emphasize the ways that Césaire’s writing breaks from French poetic predecessors, marveling at his “willingness to tamper with French syntax in a way that makes Breton and Eluard sound like Mme de La Fayette” (18).This is particularly apparent in Césaire’s recourse to what Gregson Davis terms “syntactical ambiguity,” often achieved through unusual, even distorted sentenceconstruction and the concomitant withholding of punctuation (above all the comma and period, which are both rare in Césaire’s poetry) (23–24). There are numerous examples at the level of the individual line, such as the following plea in the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: “et toi veuille astre de ton lumineux fondement tirer lémurien du sperme insondable de l’homme la forme non osée” / “and you star please from your luminous grounding extract lemur from the unfathomable sperm of man the undared form” (66). The reader is forced to strain to decipher the syntactical relationsbetween elements, and more than once—at the intrusion of the word “lemurien,” at the deferral of the infi nitive (“tirer”) that accompanies “veuille”—fi nds the apparentlogical progression of the sentence qualifi ed, put off, or displaced.1

In what follows, my aim will be less to catalogue or evaluate such instances of peculiar syntax at the level of the individual line, and more to consider the function of syntactical patterns as they recur from line to line, giving a “rhythmic” pattern to the poetry. I will be concerned here mainly with simple syntactical structures in Césaire’s work, especially its recourse to anaphora, the repetition of the same word orwords at the beginning of successive phrases. Although many critics have noted thatanaphora is central to Césaire’s poetics, almost none have attempted to make sense of its privileged function on a theoretical level in the propositions the verse explores, above all with regard to the articulation of négritude in the Cahier. My title is meant to rrsignal the claim that this characteristic use of anaphora is an element of Césaire’s writ-ing that has had great infl uence among other poets in the African diaspora (perhapseven more than Césaire’s poetics of neologism). At the same time, the title is meant to draw our attention to the complexities of theorizing “infl uence” in such a diasporicorbit. How does one attend to the syntax of infl uence—the particular ways the termimplies a fl ow or exchange of forms, the exportation or imposition of paradigms, an aesthetics of the vanguard, a model of imitative and processive development? To raise these questions with regard to Césaire is of course to return to one of the old debates

BRENT HAYES EDWARDS � 3

about the Négritude movement: the dynamics of infl uence in its formation andtransnational reception. I am doing so precisely to argue against the simplistic ways that infl uence has most commonly been conceptualized in scholarship on Négritude: as unidirectional and formative impact, as positive and exemplary modeling, as the trace of deliberate emulation.

In writing about the interwar period, scholars often assume all too neatly that the New Negro Renaissance in the 1920s “contient déjà en germes les principauxthèmes de la ‘négritude’ ” ‘already contains the seeds of the principal themes of “negritude”’ (Kesteloot 64), without bothering to explain just how those germinalmodels travel from one place to another, and from English to French. What exactlydoes it mean to claim that one writer is “infl uenced” by another, or by the reading of a particular poem or book? Tracing Césaire’s own comments on the issue shows that one cannot presuppose “infl uence” to be an overwhelming force, a model so defi ning and defi nitive that everything that follows is written under its shadow and in its debt. The invocation of “infl uence” may have more to do with political strategy and histori-cal framing—the rhetoric with which a writer situates his work, in hindsight—than with the contextual pressures and reading habits that may have informed a particular scene of writing. At times, Césaire has said that the Négritude generation was deeply“infl uenced” by their anglophone “predecessors” such as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay (Rowell 51); he has even gone so far as to claim that Négritude was “invented” by the writers of the Harlem Renaissance (qtd. in Fabre 149). But at other times, he has rejected any direct input, citing the importance of black literature in English,but describing it as writing “qui ne m’a pas infl uencé d’une manière littérale, mais acréé l’atmosphère qui m’a permis de prendre conscience de la solidarité des peuples noirs” / “which did not infl uence me directly but still created an atmosphere whichallowed me to become conscious of the solidarity of the black world”) (Depestre 74; Césaire, Discourse 87). Aiming to emphasize the autonomy and specifi c contributionof his own work, Césaire thus describes Négritude and the New Negro Renaissance as “mouvements parallèles” / “parallel movements,” but “mouvements qui n’avaientpas de liaison particulière entre eux” / “movements that had no particular relation between them” (Depestre 72; Césaire, Discourse 86, modifi ed).2

There is no doubt that Césaire read some literature from the Harlem Renaissanceduring the 1930s. He told one interviewer that, in the years leading up to the war,he and his colleague René Ménil had been avidly reading Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay, writers that had been “revealed” to him in the early 1930s by La Revue du Monde Noir, the journal edited by Paulette Nardal and Léo Sajous. As herrput it, “Ils faisaient partie, si je puis dire, de nos bagages personnels” ‘They were part of our personal baggage, as it were’ (Leiner viii). Moreover, in 1938, while studyingat the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Césaire wrote a thesis (now lost) for his Diplômed’Etudes Supérieures on “Le thème du Sud dans la poésie nègre des Etats-Unis” (see Ngal 185; Arnold 10–11). The only extant clue to Césaire’s reading of African Ameri-can poetry in the period is his 1941 introduction to a selection of Harlem Renaissancepoets published in the journal Tropiques (the section featured translations of JamesWeldon Johnson’s “The Creation,” Jean Toomer’s “Harvest Song,” and Claude McKay’s “America”). While admiring, Césaire’s tone is strikingly measured in comparison to the comments of prior Antillean critics such as Ménil and Etienne Léro, who had made much more direct arguments that anglophone black US poetry offered a modelthat francophone Antilleans should emulate (Ménil 9; Léro 12). Césaire calls African


