Cesaire - Tabba

Aime Cesaire’s work of literature, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is a long poem that evokes surrealist tendencies and also conveys the tensions that arise from colonialism. Surrealism focuses on unleashing the unconscious and blurring the lines between reality and illusion. I believe that Cesaire allows his writing to defy the conventions of literature as he switches between prose and poetry and between past and present. He further employs surrealist techniques when he writes by taking associations from his memory and embedding them into a context that explores the course and effects of colonialism. One Passage that caught my attention while reading this poem is the following:

“So much blood in my memory! In my memory are lagoons. They are covered with death’s-heads

They are not covered with water lilies

In my memory are lagoons. No women loincloths spread out in their shores.

My memory is encircled with blood. My memory has a belt of corpses!

and machine gun fire of rum barrels brilliantly sprinkling

our ignominious revolts, amorous glances swooning from having

swigged too much ferocious freedom” (page 59)

Cesaire uses powerful imagery here to express the devastation that colonization caused; he touches not only on the physical disasters but also the mental and natural effects that were left. Our memories are often blurred over time, but we can see that Cesaire still has a completely vivid image of the past in his memory. The ruthless acts and beatings by the colonizers left such a lasting effect that the physical blood shed then, has caused their minds to still bleed with thoughts of despair and terror. Cesaire also uses words or phrases that have a duality to them. When he says that his memories are “lagoons,” not only does he imply that massive amount of bloodshed, pain, and misery that were endured, but he also points to lagoons as a landscape feature that is common in the Caribbean. It seems as if the mind, body and land all suffered from the tortures of colonialism.

There are also several instances in the poem where we see Cesaire jumping between words that have positive connotation to suddenly one with a negative connotation, or vice versa. In this passage for instance, he mentions the machine guns firing as “brilliantly sparkling.” Guns, one of the many harmful objects that wounded and killed many of his people, Cesaire describes using such light and lively words. This simply serves to reflect on the European attitude toward colonialism; they committed such destructive acts without regarding them as being harmful at all. Instead they deemed these acts as the “voice of order” (page 49).In his poem, Cesaire has employed various surrealist techniques to show the extensive damage that colonialism has caused for the native people and land.