Cesaire- Ball

                In his poem “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land”, Aime Cesaire uses a number of the surrealist techniques used by other writers we have discussed in class such as Andre Breton in Nadja. However, Cesaire’s writings produce an effect quite different than those of Breton. Instead of a story of the nature of surrealism and its muse, Cesaire’s poetry is much more political as he discusses the effect that colonialism has had on his home island of Martinique.

                Like other Surrealist writers and Dadaists before them, Cesaire also expresses a strong distaste for the established systems of logic prevailing in the western world. However, Cesaire takes these themes further than previous writers. Where other writers had justified their defiance of logic and reason with ideas such as the stagnation of artistic ideals, Cesaire politicizes it. On page 49, he relates these systems of reasons to tools that have been used by the French in Martinique and other colonial powers.

"Reason, I crown you evening wind.

Your name voice of order?

To me the whip’s corolla.

Beauty I call you the false claim of the stone.

But ah! my raucous laughter

Smuggled in

Ah! my saltpeter treasure!

Because we hate you

And your reason, we claim kinship

With dementia praecox with the flaming madness

Of persistence cannibalism” (Cesaire, 49)

                In this passage, Cesaire relates reason to the justifications of the colonization of foreign lands, the subjugation of their native peoples, and the general ideas of white supremacy. The idea of colonialism is partly based on the idea that being colonized benefits the life of the “savage” natives. This idea is further corroborated further down on the page where Cesaire recounts a conversation in which the idea is put forth that, by beating the black natives of Martinique, one is feeding them. Cesaire also brings up the idea of madness that has been cast upon many of the people that have challenged the reasoning of the colonial system, that challenging this system that has ravaged the land of his birth is a sign that one cannot think "properly". In rejecting reason, Cesaire is rejecting the logic behind systematic oppression.