Tracing the païdeuma in Aimé Césaire’s poetry: From ‘Solar Throat Slashed (Soleil Cou-Coupé)’ to ‘Cadaster (Cadastre)’
Year: 2003
Type: article
Abstract: Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle, the créoliste Raphaël Confiant (1993) harshly criticizes the apparent disassociation between the former député's revolutionary poetics and his moderate, even ineffectual, political policies.Other critics, including Auguste Armet (1973) and Lilyan Kesteloot (1992) also note the paradox between the poet's inspiration of the African independence and American Black Power movements and his failure to achieve autonomy for his own island nation of Martinique.James Arnold (1981:269) argues that the new independence of African nations of the early 1960s, in contrast with the lack of political change in Martinique, brought about a crisis for the negritude prophet of political revolution that led him to abandon poetry for the theater.In his discussion of Césaire's (1967) play A Season in the Congo (Une saison au Congo), Jacques Corzani (1978:17) writes that the poet-turned-playwright seemed to have renounced the term and the ideology of negritude beginning in 1971.I believe that Césaire underwent an even earlier disillusionment with negritude as a worldwide movement of black liberation.The term first appeared in 1939' in Césaire's (1983) Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Cahier d'un retour au pays natal), but by the early 1960s the poet realized that the literary and political movement that negritude had engendered was being superseded.It was during this critical period that Césaire edited his 1948 collection of poetry Solar Throat Slashed (Soleil cou-coupé) for its republication in the 1961 volume Cadaster (Cadastre) (both in Césaire 1983).New West Indian Guide I Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol.77 no. 1 & 2 (2003):85-104
Author: Janice Horner Kaufman
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W2076750291