The liberating power of words

UNESCO Courier, May, 1997 by Annick Thebia Melsan

Quite simply to make life livable!

It is no easy matter to put up with life and face up to death.

And this is what is so moving.

We are all taking part in the same great adventure.

That is what is meant by cultures, cultures that come together at some meeting-point.

* You invented the term "negritude", which has been the mortar holding together a historic movement. Does not the assertion of negritude carry with it the risk of separating you from others, from "non-blacks"?

A.C.: We have never regarded our specificity as the opposite or antithesis of universality. It seemed to us - or at least to me - to be very important to go on searching for our identity but at the same time to reject narrow nationalism, to reject racism, even reverse racism.

Our concern has always been a humanist concern and we wanted it to have roots.

We wanted to have roots and at the same time to communicate.

I think it was in a passage in Hegel emphasizing the master-slave dialectic that we found this idea about specificity. He points out that the particular and the universal are not to be seen as opposites, that the universal is not the negation of the particular but is reached by a deeper exploration of the particular.

The West told us that in order to be universal we had to start by denying that we were black. I, on the contrary, said to myself that the more we were black, the more universal we would be.

It was a totally different approach. It was not a choice between alternatives, but an effort at reconciliation.

Not a cold reconciliation, but reconciliation in the heat of the fire, an alchemical reconciliation if you like.

The identity in question was an identity reconciled with the universal. For me there can never be any imprisonment within an identity.

Identity means having roots, but it is also a transition, a transition to the universal.

* Fire, one of the main life forces?

A.C.: Yes, as you say, fire.

There is an obvious fiery quality in my poetry, but why? I belong to this island. . . . Why this obsession in my poetry? It is not something that I deliberately seek. I am aware - everyone is aware - that the volcano is out there. It is earth and it is fire.

Fire is not destructive. The volcano is not destructive except in an indirect way. It is a cosmic anger, in other words, a creative anger, yes, creative!

We are far removed from that romantic idyll beneath the calm sea. These are angry, exasperated lands, lands that spit and spew, that vomit forth life.

That is what we must live up to. We must draw upon the creativity of this plot of land! We must keep it going and not sink into a slumber of acceptance and resignation. It is a kind of summons to us from history and from nature.

* How, then, do you explain the fact that your "primary utterance" was expressed in the language of the colonial power, of colonialism?

A.C.: I have no problem with that.

It was not something I wanted, but it happens that the language I used was the language I had learned at school. That didn't bother me in the slightest, it didn't in any way come between me and my existential rebellion and the outpouring of my innermost being. I bent the French language to my purposes.