American poetry “pettily, meagerly lyrical” (petitement, chichement lyrique) (Césaire,“Introduction” 41), and avers that

enfi n, voilà une poésie qui n’offre pas à l’oreille ou à l’oeil un corps inattendu etindiscutable de vibrations. Ni l’éclat des couleurs. Ni la magie de son. Tout auplus du rhythme, mais de primitive, de jazz ou de tam-tam c’est-à-dire enfonçant la résistance de l’homme en ce point de plus basse humanité qu’est le systèmenerveux.

in the end, here is a poetry that does not offer the ear or the eye an unexpectedand indisputable body of vibrations. Neither the brilliance of colors, nor the magicof sound. At most, rhythm, but a primitive one, of jazz or of tom-tom—that is, breaking down man’s resistance at that point of most basic humanity, the nervoussystem. (41)

He goes on to say that the “grandeur” of such a literature is located in a different aspect than one might expect. “Nous cherchions une grandeur de présence, une grandeur de constitution” ‘We seek a grandeur of presence, a grandeur of constitution”), Césaire explains, “et la grandeur de cette littérature est toute d’orientation” ‘and the grandeur of this literature is entirely one of orientation’ (41). Finally, its enduring value, in his view, is that it is “ouverte sur l’homme tout entier” ‘open to man as a whole’ (41). But what does “orientation” mean, in this regard, and how would one go about evaluating the resonance of such a stance—such an openness—in Césaire’s own poetry?

Rather than continue to wade into the variety of the rhetorical occasions where Césaire discusses the Harlem Renaissance, as though one might glean some sort of conclusive avowal from them—an admission that would establish a narrative of literary fi liation—here I will explore a fi eld of echoes in a limited group of African diasporic texts. This is to follow, on the micro-level of formal analysis, some of the scholars who—on a broader plane of literary history—have reminded us of the intri-cacies of reception and translation in a transnational literary context. In other words,it is to investigate how a diasporic poetics is practiced.3 To ask about the “syntax of infl uence” in the African diaspora is to think infl uence in terms of conjugation andcirculation, in terms of the unavoidable confrontation of difference, in terms of the sea changes a syllabic intelligence suffers in moving from one context to another, from one language to another. To this end, here I will open with Césaire’s explicit read-ing of one of the key fi gures of the “younger generation” of the Harlem Renaissance, but then consider in turn some of the African American and anglophone Caribbeanwriters whose work reads and refracts Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal.

I have long been fascinated by the fact that in 1939, the same year Césaire published the fi rst version of his Cahier, he also published a translation of a poem rrtitled “Strong Men” by Sterling Brown. An African American student named Edward Jones, arriving in Paris in the fall of 1935 to study at the Sorbonne, met Césaire and lent him an autographed copy of Brown’s 1932 book Southern Road. According to Jones, Césaire “devoured its contents” (18). Césaire published his translation in the journal Charpentes, somewhat perplexingly in a section called “Afrique Noire,” which included the French version of the Brown poem next to a poem by Léopold Sédar Senghor (“Neige sur Paris”) and a short folktale by Léon-Gontran Damas (“Aux Premiers Ages”). Indeed, since Damas did not contribute to the single issue of the 1935 journal L’Etudiant Noir, this confi guration is, as far as I know, the fi rst time that rr


the so-called fathers of Négritude appear in print together. I am less interested in the simple claim that this translation indicates the “infl uence” of Brown (or of the Harlem Renaissance more generally) on Césaire’s development, and more interested in askingjust what travels, here, just what information or strategies—what “potentialities,” in other words—are found in this poetic practice of carrying over.

Of course, Brown’s “Strong Men” is itself a poem that reads and appropriates a “predecessor,” lifting the kernel of its refrain from a poem by Carl Sandburg, “The strong men keep coming on.” “Strong Men” forges an evocation of black virility andresistance by reformulating Sandburg’s line through the black vernacular: repeatedly, it intones, “The strong men keep a-comin’ on / The strong men git stronger” (56). Césaire’s rather straightforward translation cannot be said to capture the force of the idiomatic English: “Les hommes forts continuent d’avancer / Les hommes forts devi-ennent plus forts” (“The strong men continue to advance / The strong men becomestronger”) (Brown, “Les hommes forts” 52). What remains—what carries over—from the English is instead the anaphoric, nearly incantory shape of Brown’s lines, the sheerrelentlessness of their repetitious attack:

They broke you in like oxen,They scourged you,They branded you,They made your women breeders,They swelled your numbers with bastards. . . .They taught you the religion they disgraced. (56)

Although the grammatical specifi city of French (the auxiliary formulation of the passé composé, the necessary interjection of the direct object) undermines some of the heavy-stressed force of these lines, the overall effect—a blunt evocation of repeated, dehumanizing objectifi cation—is conveyed in Césaire’s version:

Il vous ont dressés comme des boeufs,Ils vous ont fouettés,Ils vous ont marqués au fer rouge,Ils ont fait de vos femmes, des machines à faire des enfants,Ils ont grossi votre nombre avec des batards...Ils vous ont enseigné la religion qu’ils déshonoraient. (52)

Is it possible that, rather than any particular trope or image (indeed, it is preciselythe specifi c richness of terms such as “scourged” and “branded” and “breeders” thatfails to carry over into French), it is the very “strength” of this line-shape that informs the composition of the Cahier?r

As many commentators have noted, the defi nition of négritude in the last third of the Cahier gains much of its power through its particular syntax. I especially want to rhighlight the negative anaphora in these lines, in which the speaker announces that

ma négritude n’est pas une pierre, sa surdité ruée contre la clameur du jourma négritude n’est pas une taie d’eau morte sur l’oeil mort de la terrema négritude n’est ni une tour ni une cathédraleelle plonge dans la chair rouge du solelle plonge dans la chair ardent du cielelle troue l’accablement opaque de sa droite patience


my negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of the daymy negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earth’s dead eyemy negritude is neither tower nor cathedralit dives into the red fl esh of the soilit dives into the ardent fl esh of the skyit pierces the opaque prostration of its straight patience (66–69, translation modifi ed)

Carefully, négritude here is elaborated through what Stuart Hall would call “the nar-row eye of the negative” (21), an accumulating tide of rejections or shoving-asides that limn the scope of the term by what it is not. Of course, when the positive defi -nition emerges, the term itself is replaced by a pronoun (“it dives into the red fl esh of the soil”), as though to pull away from the proper, as though to emphasize action(“pierces”) rather than nominative defi nition (“is”), as though the term is afforded salience only against the contrast of its non-designation. The subsequent lines extend this process with a chant of praise to that portion of humanity that exists outside what Sylvia Wynter terms the “techno-cultural fallacy” of Western modernity, which perniciously defi nes technological advancement alone as the “ultimate criterion of human value” (31, 32):

Eia pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien inventépour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien explorépour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien dompté

Eia those who have never invented anythingfor those who have never explored anythingfor those who have never tamed anything (68–69, translation modifi ed)

René Ménil has sugggested usefully that these lines must not be read as some black“non-technicity erected into value and proposed as an ideal of life”; instead, they markthe acceptance of—not the resignation to—a history of degradation and exploitation only “in the form of a challenge [sous forme de défi ]” (90), extending the negative anaphora of the previous lines. Of course, Césaire himself has explained that he ad-opted the term nègre in the 1930s above all “comme un mot-défi ” ‘as a term of defi ance’ (Depestre 76; Césaire, Discourse 89). The question, then, revolves around the status of this poetics of negation as syllabic intelligence, as the proper form of “defi ance”or “challenge”—that is, as the required mode of apprehending the history of slaveryand colonialism and the place of peoples of African descent in a universal moder-nity, what the poem goes on to term the “rendez-vous de la conquête” ‘convocation of conquest’ (76–77).

Nick Nesbitt’s recent study Voicing Memory offers the most thorough consider-ation of the work of negation in the poetics of the Cahier. Nesbitt argues convincinglyrrthat the subject of Césaire’s poem can be read as a sort of “aesthetic analogue” to the “heroic subject” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The intellectual world of Paris in the 1930s, Nesbitt points out, was very much animated by the rediscovery of Hegel, especially through the highly infl uential lectures being given at the Ecole des HautesEtudes by the philosopher Alexandre Kojève, whose reading of the Phenomenologyemphasized the work of what Hegel termed “determinate negation” in the achieve-ment of self-consciousness. Hegel argues that the Subject is “is in truth actual only in


so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-otheringwith itself” (Hegel, Phenomenology 18). Such “self-othering” involves not a pretension to a secure and self-contained identity, but instead the continual confrontation with what is not the self: in other words, self-consciousness requires “the tremendous power of the negative [ungeheure Macht des Negativen]” (Hegel, Phenomenology 19; Hegel, Phänomenologie 36). In his lectures of 1934–35, Kojève elaborates at length onthe importance of “determinate negation” in the achievement of true or “revealed” Being through what Hegel calls “speculative logic”:

The negation of A has a positive or specifi cally determined content because it is anegation of A, and not of M or N, for example, or of some undetermined X. Thus,the “A” is preserved in the “non-A”; or, if you please, the “A” is “dialectically over-come” (aufgehoben) in the “non-A.” And that is why the non-A is not pure Nothing-ness, but an entity that is just as “positive”—i.e., determined or specifi c, or better,identical to itself—as the A which is negated in it: the non-A is all this because itresults from the negation of a determined or specifi c A. (203)

In other words, negation does not annihilate or destroy the negated element; instead that quality is preserved as that which defi nes the Subject (through what it is not). The parallel with the Cahier should be evident: Césaire defi nesr négritude in the anaphoricpassage I quoted earlier (“my negritude is not a stone . . .”) through precisely this understanding of negation as the creation of a “positive” content by its differentiation from a series of items of “determined” symbolic valence within technocratic Western modernity (“stone,” “leukoma,” “tower,” “cathedral”). As Kojève puts it, “The freedom which is realized and manifested as dialectical or negating Action is thereby essentially ga creation. For to negate the given without ending in nothingness is to produce some-thing that did not exist; now, this is precisely what is called ‘creating’ [. . .]. What is involved is not replacing one given by another given, but overcoming the given in favor of what does not (yet) exist, thus realizing what was never given” (222, 223).

