“Lands that spit and spew”: Aimé Césaire’s vegetal poetry

Abstract

Little critical attention has concentrated on the rich botanical imagery of Aimé Césaire’s poetry. Far from serving as the placid, bucolic backdrop of Martinique, Césaire’s vegetal world is a space of tremendous and unpredictable flux and change. By performing several close readings of Césaire’s flora-centric poems in the context of Édouard Glissant’s poetics of Relation, this article articulates a notion of “vegetal writing”, a kind of critical mode of composition and reading that produces distinct imaginings of creolization through the aesthetic lens of botanical imagery. In doing so, this article argues that Césaire’s vegetal poetry posits a challenge to romanticized pastoral renderings of Antillean landscape and, secondly, dominant readings that place Césaire’s work in the literary stronghold of Négritude. Instead, reading Césaire’s poems alongside Glissant’s notion of Relation, vegetal writing creatively obfuscates the lines dividing root/stem, verticality/horizontality, mobile/immobile, self/other — placing the self in an increasingly complex, creolized world of hybridity, transformation, and human possibility.

In André Breton’s preface to Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1947/1939), Breton poignantly recalls meeting, for the first time, with Aimé Césaire and his wife, Suzanne Césaire, in Fort-de-France, Martinique. Breton had just perused the “unpretentious” pages of the Césaires’ (Aimé and Suzanne’s) cultural journal, Tropiques, and understood, with penetrating clarity that in its heady poetic and pictorial language, “all the grimacing shadows were torn apart, scattered” (Breton, 2001: x). Shrewdly presenting itself as an anodyne West Indian folklore publication, Tropiques’ art, cultural criticism, and literary topics levelled subversive blows at Martinique’s Vichy regime, the Nazi-linked colonial power ruling the island. The journal’s voices, boldly challenging the racial and political structures of the Vichy era, occasioned Breton to remark, “What I learned was that the verbal instrument had not gotten out of tune in the tempest” (Breton, 2001: xi). Breton likened the production of Tropiques to a surreal jungle voyage, seeing the Césaires adrift in “an ocean of delirious vegetation” with the “enigmatic” balisier flower serving as the solitary landmark guiding their course of dissent and creation. As Breton puts it, “It is there, under the auspices of that flower, that this mission, assigned to man today, of breaking violently with the modes of thinking and feeling that eventually render his existence impossible took on an imprescriptable form” (Breton, 2001: viii). Imbued with a kind of talismanic energy, this incandescent buoy — the balisier flower — seems to consecrate an unfolding artistic vision seeking human emancipation and redemption.

In light of these botanical preoccupations, this article situates and reads Aimé Césaire’s flora-centric poems in the context of Édouard Glissant’s notion of the poetics of Relation. In doing so, its close readings of the selected poems contest dominant interpretations of Césaire’s writing as fortifying the literary objectives of négritude; that is, a close-ended, Afro-centric worldview focused exclusively on the culture and art of globally dispersed Africans. Literary criticism is overly apt to rehearse the intellectual tug of war narrative that has come to overshadow the shared literary legacy of Césaire and Glissant — that is, Césaire’s claim to a one-dimensional worldview based on the precepts of négritude, and Glissant’s follow-up articulation of Relation to dispute négritude’s Afro-centricity in favour of a globalized, multicultural view. Rather, as this paper argues, close readings of Césaire’s botanical imagery suggests that his poems evince a distinct, if nascent, imagining of the Caribbean as a creolized space in which flux and multiplicity shape identity. To more specifically trace the movement towards creolization, this paper articulates an overarching critical notion of “vegetal writing”. To be clear, vegetal writing is not an altogether standalone critical term that can be seamlessly extrapolated and applied to interpret other texts; it does not possess the far-reaching immediacy and applicability of other interpretive frameworks from the critical theory lexicon. Thus, vegetal writing rather describes the particular nuances of recurring “moments” or efflorescences in Césaire’s poetry involving creolization through the distinct aesthetic lens of botanical imagery. Importantly, vegetal writing is not a static term, but an early aesthetic rendering of Glissant’s notion of Relation that, by stripping it of abstraction, gives it a distinct literary shape. Reading Césaire’s poems alongside Glissant’s notion of Relation, vegetal writing deliberately obfuscates botanical and human ontologies, blurring the lines of root/stem, verticality/horizontality, mobile/immobile, self/other — placing the “I” in an increasingly complex, creolized world of hybridity and transformation.

Beyond vegetal symbolism

Aimé Césaire’s literary engagement with Caribbean flora merits close, critical consideration. His depiction of landscape and flora encompasses a vast Antillean geography, ranging from wild coasts and pullulating jungle terrain, to the ancient arboreal monuments of West Africa. Césaire’s landscapes, however, all but perpetuate familiar poetic depictions of the Caribbean environment as an ahistorical tabula rasa upon which Western Empire inscribes its narratives. Literary traversal of these verdant spaces, suggests Suzanne Césaire, stirs the poet’s creative animus and provides the inspiration to transcend the “colonial idiocies” gripping Martinique and the broader Caribbean world (S. Césaire, 2012: 38). That Aimé Césaire wrote during the era of Vichy rule — no doubt an era of intense cultural aridity — and took up the peculiar theme (among others) of vegetation, casts a quizzical light on poetry penned under the cloud of political hegemony. Put another way, why plants? Plants, though possessing degrees of sentience, are bereft of speech, voice, and sound, things incapable of articulation and stridency. Even Breton’s glorious balisier bloom strikes one as an unlikely symbol of political dissent and the literary avant-garde. In the natural world of Martinique, Mount Pelée, with its primeval convulsions and pumice-sputtering fury, would have seemed the obvious icon of political action — ironically, however, he focuses on the plant life carpeting its precipitous slopes. As close reading suggests, Aimé Césaire’s poetry does not depict anthropomorphized Venus flytraps, garrulous mangroves, or the stuff of fantasy. Rather, he fashions a polyvalent poetry that, drawing on vegetal imagery, articulates a fraught (post)colonial identity in a politically vexed and rapidly modernizing Caribbean world.

