A Poetics of Anticolonialism

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

By 1950, of course, Cesaire had been a leader in the Communist Party of Martinique for about five years. Under the Communist ticket, he was elected mayor of Fort-de-France as well as Deputy to the French National Assembly. Now, given everything he has written thus far, everything that he has lived, why would he hold up Stalinism circa 1950s as an exemplar of the new society? Why would a great poet and major voice of surrealism and Negritude suddenly join the Communist Party? Actually, once we consider the context of the postwar world, his decision is not shocking at all. First, remember that Communist parties worldwide, especially in Europe, were at their height immediately after the war, and Joe Stalin spent the war years as an ally of liberal democracy. Second, several leading writers and artists committed to radical social change, particularly in the Caribbean and Latin America, became Communists - including Cesaire's friends Jacques Romain, Nicolas Guillen, and Rene Depestre. Third, Cesaire, who was reluctant to become involved in politics, discovered early on that he could be effective. Almost as soon as he was elected, Cesaire set out to change the status of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guiana, and Reunion from colonies to "departments" within the French Republic. Departmentalization, he insisted, would put these areas on equal footing with departments in metropolitan France. Cesaire's eloquent and passionate arguments led to a law in 1946 resulting in departmentalization. However, his dream that assimilation of the old colonies into the republic would guarantee equal rights turned out to be a pipe dream. In the end, French officials were sent to the colonies in greater numbers, often displacing some of the local black Martinican bureaucrats. By the time he drafted the popularly known third edition of Discourse in 1955, he had become an outspoken critic of departmentalization.

Thus, given Cesaire's role as Communist leader, we should not be surprised by Discourse's nod to the Soviet Union, or even the final closing lines of the text, in which he names proletarian revolution as our savior. What is jarring, however, is how incongruous these statements are in relation to the rest of the text. After demonstrating that Europe is a dying civilization, one on the verge of self-destruction (in which the chickens of colonial violence and tyranny have come home to roost while the white working class looks on in silent complicity), he proposes proletarian revolution as the final solution! Yet, throughout the book, he anticipates Fanon, implying that there is nothing worth saving in Europe, that the European working class has too often joined forces with the European bourgeoisie in their support of racism, imperialism, and colonialism, and that the uprisings of the colonized might point the way forward. Ultimately, Discourseis a challenge to, or revision of, Marxism; it draws on surrealism and the anti-rationalist ideas of Cesaire's early poetry and explorations in Negritude. It is fairly unmaterialist in the way it cries out for new spiritual values to emerge out of the study of what colonialism sought to destroy.