One might argue, indeed, that determinate negation becomes a crucial elementin Césaire’s understanding of literary expression more broadly. It would seem clearlyto be at stake in the defi nition of the poetic image in Césaire’s best-known statementon poetics, the 1945 essay “Poetry and Knowledge”:The barriers [garde-fous] are in place; the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, the logical principle of the excluded middle [tiers-exclu].

Precious barriers. But remarkable limitations as well.It is by means of the image, the revolutionary image, the distant image, the image that overthrows all the laws of thought that mankind fi nally breaks down thebarrier.In the image A is no longer A. . . .In the image A can be not-A. . . . (“Poetry” li-lii; Césaire, “Poésie” 166)

According to this passage, the poetic image is held up as a particularly effective tool of determinate negation. It is important to stress, again, the creative function of negation in this sense. Poetic negation in Césaire’s defi nition does not reduce or shrink the “potentiality” of the image as it is articulated, but on the contrary holdsopen and unfi nished what we might call (following Césaire’s own terminology) the image’s “orientation.”


Nesbitt extends his Hegelian reading to Césaire’s poetics of neologism: as he writes, in coining the term négritude, Césaire “affirmed the radical creativity of constituent subjectivity, redeploying the force of the productive imagination against colonialist racism,” since the “the concept and word negritude is the model of anautonomously created object that negates the objectivity of enslaved existence it-self—where humans are putatively reduced to pure objects—in a becoming-human” (23, 28). Drawing on the work of Dominique Combe, Nesbitt suggests that bothanaphora and parataxis are indispensable to the form of the Cahier, although he con-rrsiders this element of the poem in terms of the poem’s gradual movement from “prose” to “verse,” and in terms of “the problem of the irrational in the Cahier as an elementremanating from its rhythmic structuration” (90). He does not fully link the functionof repetition in the poem to his earlier contention regarding its recourse to negation. Thus he concludes that the fi nal section of the poem, in which the language is soresolutely anaphoric, “compulsively transfers an identitarian rhythmic logic into its formal structure” in a manner that “masterfully works through a traumatic past whileformally calling attention to the very totalizing procedures it would condemn” (91). This is to simplify the workings of repetition in the poem, which can by no means be reduced to an overbearing, unwavering “identitarian rhythmic logic.” As Nesbitt himself admits, even when the anaphora seems to exhibit a “pounding regularity,” the poetry puts forward a diverse “fi eld of signifi ers . . . each of which carries its own specifi c dimension of suffering, never interchangeable with another” (91).

In other words, I am suggesting that the function of anaphora in the Cahier mayrnot have to do with “regularity,” nor with what other critics have diagnosed either as“invariance” (a “deep-seated universalist syntax”) (Dash 67) or as rhythmic primitiv-ism (an evocation of “tribal” “frenzy” and “delirium” that would somehow be “properly African and concrete”) (Ngal 133; Combe 74). Instead, in the lines defi ning négritudefor instance, it may be precisely the element of repetition that adds a qualifi cation, anelement of uncertainty, to a proposition that could otherwise be taken as a singular declaration. The effect may be reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s well-known observation in Les damnés de la terre that “La mise en question du monde colonial par le colonisé n’est pas une confrontation rationnelle des points de vue. Elle n’est pas un discours sur l’universel, mais l’affirmation échevelée d’une originalité posée comme absolue” (Les damnés 10) / “The challenge of the colonized to the colonial world is not a rationalconfrontation of points of view. It is not a treatise on the universal, but the unkempt affirmation of an originality posed as an absolute” (The Wretched 41).4 But here, that affirmation cannot become dogmatic—cannot be reifi ed as an “absolute”—because its seeming defi nitional fi xity is immediately undone when, in an anaphoric verse structure, it is reformulated in the subsequent lines. One sees this clearly in the lines I quoted earlier, in which anaphora does not install regularity, but instead introduces transformation and even contradiction: it “dives into the red fl esh of the sun,” and also“dives into the ardent fl esh of the sky.” Anaphora is used consistently to this effect in the Cahier, as in the speaker’s subsequent prayer to his “heart”:rr

Faites-moi rebelle à toute vanité, mais docile à son génie comme le poing à l’allongée du bras!Faites-moi commissaire de son sang

faites-moi dépositaire de son ressentimentfaites de moi un homme de terminaisonfaites de moi un homme d’initiation


faites de moi un homme de receuillementmais faites aussi de moi un homme d’ensemencement

Make me a rebel against any vanity, but docile in its genius like the fi st at the endof the arm!Make me a steward of its blood

make me a trustee of its resentmentmake me into a man of terminationmake me into a man of initiationmake me into a man of harvestingbut make me also into a man of sowing (70–71, translation modifi ed)