“Critics”, commented Aimé Césaire, “have remarked upon the recurrence of certain themes in my works, in particular plant symbols. I am in fact obsessed by vegetation, by the flower, by the root” (quoted in Linsley, 2002: 294). Indeed, several postcolonial scholars, such as Ella Robinson, read Césaire’s vegetal imagery as a collection of potent spiritual symbols. For Robinson, these botanical allusions represent a spiritual “regeneration central to the vegetal connection with plant, animals, and humans” (Robinson, 1987: 163). Critical discussions, particularly those articulated by translators Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, concentrate on plant imagery’s links with West African spiritualism and themes of metamorphosis. In this interpretive vein, Antillean flora is read as being endowed with totemic and mystical potency, a cosmically oriented life-force that symbolizes Black resilience and spiritual vigour. Césaire, they write, crafted his botanical images based on his academic zeal for the anthropological work of Frobenius, who wrote prolifically (and reductively) on a dualist interpretation of Western (Hamitic) and African (Ethiopian) civilizations. Whereas Hamitic culture was defined by voracious animal aggression, Ethiopian culture was characterized as vegetal passivity. Thus, for Eshleman and Smith, Césaire’s poems channel the Hamitic power of human–plant metamorphosis to emphasize a telluric steadfastness in the midst of upheaval. In this way, “Césaire’s position was tinted with African wisdom; and the passive principle was as much a part of his ideal as the active one” (Eshleman and Smith, 1983: 11). Furthermore, and by extension, these green references and symbols contribute to what Eshleman and Smith understand to be the cynosure of Césaire’s botanical lexicon: the mighty tree:

To a dispersed race the tree offered the advantage of being rooted in telluric solidity and security while reaching for the sky. It had both the openness to the cosmos that constituted the special gift of the blacks and the strength necessary for survival and regeneration. (Eshleman and Smith, 1983: 11)

Césaire ascribes the tree transcendental and mythic qualities that speak to the larger historical plight of dispersed Africans.

Similarly, art historian Robert Linsley identifies the vegetal’s metaphysical qualities, particularly as they are rendered in twentieth-century art. Césaire’s friend and contemporary, the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, captured the spiritual dimension of Antillean flora in his painting, The Jungle (1943). Drawing these botanical parallels between Césaire and Lam, Linsley writes: “Trodden down but still living, the plant is a symbol of the patient defiance of the slave; but in the Césairean universe it also symbolizes the nature of African spirituality, in tune with the ‘rhythms of life’” (Linsley, 2002: 294). To achieve this symbolism, Lam’s The Jungle vividly obscures plant and human ontologies by depicting the claustrophobic proximity of dense jungle vegetation. In a frenetic blur of earthly purples and bronzes, Lam depicts a heliolithic people united in plantlike solidarity. Fixed closely together, Lam’s figures stand as anthropomorphic stalks, shoots, and sprouts, locked in a celebratory (almost phototropic) posture, reaching up towards their source of life-giving sustenance. Other critics, like Ernest Pépin, have peered through the foliage of this symbolic language to read Césaire’s vegetal references as a kind of Messianic impetus propelling the Caribbean through a vexed continuum of history:

Far from being a simple backdrop, [the vegetal] signifies, through the prism of a persistent animism, the full force of a possible redemption. For Césaire, the vegetal is neither knowledge nor science but, rather, the intuition of a renewed participation in the dynamic of salvation. (Pépin, 2003: 6)

On a personal level, however, Césaire’s fascination with Antillean vegetation — one he nurtured his entire life — was surely a belated reaction to the French colonial education he received as a child. Like his peers, Césaire was inundated with French mores and customs. Colonial education extolled the sacrosanct canons of Western humanities and sciences, to such an extent that Martinique’s local history and culture was obscured, if not altogether effaced from academic discourse. Césaire acerbically recalls the lessons his French pedagogues delivered, particularly those that academically discounted Martinique’s natural world:

If my grades were so low, it was because I could never find a plant from Martinique and that in my botany book I kept seeing plants from France. Everything was like that. And so we became quickly aware of the limits of official culture. (Césaire, 2008: 994)

These limits, of course, refer to that which was outside Western erudition and deemed exotic and Other.

Symbolic, spiritual, and metaphysical readings aside, scholar Martin Munro shifts the critical focus of vegetal imagery onto the subversive linguistic propensities unique to Aimé Césaire’s botanical vocabulary. Munro reads Césaire’s botanical references within the troubled contexts of speaking French, the language of Martinique’s colonizer. Through his poetry’s sophisticated botanical lexis, Munro explains, Césaire fashions a kind of “coded sub-language” which serves to internally sabotage and subvert the broader framework of conventional French discourse (2000: 106). Césaire’s botanical references to Antillean flora deliberately frustrate easy reading and interpretation, achieving the linguistic effect of enlarging an “unbridgeable chasm between the French reader and the poetic language” (Munro, 2000: 106). Indeed, not without considerable difficulty would Césaire’s contemporaneous European readers find the edifying resources sufficient to clarify the obscure vocabulary and allusions to Antillean flora. Munro defines the semantic aftermath of creating this “coded sub-language”. On one level, referential opacity leads to an interpretive impasse, “where the metropolitan French reader is led to feel a certain unease — this is my language, so why does it sound alien to me?” On a second level, “any reading, any (attempted) translation should never truly assimilate Césaire’s poetry into the European tradition” (Munro, 2000: 106). That Césaire wrote in French, and with a range of dazzling neologisms, poses interpretive difficulties, as French–English translators encounter a poetic vocabulary that is, at times, starkly alien.

Criticism offers much to elucidate the significance of Césaire’s botanical imaginary; but it often oversimplifies Césaire’s intentions by reading the vegetal merely as a sophisticated network of spiritual and symbolic ciphers. While elements of symbolism are important, this article posits an interpretive counterpoint to these dominant readings by articulating a theoretical concept of the “vegetal” not in terms as a familiar Césairean trope or symbol, but more broadly as a critical mode of writing. Defined as such, and inspired by Césaire’s rich botanical lexis, vegetal writing articulates a discourse and aesthetic of creolization, ultimately producing a nascent poetics of relation. To unpack the complexities of the vegetal as a critical mode of writing, this paper draws on the critical theory of Gilles Deleuze and Édouard Glissant. Keeping with Césaire’s penchant for botanical terms and with Deleuze’s biological metaphors, we might figuratively liken the vegetal, as a mode of critical writing, to a recalcitrant weed that sprouts up between binaries and flowers in liminal crevices and interstitial spaces. The vegetal, more precisely, fosters resistance by sprouting up in places thought inhospitable for creativity to take root and evolve. Vegetal writing does not always assume the bright form of “venomous flowers” and “green fires”; it is also minute, saxicolous (growing among and in between rocks), germinating on the monoliths of Western culture until becoming conspicuously verdant (Césaire, 2001: 22–3). Tropiques was, for example, an intensely saxatile artistic process: it took root during the Vichy regime when state censorship squelched dissent and opposition. Out of the magical debris of a transported West African animism, vegetal writing, responding to Césaire’s call for “newness”, takes up the task of resistance and “augurs a new mode of connection with the Other” (Glissant, 1997/1990: 41). Critically speaking, vegetal writing is a literary extension of Deleuze’s notion of the rhizome, in that it is not only a botanical metaphor for radically moving thought (planar versus arboreal), but a discourse of creolization that, like a plant, is at once structured and spontaneous, moving from homogeneity to complexity and transformation.

Rhizome, relation, and vegetal writing

Martinican poet and cultural theorist Édouard Glissant wrote prolifically on the complexity of Caribbean identities. His adoption of Deleuze’s notion of rhizomatic thought to formulate a philosophical and artistic discourse of creolization is outlined in his Poetics of Relation (1990), a foundational work incisively tracing the intersection of Deleuze’s philosophy, Caribbean writing, and hybridity. “The work of Glissant”, writes Lorna Burns, “led the way in demonstrating the significance of Deleuzian thought to postcolonial theory” (2012: 6). Glissant was perhaps most intrigued by the processes of creolization as a mode of rethinking alterity and the multiplicity of identities following the colonial era. In Poetics of Relation, Glissant writes:

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari criticized notions of the roots and, even perhaps, notions of being rooted. The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it. In opposition to this they propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system, a network […] with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently […]. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other. (Glissant, 1997/1990: 11)

Put simply, Glissant’s philosophical exploration limns a philosophical framework capable of understanding the totality of multiplicity without lapsing into essentialist generalizations. Deleuze typically adopted scientific and mathematical language to articulate a philosophical concept. The rhizome, a root system that grows horizontally and produces lateral sprouts, serves as an apt metaphor for political and cultural transformation. In contrast to arboreal tree-like structures or hierarchal systems that are vertical, binary, and chronological, the rhizome is a planar, nonhierarchical, and horizontal proliferation. The rhizome resists structural verticality and spreads adventitiously, spilling into fissures and liminal spaces, and opening up new ones (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 6–7). As a politico-philosophical metaphor, the rhizome symbolizes an organizational alternative to rigidly structured cultural and political systems, particularly those emphasizing homogeneity. Deleuze’s botanical metaphors usher in a radical thought process — indeed, an artistic process too — that moves toward heterogeneity, multiplicity, and difference.

Glissant concedes that Relation eludes concrete definition; nor can it be “proved” — rather, it can only be imagined, “conceivable in transport of thought” (Glissant, 1997/1990: 173–4). Drawing Relation into the sphere of thought and creativity, Glissant defines Relation, in part, as an infinitely unfolding totality: “In Relation, the whole is not the finality of its parts: for multiplicity in totality is totally diversity” (Glissant, 1997/1990: 192). Glissant articulates Relation in sharp contrast to the classic Western model of self–Other dualism. For Glissant, Western notions of identity are purely atavistic (the arboreal), meaning that identity is grounded in origin, filiation, and territory. From a Western standpoint, the Other or foreigner, is regarded as opposition, not an instance of difference. Glissant poses the atavistic self–Other dualism in relation to his notion of creolization (rhizomatic movement), the convergence of cultures and identities that produces states of Relation: “evolving cultures infer Relation — the overstepping that grounds their unity diversity” (Glissant, 1997/1990: 1). According to Glissant, creolization is the rhizomatic unfolding of new identities and multiplicity, or “unity-diversity”, outside the rigid political hierarchies of race. Glissant grounds his definition by evoking the lurid spectre of a slave vessel, a “womb abyss”, traversing the Atlantic — propelling, at one level, the atavistic mission to subjugate otherness (via colonial constructs) and, at the other, cradling the future germ of Relation to the New World. The uprooting and movement of atavistic identity via the slave trade, however, produced the preconditions for Relation and, by extension, the creolized subjects that would ultimately subvert and dilute its structures over time.

