Aime Cesaire - Return to my Native Land

Famine man, curse man, torture man, you may seize him at any moment, beat him, kill him — yes, perfectly fine to kill him — accounting to no one, having to offer an excuse to no one

a Jew man

a pogrom man

a whelp

a beggar

but can you kill Remorse with its beautiful face like that of an English lady stupefied at finding a Hottentot’s skull in her soup tureen?

I want to rediscover the secret of great speech and of great burning. I want to say storm. I want to say river. I want to say tornado. I want to say leaf, I want to say tree. I want to be soaked by every rainfall, moistened by every dew. As frenetic blood rolls on the slow current of the eye, I want to roll words like maddened horses like new children like clotted milk like curfew like traces of a temple like precious stones buried deep enough to daunt all miners. The man who couldn’t understand me couldn’t understand the roaring of a tiger.

Rise, phantoms, chemical-blue from a forest of hunted beasts of twisted machines of jujube-trees of rotten flesh of a basket of oysters of eyes of a lacework of lashes cut from the lovely sisal of human skin I would have words huge enough to contain you all and you too stretched earth

drunken earth

earth great sex raised in the sun

earth great delirium of the phallus of God

earth risen wild from the sea’s locker with a bunch of cecrops in your mouth

earth whose surfing face I must compare to the mad and virgin forests

that I would wish to wear as countenance before the undeciphering eyes of men.

One mouthful of your milk-spurt would let me discover always the distance of a mirage on earth — a thousand times more native, golden with a sun that no prism has split open — a fraternal earth where all is freed, my earth.

To leave. My heart was throbbing with an insistent desire to give. To leave … I would arrive sleek and young in that country, my country, and I would say to that country whose clay is part of my flesh: “I have wandered far and I am coming back to the lonely ugliness of your wounds.”

I would come to that country, my country, and I would say to it: “Kiss me without fear … And if I do not know what to say, it is still for you that I speak.”

And I would say to it:

“My mouth shall be the mouth of misfortunes which have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those which break down in the prison cell of despair.”

And, coming, I would say to myself:

“Beware, my body and soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle, because a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, because a man who cries out is not a dancing bear.”

Now I have come.

Once more this limping life before me, no not this life, this death, this death without sense or piety, this death where there is no majesty, the gaping pettiness of this death, this death which limps from pettiness to pettiness; little greeds heaped on top of the conquistador; little flunkeys heaped on top of the great savage; little souls shovelled on top of the three-souled Caribbean

and all those pointless deaths

absurd beneath the spatter of my ripped conscience

tragically pointless, lit by just one phosphorescent noctiluca

and myself alone with the apocalypse of monsters

who suddenly strut across the stage of the small hours

only to capsize and fall silent

an election of hot ashes, of downfall and collapse.

Again an objection! only one, let it be only one: I have no right to assess life by this black hand’s span; to reduce myself to this little ellipsoidal nothing trembling four fingers above the line. I, a man, have no right to deny creation like this. Let me be contained between latitude and longitude.

At the end of the small hours,

male thirst and persistent desire,

I am cut off from the fresh oases of fraternity

Such meek nothingness is like a splinter under my nail

This horizon is too sure and nervous as a gaoler.

Your last triumph, tenacious crow of Treason.

These are mine: these few gangrenous thousands who rattle in this calabash of an island. And this too is mine: this archipelago arched with anxiety as though to deny itself, as though she were a mother anxious to protect the tenuous delicacy with which her two Americas are separated; this archipelago whose flanks secrete for Europe the sweet liquid of the Gulf Stream; this archipelago which is one side of the shining passage through which the Equator walks its tightrope to Africa. My island, my non-enclosure, whose bright courage stands at the back of my polynesia; in front, Guadeloupe split in two by its dorsal ridge and as wretched as we ourselves; Haiti where negritude rose to its feet for the first time and said it believed in its own humanity; and the comic little tail of Florida where they are just finishing strangling a Negro; and Africa gigantically caterpillaring as far as the Spanish foot of Europe: the nakedness of Africa where the scythe of Death swings wide.

My name is Bordeaux and Nantes and Liverpool and New York and San Francisco

not a corner of this world but carries my thumb-print

and my heel-mark on the backs of skyscrapers and my dirt

in the glitter of jewels!

Who can boast of more than I?

Virginia. Tennessee. Georgia. Alabama

Monstrous putrefactions of revolts

coming to nothing,

putrid marshes of blood

trumpets ridiculously blocked

Red earth, blood earth, blood brother earth.

Mine too a small cell in the Jura,

the snow strengthens the small cell with white bars

the snow is a white gaoler who stands guard

in front of a prison

This man is mine

a man alone, imprisoned by whiteness

a man alone defying the white cries of a white death

(TOUSSAINT, TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE)

a man who fascinates the white

sparrow-hawk of white death

a man alone in the sterile sea of white sand

an old nigger standing upright against the waters of the sky

Death describes a shining circle above this man

death is a gentle star above his head

death, driven mad, blowing in the ripe cane plantation of his

arms

death galloping through the prison like a white horse

death gleaming like a cat’s eyes in the dark

death hiccuping like water underneath the Reefs

death is a wounded bird

death wanes

death vacillates

death is a shady scavenger

death expires in a white pool of silence.

At the four corners of these small hours

swellings of the night

convulsions of rigid death

stubborn fate

upright cries of the mute earth

will not the splendour of this blood explode?

At the end of the small hours these countries whose past is uninscribed on any stone, these roads without memory, these winds

without a log.

Does that matter?

We shall speak. We shall sing. We shall shout.

Full voice, great voice, you shall be our good and our guide.

Words?

Ah yes, words!

Reason, I appoint you wind of the evening.

Mouth of authority, be the whip’s corolla.

Beauty, I name you petition of stone.

But ah! my hoarse contraband laughter

Ah! my saltpetre treasure!

Because we hate you, you and

your reason, we claim kinship with

dementia praecox with flaming madness

with tenacious cannibalism

Treasure? let us count it

the madness that remembers