What is performed here is not dogma, much less primitivism, but instead a dialecti-cal litany in which the “moi” is envisioned as a vessel of multiplicity, a form able to contain polar opposites. The desired state is racially specifi c—the speaker asks to be the lover of “cet unique peuple,” and a few lines later to be the “digger” (bêcheur)rof “cette unique race” (70–71)—and yet unyieldingly anti-essentialist in its geo-his-torical “measuring” of that specifi city not by “cephalic index” but by “the compass of suffering” (76–77). For Césaire, poetic language is by defi nition the mode that allows such an instantiation of subjectivity. As he explained to one interviewer, “I believe very much in these things, and my effort has been to infl ect French [d’infl échir le fran-çais], to transform it in order to express, let’s say: ‘this I, this nègre-I, this creole-I, thisMartinican-I, this Antillean-I’ [‘ce moi, ce moi-nègre, ce moi-créole, ce moi-martiniquais, ce moi-antillais’]. This is why I have been more interested in poetry than in prose,to the extent that it is the poet who makes his language [langage]. Whereas, in general,the prose writer makes use of language” (Leiner xiv). In other words, poetry infl ectsthe language—gives it an orientation—by projecting the subject through a series of determinations, shifting with each iteration—in the list above, with each new angle(racial, linguistic, national, regional) re-qualifying the “moi.”5

If the dialectic of determination in such an anaphoric poetics is inherently open or unbounded, then how does one come to terms with the translation of that poetics within a African diasporic orbit—one defi ned by its multilingual reformulations of a global “black” subject? How does this syllabic intelligence travel? It is worth recall-ing that this same section of the Cahier (starting with the line “my negritude is notra stone . . .”) is the one that C. L. R. James quotes at length in the “Appendix” to the 1963 edition of The Black Jacobins, his masterful history of the Haitian Revolution.What James fi nds in the passage is a certain crystallization of black resistance, an articulation of the autonomy of a black radical internationalist project. But above all,he emphasizes the unfi nished quality of the anaphoric form, its success in pointing towards—without claiming to exhaust or contain—a humanist universalism: “caril n’est point vrai que l’oeuvre de l’homme est fi nie / que nous n’avos rien à faire au monde / . . . / il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête” (“for it is not true that the work of man is done / that we have nothing to do on earth / . . . / there is room for everyone at the convocation of conquest”) (Césaire, Cahier 76–77). Jamesrcomments, “Negritude is what one race brings to the common rendez-vous where allwill strive for the new world of the poet’s vision” (401).

One also hears these lines echoed in Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s 1967 Rights of Passage, the fi rst book of his trilogy The Arrivants, with its repeated invocations of “we who have achieved nothing”: “For we / who have cre-/ ated nothing,” we hear


in the “Postlude,” “must exist / on nothing; cannot see the soil” (13, 79). Indeed, the reverberation of this negative syntax is equally the germ of what becomes the keyshift in the last book of the trilogy, Islands, especially in the poem “Negus.” If as Na-thaniel Mackey has pointed out, Brathwaite’s work “both announces the emergenceof a new language and acknowledges the impediments to its emergence, going so far as to advance impediment as a constituent of the language’s newness” (74), the poem“Negus” fi nds that impediment and innovation in a revision of Césaire’s anaphora. It fi nds a creative resource in a poetics of determinate negation, in the precise manner in which it is practiced by Césaire in the Cahier. Brathwaite’s poem starts with anrrimpasse or stutter which builds into a negative, fi nding invention (in homophonesand rhythmic accretion) as it pushes from the observation of obliteration (“it is not”) to potential and demand (“it is not enough”):

Itititit is not

itititit is not

it is notit is notit is not enoughit is not enough to be freeof the red white and blueof the drag, of the dragon

it is notit is notit is not enoughit is not enough to be freeof the whips, principalities and powerswhere is your kingdom of the Word? (222)

It is crucial to add that this inspiration is fi gured as a diasporic gift, the Caribbean’s demand of an African inheritance: “I / must be given words to refashion futures / like a healer’s hand” (224). But what is given over (particularly in Masks, the middle book of the trilogy, set in Ghana) is not some essential black identity, not some easy reconnection with African roots. “My island is a pebble,” we read: “You cannot crack a pebble, / it excludes / death. Seeds will not / take root on its cool surface” (196). The pebble represents endurance (death is “excluded”) but also infertility: it “will never bear children” (196). The pebble, in other words, is a fi gure for diasporic difference in the poem, not for some easy continuity. It is unyielding, unbreakable, yet barren.Early in Masks it is linked to language (“pebbles of consonants”) (95) and linguisticdifference in particular. In the poem “The New Ships,” set in the western Ghana-ian port of Takoradi, the speaker hears a group of women conversing in Akan, andresponds fi rst to the sound and rhythm of their language (the “smooth voices like pebbles / moved by the sea of their language”) rather than to its meaning (124).


I am suggesting that what travels in diaspora is difference, a changing core of resiliency and singularity. What is translated, then, in the above instances, from French to English, or from Africa to the Caribbean, is a poetic mode (anaphora) of ar-ticulating difference through determinate negation—that is, a means of transfi guring that “pebble” from an emblem of deprivation into a principle of resistance. The syntaxof “Negus,” its accumulative stammer, is the poem’s discovery of an orientation: the pebble, thrown, skipped across the water, or reconceived as a weapon: “fl ing me the stone,” as the poem concludes, “that will confound the void” (224).

