The liberating power of words

UNESCO Courier, May, 1997 by Annick Thebia Melsan

* The usual way of trying to place you is by reference to various things such as time and place, writing, poetry and its different categories, political action and so on, but how would you place yourself?

Aime Cesaire: That's a terribly difficult question to answer but, well, I'm a man, a man from Martinique, a coloured man, a black, someone from a particular country, from a particular geographical background, someone with a history who has fought for a specific cause. It's not very original but, broadly speaking, my answer would be that history will say who I am.

* You are from the north of Martinique. . . .

A.C.: I've always had the feeling that I was on a quest to reconquer something, my name, my country or myself.

That is why my approach has in essence always been poetic.

Because it seems to me that in a way that's what poetry is.

The reconquest of the self by the self.

* And what is your preferred instrument for that purpose?

A. C.: I think words are the essential instrument!

For a painter it would be painting! For a poet it is words!

I think it was Heidegger who said that words are the abode of being. There are many such quotations. I believe it was Rene Char, in his surrealist days, who said that words know much more about us than we know about them.

I too believe that words have a revealing as well as a creative function.

* Revealing, creative . . . exploratory, perhaps?

A.C.: Exploratory is very well put: It's the plummet dropped in the water, the homing device that brings the self back up to the surface.

* You have often said that the black person's first words, after the tong years of silence, are bound to be revolutionary words. Does that mean that poetry is "revolutionary" as well?

A.C.: Yes, it is revolutionary because it is the world turned upside down, ploughed up, transmuted.

When the review Tropiques came out in Martinique under the occupation in 1941, in the middle of the world war, like a plunge into the contradictory wellsprings of the West Indian soul, a stark glimpse into the depths of colonial alienation, it was truly a cultural revolution.

And when the Vichy censor banned Tropiques in 1941 with the comment that it was revolutionary, he showed himself to be a very good critic. It's true! It was a cultural revolution.

We were carrying out a kind of Copernican revolution. There was good reason to be surprised! And the Martiniquais were themselves surprised as they stood revealed to themselves. It was a strange encounter!

It modified quite a number of values.

* Which ones?

A.C.: We are by definition complicated beings. That is the general rule for any society but one that is particularly applicable in the case of societies where complex layers of sediment have been laid down as a result of the inequalities of colonial life. Not everything was negative, far from it. The hybridization of which we are the outcome has achievements and positive values to its credit wherein the West and Europe also had their share. There was, as I say, a positive side, the effects of which were only belatedly felt by the non-Europeans but which are undeniable and in which we are simultaneously agents and partners - and, I should add, sometimes the beneficiaries as well. The Abbe Gregoire(1), Victor Schoelcher(2) and all those who spoke out and still speak out, who campaigned for human rights without distinction of race and against discrimination, these were my guides in life. They stand forever as representatives of the West's great outpouring of magnanimity and solidarity, an essential contribution to the advancement of the ideas of practical universality and human values, ideas without which the world of today would not be able to see its way forward. I am forever a brother to them, at one with them in their combat and in their hopes.

* You made an important speech in Geneva in 1978, at the event called "Geneva and the Black World", in which you said: "The effective power of poetry, with its two faces, one looking nostalgically backward, the other looking prophetically forward, with the redeeming feature of its ability to redeem the self, is the power of intensifying life". Was your Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, published in 1939, just such a primary utterance?

A.C.: Yes, that is how I see it: a new starting-point, a real start - there are many false starts in life.

But I think that was, for me, the real start.

Disinterring memories, all that was buried, bringing it back, presenting it so that it bursts forth fully formed upon the world - I think this sends an important signal. To express, not suppress, the force of one's reaction, to wield reinvigorated words as a miraculous weapon against the silenced world, freeing it from gags that are often imposed from within.

* How does one set about "ungagging" the world?

A.C.: I simply believe in the redeeming power of words.

* Is that enough to dent with the human condition and the way it repeatedly slides out of control?

A.C.: Probably not, not without love and humanism.

I really do believe in human beings. I find. something of myself in all cultures, in that extraordinary effort that all people, everywhere, have made - and for what purpose?