Aimé Césaire:
Une voix pour l’histoire, une parole pour le XXIème siècle
A voice that goes down through history, a message for the 21st century
This three-part video biography of Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), poet and statesman who had as
much impact on comparative literature as he did on the self-determination of people in the
Americas and Africa, raises questions that occur throughout the film series “Celluloid for Social
Justice.” The first DVD will be shown on September 22, the second September 30, and the third
October 8.
Euzhan Palcy, director of the films Sugarcane Alley and A Dry White Season, added to this set of
three DVDs a booklet of excerpts from interviews that he and Annick Thébick-Melsan conducted
with Césaire during production of A Voice That Goes Down Through History. This handout quotes
some of the excerpts.
1ère Partie: L’ile veilleuse.
(Aimé Césaire, A Voice That Goes Down Through History – Part I: The Vigilant Island.)
English subtitles. 55 minutes. 1994. 7 p.m. Calhoun 100. Sep. 22.
This documentary focuses on Césaire’s love for his birthplace, the French Caribbean colony
Martinique, and on his life, which was filled with contributions to Martinique in literature and
politics. In interviews with the filmmakers, Césaire says:
Yes, there is a certain grandeur to municipal tasks.
That, I do believe. But it lies in creation, it is life continued.
Consequently it seems to me quite normal that a poem can give rise to the creation of a
road, of a school or of a day care center.
It is poetry . . . poetry continued.
In another form.
Maryse Condé, one of the best known writers from the Caribbean island Guadeloupe, quotes
Césaire as saying that “The smallest township is not the center of the world, but it is
representative of all of civilization.” In interviews with the filmmakers, Césaire says:
In fact, what is Martinique?
We are, we are the result of the spewing of the volcano.
Imagine this extraordinary spectacle: ten volcanoes simultaneously,
Spewing forth their lava in order to create Martinique. [. . . ]
There is a summons to assume history and a summons to assume
Nature that is served to us.
Joseph Zobel, author of the novel set in Martinique, Rue Cases-Nègres, which was made into the
film Sugar-Cane Alley, also pays tribute to Césaire, quoting from his poem that he had never
shown to the writer:
[. . .] I have no word to enter
Into the circle in which your brilliance vibrates
You speak and your blazing mirror reflects back to me
Our memories there before childhood
I listen.
The oxygen of your word has the eyes of the sun.
I breathe in your presence in silence.
2ème Partie: Au rendez-vous de la conquête.
(Aimé Césaire, A Voice That Goes Down Through History – Part II: Where the Edges of
Conquest Meet.) English subtitles. 55 minutes. 1994. 7 p.m. Calhoun 100. Sep. 30.
This documentary focuses on Césaire’s growth as a student in Paris 1931-39. Paris had a
uniquely international culture of writers, philosophers, artists, and musicians that included at one
time or another Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright,
James Baldwin, and the Jamaican-American Claude McKay.
Césaire met two other students who like him would become poets and statesmen: Léopold Sédar
Senghor (president of Senegal, 1960-1980) and Léon Damas, deputy from French Guiana to the
French National Assembly (1948-1951), editor of the journal Présence Africaine, and UNESCO
delegate for the Society of African Culture. Together the three founded the literary review
L’Étudiant Noir (The Black Student), which inspired the literary and ideological négritude
movement of black intellectuals and artists who reject the political, social and moral domination of
the West. In interviews with the filmmakers, Césaire says:
Senghor is the founder of negritude.
I am in a small way also the founder.
We are co-founders.
But it is ultimately the same negritude.
It is quite obvious however that the negritude of a West Indian seeking the recovery of his
being cannot be exactly the negritude of an African rooted in his sense of being, which
never doubted its identity.
These are two very different things.
They are two temperaments, two different forms of conditioning. [. . .]
Our idea was absolutely coherent. What we brought was the advent of the Black into
literature.
We did not refer to Marx – even if we had read him—we referred to ethnologists, to the
accounts of travelers, to African life.
Our reference point was Africa. [. . .]
Civilization is European. And civilization has as its task to raise the other peoples, the
colonized, up to this civilization which is the one and universal. Here is the general
principle.
And it is against all of that precisely that we wanted to react.
In 1931, the French, even most intellectuals, still claimed that civilization was defined by
European values and that one purpose of colonization was to raise other peoples to a civilized
level. Through individual experiences such as reading Frobenius’ History of African Civilization
and visiting Martinska, the Yugoslavian equivalent of Martinique, with a friend in 1935, the three
friends came to see that their true purpose in coming to France was not to be assimilated by its
culture but to assimilate what they needed of its culture. They felt that only in fully appreciating
their own negritude could they truly become universal. This was the year when Mussolini invaded
Ethiopia, and people from the French colonies learned from that experience and from the fascist
support of Franco in the Spanish civil war, as did African-Americans.
In 1939 Césaire published his book-length poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a
Return to My Native Land) and returned with his wife Suzanne Roussi to Martinique, where he
taught Frantz Fanon and inspired Edouard Glissant, two of the most widely read theoreticians of
the relationship between psychology, society, and the arts for students of comparative literature.
Césaire says in interviews with the filmmakers:
It is an entire world that I rediscover, or that quite simply I discover.
