Aimé Césaire and the

Syntax of Influence
BRENT HAYES EDWARDS
Rutgers University

A BST R ACT
Much of the criticism on Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal focuses
on the poem’s linguistic innovation, especially its use of neologism. This paper
considers the poem’s syntax, its unusual and sometimes disorienting ways of
organizing the links between sentence elements and between individual po-
etic lines. In this regard, the Cahier’s recourse to anaphora is one of its features
that has had the most influence on the work of other African diasporic writers.
Looking in detail at the function of anaphora in the poem, especially in the
crucial lines defining the term négritude, I suggest that Césaire’s use of formal
repetition is related both to his translation of a poem by Sterling Brown, and
to his reading of Hegel’s concept of “negative determination.” I then read the
ways a Césairean poetics of anaphora is appropriated, translated, and revised
by other New World black writers, including Edward Kamau Brathwaite,
C. L. R. James, and Will Alexander.

I t is by now a commonplace to note that one of the most crucial aspects of Aimé
Césaire’s writing is his unique approach to poetic form, what one might call the
“syllabic intelligence” (Brathwaite, “History of the Voice” 263) at evidence in his
work—that is, the striking ways his writing handles, rends, and ignites language
into regions of resonance that exceed or veer from the mundane. Most often this is-
sue has been approached through criticism that highlights what James Clifford has
termed Césaire’s “poetics of neologism,” his recourse to vertiginous lexicographical
provocations, his predilection for combing the recesses of the dictionary to unearth
the word-work that thickens his verse (homonyms, foreign language grafts, invented
words, obscure idioms, rare and technical terms, especially botanical and biologi-
cal designations) (see Eshleman and Smith 26). This approach tends to focus one’s
attention on the most discrete level, the individual word, as a way to track the indis-
pensable function of what Césaire calls “l’image révolutionnaire, l’image distante”
(“Poésie et connaissance” 166) / “the revolutionary image, the distant image” (“Poetry

RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer 2005). © 2005

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RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES

and Knowledge” 27) in the poetry. In what follows I am going to attempt to pull out
from this morphemic focus, in order to ask instead how one might theorize a Cés-
airean syllabic intelligence at the level of syntax. It would mean moving beyond the
particular word, its resonance and force, in order to take account of the joints of the
poem, the ways it propels particular images into juxtaposition, echo, and transforma-
tion. Or in Césaire’s own language: “l’image relie l’objet: achève, en me montrant la
face inconnue, d’accuser sa singularité, mais par la confrontation et la révélation de
ses rapports; définit non plus son être mais ses potentialités . . .” ‘the image binds the
object: achieves, in showing me its unknown side, the accusation of its singularity,
but through the confrontation and the revelation of its relations; defines no longer its
being but its potentialities’ (“La poésie” 5).
Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith have noted that “Césaire’s syntax is dis-
jointed in an erudite Mallarmean way, partly as the result of his often unbounded
lyricism,” and they stress the hypotactic and anaphoric qualities of so much of his
verse, with “each clause introducing a dependent clause, the sequence building up to
the last clause which usually brings a climactic opening or an ironical juxtaposition”
(25). At the same time, they emphasize the ways that Césaire’s writing breaks from
French poetic predecessors, marveling at his “willingness to tamper with French
syntax in a way that makes Breton and Eluard sound like Mme de La Fayette” (18).
This is particularly apparent in Césaire’s recourse to what Gregson Davis terms
“syntactical ambiguity,” often achieved through unusual, even distorted sentence
construction and the concomitant withholding of punctuation (above all the comma
and period, which are both rare in Césaire’s poetry) (23–24). There are numerous
examples at the level of the individual line, such as the following plea in the Cahier
d’un retour au pays natal: “et toi veuille astre de ton lumineux fondement tirer lémurien
du sperme insondable de l’homme la forme non osée” / “and you star please from
your luminous grounding extract lemur from the unfathomable sperm of man the
undared form” (66). The reader is forced to strain to decipher the syntactical relations
between elements, and more than once—at the intrusion of the word “lemurien,” at
the deferral of the infinitive (“tirer”) that accompanies “veuille”—finds the apparent
logical progression of the sentence qualified, put off, or displaced.1
In what follows, my aim will be less to catalogue or evaluate such instances of
peculiar syntax at the level of the individual line, and more to consider the function
of syntactical patterns as they recur from line to line, giving a “rhythmic” pattern
to the poetry. I will be concerned here mainly with simple syntactical structures in
Césaire’s work, especially its recourse to anaphora, the repetition of the same word or
words at the beginning of successive phrases. Although many critics have noted that
anaphora is central to Césaire’s poetics, almost none have attempted to make sense
of its privileged function on a theoretical level in the propositions the verse explores,
above all with regard to the articulation of négritude in the Cahier.r My title is meant to
signal the claim that this characteristic use of anaphora is an element of Césaire’s writ-
ing that has had great influence among other poets in the African diaspora (perhaps
even more than Césaire’s poetics of neologism). At the same time, the title is meant
to draw our attention to the complexities of theorizing “influence” in such a diasporic
orbit. How does one attend to the syntax of influence—the particular ways the term
implies a flow or exchange of forms, the exportation or imposition of paradigms, an
aesthetics of the vanguard, a model of imitative and processive development? To raise
these questions with regard to Césaire is of course to return to one of the old debates
 BRENT HAYES EDWARDS
3

about the Négritude movement: the dynamics of influence in its formation and
transnational reception. I am doing so precisely to argue against the simplistic ways
that influence has most commonly been conceptualized in scholarship on Négritude:
as unidirectional and formative impact, as positive and exemplary modeling, as the
trace of deliberate emulation.
In writing about the interwar period, scholars often assume all too neatly that
the New Negro Renaissance in the 1920s “contient déjà en germes les principaux
thèmes de la ‘négritude’ ” ‘already contains the seeds of the principal themes of
“negritude”’ (Kesteloot 64), without bothering to explain just how those germinal
models travel from one place to another, and from English to French. What exactly
does it mean to claim that one writer is “influenced” by another, or by the reading of
a particular poem or book? Tracing Césaire’s own comments on the issue shows that
one cannot presuppose “influence” to be an overwhelming force, a model so defining
and definitive that everything that follows is written under its shadow and in its debt.
The invocation of “influence” may have more to do with political strategy and histori-
cal framing—the rhetoric with which a writer situates his work, in hindsight—than
with the contextual pressures and reading habits that may have informed a particular
scene of writing. At times, Césaire has said that the Négritude generation was deeply
“influenced” by their anglophone “predecessors” such as Langston Hughes and Claude
McKay (Rowell 51); he has even gone so far as to claim that Négritude was “invented”
by the writers of the Harlem Renaissance (qtd. in Fabre 149). But at other times, he
has rejected any direct input, citing the importance of black literature in English,
but describing it as writing “qui ne m’a pas influencé d’une manière littérale, mais a
créé l’atmosphère qui m’a permis de prendre conscience de la solidarité des peuples
noirs” / “which did not influence me directly but still created an atmosphere which
allowed me to become conscious of the solidarity of the black world”) (Depestre 74;
Césaire, Discourse 87). Aiming to emphasize the autonomy and specific contribution
of his own work, Césaire thus describes Négritude and the New Negro Renaissance
as “mouvements parallèles” / “parallel movements,” but “mouvements qui n’avaient
pas de liaison particulière entre eux” / “movements that had no particular relation
between them” (Depestre 72; Césaire, Discourse 86, modified).2
There is no doubt that Césaire read some literature from the Harlem Renaissance
during the 1930s. He told one interviewer that, in the years leading up to the war,
he and his colleague René Ménil had been avidly reading Langston Hughes, Countee
Cullen, and Claude McKay, writers that had been “revealed” to him in the early 1930s
by La Revue du Monde Noir, r the journal edited by Paulette Nardal and Léo Sajous. As he
put it, “Ils faisaient partie, si je puis dire, de nos bagages personnels” ‘They were part
of our personal baggage, as it were’ (Leiner viii). Moreover, in 1938, while studying
at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Césaire wrote a thesis (now lost) for his Diplôme
d’Etudes Supérieures on “Le thème du Sud dans la poésie nègre des Etats-Unis” (see
Ngal 185; Arnold 10–11). The only extant clue to Césaire’s reading of African Ameri-
can poetry in the period is his 1941 introduction to a selection of Harlem Renaissance
poets published in the journal Tropiques (the section featured translations of James
Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation,” Jean Toomer’s “Harvest Song,” and Claude McKay’s
“America”). While admiring, Césaire’s tone is strikingly measured in comparison to
the comments of prior Antillean critics such as Ménil and Etienne Léro, who had
made much more direct arguments that anglophone black US poetry offered a model
that francophone Antilleans should emulate (Ménil 9; Léro 12). Césaire calls African
4
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES

American poetry “pettily, meagerly lyrical” (petitement, chichement lyrique) (Césaire,

“Introduction” 41), and avers that
enfi n, voilà une poésie qui n’offre pas à l’oreille ou à l’oeil un corps inattendu et
indiscutable de vibrations. Ni l’éclat des couleurs. Ni la magie de son. Tout au
plus du rhythme, mais de primitive, de jazz ou de tam-tam c’est-à-dire enfonçant
la résistance de l’homme en ce point de plus basse humanité qu’est le système
nerveux.

in the end, here is a poetry that does not offer the ear or the eye an unexpected
and indisputable body of vibrations. Neither the brilliance of colors, nor the magic
of sound. At most, rhythm, but a primitive one, of jazz or of tom-tom—that is,
breaking down man’s resistance at that point of most basic humanity, the nervous
system. (41)

He goes on to say that the “grandeur” of such a literature is located in a different aspect
than one might expect. “Nous cherchions une grandeur de présence, une grandeur de
constitution” ‘We seek a grandeur of presence, a grandeur of constitution”), Césaire
explains, “et la grandeur de cette littérature est toute d’orientation” ‘and the grandeur
of this literature is entirely one of orientation’ (41). Finally, its enduring value, in his
view, is that it is “ouverte sur l’homme tout entier” ‘open to man as a whole’ (41). But
what does “orientation” mean, in this regard, and how would one go about evaluating
the resonance of such a stance—such an openness—in Césaire’s own poetry?
Rather than continue to wade into the variety of the rhetorical occasions where
Césaire discusses the Harlem Renaissance, as though one might glean some sort
of conclusive avowal from them—an admission that would establish a narrative of
literary filiation—here I will explore a field of echoes in a limited group of African
diasporic texts. This is to follow, on the micro-level of formal analysis, some of the
scholars who—on a broader plane of literary history—have reminded us of the intri-
cacies of reception and translation in a transnational literary context. In other words,
it is to investigate how a diasporic poetics is practiced.3 To ask about the “syntax of
influence” in the African diaspora is to think influence in terms of conjugation and
circulation, in terms of the unavoidable confrontation of difference, in terms of the
sea changes a syllabic intelligence suffers in moving from one context to another, from
one language to another. To this end, here I will open with Césaire’s explicit read-
ing of one of the key figures of the “younger generation” of the Harlem Renaissance,
but then consider in turn some of the African American and anglophone Caribbean
writers whose work reads and refracts Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal.
I have long been fascinated by the fact that in 1939, the same year Césaire
published the first version of his Cahier, r he also published a translation of a poem
titled “Strong Men” by Sterling Brown. An African American student named Edward
Jones, arriving in Paris in the fall of 1935 to study at the Sorbonne, met Césaire
and lent him an autographed copy of Brown’s 1932 book Southern Road. According
to Jones, Césaire “devoured its contents” (18). Césaire published his translation in
the journal Charpentes, somewhat perplexingly in a section called “Afrique Noire,”
which included the French version of the Brown poem next to a poem by Léopold
Sédar Senghor (“Neige sur Paris”) and a short folktale by Léon-Gontran Damas (“Aux
Premiers Ages”). Indeed, since Damas did not contribute to the single issue of the
1935 journal L’Etudiant Noir, r this configuration is, as far as I know, the first time that
 BRENT HAYES EDWARDS
5

the so-called fathers of Négritude appear in print together. I am less interested in the
simple claim that this translation indicates the “influence” of Brown (or of the Harlem
Renaissance more generally) on Césaire’s development, and more interested in asking
just what travels, here, just what information or strategies—what “potentialities,” in
other words—are found in this poetic practice of carrying over.
Of course, Brown’s “Strong Men” is itself a poem that reads and appropriates
a “predecessor,” lifting the kernel of its refrain from a poem by Carl Sandburg, “The
strong men keep coming on.” “Strong Men” forges an evocation of black virility and
resistance by reformulating Sandburg’s line through the black vernacular: repeatedly,
it intones, “The strong men keep a-comin’ on / The strong men git stronger” (56).
Césaire’s rather straightforward translation cannot be said to capture the force of the
idiomatic English: “Les hommes forts continuent d’avancer / Les hommes forts devi-
ennent plus forts” (“The strong men continue to advance / The strong men become
stronger”) (Brown, “Les hommes forts” 52). What remains—what carries over—from
the English is instead the anaphoric, nearly incantory shape of Brown’s lines, the sheer
relentlessness of their repetitious attack:
They broke you in like oxen,
They scourged you,
They branded you,
They made your women breeders,
They swelled your numbers with bastards. . . .
They taught you the religion they disgraced. (56)

Although the grammatical specificity of French (the auxiliary formulation of the

passé composé, the necessary interjection of the direct object) undermines some of the
heavy-stressed force of these lines, the overall effect—a blunt evocation of repeated,
dehumanizing objectification—is conveyed in Césaire’s version:
Il vous ont dressés comme des boeufs,
Ils vous ont fouettés,
Ils vous ont marqués au fer rouge,
Ils ont fait de vos femmes, des machines à faire des enfants,
Ils ont grossi votre nombre avec des batards...
Ils vous ont enseigné la religion qu’ils déshonoraient. (52)

Is it possible that, rather than any particular trope or image (indeed, it is precisely
the specific richness of terms such as “scourged” and “branded” and “breeders” that
fails to carry over into French), it is the very “strength” of this line-shape that informs
the composition of the Cahier? r
As many commentators have noted, the definition of négritude in the last third of
the Cahierr gains much of its power through its particular syntax. I especially want to
highlight the negative anaphora in these lines, in which the speaker announces that
ma négritude n’est pas une pierre, sa surdité ruée contre la clameur du jour
ma négritude n’est pas une taie d’eau morte sur l’oeil mort de la terre
ma négritude n’est ni une tour ni une cathédrale
elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol
elle plonge dans la chair ardent du ciel
elle troue l’accablement opaque de sa droite patience
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RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES

my negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of the day
my negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earth’s dead eye
my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it dives into the red flesh of the soil
it dives into the ardent flesh of the sky
it pierces the opaque prostration of its straight patience (66–69, translation
modified)

Carefully, négritude here is elaborated through what Stuart Hall would call “the nar-
row eye of the negative” (21), an accumulating tide of rejections or shoving-asides
that limn the scope of the term by what it is not. Of course, when the positive defi-
nition emerges, the term itself is replaced by a pronoun (“it dives into the red flesh
of the soil”), as though to pull away from the proper, as though to emphasize action
(“pierces”) rather than nominative definition (“is”), as though the term is afforded
salience only against the contrast of its non-designation. The subsequent lines extend
this process with a chant of praise to that portion of humanity that exists outside
what Sylvia Wynter terms the “techno-cultural fallacy” of Western modernity, which
perniciously defines technological advancement alone as the “ultimate criterion of
human value” (31, 32):
Eia pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien inventé
pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien exploré
pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien dompté

Eia those who have never invented anything

for those who have never explored anything
for those who have never tamed anything (68–69, translation modified)

René Ménil has sugggested usefully that these lines must not be read as some black
“non-technicity erected into value and proposed as an ideal of life”; instead, they mark
the acceptance of—not the resignation to—a history of degradation and exploitation
only “in the form of a challenge [sous forme de défi]” (90), extending the negative
anaphora of the previous lines. Of course, Césaire himself has explained that he ad-
opted the term nègre in the 1930s above all “comme un mot-défi” ‘as a term of defiance’
(Depestre 76; Césaire, Discourse 89). The question, then, revolves around the status
of this poetics of negation as syllabic intelligence, as the proper form of “defiance”
or “challenge”—that is, as the required mode of apprehending the history of slavery
and colonialism and the place of peoples of African descent in a universal moder-
nity, what the poem goes on to term the “rendez-vous de la conquête” ‘convocation
of conquest’ (76–77).
Nick Nesbitt’s recent study Voicing Memory offers the most thorough consider-
ation of the work of negation in the poetics of the Cahier.
r Nesbitt argues convincingly
that the subject of Césaire’s poem can be read as a sort of “aesthetic analogue” to the
“heroic subject” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The intellectual world of Paris in
the 1930s, Nesbitt points out, was very much animated by the rediscovery of Hegel,
especially through the highly influential lectures being given at the Ecole des Hautes
Etudes by the philosopher Alexandre Kojève, whose reading of the Phenomenology
emphasized the work of what Hegel termed “determinate negation” in the achieve-
ment of self-consciousness. Hegel argues that the Subject is “is in truth actual only in
 BRENT HAYES EDWARDS
7

so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering

with itself” (Hegel, Phenomenology 18). Such “self-othering” involves not a pretension
to a secure and self-contained identity, but instead the continual confrontation with
what is not the self: in other words, self-consciousness requires “the tremendous
power of the negative [ungeheure Macht des Negativen]” (Hegel, Phenomenology 19;
Hegel, Phänomenologie 36). In his lectures of 1934–35, Kojève elaborates at length on
the importance of “determinate negation” in the achievement of true or “revealed”
Being through what Hegel calls “speculative logic”:
The negation of A has a positive or specifically determined content because it is a
negation of A, and not of M or N, for example, or of some undetermined X. Thus,
the “A” is preserved in the “non-A”; or, if you please, the “A” is “dialectically over-
come” (aufgehoben) in the “non-A.” And that is why the non-A is not pure Nothing-
ness, but an entity that is just as “positive”—i.e., determined or specific, or better,
identical to itself—as the A which is negated in it: the non-A is all this because it
results from the negation of a determined or specific A. (203)

In other words, negation does not annihilate or destroy the negated element; instead
that quality is preserved as that which defines the Subject (through what it is not). The
parallel with the Cahierr should be evident: Césaire defines négritude in the anaphoric
passage I quoted earlier (“my negritude is not a stone . . .”) through precisely this
understanding of negation as the creation of a “positive” content by its differentiation
from a series of items of “determined” symbolic valence within technocratic Western
modernity (“stone,” “leukoma,” “tower,” “cathedral”). As Kojève puts it, “The freedom
which is realized and manifested as dialectical or negatingg Action is thereby essentially
a creation. For to negate the given without ending in nothingness is to produce some-
thing that did not exist; now, this is precisely what is called ‘creating’ [. . .]. What is
involved is not replacing one given by another given, but overcoming the given in favor
of what does not (yet) exist, thus realizing what was never given” (222, 223).
One might argue, indeed, that determinate negation becomes a crucial element
in Césaire’s understanding of literary expression more broadly. It would seem clearly
to be at stake in the definition of the poetic image in Césaire’s best-known statement
on poetics, the 1945 essay “Poetry and Knowledge”:
The barriers [garde-fous] are in place; the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction,
the logical principle of the excluded middle [tiers-exclu].
Precious barriers. But remarkable limitations as well.
It is by means of the image, the revolutionary image, the distant image, the image
that overthrows all the laws of thought that mankind finally breaks down the
barrier.
In the image A is no longer A. . . .
In the image A can be not-A. . . . (“Poetry” li-lii; Césaire, “Poésie” 166)

According to this passage, the poetic image is held up as a particularly effective

tool of determinate negation. It is important to stress, again, the creative function
of negation in this sense. Poetic negation in Césaire’s definition does not reduce or
shrink the “potentiality” of the image as it is articulated, but on the contrary holds
open and unfinished what we might call (following Césaire’s own terminology) the
image’s “orientation.”
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RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES

Nesbitt extends his Hegelian reading to Césaire’s poetics of neologism: as

he writes, in coining the term négritude, Césaire “affirmed the radical creativity of
constituent subjectivity, redeploying the force of the productive imagination against
colonialist racism,” since the “the concept and word negritude is the model of an
autonomously created object that negates the objectivity of enslaved existence it-
self—where humans are putatively reduced to pure objects—in a becoming-human”
(23, 28). Drawing on the work of Dominique Combe, Nesbitt suggests that both
anaphora and parataxis are indispensable to the form of the Cahier, r although he con-
siders this element of the poem in terms of the poem’s gradual movement from “prose”
to “verse,” and in terms of “the problem of the irrational in the Cahierr as an element
emanating from its rhythmic structuration” (90). He does not fully link the function
of repetition in the poem to his earlier contention regarding its recourse to negation.
Thus he concludes that the final section of the poem, in which the language is so
resolutely anaphoric, “compulsively transfers an identitarian rhythmic logic into its
formal structure” in a manner that “masterfully works through a traumatic past while
formally calling attention to the very totalizing procedures it would condemn” (91).
This is to simplify the workings of repetition in the poem, which can by no means
be reduced to an overbearing, unwavering “identitarian rhythmic logic.” As Nesbitt
himself admits, even when the anaphora seems to exhibit a “pounding regularity,”
the poetry puts forward a diverse “field of signifiers . . . each of which carries its own
specific dimension of suffering, never interchangeable with another” (91).
In other words, I am suggesting that the function of anaphora in the Cahierr may
not have to do with “regularity,” nor with what other critics have diagnosed either as
“invariance” (a “deep-seated universalist syntax”) (Dash 67) or as rhythmic primitiv-
ism (an evocation of “tribal” “frenzy” and “delirium” that would somehow be “properly
African and concrete”) (Ngal 133; Combe 74). Instead, in the lines defining négritude
for instance, it may be precisely the element of repetition that adds a qualification, an
element of uncertainty, to a proposition that could otherwise be taken as a singular
declaration. The effect may be reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s well-known observation
in Les damnés de la terre that “La mise en question du monde colonial par le colonisé
n’est pas une confrontation rationnelle des points de vue. Elle n’est pas un discours
sur l’universel, mais l’affirmation échevelée d’une originalité posée comme absolue”
(Les damnés 10) / “The challenge of the colonized to the colonial world is not a rational
confrontation of points of view. It is not a treatise on the universal, but the unkempt
affirmation of an originality posed as an absolute” (The Wretched 41).4 But here, that
affirmation cannot become dogmatic—cannot be reified as an “absolute”—because
its seeming definitional fi xity is immediately undone when, in an anaphoric verse
structure, it is reformulated in the subsequent lines. One sees this clearly in the lines
I quoted earlier, in which anaphora does not install regularity, but instead introduces
transformation and even contradiction: it “dives into the red flesh of the sun,” and also
“dives into the ardent flesh of the sky.” Anaphora is used consistently to this effect in
the Cahier,
r as in the speaker’s subsequent prayer to his “heart”:
Faites-moi rebelle à toute vanité, mais docile à son génie comme le poing à
l’allongée du bras!
Faites-moi commissaire de son sang
faites-moi dépositaire de son ressentiment
faites de moi un homme de terminaison
faites de moi un homme d’initiation
 BRENT HAYES EDWARDS
9

faites de moi un homme de receuillement

mais faites aussi de moi un homme d’ensemencement

Make me a rebel against any vanity, but docile in its genius like the fi st at the end
of the arm!
Make me a steward of its blood
make me a trustee of its resentment
make me into a man of termination
make me into a man of initiation
make me into a man of harvesting
but make me also into a man of sowing (70–71, translation modified)

What is performed here is not dogma, much less primitivism, but instead a dialecti-
cal litany in which the “moi” is envisioned as a vessel of multiplicity, a form able to
contain polar opposites. The desired state is racially specific—the speaker asks to
be the lover of “cet unique peuple,” and a few lines later to be the “digger” (bêcheur) r
of “cette unique race” (70–71)—and yet unyieldingly anti-essentialist in its geo-his-
torical “measuring” of that specificity not by “cephalic index” but by “the compass of
suffering” (76–77). For Césaire, poetic language is by definition the mode that allows
such an instantiation of subjectivity. As he explained to one interviewer, “I believe
very much in these things, and my effort has been to inflect French [d’infléchir le fran-
çais], to transform it in order to express, let’s say: ‘this I, this nègre-I, this creole-I, this
Martinican-I, this Antillean-I’ [‘ce moi, ce moi-nègre, ce moi-créole, ce moi-martiniquais,
ce moi-antillais’]. This is why I have been more interested in poetry than in prose,
to the extent that it is the poet who makes his language [langage]. Whereas, in general,
the prose writer makes use of language” (Leiner xiv). In other words, poetry inflects
the language—gives it an orientation—by projecting the subject through a series of
determinations, shifting with each iteration—in the list above, with each new angle
(racial, linguistic, national, regional) re-qualifying the “moi.”5
If the dialectic of determination in such an anaphoric poetics is inherently open
or unbounded, then how does one come to terms with the translation of that poetics
within a African diasporic orbit—one defined by its multilingual reformulations of
a global “black” subject? How does this syllabic intelligence travel? It is worth recall-
ing that this same section of the Cahierr (starting with the line “my negritude is not
a stone . . .”) is the one that C. L. R. James quotes at length in the “Appendix” to the
1963 edition of The Black Jacobins, his masterful history of the Haitian Revolution.
What James finds in the passage is a certain crystallization of black resistance, an
articulation of the autonomy of a black radical internationalist project. But above all,
he emphasizes the unfinished quality of the anaphoric form, its success in pointing
towards—without claiming to exhaust or contain—a humanist universalism: “car
il n’est point vrai que l’oeuvre de l’homme est finie / que nous n’avos rien à faire au
monde / . . . / il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête” (“for it is not true
that the work of man is done / that we have nothing to do on earth / . . . / there is
room for everyone at the convocation of conquest”) (Césaire, Cahierr 76–77). James
comments, “Negritude is what one race brings to the common rendez-vous where all
will strive for the new world of the poet’s vision” (401).
One also hears these lines echoed in Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s 1967 Rights
of Passage, the first book of his trilogy The Arrivants, with its repeated invocations of
“we who have achieved nothing”: “For we / who have cre-/ ated nothing,” we hear
10
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES

in the “Postlude,” “must exist / on nothing; cannot see the soil” (13, 79). Indeed, the
reverberation of this negative syntax is equally the germ of what becomes the key
shift in the last book of the trilogy, Islands, especially in the poem “Negus.” If as Na-
thaniel Mackey has pointed out, Brathwaite’s work “both announces the emergence
of a new language and acknowledges the impediments to its emergence, going so far
as to advance impediment as a constituent of the language’s newness” (74), the poem
“Negus” finds that impediment and innovation in a revision of Césaire’s anaphora. It
finds a creative resource in a poetics of determinate negation, in the precise manner
in which it is practiced by Césaire in the Cahier. r Brathwaite’s poem starts with an
impasse or stutter which builds into a negative, finding invention (in homophones
and rhythmic accretion) as it pushes from the observation of obliteration (“it is not”)
to potential and demand (“it is not enough”):
It
it
it
it is not
it
it
it
it is not
it is not
it is not
it is not enough
it is not enough to be free
of the red white and blue
of the drag, of the dragon
it is not
it is not
it is not enough
it is not enough to be free
of the whips, principalities and powers
where is your kingdom of the Word? (222)

It is crucial to add that this inspiration is figured as a diasporic gift, the Caribbean’s
demand of an African inheritance: “I / must be given words to refashion futures /
like a healer’s hand” (224). But what is given over (particularly in Masks, the middle
book of the trilogy, set in Ghana) is not some essential black identity, not some easy
reconnection with African roots. “My island is a pebble,” we read: “You cannot crack
a pebble, / it excludes / death. Seeds will not / take root on its cool surface” (196). The
pebble represents endurance (death is “excluded”) but also infertility: it “will never
bear children” (196). The pebble, in other words, is a figure for diasporic difference
in the poem, not for some easy continuity. It is unyielding, unbreakable, yet barren.
Early in Masks it is linked to language (“pebbles of consonants”) (95) and linguistic
difference in particular. In the poem “The New Ships,” set in the western Ghana-
ian port of Takoradi, the speaker hears a group of women conversing in Akan, and
responds first to the sound and rhythm of their language (the “smooth voices like
pebbles / moved by the sea of their language”) rather than to its meaning (124).
 BRENT HAYES EDWARDS
11

