Cesaire, Colonialism -- Seifert

(I will be focusing mainly on the highlighted lines of the following passage.) 

        --me on a road, a child, chewing

            sugar cane root

            --a dragged man on a bloodspattered road

            a rope around his neck

            --standing in the center of a huge circus

            on my black forehead  crown of daturas

            voum rooh

            to fly off

            higher than quivering higher

            than the sorceresses toward other stars

            ferocious exultation of forests and

            mountains uprooted at the hour

            when no one expects it

            the islands linked for a thousand years!

(page 53)

This passage exemplifies an idea of Cesaire’s “brand” of surrealism that I have been trying to pinpoint. When we first began our discussion on surrealism, my impression was that surrealist works generally involve conventional “things” (whether they be objects, people, places, or other) in unconventional and completely unexpected contexts. I feel that Cesaire presets aspects of this simplified definition in his writing, but with a difference. That is, while many surrealist pieces might place the conventional objects in the completely bizarre in terms of things that defy the physical world (and here I tend to prototype surrealism with the image of a melting clock), Cesaire uses conventional things contained in his memory and finds them in the equally bizarre context of colonialism (in other words, Cesaire seems to be using the surreal aspect of colonialism as an event in order to produce his reactionary writing).

Going back to the passage that I have chosen, Cesaire brings up snapshot-like memories and drags them into the surreal by using colonialism and racial violence as a catalyst. It begins with a childhood memory of him chewing sugar cane root on a road, an image of security amidst the heavy reminders of hunger and disease in the poem. The next image introduced is a product of colonialism. The description of a man with a rope around his neck being dragged across a road splattered with blood disturbs and disrupts the preceding image, much in a way that these more recent memories will disrupt the further childhood memories of Cesaire himself.

The chain of memories next links to the center of a circus, where he stands wearing a crown of flowers (daturas, which grow generally in the US, Mexico, and Tunisia in Africa—this may have some relation to what we spoke of in class about there also being aspects of the Americas and Africa mixed within the descriptions of Martinique). The image of the circus seems to have connections with the event of colonialism and the resulting feelings—people would be withheld and taken over as if they were animals, their cultural traditions put on display as an act or eliminated altogether, their established lifestyle disrupted by some sort of chaotic order imposed (forced) by European colonialism. The circus is also something surreal, which takes ordinary performers (whether they be human or animals) and exhibits them doing an action or performing an event that is completely out of the ordinary.