Brathwaite’s Islands concludes with a paradoxical image of innovation (“some- / thing torn // and new”) as the foundation of a Caribbean poetics (270). Césaire’s Ca-hier imagines the shape of regional identity likewise with a fi gure of tearing r (papier déchiré). But if Brathwaite’s lines perform the fracturing they evoke (“some- / thing”),Césaire uses a rather different formal effect (yet another syntactical ambiguity) to signal the provisional quality of the collectivity being enunciated:

Iles cicatrices des eauxIles évidences de blessuresIles miettesIles informes

Iles mauvais papier déchiré sur les eauxIls tronçons côte à côte sur l’épée fl ambée du SoleilRaison rétive tu ne m’empêcheras pas de lancer absurde sur les eaux au gré descourants de ma soifvotre forme, îles difformes,votre fi n, mon défi .

Islands scars of the watersIslands evidence of woundsIslands crumbsIslands formless

Islands bad paper shredded upon the watersIslands sections coast by coast skewered on the fl aming sword of the SunMulish reason you will not prevent me from casting absurd upon the waters at themercy of the currents of my thirstyour form, deformed islandsyour end, my challenge. (74–75, translation modifi ed)

The speaker announces that reason will not prevent him from “casting” the “deformed islands” of the Caribbean into coherence, into one common “form” (in the singular).And yet we are left with an “end” that remains a “challenge,” both a difficult under-taking and an unwavering stance of defi ance. The word that sticks out syntacticallyis “absurde”: it would seem to make the most sense to read it as an adjective modify-ing “forme,” despite the—appropriately absurd, one might say—distance betweennoun and qualifi er. The unwieldy syntax serves as a reminder6 that the seeminglytriumphal end (the achieved regional identity) is an act of the imagination, something“cast” or “thrown” (lancer), not a political decree or a historical fact. It is a reminderthat, if Césaire’s poetics are informed by Hegelian dialectics, the poems themselvesalso perform, in their syntactical absurdities, an implicit though far-reaching critique


of Hegelian idealism. As Césaire writes in “Poésie et connaissance,” “La démarche poétique est une démarche de naturation qui s’opère sous l’impulsion dementielle de l’imagination” (“Poésie” 169) / “The poetic process is a naturation process operating under the demential impulse of the imagination” (“Poetry” lv).

It would be possible to track the diasporic circulation of this orientation through a number of examples, but here I will only offer one more. I will close by returning to the United States, to discuss one of the contemporary African American poets most often described as “infl uenced” by Césaire. Will Alexander is a poet based in Los Angeles who in the past decade has been featured in a number of the most prominent journals of experimental poetics, including Sulfur,rr Hambone, and Apex of the M. He calls himself a “psychic maroon” (Mullen 402), and has published a number of books of dauntingly dense poetry and prose, at once politically engaged, spiritually driven,and highly abstract. His stunning 1995 book Asia and Haiti, for instance, offers twolong poems in a fi rst-person plural voice, with “Asia” spoken by Tibetan Buddhist monks forced out of monasteries when Chinese Communist army invades Tibet, and “Haiti” spoken in the collective voice of “Les Morts” of Haiti, killed by the TontonsMacoutes during the regime of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and rising to excoriate the dictator in a relentless outburst of imagined punishments. His essay “The Western World: An Axis of Cataracts” takes its epigraph from Césaire’s Discourse on Colonial-ism, and erupts in verbal resistance, adopting an anaphoric, interminable sentence structure that recalls Césaire’s poetics:

I speak for bringing forth a scarlet sun shining in the open sky of metaphoricbellies, I speak for attacking the material boundaries with verbal turpentinescaldings, I mean loaded words which transform by destruction, we are living asGuenon so aptly put it, under “the law of matter and brute force,” which the poetmust magically eviscerate with an overwhelming nova of irrational Venusian wind demons brimming altitudes of Dionysian intuitions and silence [. . .] the mind islifted to slippery repetitious irrationals [. . .]. (32)

Alexander tends to describe his work in alchemical terms, as an attempt at transub-stantiation or “kindling,” the transformation of the phenomenological world throughincendiary language (“attacking the material boundaries with verbal turpentine scaldings”) (see “Alchemy”). His calls for “a different archery of usage” of language, discovered in poetry, is reminiscent of Césaire’s previously-mentioned explanation that his writing attempts to “infl ect French”—to bend it to another orientation, as it were ( “My Interior Vita” 372; Leiner xiv).

Interestingly, Alexander’s 1995 collection The Stratospheric Canticles includesa poem titled “Apprenticeship,” which might be read as an attempt to negotiate the question of infl uence and poetic tradition. “Here I am,” it opens,

posing in a mirror of scratch paper sonnetssonnets as rareas a live Aegean rhino

absorbing the crackings of my craftits riverine volcanoesits spectacular lightning peninsulasemitting plentiful creosote phantomsfrom an ironic blizzard of unsettled pleromas (33)


“Apprenticeship” in the poem is not equivalent to untroubled instruction. On the contrary, learning from predecessors or alternative models seems to involve a certain suffering, a burning that paradoxically sensitizes: “I’ve looked / for only the tonalities that scorch / which bring to my lips wave after wave / of sensitivity by virulence” (35). If there is connection, the sense of a tradition or a common project, it is “gambled syn-ecdoche,” the wager of the part standing in for the whole, and unavoidable “psychicconfrontational damage” as one is “conducting one’s frictions in a torrential furnace of osmosis & ire” (34). Again, transport is fi gured as constitutively vexed, an encounter with difference. Indeed, apprenticeship involves rejecting any implication of directtransmission of infl uence, and instead attempting to proliferate points of dissonance: as Alexander puts it, “language exists as erupting transfunctional plasma, as magic intensifi cation of multiples; thus, linguistic methodology is not capable of evincing a scale of insight as long as it limits its power to mono-dimensional linearity as habit”(“Language” 75).

