A Poetics of Anticolonialism

Monthly Review, Nov, 1999 by Robin D.G. Kelley

The couple returned to Martinique in 1939 and began teaching in Fort-de-France. Joining forces with Rene Menil, Lucie Thesee, Aristide Maugee, Georges Gratiant, and others, they launched a journal called Tropiques. The appearance of Tropiques coincided with the fall of France to the fascist Vichy regime, which consequently put the colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guiana under Vichy rule. The effect was startling; any illusions Cesaire and his comrades might have harbored about colorblind French brotherhood were shattered when thousands of French sailors arrived on the island. Their racism was blatant and direct. As literary critic A. James Arnold observed, "The insensitivity of this military regime also made it difficult for Martinicans to ignore the fact that they were a colony like any other, a conclusion that the official policy of assimilation had masked somewhat. These conditions contributed to radicalizing Cesaire and his friends, preparing them for a more anticolonialist posture at the end of the war." The official policy of the regime to censor Tropiques and interdict the publication when it was deemed subversive also hastened the group's radicalization. In a notorious letter dated May 10, 1943, Martinique's Chief of Information Services, Lt. de Vaisseau Bayle, justified interdicting Tropiques for being "a revolutionary review that is racial and sectarian." Bayle accused the editors of poisoning the spirit of society, sowing hatred and ruining the morale of the country. Two days later, the editors penned a brilliant polemical response:

To Lieutenant de Vaisseau Bayle:

Sir, We have received your indictment of Tropiques.

"Racists," "sectarians," "revolutionaries," "ingrates and traitors to the country," "poisoners of souls," none of these epithets really repulses us. "Poisoners of Souls," like Racine, . . . "Ingrates and traitors to our good Country," like Zola, ... "Revolutionaries," like the Hugo of "Chatiments." "Sectarians," passionately, like Rimbaud and Lautreamont. Racists, yes. Of the racism of Toussaint Louverture, of Claude McKay and Langston Hughes against that of Drumont and Hitler. As to the rest of it, don't expect for us to plead our case, nor vain recriminations, nor discussion. We do not speak the same language.

Signed: Aime Cesaire, Suzanne Cesaire, Georges Gratiant, Aristide Maugee, Rene Menil, Lucie Thesee.

But in order for Tropiques to survive, they had to camouflage their boldness, passing it off as a journal of West Indian folklore. Yet, despite the repressions and the ruses, Tropiques survived the war as one of the most important and radical surrealist publications in the world. Lasting from 1941 to 1945, the essays and poems it published (by the Cesaires, Rene Menil, and others) reveal the evolution of a sophisticated anticolonial stance, as well as a vision of a postcolonial future. Theirs was a vision of freedom that drew on Modernism and a deep appreciation for pre-colonial African modes of thought and practice; it drew on Surrealism as the strategy of revolution of the mind and Marxism as revolution of the productive forces. It was an effort to carve out a position independent of all of these forces, a kind of wedding of Negritude, Marxism, and surrealism, and their collective efforts would have a profound impact on international surrealism, in general, and on Andre Breton, in particular. Tropiques also published Breton, as well as texts by Pierre Mabille, Benjamin Peret, and other surrealists. In fact, it is not too much to proclaim Suzanne Cesaire as one of surrealism's most original theorists. Unlike critics who boxed surrealism into narrow "avant garde" tendencies such as futurism or cubism, Suzanne Cesaire linked it to broader movements such as Romanticism, socialism, and Negritude. Surrealism, she argued, was not an ideology as such but a state of mind, a "permanent readiness for the Marvelous." In a 1941 issue of Tropiques, she imagined new possibilities in terms that were foreign to Marxists; she called on readers to embrace "the domain of the strange, the marvelous and the fantastic, a domain scorned by people of certain inclinations. Here is the freed image, dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming. Here are the poet, the painter, and the artist, presiding over the metamorphoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucination and madness." And yet, when she speaks of the domain of the Marvelous, she has her sights on the chains of colonial domination, never forgetting the crushing reality of everyday life in Martinique and the rest of the world. In "Surrealism and Us: 1943," she writes with a boldness and clarity that would come to characterize her husband's Discourse on Colonialism: