Aime Cesaire - Return to my Native Land

I can do the soft-shoe, the Lindy-hop and the tap dance.

And for a special treat the muted trumpet of our cries wrapped

in wah-wah.

Wait.… Everything’s in order. My good angel grazes in neon

lights.

I swallow sticks. My dignity

wallows in vomit

Sun, Angel Sun, curly-headed Angel of the Sun,

O leap across the sweet greenish fluid

of the waters of shame!

But I have come to the wrong witch-doctor.

On this exorcised earth, abandoned to the bias of its own aim, precious and evil, a voice cries, slowly getting hoarse, vainly, vainly hoarse,

and there is nothing, only the piled-up dung of our lies.

Not replying.

What madness to dream of the marvellous dancer leaping

beyond all that is contemptible!

Indeed the white man is a great warrior

hosannah to the master, the castrator of Negroes!

Victory! Victory! I say the vanquished are content.

Foetid gaiety and songs of mud.

As a result of an unforeseen happy conversion I now respect

my repellent ugliness.

On St John the Baptist’s Day, as soon as there is some shade, hundreds of horse-dealers congregate in the township of Gros-Morne. And the street they meet in is called De Profundis Street. At least the name gives some warning of what Death will deliver from its lower depths. And it is truly from Death that the astonishing cavalcade comes, from Death in its thousand mean local forms (hunger pains uneased by Para grass, drunken addiction to the distilleries). The impulsive worn-out nags that come from Death push their way into Life which opens like a flower. And what galloping! what whinnying! what sincere pisses! what amazing defecations! “A spirited horse, difficult to mount!” “A grand mare with fine fetlocks!” “A plucky foal nobly proportioned.” And the salesman, cunning, proud with a watch-chain across his waistcoat, pretends that the regular swellings caused by obliging wasps, the obscene stings of ginger, the charitable flow of a bucketful of sugared water, are proof of genuine sturdiness, youthful ardour, full udders.

I refuse to pass my swellings off for authentic glories. And I laugh at my old childish imaginings.

No, we have never been amazons at the court of the King of Dahomey, nor the princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor doctors at Timbuctoo when Askia the Great was king, nor architects at Djenné, nor Madhis, nor warriors. We do not feel in our armpits the itch of those who once carried the lance. And because I have sworn to conceal nothing of our history (I who admire nothing so much as a sheep grazing of an afternoon in its own shadow), I wish to confess that we were always quite undistinguished dishwashers, small-time shoeshiners, at the very most fairly conscientious witch-doctors, and the only record we hold is our staying power in wrangling over trifles …

For centuries this country repeated that we are brute beasts; that the human heartbeat stops at the gates of the black world; that we are walking manure hideously proffering the promise of tender cane and silky cotton, and they branded us with red-hot irons and we slept in our shit and we were sold in public squares and a yard of English cloth and salted Irish meat were cheaper than us and this country was quiet, calm, saying that the spirit of God was in his acts.

We, vomit of the slave-ship

We, hunted meat of Calabar.

Plug your ears?

We, stuffed to bursting with the swell, with squalls with

inhaled fog!

Forgive me, partner whirlwind!

I hear rising from the hold chained curses, gasps of the dying, the sound of one who is thrown into the sea … the baying of a woman giving birth … the scrape of fingernails advancing on throats … the sneer of the whip … the prying of vermin among weary bodies …

Nothing can rouse us to noble desperate adventure.

Amen. Amen.

I am of no nationality ever contemplated by the chancelleries.

I defy the craniometer. Homo sum, etc.

And may they serve and betray and die.

Amen. Amen. It was written in the shape of their pelvis.

And I, and I,

I who sang with clenched fist

You must be told the length to which I carried cowardice.

In a tram one night, facing me, a Negro.

He was a Negro tall as a pongo who tried to make himself very small on a tram seat. On that filthy tram seat he tried to abandon his gigantic legs and his starved boxer’s trembling hands. And everything had left him, was leaving him. His nose was like a peninsula off its moorings; even his negritude was losing its colour through the effects of a perpetual tanner’s bleach. And the tanner was Poverty. A great sudden long-eared bat whose claw-marks on that face were scarred, scabby islands. Or perhaps Poverty was a tireless workman fashioning some deformed cartridge. You could see clearly how the industrious malevolent thumb had modelled a lump of the forehead, pierced two tunnels — parallel and disturbing — through the nose, drawn out the disproportion of the upper lip, and by a masterstroke of caricature had planed, polished, varnished the smallest, neatest little ears in all creation.

He was an ungainly Negro without rhythm or measure.

A Negro whose eyes rolled with bloodshot weariness.

A Negro without shame, and his big smelly toes sniggered in the deep gaping lair of his shoes.

Poverty, it has to be said, had taken great pains to finish him off. She had hollowed the eye socket and painted it with a cosmetic of dust and rheum.

She had stretched the empty space between the solid hinge of the jaws and the bone of an old, worn cheek. On this she had planted the shiny little bristles of several days’ beard. She had maddened the heart and bent the back.

And the whole thing added up to a perfectly hideous Negro, a peevish Negro, a melancholy Negro, a slumped Negro, hands folded as in prayer upon a knotty stick. A Negro shrouded in an old, threadbare jacket. A Negro who was comical and ugly, and behind me women giggled as they looked at him.

He was COMICAL AND UGLY.

COMICAL AND UGLY, for a fact.

I sported a great smile of complicity …

My cowardice rediscovered!

I bow to the three centuries which support my civil rights and my minimized blood.

My heroism, what a joke!

This town suits me to perfection.

My soul is supine. Like this town, supine

in the dirt and mud.

This town, my face of mud.

I demand for my face the dazzling prize

of being spat upon!

Being such as we are, can the rush of virility, the limb of victory,

the large-clodded plain of the future, belong to us?

I prefer to admit that I have babbled generously, my heart in my

brain like a drunken knee.

My star now the funeral hawk

And on this ancient dream my cannibal cruelties:

(bullets in the mouth thick saliva

our heart daily busts with meanness

the continents break the frail moorings of isthmuses

lands explode along the fatal division of rivers

and now it is the turn of these Heights

which for centuries have stifled back their cry

to quarter the silence

and the people

courage leaping

and our bodies dismembered

in vain by the most refined tortures

a hotter-headed life spurting from this dung

like a bullock’s-heart tree unexpected among decaying

breadfruit!)

On this ancient dream within myself my cannibal cruelties

Destiny was calling me

and I hid behind a stupid vanity:

here’s a man forced to the ground, his feeble defences

scattered,

his sacred maxims trampled underfoot, his pedantic

declamations

farting through every lesion

here’s a man forced to the ground

and his soul is naked

and destiny triumphs as it looks upon