As in Brathwaite’s poem “The New Ships,” this requisite “friction” is moreover a confrontation with another language. Alexander, explaining to one interviewer the ways that he is “concerned with using language like Césaire to turn the world upsidedown,” added that one way to achieve that upheaval is to strive for the insertion of linguistic alterity into one’s poetics at every turn, to write as though the words are being translated from another tongue. “It’s not that I know these other languages, like Spanish or Italian,” Alexander explains, “but I can feel their rhythms, althoughI’m writing in English. Writing a foreign language within your own language creates another language” (Mullen 401).

This is to foreground the necessity of translation, not as a project of domestica-tion or appropriation (bringing the foreign into a “home” or “target” context), but as a project of defamiliarization and othering from within. African diasporic poetics, inother words, is not the pursuit of correspondence, some ultimate unity, but instead the pursuit of innovation through serial negation, in a “blackness” that fi nds itself unmade and redone at every turn. As Aldon Neilsen has argued, in transnational black poetries the link to modernism is made “across a diasporic rupture” (410–11).Of course, as with Alexander’s imagined Spanish or Italian, one often fi nds these strategies of othering, linguistic estrangement, within a single language. For anotherinstance, one might turn to C. L. R. James’s remarkable introduction to the 1964 pamphlet publication of Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris’s lecture “Tradition and theWest Indian Novel,” which Harris had presented to the West Indian Students’ Unionin London. James places Harris in the “German philosophical tradition,” comment-ing at some length on the similarities of Harris’ “philosophy” (as represented by his novels) to the thought of Martin Heidegger.7 James contends, with characteristic dryhumor, that Harris “writes as one educated in a German university.” Indeed, Harris writes “English as if his native language were German. Not that the language is notfi ne English, but he has exactly the terms and outlook of German philosophy” ( James,“Discovering Literature” 242). James is especially taken with Harris’s comments onthe capacity of language as a medium of consciousness; in arguing for a conception of the West Indian novel that would go beyond the conventional “novel of persua-sion,” Harris suggests that language is a medium permitting “a continuous inward revisionary and momentous logic of potent explosive images evoked in the mind” (32). “The point that shook me,” James explains, “was that Harris, grappling with aWest Indian problem, had arrived at conclusions which dealt with the problem of


language as a whole in the world at large” (“On Wilson Harris” 170). The observationis reminiscent of Aimé Césaire’s reaction more than two decades earlier upon reading Hegel for the fi rst time: “Au moment où la traduction de la Phénoménologie de l’espritest sortie en France, je l’ai montrée à Senghor, et je lui ai dit ‘Ecoute, Léopold, ce que dit Hegel: il faut arriver à l’Universel par l’approfondissement du Particulier’ ” ‘Whenthe French translation of the Phenomenology fi rst came out, I showed it to Senghor,and said to him, “Listen to what Hegel says, Léopold: to arrive at the Universal, one must immerse oneself in the Particular!”’ (qtd. in Nesbitt 230–31, 120).

To pursue this theme interlinguistically, one would have to consider the impact of a series of “confrontations” in the practice of translation: what shifts and alterationscan be located not just in Césaire translating Sterling Brown, but also in LangstonHughes translating Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, and Federico García Lorca,or in Léopold Senghor translating Jean Toomer and Countee Cullen. In Alexander’s terms, the operation is one of reinvention through extension: “One expands the realm of speech, one takes in odors, in foliage, in contra-band” (“Alchemy” 173). The word “contra-band” is hyphenated, perhaps, in order to emphasize the con-trary quality in coming together, that unyielding barrier of difference that irritates any alliance. It is a phrasing not distant from the conclusion of Césaire’s Cahier, inrrwhich the speaker espouses a certain unity, demanding that the wind “embrasse-moi jusqu’au nous furieux” (“embrace me unto furious us”). But if there is a coming together, there—an achieved communal voice—it continues to cling to the negative,in another anaphora:

et lie, lie-moi sans remordslie-moi de tes vaste bras à l’argile lumineuselie ma noire vibration au nombril même du mondelie, lie-moi, fraternité âprepuis, m’étranglant de son lasso d’étoilesmonte

and bind, bind me without remorsebind me with your vast arms to the luminous claybind my black vibration to the very navel of the worldbind, bind me bitter brotherhoodthen, strangling me with your lasso of starsrise (82–85)

As Nesbitt and others have noted, the conclusion of the Cahier “simultaneously ar-rticulates both the aesthetic semblance of an autonomous black subjectivity and its immanent critique” (Nesbitt 80; see also Edwards, “The Ethnics” 132–35). If frater-nity “rises,” here, if it unites, it is only through a violence, a “bitterness.” Although many critics claim the Cahier ends on a transcendent note, in fact it concludes withrambivalence. That ambivalence is both semantic and linguistic, as in the fi nal line of the poem the speaker announces that “ je veux pêcher maintenant la langue maléfi que de la nuit en son immobile verrition!” ‘now I want to fi sh the malevolenttongue of the night in its immobile veerition’ (84–85, translation modifi ed). Eshle-man and Smith inform us in their introduction that the fi nal word, verrition, “was coined on a Latin verb, ‘verri,’ meaning ‘to sweep,’ ‘to scrape a surface,’ and ultimately


‘to scan’ ” (26). But how can an action of scanning or sweeping be “immobile”? Thisconclusion—with its insistence on founding collectivity on paradox, on antithesis without sublation—forces us to ask to what degree the Cahier, beyond its recourse rrto determinate negation, adheres in the end to a Hegelian dialectics. It may be that a Césairean poetics of anaphora, in delivering the possibility of infi nite requalifi ca-tion and extension inherent in serial form, thereby forecloses the possibility of anyultimate term, any dialectical synthesis.

It is likewise striking that the fi nal word of the poem is derived from Latin,with a term that is radically other to French, in the etymological sense of the wordradical—an unfamiliar root. One might then ask whether linguistic translation canbe considered a model of the “bitter brotherhood” espoused by the end of the Cahier.rrIf so, what would this imply for the theorization of infl uence in a diasporic literaryorbit? That any linkage, any claimed commonality, necessarily involves a certain force,a certain misapprehension that proves productive? What is “bound,” what content is carried over in creative mishearing, in Césaire’s translation of Sterling Brown’s “StrongMen”? I return to where I started, to ask what crosses over in the shift from French to English, and what is lost or transformed. Take the fi rst lines of the poem, a portrait of black masculinity as intransigent, indefatigable, self-sufficient, cumulative in its power. The poem opens

They dragged you from homeland,They chained you in coffles (56)

Césaire translates these lines as follows:

Ils vous ont arrachés de votre terre natale,Ils vous ont enchaînés en un troupeau d’esclaves. (Brown, “Les hommes forts”52)

They uprooted you from your native land,They enchained you in a herd of slaves.8

What do we make of the difference between “dragged” and “uprooted” (arrachés),between a reference to forced transport, on the one hand, and to a violence that dis-turbs a prior rootedness, that fractures an autochthony, on the other? Is it possible to hear, in the shift from “homeland”—in the abstract, without article—to “your native land,” a premonition of the recourse to the “native” (natal) that Césaire would make in the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, published in its initial version just two monthslater? How would we measure the difference between English and French, the writer in Washington, DC, and the scholarship student in Paris? It’s a small thing in the way, certainly, maybe something as small as a pebble. But it provides the necessary friction, where innovation is found in impediment.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to thank the anonymous readers for the journal for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions for revision.


NOTES

1. Given this state of affairs, the dangerous temptation for any translator is to “solve” or “explicate” the line, especially by inserting punctuation in order to lessen its syntacti-cal ambiguity. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith translate this line in precisely such a manner, adding the word “being” and a dash in an attempt to clarify the meaning: “andyou star please from your luminous foundation draw lemurian being—of man’s unfathom-able sperm the yet undared form” (67). 2. Likewise, Paulette Nardal, in her important essay “Eveil de la conscience de race,” published in 1932 in La Revue du Monde Noir, considers her generation of francophonerrCaribbean writers to be “behind” in relation to the accomplishments of African Ameri-cans, and yet describes the relationship between the two groups as parallel development, rather than direct infl uence. In commending the recent fi ction of Antillean writers suchas René Maran, for instance, she writes: “Il est à remarquer qu’un certain nombre de nos jeunes amis semble être arrivée spontanément à la dernière phase que nous avons notéedans l’évolution intellectuelle des Noirs américains” / “It is worth noticing that some of our young friends seem to have arrived spontaneously at the last phase observed by us inthe intellectual evolution of the American Negroes” (31, translation modifi ed). 3. This is to say that this essay is intended as an elaboration of my own recent work (Edwards, Practice) as well as the work of some of the important scholars who have infl u-enced it (see for instance Arnold, “La réception”; Fabre; Nielsen; Mackey). 4. Ato Sekyi-Otu provides as incisive reading of this passage in his book on Fanon.As he writes, “we can hear the text as saying that the antifoundationalism of the anti-imperialist—the repudiation of the possibility of rationally warranted and universalizable propositions—is not a fi nal epistemological and meta-ethical position but a contingent political stance. [. . .] That language in effect delivers an admonition that revolutionary particularism is not to be equated with a radical relativism, and that the anti-imperialist critique of purely Western reason must never become a dogmatic antirationalism” (36). 5. It should be clear that determinate negation in Hegel is implicitly a serial form aswell, rather than a single opposition; see Kojève 205. 6. Only if the reader remembers the fl oating term, of course: in the translation of theCahier by Eshleman and Smith, the word “absurde” has simply been overlooked in therEnglish version (75). 7. In a later essay on Harris’s work, James broadens this constellation to include Heidegger, Jaspers, and Sartre. See James, “On Wilson Harris.” 8. The translation back into English is my own.

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Aimé Césaire and the Syntax of Influence