from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

Notes on Wifredo Lam's Heretical Surrealism

“…Césaire needs imaginative resources that are not gray and bureaucratic. They will have to come from things and places untouched by “the cursed venereal sun,” as much the spirit of the times as the actual celestial body that parches the land and maims the thinking of those on it, that rises at the beginning of the Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Césaire 2001, 1). These resources will have to be deep‐woods and chthonic.…”

Antillean Women and Black Internationalism

“…In his poetic texts, Aimé Césaire makes numerous references to Black female figures, particularly to their bodies, histories and behaviors, but often their voices are not actually heard, which tapkes us back to the notion of voicelessness. Whether it is the woman carrying thousands of names of fountain or sun in the Notebook, 26 the restored maroon wife in The Miraculous Weapons 27 or the woman stretching out like a mountain in Solar Throat Slashed, 28 female expression appears as corporeal and passive rather than discursive and proactive. When accused of relative misogyny in a 1977 interview, Césaire replied that Black women have sustained race and tradition and that in every Martinican household, there is a woman who is indeed a great man.…”

Césaire's Revolution of Pedagogy

“…Césaire The End of the world of course. 40 Let me briefly lay out a historical account of revolution and what this might mean for the twenty-first century. First, revolution is not synonymous with war nor should it be confused with revolt.…”

“…Whereas the moderate says no to radical change, no to violent revolution, no to the abolition of capitalism, the Sartrean public intellectual, of which Césaire is paradigmatic, says "if all I can do is speak, it is for you [the colonized, that] I shall speak." 46 Where white supremacist patriarchy attempts to fragment the oppressed, thereby rendering them mute, the revolutionary poet, the public intellectual, gives unreserved "support [to] the national aspirations of colonized peoples." 47 While the liberal focuses on reforming society in order to reduce individual racism, Césaire, according to André Breton, is "a black who is not only a black but of all of [humankind], who conveys all of [our] questionings, all of [our] anguish, all of [our] hopes and all of [our] ecstasies, and who will remain more and more […] the prototype of dignity" that stands defiantly before the monster that is systemic © 2018 Mark W. Westmoreland https://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_23/westmoreland_december2018.pdf ISSN 1908-7330 racism.…”