Aime Cesaire - Return to my Native Land

instantly swerves tries to flee

the paddle coaxes and brings it round

the canoe surges forward

a shiver down the spine of the wave

the sea foams at the mouth and scolds

like a sleigh the canoe beaches on the sand.

At the end of these small hours my virile prayer

give me the muscles of that canoe on the furious sea

give me the authentic gaiety of the lambi of good news!

Look, I am nothing but a man now, no degradation, no spit in the face disturbs me,

I am nothing but a man who accepts, there is no more anger

(he has in his heart only an immense love which burns)

I accept … I accept … entirely without reservation …

my race which no ablution of hyssop mingled with lily can ever purify

my race gnawed by blemishes

my race ripe grapes from drunken feet

my queen of spit and leprosies

my queen of whips and scrofulae

my queen of squamae and chloasmae

(O royalty whom I have loved in the far gardens of spring lit by chestnut candles!)

I accept. I accept.

The flogged Negro who says “Sorry, Master”

and the twenty-nine legally permitted strokes of the whip

and the cell four feet high

and the branched yoke of iron

and the hamstringing of my runaway courage

and the red-hot fleur-de-lys from the smoking brands

bleeding on the soft flesh of my shoulder

And the kennel of Monsieur VAULTIER MAYENCOURT where

I barked for six dog months

and Monsieur BRAFIN

and Monsieur de FOURNIOL

and Monsieur de la MAHUDIERE

and the yaws

the watch-dog

the suicide

the promiscuity

the boot

the stocks

the wooden horse

the shackles

the headband

Am I humble enough? Have I enough callouses on my knees?

Enough muscle in the back?

To crawl in the mud. To struggle in the grease of mud. To carry.

Earth of mud. Horizon of mud. Sky of mud.

Those who died of the mud, o names to be feverishly warmed by breathing upon them in the palm of the hand!

Siméon Piquine, who had never known his father or mother; whom no town hall had ever registered, and who all his life went searching for his name.

Grandvorka — of whom I know only that he died, crushed to death one evening at harvest time; it was his job, it seems, to throw sand under the wheels of the advancing locomotive so that it could move on when the going was bad.

Michel who wrote me signing strangely:

Michel Deveine, address Abandoned Quarter . And you their living brothers:

Exelié Vaté Congolo Lemké Boussolongo—

where is the healer

to suck with thick lips the obstinate

secret of the poison

at the root of the open wound?

where’s the gentle witch-doctor to unwind from your ankles the clammy warmth of the deadly iron rings?

You are here and I will not make my peace while the world is on your backs.

Islands that are scars upon the water

islands that are evidence of wounds

crumbled islands

formless islands

islands that are waste paper torn up and strewn upon the water islands that are broken blades driven into the flaming sword of the sun

I cast your form

formless islands

on water obedient to the currents of my thirst

absurdly I cast your overthrow and my defiance.

Stubborn reason will not prevent me.

Ringed islands, only lovely keel

I caress you with my ocean hands. I swing you round

with my trade-wind words. I lick you

with my algae tongues.

I raid you without thought of gain.

The furred swamp of death!

The fragments of shipwrecks! I accept!

At the end of the small hours, lost pools,

stray smells, stranded hurricanes, dismasted boats, old wounds, rotten bones, blurs, chained volcanoes, ill-rooted deaths, bitter cries. I accept!

And also my racial geography: the map of the world made for my use, coloured not with the arbitrary colours of schoolmen but with the geometry of my spilt blood, I accept

and the definition of my biology, no longer miserably confined to a facial angle, to a type of hair, to a nose sufficiently flattened, to a pigmentation sufficiently melanous, negritude is no longer a cephalic index or a plasma or a soma;

we are measured with the compasses of suffering

and the Negro every day lower, more cowardly, more sterile, less profound, more spent beyond himself, more separate from himself, more cunning with himself, less straight to himself,

I accept, I accept it all

and far from the palatial sea which breaks under a weeping syzygy of blebs

the body of my country marvellously recumbent in my despairing hands

its bones shaken, and in its veins blood pausing like

the drop of vegetable milk hesitant at the wound of the bulb …

And now suddenly strength and life attack me like a bull the wave of life streams over the nipple of the Morne, veins and veinlets throng with new blood, the enormous lung of cyclones breathing, the fire hoarded in volcanoes, and the gigantic seismic pulse beats the measure of a living body within my blaze.

Upright now, my country and I, hair in the wind, my hand small in its enormous fist and our strength not inside us but above in a voice that bores through the night and its listeners like the sting of an apocalyptic wasp. And the voice declares that for centuries Europe has stuffed us with lies and crammed us with plague, for it is not true that:

the work of man is finished

we have nothing to do in the world

we are the parasites of the world

our job is to keep in step with the world.

The work of man is only just beginning

It remains for him to conquer

at the four corners of his fervour

every rigid prohibition.

No race holds a monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength

there is room for all at the meeting-place of conquest

we know now

that the sun revolves round our earth illuminating the plot

which we alone have selected

that every star falls at our command from the sky to the earth

without limit or cease.

Now I see what the ordeal means: my country is the “spear of the night” of my ancestral Bambaras. It shrinks and its desperate blade retracts if it is offered chicken-blood; its temper wants the blood of man, the fat of man, the liver of man, the heart of man and not the blood of chickens.

Thus I too seek for my country not hearts of dates but hearts of men pumping manly blood so that men may enter the silver cities by the great trapezoidal gate, my eyes sweep the acres of my native country and I count the wounds with a kind of gladness as I pile them on top of one another like rare species and the account is constantly lengthened by the contemptible being unexpectedly and newly minted.

There are those who never get over being made in the likeness of the devil and not in the likeness of God, there are those who think that to be a Negro is like being a second-grade clerk, waiting for better things and the prospect of promotion; there are those who have capitulated before themselves; those who say to Europe: “See, I know how to bow and scrape as well as you, and like you I can pay my respects, I am different from you in nothing; pay no attention to my black skin; it’s the sun that has burnt it.”

There is the Negro pimp and the Negro Askari: all zebras shake themselves in their own fashion so that their stripes may fall into a dew of fresh milk.

And in the midst of all this I say Hurrah! my grandfather is dying, Hurrah! little by little the old negritude is turning into a corpse. There’s no denying it: he was a good nigger. The Whites say he was a good nigger, a really good nigger, his good master’s good Negro. And I say Hurrah!