Importantly, Glissant articulates creolization outside the confining discourses of identity by defining the term as a limitless creative process. First, Glissant explains, “When we speak about creolization, we do not mean only ‘métissage’, cross-breeding, because creolization brings something new to the components that participate in it”. Glissant’s definition of creolization, here, comes into clearer focus as a distinct process: “Creolization”, he explains, “is unpredictable, whereas the immediate results of cross-breeding are more or less predictable. […] Creolization opens on a radically new dimension of reality […] [it] does not produce direct synthesis, but ‘résultantes’, results: something else, another way” (Glissant, 1995: 269–70). Glissant references geneticist Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), who experimented with plant hybridization and cross-breeding, to articulate the distinction between métissage and creolization:

The effects of métissage of plants by grafting or animals by crossing can be measured. The result of grafting of red beans with white beans can be calculated in that they will result in such and such a way in various generations. But creolization is métissage with the added value of unpredictability. (Loichot translation of Glissant, 2012: 88–9)

Beyond the biological “stuff” of race and colour, creolization pushes culture, language, and art to a horizon of kaleidoscopic change, challenging not the particularity but fixity of identity. Keeping in mind Glissant’s emphasis on Relation’s artistic potentiality, vegetal writing, as a discourse of creolization, fashions a poetry focused on this kind of errant, rhizomatic movement among West Africa, Martinique, and the larger sphere of the Antilles. The thematic strain of Glissant’s definition of creolization is newness, not in the sense of ephemeral novelty but perpetually unfolding change and transformation:

[Creolization] is only exemplified by its processes and certainly not by its “contents” on which these operate. This is where we depart from the concept of “creoleness” […]. We propose neither humanity’s being nor its models. We are not prompted solely by the defining of our identities but by their relation to everything possible. (Glissant, 1997/1990: 89)

Creolization is neither a synthesizing power nor dialectical resolution between self and Other — it is, rather, a process of spontaneous creation and imagination that “relinks (relays), relates” difference, and the poetics of relation “call upon the imagination” (Glissant, 1997/1990: 174–5).

The vegetal, as a critical mode of writing, takes a more precise form as Césaire defines how artistic creation opens up new horizons of possibility. In a rhetoric proclaiming “newness”, Césaire calls for establishing fresh imaginaries and, in so doing, coins a peculiar neologism, “verrition”, to articulate a fiery exhortation to move beyond the colonial past and establish a new Black identity (Césaire, 2001: 51). In Eshleman and Smith’s particular translation, Césaire’s “verrition” is translated as “veerition”. Veerition, Césaire clarifies, stems from the Latin verb, “to sweep, to scrape a surface, or to scan” (Césaire, 2001: 63). In the Eshleman and Smith translation, “veerition” punctuates the end of Césaire’s poetic manifesto, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (2001). The word, again unique to the Eshleman and Smith variation, compactly fuses movement and erasure: to veer from established artistic convention, to sweep and scrape away the inscriptions of empire, pointedly encapsulates the process of inaugurating artistic newness. This is echoed differently in Discourse on Colonialism (1955/2000), in which Césaire writes,

the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism. Nor is it the present colonial society that we wish to prolong […]. It is a new society that we must create […]. (Césaire, 2000: 51–2).

Césaire does not trumpet pre-colonial nostalgia, violent demagoguery, or hermetic self-isolation. Instead, he calls for a galvanizing poetic imagination capable of establishing a new Black identity, one that is not dictated by arbitrary political structures but by an intensely local, rhizomatic movement toward transformation and self-determination. By the same token, Césaire forewarns of the cultural and political perils of embracing the idealistic vision of returning to a pre-colonial existence: the poet’s task is to “go beyond”, to create poetry rooted in both past and present.

Admittedly, creolization seems markedly antipodal to the poetry penned by the progenitor and sage of négritude — the cultural, philosophical, and political movement that ignited an international “renewed awareness of being black” and the attendant “acceptance of one’s destiny, history, and culture, as well as a sense of responsibility toward the past” (Eshleman and Smith, 1983: 6). Creolization, defining Caribbean identity in terms of fluidity and transformation, clashes with négritude’s mission to establish a universal Black identity; that is, early iterations of négritude did not theorize Black identity in terms of osmotic encounter or the transformative potentiality of blackness to undergo “mutual mutation generated by [the] interplay of relations” (Glissant, 1997/1990: 89). Indeed, Glissant explicitly defines Relation as a sort of philosophical rejoinder to négritude’s seemingly one-dimensional emphasis on solidifying a universal Black identity. Whereas Césaire postulates monolithic racial identity, Glissant, in philosophical opposition, articulates one of illimitable complexity and multiculturalism. Critics have reductively pitted creolization and Césaire’s brand of négritude as antithetical world views; however, Césaire’s late-life interviews evince a decidedly diminished emphasis on négritude’s former Afrocentric exclusivity and an incipient Caribbean-wide, even global conception of postcolonial identity. For example, referring to a 1978 interview, Césaire’s translators Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith point out that “[Césaire] maintained that for him black culture had never had anything to do with biology and everything to do with a combination of geography and history: identity in suffering, not in genetic material, determined the bond among black people of different origins” (Eshleman and Smith, 1983: 6). On another occasion, Césaire remarked:

I’m not going to entomb myself in some strait particularism. But I don’t intend either to become lost in a fleshless universalism. There are two paths to doom: by segregation, by walling yourself in the particular; or by dilution, by thinning off into the emptiness of the “universal”. I have a different idea of a universal. It is a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all. (Césaire quoted in Majumdar, 2005: 20–1)

Ultimately problematizing Césaire’s négritude is the indisputable fact that, despite his emphasis on African roots, he was Caribbean and French — a polyvalent identity that cannot be summarily linked with Africa and its attendant ideals. Mary Gallagher rightly notes, “The writing of Césaire, […] while it might emphasize the relation to Africa, is often deeply embedded too in the texture of Caribbean space and culture” (2002: 24). By situating négritude in relation to creolization, the movement can be “read” as a kind of nodal starting point within the larger rhizomatic network of identity relations in the Caribbean world, one which points to a shared horizon of humanity and multiplicity.

Cannibalizing the Antillean arcadia

A less abstract, decisive element of vegetal writing involves answering Aimé Césaire’s literary exhortation voiced in Notebook of a Return to the Native Land to “go beyond” not only the political strictures of Martinique’s Vichy government, but also Western literary conventions trivializing the complexities of Antillean landscapes. While the central thrust of vegetal writing is its use of botanical imagery to emphasize movement toward creolization, it also functions as an artistic instance of “veerition”, as it reimagines literary clichés regarding landscape and flora. In a 2008 interview, Aimé Césaire rejects depictions of Martinique as a somnolent outpost of French empire:

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 this story and from nature. (Césaire quoted in Melsan, 2008: 6)

As though infected by the poetic adrenaline provoked by admiring the verdant crags of Mount Pelée, Césaire characterizes Martinique’s landscape as a seething volcanic bulge — an island, despite its small size, cradling subterranean tremors of reinvigorating creativity and transformation. Césaire’s almost oracular exhortations call for artistic emulation of the environment: to “live up to” Martinique’s vegetal world — one that spits, spews, and sputters — is to extract inspiration from the island’s vibrant terrain. “Fire is not destructive”, explains Césaire, “The volcano is not destructive except in an indirect way. It is a cosmic anger, in other words, a creative anger, yes, creative!” (Césaire quoted in Melsan, 6: 2008). Césaire locates poetry in this furious discharge and dense flora, pointing to an aesthetic for writing poetry that is rooted in the synthesis of inspired fury and awe of the Caribbean environment.

Aimé Césaire was undoubtedly influenced by his wife’s essay, “Poetic Destitution” (published in Tropiques, January 1942), and no doubt echoed her urgings to fashion subversive poetry. In “Poetic Destitution”, which offers a scintillating study of the current state and future of Martinican poetry, Suzanne Césaire writes: “Come on now, real poetry lies elsewhere. Far from rhymes, laments, sea breezes, parrots. Stiff and stout bamboos changing direction, we decree the death of sappy, sentimental, folkloric literature. And to hell with hibiscus, frangipani, and bougainvillea. Martinican poetry will be cannibal or it will not be” (S. Césaire, 2012: 27). Indeed, these are the vapid themes of “tropical” writing that the vegetal, as a critical mode of writing, subverts and rewrites. Suzanne Césaire performs her own cannibalization of what she has sardonically termed “Hammock literature” by consuming, digesting, and regurgitating poetry that (es)chews romanticizing Martinique’s landscape. Figuratively speaking, the gastric process becomes a method of critical assessment, as she becomes herbivorous by processing plant matter and reimagining its function through a digestive, that is, literary tract. Césaire’s call for poetry to be cannibal sounds the death knell of torpid, unimaginative “tourist” literature (S. Césaire, 2012: 26–7). Through the churning of stomach and intellect, this regurgitated poetry subverts hackneyed literary tropes, reimagining Antillean landscape as the inspiring force of artistic creation.

In typical surrealist fashion, Aimé Césaire’s poetry regularly dismantles colonial depictions of Caribbean environments as tableaux of indolence and submission; he radically transmutes (and transmogrifies) familiar tropical elements into distinctly surreal landscapes. One dazzling depiction of a cannibalized Antillean landscape is found in Césaire’s poem, ironically entitled “Bucolic” (1960), in which the reader is submerged in the cosmic tumult of a near-apocalyptic earth that has inexplicably grown a mane and moves its “well-oiled octopus head”. The octopus head “turns over in its brain an idea clearly visible in the area of circumvolutions” (Césaire, 1983: 313). Circumvolution refers to the act of winding, folding, or orbiting around a central axis but, more specifically, serves as a neuroanatomical term for the spongy grey folds of the brain. The development of brain circumvolutions comprises an evolutionary response allowing for complex thought processes involving language. Césaire’s adroit play on the word evokes a double meaning linking the mechanical action of winding with brain tissue containing complex thought, the effect of which launches the earth into a kind of black hole “at full | speed, carrying in a sinister flight of rocks and meteors, the river, the horses, the horsemen and | the houses” (Césaire, 1983: 313). Familiar conventions of the peaceful bucolic panorama are subversively distorted, as this blast of apocalyptic flux suddenly transports the reader to a plutonian void, where “the water of piscinas swells, as the tombstones are | unsealed, as the bucolic installs in the hollow a sea of mud which nonchalantly smoke the best | maccaboy of the century” (Césaire, 1983: 313). The two-fold meaning of circumvolution signifies the galactic motion inspired by the “idea” and the movement of iconoclastic creativity that flings pastoral conventions into chaos.

Césaire’s poem reaches its surrealist crescendo when, in the dim of this now transformed landscape and as “gigantic lights flash off in the distance”, the reader encounters a transmuted Miltonic figure, “a good russet shepherd”. Wielding a “phosphorescent bamboo” (a peculiar substitute for the crook or crosier) Césaire’s solitary figure ushers not a herd of sheep but the recognizable edifices of Western civilization towards the edge of a promontory, where he “pushes a tall herd of shivering temples and cities into the sea” (Césaire, 1983: 313). Could the “russet shepherd” be Césaire the poet, prodding convention and custom over the fatal edge? While there are no explicit botanical references in the poem, Césaire nonetheless challenges Western definitions of “bucolic”, exchanging in its place a darkly reimagined Antillean world of universal rebirth symbolized by the wayward shepherd and his misguided flocks of edifices. In one cosmic sweep, the shepherd razes the edifice of literary convention. Less abstractly, vegetal writing enacts Césaire’s literary task of veerition, or sweeping away cliché landscape tropes, which, as the following section of this article demonstrates, propels his poetry towards a horizon of creolization.

Baobab, laminaria, and the horizon of relation

While Aimé Césaire’s poetry does not presage the philosophical specificities of Glissant’s definition of Relation, we can trace his movement towards a nascent conception of creolization among three poems: “Your Hair” (1948); “Lagoonal Calendar” (1976); and “algae” (1982). I argue that these poems dramatize a critical set of transitions, or rhizomatic progressions, that trace a movement towards creolization (and in chronological parallel with Césaire’s life), or a creolized understanding of the (post)colonial self’s vexed place in the Caribbean. Put another way, as Césaire’s late poems become increasingly laconic and minimal, so do his vegetal allusions. By extension, identity and self are no longer defined in relation to majestic arboreal (African) forms (as we will see in “Your Hair” with its representations of the baobab tree), but are rather personified in increasingly minuscule organisms. The self, or “I” of Césaire’s late poetry, becomes curiously cellular, occupying liminal and interstitial spaces of the Caribbean’s environment (like the “octopus’s hole” in “Lagoonal Calendar”). Indeed, the self, articulated in relation to and embodying different vegetal forms — ranging from the baobab tree to algae — transitions from the telluric fixity of his earlier poems, to pelagic errantry. ¹ This pivot in Césaire’s poetry, I argue, suggests an incipient creolization, one in which the self is no longer symbolically conceptualized as a fixed and mighty earth-bound “I”, but as a dispersed particle within a larger web of relational existence.

Aimé Césaire’s poem, “Your Hair”, powerfully underscores the relationship between Caribbean memory and the distant lands of West Africa. Césaire depicts a deceptively passive landscape, one almost heavy with primordial sleep, but really as a necropolis of geological memory; for, beneath the earth’s crust there exists a substratum of tectonic memories that transport the poet to the depths of memory. In “Your Hair”, Césaire draws on botanical references linking the cosmic synchronization of the poet’s memory and West African landscape:

The forest will remember the water and the sapwood

as I too remember the compassionate snouts

of big rivers that stumble around like blind men

the forest remembers that the last word can only be

the flaming cry of the bird of ruins in the bowl of the storm. (Césaire, 1983: 181)

Rather than reiterating the tribulations of colonialism or idealizing a pre-colonial world, Césaire suggests that remembering West Africa (or any pre-Diasporic homeland) maintains a kind of cultural survival, as both human and nature work in tandem to overcome cultural destruction.

Amidst the “remembering” process of poet and vegetation there is an effort not to “forget to remember | that the baobab is our tree | that it barely waves arms so dwarfed | that you would take it for an imbecilic giant” (Césaire, 1983: 181). The baobab tree is Césaire’s central vegetal symbol which, according to Keith L. Walker, is essential to the present discussion because of its “cathectic dimension as cult object, its subsequent diegetical survival in myth, and the rich hermeneutical potential of the myth” (1999: 96). According to legend, the tree was once extolled and worshiped as a fortress of animal spirits by West Africans. Spurred on by their jealousy, the gods violently uprooted this preternatural tree so that its stubby roots became its branches and its magnificent branches served as its roots (Walker, 1999: 96). Despite the brutal inversion of its root-foliage system, “Miraculously, going against every design of the gods, the baobab rerooted upside down. The former branches functioned as roots, while the former roots functioned as branches, thus explaining the distinctively withered and atrophied appearance of the tree” (Walker, 1999: 97). The violence underlying the nature of the baobab tree, claims Walker, “coincides with the trajectory and history of the slave trade and the survival of Blacks in the New World” (1999: 97). But, extending this curious human–arboreal ontology into the context of Martinican poetry, the baobab tree also reflects the ability of Blacks, despite being viciously overturned, up- and re-rooted, coerced to learn and speak (in this case) French, to seize and transform the colonizer’s language into a weapon of retaliatory resistance.

Césaire, however, complicates the poem’s reference to the baobab tree myth in “Poetry and Knowledge”, writing: “Only myth satisfies mankind completely; heart, reason, taste for detail and wholeness, taste for the false and the true, since myth is all that at once. A misty and emotional apprehension, rather than a means of poetic expression” (1990: 43). Because “poetry is in accord with myth”, myth affords inspiration and substance for the poet to craft a text reimagining, thereby sustaining the culture’s rich mythology (Césaire, 1990: 43). Walker provides an illuminating remark from an interview in which Césaire was queried on the “extended role of flora” in his writings: “Further, it [the baobab tree] is the tomb of the African storyteller-poet-chroniclers. Yes, the soul of the griot rests in the Baobab tree” (Césaire quoted in Walker, 1999: 99). As a myth, the baobab tree has had a far-reaching resonance with Black poets and artists because its present nature as an “upside-down tree” serves as an organic testament not only to the uprooting it has suffered, but to its refusal to wither and perish after its violent inversion. Césaire presents an optimistic reading of the baobab tree in the concluding lines of the poem: “sleep softly by the meticulous trunk of my embrace my | woman | my citadel” (Césaire, 1983: 181). Why, though, is the baobab’s trunk described as “meticulous”? Does its towering stature overwhelm the viewer? Or, is it because the griot’s stories, songs, and chronicles are inscribed upon its exterior? To clarify, noting that the arboreal ontology is reflected accurately in the present state of displaced Blacks in the Caribbean and abroad, Césaire could have bemoaned this shared plant–human state, but chooses to recuperate — “sleep softly by the meticulous trunk” — and draw his poetic powers before the sagacious griot dwelling within. Importantly, while the mangled vegetal architecture of the baobab tree reminds viewers of its traumatic uprooting, the tree’s mythic and symbolic essence functions to inspire poetry and artistic creation grounded in a shared cultural memory. In other words, within the presence of this ancient, elephantine tree, language undergoes a kind of pilgrimage where, in the presence of the griot, it is charged with new vitality. Césaire alludes to this mythic rejuvenation in “Poetry and Knowledge”, as he reflects on a kind of cosmic energy that, as a poet, radiates throughout his being:

Like the tree, like the animal, he [the poet] has surrendered to primal life, he has said yes, he has consented to that immense life that transcends him. He has rooted himself in the earth, he has stretched out his arms, he has played with the sun, he has become a tree: he has blossomed, he has sung. (Césaire, 1990: 49)

The first poem in the trajectory of creolization, “Your Hair”, appropriately turns to mythology, the ancient narratives that undergird African identity and culture. Césaire transmutes the significance of those tales so that they are relevant for contemporary readers; in a sense, his turn to mythology and imaginative re-appropriation of the baobab tree gestures toward a writing of healing and Relation that works to unite all the fragmented postcolonial identities uprooted by colonial forces.

“Calendrier lagunaire” (Lagoonal calendar), published in the late collection, Noria (1976), narrates the wanderings of Césaire’s poetic “I” that “inhabits a sacred wound”, a wound of historical trauma that torments the self in “an absurdly botched version of paradise” (Césaire 1983, 383). The wound drives the narrator’s restless movement: “I inhabit from time to time one of my wounds | Each minute I change apartments | and any peace frightens me” (Césaire, 1983: 383). Here, the self is tormented by the haunted lingering of a wound, no doubt assumed to be the ancestral suffering wrought by the Atlantic slave trade, colonization, and the prevailing political structures enforcing racism. While the narrating “I” of the poem struggles to carry the weight of ancestral memory, readers encounter a dramatically minimized “I”, reduced to a kind of cosmic atom residing in the liminal spaces of both the natural world and psychological wounds of history. The narrator expounds a litany of the organic and psychological spaces he inhabits: “I inhabit the ice jam | I inhabit the ice melting | […] I inhabit the halo of the Cactaceae | I inhabit a herd of goats pulling | on the tit of the most desolate argan tree” (Césaire, 1983: 383). Inhabiting cacti and the tree-climbing goats that perch and feed on Argan fruits, the “I” wanders errantly between arid places and the benthic depths of oceans: “To tell you the truth I no longer know my correct address | Bathyale or abyssal” (Césaire, 1983: 383). Descending the mystical limbs of the baobab tree, the “I” of this poem moves frenetically between both real and imagined spaces.

The distinct scattering of the “I” among these different spaces underscores Césaire’s incipient awareness of the self in an ever-expanding, globalized world. In this poem, the “I” is a mere speck, traversing the liminal spaces of marine and telluric environments — “I inhabit the octopuses’ hole | I fight with the octopus over an octopus hole”; the “I” moves towards imperceptibility, a mote floating in the minute crevices of the natural world. As translators Eshleman and Smith point out, reading “Lagoonal Calendar” and other late poems: “The ‘I’ in these poems no longer is a stylized one, part of the mythopoesis as in previous collections, but a more concrete, human and real one, reflecting on a full and difficult career” (Eshleman and Smith, 1983: 24). Again, Césaire’s poetic “I” is now ensconced in the liminal voids of organic spaces: “I inhabit an abandoned cult | between bulb and bulbil I inhabit the unexploited space” (Césaire, 1983: 383). The “I” neither inhabits the bulb itself (the node of future growth) nor the bulbil (in botany, a secondary bulb that grows between the stem and leaf of a plant). Rather, the “I” is a new growth of its own, occupying the space between the two bulbs. Consider also the striking image of the ascidium, the hollow, vase-shaped organ of a pitcher plant: “whirling fire | ascidium like none other for the dust of strayed worlds | having spat out my fresh-water entrails | a volcano I remain with my loaves of words and my secret minerals” (Césaire, 1983: 383). Césaire again depicts himself (via the ascidium and volcano) as a vessel of subversive poetry. Césaire likens himself to “a kelpy mess | twining dodder-like | or unfurling porana-like | it’s all the same thing” (Césaire, 1983: 385). First kelp, then dodder (a species of wiry, parasitic plant), then the delicate white blooms of the porana plant, Césaire’s “I” grows increasingly minuscule within an ever-expanding, complex universe of creation.

Indeed, as Carrie Noland remarks in her reading of the poem, Césaire’s choice to write poetry in French does not suggest a linguistic and cultural disdain for Creole and the Caribbean’s multiculturalism. On the contrary, “Lagoonal Calendar” evinces a nascent creolization: “Césaire incorporates geographical, zoological, and botanical lexicons that turn out to possess roots in languages ranging from Arawak to Greek. Thus, instead of obscuring the specificity of Martinique through a language supposedly foreign to it, Césaire reveals the hybrid origins of the languages used to designate a specific site” (Noland, 2015: 27). These cross-cultural references and allusions abound throughout the poem, spanning arcane Greek- and Arawak-derived vocabularies. Noland continues: “The poet [Césaire] so frequently criticized for writing in French, shows through ingenious lexical means that in fact he does not write in French — not because he writes in Creole but because French is not French” (Noland, 2015: 27). Noland adds:

In his own way, then, Césaire anticipates the thesis of créolisation, namely, that no language is originary, self-identical, or pure. His revelation of an imperial history embedded in toponyms, geographical terms, and botanical nomenclatures buttresses Édouard Glissant’s contention that, in a land without written history, history is inscribed in the land and its names. (Noland, 2015: 27)

Césaire’s French is a palimpsest language layered with, to maintain Glissant’s vocabulary, linguistic and cultural multiplicities.