It is the negation of everything seen through the eye of the colonizer. [. . .]
No one colonizes with impunity, colonizes innocently.
The price will be heavy to pay for a humanity reduced to a monologue.
3ème Partie: La force de regarder demain.
(Aimé Césaire, A Voice That Goes Down Through History – Part III: The Strength to Face
Tomorrow.) English subtitles. 52 minutes. 1994. 7 p.m. Calhoun 100. Oct. 8.
Césaire, Roussi, and other Martinican writers founded the literary review Tropiques in 1941. In
interviews with the filmmakers, this is how Césaire explains the review:
It is the refusal of assimilation and euro-centrism.
Up until now, all Martinican gazes – cultural in particular – were
Directed towards Europe, towards France. [. . .]
It was imperative to make the great Black shout resound.
Against silence, against the gagging, it was necessary to bear witness,
to state and at the same time to lay the groundwork of a better world.
The groundwork of tomorrow.
The Cuban artist Wifredo Lam and the French surrealist poet André Breton, who spent some time
in Martinique during World War II, encouraged Césaire in his projects. In interviews with the
filmmakers, Césaire says:
Fundamentally, what did Breton bring to me?
What he brought to me was the call to freedom of expression.
It was the opening onto the imaginary.
Consequently, I was quite emboldened in my project: to go deep into the self.
But when I descend into myself what is it that I find?
I find the deep fundamental Black.
From 1945-2001 Césaire was active both as mayor of the capital city of Martinique and
representative in the French National Assembly. He encouraged the successful vote in Martinique
to become a state of France because it was the wish of his people, while continuing to denounce
colonialism and racism (Discours sur le colonialisme, 1953). In interviews with the filmmakers,
Césaire says:
It was a reform in vocabulary.
It was a neologism.
I said “departmentalization.”
It was not assimilation, the cultural connotations of which are humiliating and grave for
the human personality.
[. . .] It was about making applicable to Martinique the laws that prevailed in France,
especially in the area of social security. [. . .]
It is a law that Martinicans took for themselves.
Just as they have wrested everything else. [. . .]
Departmentalization represented a plus for the people’s emancipation. If there are those
who can freely claim independence – and I am very pleased – it is because we have
emerged from a colonial state and entered – perhaps by the side door, into a state of
legitimacy. [. . .]
My idea is that it was necessary to go beyond departmentalization.
It was necessary to do something else.
So my choice was motivated philosophically.
For autonomy. What I called self-management.
Managing our affairs ourselves.
Making the Caribbean a center of responsibilities.
Independence was not an end in itself, he felt. Duty to human beings was the main point.
Martinique was rebuilt with aid from the Marshall Plan.
Césaire joined the Communist Party in 1946, but after the party denounced jazz, a musical form
developed by blacks, along with Western decadent culture, and Soviet brutality to its satellite
states reached a high point (Hungary 1956), Césaire left the party and founded a progressive
party in Martinique. In interviews with the filmmakers, Césaire says:
I saw the immense gap that existed between theoretical communism, ideological
communism, communism the dream, real communism and real socialism.
And, one fine day from all of that I drew my personal conclusion.
Césaire maintained a critical distance from French policies, which continued in his refusal to meet
with presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy in 2006 because Sarkozy’s party had endorsed an
education policy that was so positive about the effects of French colonialism that it had to be
repealed.
The third documentary shows scenes from two of the plays that Césaire published in the 1960s,
responding to general disappointment about the postcolonial world. He felt that the messages of
the 1960s could be communicated better with plays than with poems. In interviews with the
filmmakers, he explains it this way:
Poetry is somewhat man alone with himself.
Theater is a given to be seen, a given to be understood.
I wanted to speak above all to the men and to the women of our overseas regions. That was our
public. To the men and women of Africa. To the men and to the women of the Caribbean. [. . .]
It was very important for us to understand ourselves, to master our History. To put ourselves on
stage in order to better grasp a sense of ourselves. That is the theatrical process.
Through the theater, the human can project the self and see the self. To see, to see the self, and
to see the self in order to understand and to grasp the self.
It seems to me that this process was imperative. [ . . .] The theater is the encounter of the human
and the obstacle. The obstacle being often constituted by man himself.
La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963) portrayed an early-19th-century Haitian ruler, Henri
Christophe, who faced the task of building a state after independence; and Une Saison au Congo
(1966) was about the assassination of Congo leader Patrice Lumumba. In 1968 Césaire
published the first version of Une Tempête, a radical adaptation of Shakespeare's play for a black
audience.
This section features interviews with French anthropologist Edgar Morin, biographer Roger
Toumson, Brazilian author Jorge Amado, Caribbean novelist Maryse Condé, and U.S. writer
Maya Angelou about Césaire’s central role in the development of African diaspora literature.
This film will be shown in Celluloid for Social Justice: The Legacy of 1968 in Documentaries
Mini-Film-Series Honoring the 40th Anniversary of California Newsreel;
http://www.newsreel.org consisting of documentaries provided by California Newsreel
The film series precedes 1968: A Global Perspective -- An Interdisciplinary Conference at
the University of Texas at Austin
October 10-12, 2008; http://www.1968conf.org