I am suggesting that what travels in diaspora is difference, a changing core

of resiliency and singularity. What is translated, then, in the above instances, from
French to English, or from Africa to the Caribbean, is a poetic mode (anaphora) of ar-
ticulating difference through determinate negation—that is, a means of transfiguring
that “pebble” from an emblem of deprivation into a principle of resistance. The syntax
of “Negus,” its accumulative stammer, is the poem’s discovery of an orientation: the
pebble, thrown, skipped across the water, or reconceived as a weapon: “fling me the
stone,” as the poem concludes, “that will confound the void” (224).
Brathwaite’s Islands concludes with a paradoxical image of innovation (“some- /
thing torn // and new”) as the foundation of a Caribbean poetics (270). Césaire’s Ca-
hierr imagines the shape of regional identity likewise with a figure of tearing (papier
déchiré). But if Brathwaite’s lines perform the fracturing they evoke (“some- / thing”),
Césaire uses a rather different formal effect (yet another syntactical ambiguity) to
signal the provisional quality of the collectivity being enunciated:
Iles cicatrices des eaux
Iles évidences de blessures
Iles miettes
Iles informes
Iles mauvais papier déchiré sur les eaux
Ils tronçons côte à côte sur l’épée fl ambée du Soleil
Raison rétive tu ne m’empêcheras pas de lancer absurde sur les eaux au gré des
courants de ma soif
votre forme, îles difformes,
votre fi n, mon défi.

Islands scars of the waters

Islands evidence of wounds
Islands crumbs
Islands formless
Islands bad paper shredded upon the waters
Islands sections coast by coast skewered on the fl aming sword of the Sun
Mulish reason you will not prevent me from casting absurd upon the waters at the
mercy of the currents of my thirst
your form, deformed islands
your end, my challenge. (74–75, translation modified)

The speaker announces that reason will not prevent him from “casting” the “deformed
islands” of the Caribbean into coherence, into one common “form” (in the singular).
And yet we are left with an “end” that remains a “challenge,” both a difficult under-
taking and an unwavering stance of defiance. The word that sticks out syntactically
is “absurde”: it would seem to make the most sense to read it as an adjective modify-
ing “forme,” despite the—appropriately absurd, one might say—distance between
noun and qualifier. The unwieldy syntax serves as a reminder6 that the seemingly
triumphal end (the achieved regional identity) is an act of the imagination, something
“cast” or “thrown” (lancer), not a political decree or a historical fact. It is a reminder
that, if Césaire’s poetics are informed by Hegelian dialectics, the poems themselves
also perform, in their syntactical absurdities, an implicit though far-reaching critique
12
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES

of Hegelian idealism. As Césaire writes in “Poésie et connaissance,” “La démarche

poétique est une démarche de naturation qui s’opère sous l’impulsion dementielle de
l’imagination” (“Poésie” 169) / “The poetic process is a naturation process operating
under the demential impulse of the imagination” (“Poetry” lv).
It would be possible to track the diasporic circulation of this orientation through
a number of examples, but here I will only offer one more. I will close by returning to
the United States, to discuss one of the contemporary African American poets most
often described as “influenced” by Césaire. Will Alexander is a poet based in Los
Angeles who in the past decade has been featured in a number of the most prominent
journals of experimental poetics, including Sulfur, r Hambone, and Apex of the M. He
calls himself a “psychic maroon” (Mullen 402), and has published a number of books
of dauntingly dense poetry and prose, at once politically engaged, spiritually driven,
and highly abstract. His stunning 1995 book Asia and Haiti, for instance, offers two
long poems in a first-person plural voice, with “Asia” spoken by Tibetan Buddhist
monks forced out of monasteries when Chinese Communist army invades Tibet, and
“Haiti” spoken in the collective voice of “Les Morts” of Haiti, killed by the Tontons
Macoutes during the regime of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and rising to excoriate
the dictator in a relentless outburst of imagined punishments. His essay “The Western
World: An Axis of Cataracts” takes its epigraph from Césaire’s Discourse on Colonial-
ism, and erupts in verbal resistance, adopting an anaphoric, interminable sentence
structure that recalls Césaire’s poetics:
I speak for bringing forth a scarlet sun shining in the open sky of metaphoric
bellies, I speak for attacking the material boundaries with verbal turpentine
scaldings, I mean loaded words which transform by destruction, we are living as
Guenon so aptly put it, under “the law of matter and brute force,” which the poet
must magically eviscerate with an overwhelming nova of irrational Venusian wind
demons brimming altitudes of Dionysian intuitions and silence [. . .] the mind is
lifted to slippery repetitious irrationals [. . .]. (32)

Alexander tends to describe his work in alchemical terms, as an attempt at transub-

stantiation or “kindling,” the transformation of the phenomenological world through
incendiary language (“attacking the material boundaries with verbal turpentine
scaldings”) (see “Alchemy”). His calls for “a different archery of usage” of language,
discovered in poetry, is reminiscent of Césaire’s previously-mentioned explanation
that his writing attempts to “inflect French”—to bend it to another orientation, as it
were ( “My Interior Vita” 372; Leiner xiv).
Interestingly, Alexander’s 1995 collection The Stratospheric Canticles includes
a poem titled “Apprenticeship,” which might be read as an attempt to negotiate the
question of influence and poetic tradition. “Here I am,” it opens,
posing in a mirror of scratch paper sonnets
sonnets as rare
as a live Aegean rhino
absorbing the crackings of my craft
its riverine volcanoes
its spectacular lightning peninsulas
emitting plentiful creosote phantoms
from an ironic blizzard of unsettled pleromas (33)
 BRENT HAYES EDWARDS
13

“Apprenticeship” in the poem is not equivalent to untroubled instruction. On the

contrary, learning from predecessors or alternative models seems to involve a certain
suffering, a burning that paradoxically sensitizes: “I’ve looked / for only the tonalities
that scorch / which bring to my lips wave after wave / of sensitivity by virulence” (35).
If there is connection, the sense of a tradition or a common project, it is “gambled syn-
ecdoche,” the wager of the part standing in for the whole, and unavoidable “psychic
confrontational damage” as one is “conducting one’s frictions in a torrential furnace of
osmosis & ire” (34). Again, transport is figured as constitutively vexed, an encounter
with difference. Indeed, apprenticeship involves rejecting any implication of direct
transmission of influence, and instead attempting to proliferate points of dissonance:
as Alexander puts it, “language exists as erupting transfunctional plasma, as magic
intensification of multiples; thus, linguistic methodology is not capable of evincing a
scale of insight as long as it limits its power to mono-dimensional linearity as habit”
(“Language” 75).
As in Brathwaite’s poem “The New Ships,” this requisite “friction” is moreover
a confrontation with another language. Alexander, explaining to one interviewer the
ways that he is “concerned with using language like Césaire to turn the world upside
down,” added that one way to achieve that upheaval is to strive for the insertion of
linguistic alterity into one’s poetics at every turn, to write as though the words are
being translated from another tongue. “It’s not that I know these other languages,
like Spanish or Italian,” Alexander explains, “but I can feel their rhythms, although
I’m writing in English. Writing a foreign language within your own language creates
another language” (Mullen 401).
This is to foreground the necessity of translation, not as a project of domestica-
tion or appropriation (bringing the foreign into a “home” or “target” context), but as
a project of defamiliarization and othering from within. African diasporic poetics, in
other words, is not the pursuit of correspondence, some ultimate unity, but instead
the pursuit of innovation through serial negation, in a “blackness” that finds itself
unmade and redone at every turn. As Aldon Neilsen has argued, in transnational
black poetries the link to modernism is made “across a diasporic rupture” (410–11).
Of course, as with Alexander’s imagined Spanish or Italian, one often finds these
strategies of othering, linguistic estrangement, within a single language. For another
instance, one might turn to C. L. R. James’s remarkable introduction to the 1964
pamphlet publication of Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris’s lecture “Tradition and the
West Indian Novel,” which Harris had presented to the West Indian Students’ Union
in London. James places Harris in the “German philosophical tradition,” comment-
ing at some length on the similarities of Harris’ “philosophy” (as represented by his
novels) to the thought of Martin Heidegger.7 James contends, with characteristic dry
humor, that Harris “writes as one educated in a German university.” Indeed, Harris
writes “English as if his native language were German. Not that the language is not
fine English, but he has exactly the terms and outlook of German philosophy” ( James,
“Discovering Literature” 242). James is especially taken with Harris’s comments on
the capacity of language as a medium of consciousness; in arguing for a conception
of the West Indian novel that would go beyond the conventional “novel of persua-
sion,” Harris suggests that language is a medium permitting “a continuous inward
revisionary and momentous logic of potent explosive images evoked in the mind”
(32). “The point that shook me,” James explains, “was that Harris, grappling with a
West Indian problem, had arrived at conclusions which dealt with the problem of
14
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES

language as a whole in the world at large” (“On Wilson Harris” 170). The observation
is reminiscent of Aimé Césaire’s reaction more than two decades earlier upon reading
Hegel for the first time: “Au moment où la traduction de la Phénoménologie de l’esprit
est sortie en France, je l’ai montrée à Senghor, et je lui ai dit ‘Ecoute, Léopold, ce que
dit Hegel: il faut arriver à l’Universel par l’approfondissement du Particulier’ ” ‘When
the French translation of the Phenomenology first came out, I showed it to Senghor,
and said to him, “Listen to what Hegel says, Léopold: to arrive at the Universal, one
must immerse oneself in the Particular!”’ (qtd. in Nesbitt 230–31, 120).
To pursue this theme interlinguistically, one would have to consider the impact
of a series of “confrontations” in the practice of translation: what shifts and alterations
can be located not just in Césaire translating Sterling Brown, but also in Langston
Hughes translating Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, and Federico García Lorca,
or in Léopold Senghor translating Jean Toomer and Countee Cullen. In Alexander’s
terms, the operation is one of reinvention through extension: “One expands the
realm of speech, one takes in odors, in foliage, in contra-band” (“Alchemy” 173).
The word “contra-band” is hyphenated, perhaps, in order to emphasize the con-
trary quality in coming together, that unyielding barrier of difference that irritates
any alliance. It is a phrasing not distant from the conclusion of Césaire’s Cahier, r in
which the speaker espouses a certain unity, demanding that the wind “embrasse-
moi jusqu’au nous furieux” (“embrace me unto furious us”). But if there is a coming
together, there—an achieved communal voice—it continues to cling to the negative,
in another anaphora:
et lie, lie-moi sans remords
lie-moi de tes vaste bras à l’argile lumineuse
lie ma noire vibration au nombril même du monde
lie, lie-moi, fraternité âpre
puis, m’étranglant de son lasso d’étoiles
monte

and bind, bind me without remorse

bind me with your vast arms to the luminous clay
bind my black vibration to the very navel of the world
bind, bind me bitter brotherhood
then, strangling me with your lasso of stars
rise (82–85)

As Nesbitt and others have noted, the conclusion of the Cahierr “simultaneously ar-
ticulates both the aesthetic semblance of an autonomous black subjectivity and its
immanent critique” (Nesbitt 80; see also Edwards, “The Ethnics” 132–35). If frater-
nity “rises,” here, if it unites, it is only through a violence, a “bitterness.” Although
many critics claim the Cahierr ends on a transcendent note, in fact it concludes with
ambivalence. That ambivalence is both semantic and linguistic, as in the final line
of the poem the speaker announces that “je veux pêcher maintenant la langue
maléfique de la nuit en son immobile verrition!” ‘now I want to fi sh the malevolent
tongue of the night in its immobile veerition’ (84–85, translation modified). Eshle-
man and Smith inform us in their introduction that the final word, verrition, “was
coined on a Latin verb, ‘verri,’ meaning ‘to sweep,’ ‘to scrape a surface,’ and ultimately
 BRENT HAYES EDWARDS
15

‘to scan’ ” (26). But how can an action of scanning or sweeping be “immobile”? This
conclusion—with its insistence on founding collectivity on paradox, on antithesis
without sublation—forces us to ask to what degree the Cahier, r beyond its recourse
to determinate negation, adheres in the end to a Hegelian dialectics. It may be that
a Césairean poetics of anaphora, in delivering the possibility of infi nite requalifica-
tion and extension inherent in serial form, thereby forecloses the possibility of any
ultimate term, any dialectical synthesis.
It is likewise striking that the final word of the poem is derived from Latin,
with a term that is radically other to French, in the etymological sense of the word
radical—an unfamiliar root. One might then ask whether linguistic translation can
be considered a model of the “bitter brotherhood” espoused by the end of the Cahier. r
If so, what would this imply for the theorization of influence in a diasporic literary
orbit? That any linkage, any claimed commonality, necessarily involves a certain force,
a certain misapprehension that proves productive? What is “bound,” what content is
carried over in creative mishearing, in Césaire’s translation of Sterling Brown’s “Strong
Men”? I return to where I started, to ask what crosses over in the shift from French to
English, and what is lost or transformed. Take the first lines of the poem, a portrait
of black masculinity as intransigent, indefatigable, self-sufficient, cumulative in its
power. The poem opens
They dragged you from homeland,
They chained you in coffles (56)

Césaire translates these lines as follows:

Ils vous ont arrachés de votre terre natale,
Ils vous ont enchaînés en un troupeau d’esclaves. (Brown, “Les hommes forts”
52)

They uprooted you from your native land,

They enchained you in a herd of slaves.8

What do we make of the difference between “dragged” and “uprooted” (arrachés),

between a reference to forced transport, on the one hand, and to a violence that dis-
turbs a prior rootedness, that fractures an autochthony, on the other? Is it possible to
hear, in the shift from “homeland”—in the abstract, without article—to “your native
land,” a premonition of the recourse to the “native” (natal) that Césaire would make
in the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, published in its initial version just two months
later? How would we measure the difference between English and French, the writer
in Washington, DC, and the scholarship student in Paris? It’s a small thing in the
way, certainly, maybe something as small as a pebble. But it provides the necessary
friction, where innovation is found in impediment.

ACK NOW L EDGMENT

I would like to thank the anonymous readers for the journal for their extremely helpful
comments and suggestions for revision.
16
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES

NOT ES
1. Given this state of affairs, the dangerous temptation for any translator is to “solve”
or “explicate” the line, especially by inserting punctuation in order to lessen its syntacti-
cal ambiguity. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith translate this line in precisely such
a manner, adding the word “being” and a dash in an attempt to clarify the meaning: “and
you star please from your luminous foundation draw lemurian being—of man’s unfathom-
able sperm the yet undared form” (67).
2. Likewise, Paulette Nardal, in her important essay “Eveil de la conscience de race,”
published in 1932 in La Revue du Monde Noir, r considers her generation of francophone
Caribbean writers to be “behind” in relation to the accomplishments of African Ameri-
cans, and yet describes the relationship between the two groups as parallel development,
rather than direct influence. In commending the recent fiction of Antillean writers such
as René Maran, for instance, she writes: “Il est à remarquer qu’un certain nombre de nos
jeunes amis semble être arrivée spontanément à la dernière phase que nous avons notée
dans l’évolution intellectuelle des Noirs américains” / “It is worth noticing that some of
our young friends seem to have arrived spontaneously at the last phase observed by us in
the intellectual evolution of the American Negroes” (31, translation modified).
3. This is to say that this essay is intended as an elaboration of my own recent work
(Edwards, Practice) as well as the work of some of the important scholars who have influ-
enced it (see for instance Arnold, “La réception”; Fabre; Nielsen; Mackey).
4. Ato Sekyi-Otu provides as incisive reading of this passage in his book on Fanon.
As he writes, “we can hear the text as saying that the antifoundationalism of the anti-
imperialist—the repudiation of the possibility of rationally warranted and universalizable
propositions—is not a final epistemological and meta-ethical position but a contingent
political stance. [. . .] That language in effect delivers an admonition that revolutionary
particularism is not to be equated with a radical relativism, and that the anti-imperialist
critique of purely Western reason must never become a dogmatic antirationalism” (36).
5. It should be clear that determinate negation in Hegel is implicitly a serial form as
well, rather than a single opposition; see Kojève 205.
6. Only if the reader remembers the floating term, of course: in the translation of the
Cahierr by Eshleman and Smith, the word “absurde” has simply been overlooked in the
English version (75).
7. In a later essay on Harris’s work, James broadens this constellation to include
Heidegger, Jaspers, and Sartre. See James, “On Wilson Harris.”
8. The translation back into English is my own.

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