Césaire’s botanically enigmatic poem “algae”, published in the late collection moi, laminaire (1982), muses laconically on cosmic resurgence through the prism of a central vegetal reference, laminarian alga. The poem’s connection to a creolizing discourse and vision appears at first reading obscure, if not entirely absent. However, as I have noted earlier, Césaire’s deliberate choosing of certain botanical references to illustrate movement toward creolization is again at work in “algae”. While there is no distinct first-person pronoun narrating this particular poem, there is a heavy solitude through which Césaire speaks to the reader, again concentrating on the centrality of a poignant botanical image. Césaire’s poem emphasizes rebirth, or “resurgence”, by recalibrating the senses “through the dust of trade winds | through the properties of spume | and the strength of the earth” (Césaire, 1990: 133). Before resurgence can occur, the “I” must evacuate sense and become a kind of bottom-dwelling organism attuned to the elemental forces of nature: “the main thing is to sniff nakedly | to think nakedly” (Césaire, 1990: 133). To “think nakedly”, the mind of the poem is pushed toward molecularity, a thought process stripped of artifice and placed in the realm of dust and sea spume, the byproducts of nature’s flux.

Conspicuously absent in this poem is the “I” which is replaced with laminarian alga — a salient departure from Césaire’s previously telluric botanical references. Botanically speaking, laminarian alga, also known as tangle, is brown and kelp-like seaweed which, according to Keith Walker, “can extend for many miles into the open sea and yet remain attached to its natal rock or land formation” (1999: 10). While the image of undulating seaweed symbolizes, in part, the wanderings of diasporic movement, Césaire’s laminarian alga serves as the botanical icon of the Caribbean’s cultural and political future: “the resurgence here takes place through influx | even more than through afflux | the resurgence | takes place | laminarian alga” (Césaire, 1990: 133). Abruptly appended as the last line of the poem, Césaire curiously articulates laminarian alga as a singular, not plural (algae), pronoun. Here, the vegetal, as a discourse of creolization, defines the “I” as a singular strand of seaweed, a powerful aesthetic representation of the self that has transitioned from telluric fixity to pelagic errantry. Endowing the self with seaweed-like characteristics does not suggest permanent wandering and disconnected uprootedness; rather, the self, as a fibre of algae, emphasizes the rhizomatic state of transformation, the very existential stance Césaire promotes in the previously quoted interview excerpt: “I have a different idea of a universal. It is a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all” (Césaire quoted in Majumdar, 2005: 20–1). Thus, the sea, as the space hosting Laminarian colonies, assumes a particularly significant role as a site that “remembers” what land forgets, to allude to Derek Walcott’s idea in his poem, “The Sea is History” (Walcott, 1986). Indeed, theorizing the real and imagined significance of marine spaces, postcolonial writer Edward Kamau Brathwaite claims that “the unity is sub-marine” (Brathwaite, 1974: 64). The sea, as a site of radical deterritorialization, hosts fluid exchange, encounter, and openness — an unfolding space in which Césaire’s algal “I” connects with and participates in what Glissant calls “le Tout-Monde”, or the “whole-world”. That Césaire selects seaweed as the vegetal pronoun of his poem emphasizes a movement towards a creolized worldview, as the “I” is transported to a marine space in which “le Tout-Monde” becomes a possibility; where fixity and verticality are perpetually destabilized; and the self is situated within an unfolding web of relational being.

Tracing the rhizomatic movement of these three poems, Césaire’s writing demonstrates a progression towards a creolized vision of the postcolonial Caribbean world. From the mythical baobab tree to a solitary strand of seaweed — from the arboreal to the algal — we chart Césaire’s movement towards a horizon of creolization by closely reading the vegetal figures and references figuring throughout his poems. We discern in these poems a concentrated poetic and philosophical rigour of internalizing the ontological singularities of Antillean flora, both telluric and marine, to articulate the course of direction postcolonial Caribbean nations must take to cultivate community and cultural survival. Previously defined as a discourse and aesthetic of creolization, the vegetal provides an interpretive framework in which to read Césaire’s botanical references on two levels. First, on a literary level, the vegetal challenges conventional literary representations of flora in postcolonial literature. In doing so, close readings of poems such as “Bucolic”, reveal that Césaire particularly concentrated on using both simplistic and complex botanical references to challenge and subvert Western discourses that often distort and oversimplify Caribbean landscapes. Thus, in surrealist fashion, the vegetal reclaims Caribbean landscapes and employs references to diverse flora in order to reflect on the vexed place and status of Caribbean art and identity in the postcolonial era. On the second level, as a discourse and aesthetic of creolization, the vegetal demonstrates how Césaire’s poems progressed, not linearly but rhizomatically, towards a nascent vision of relation similar to the philosophical model Glissant would later articulate. As these close readings have demonstrated, the “I” of Césaire’s poems is increasingly minimized; the botanical references are reduced from majestic West African trees to specks of floating seaweed. That the poetic “I” embodies these diverse vegetal forms advances Césaire’s poetry toward a horizon of difference, multiplicity, and transformation — the hallmarks of human community of Glissant’s “le Tout-Monde”.