Colonialism and Surrealism--Cesaire

“At the end of the wee hours, life prostrate, you don’t know how to dispose of your aborted dreams, the river of life desperately torpid in its bed, neither turgid now low, hesitant to flow, pitifully empty, the impartial heaviness of boredom distributing shade equally on all things, the air stagnant, unbroken by the  brightness of a single bird.”

I find this passage quite amazing. I remember learning about personification in middle school and again in freshman year of high school. It was mainly applied to objects and very subtle. We may have said something as small as the sun kissed my cheek or described my blanket’s warm embrace; Cesaire, on the other hand, so beautifully yet grimly applies personification of everything. He describes life as lying on the floor, face down in surrender and exhaustion. In two lines, he gave such a powerful image. The people weren’t, their hopes weren’t, all of life itself felt paralyzed under the rule of colonialism. This phrase, “life prostrate”, was placed it in between two commas. Stylistically, he made you stop and see that. Cesaire needed you to feel that hopelessness. It’s hard to imagine what slaves anywhere, but specifically under French colonialism, were experiencing. Not to mention, later on, he describes life as torpid, or mentally or physically inactive, sluggish, lethargic. Life was downgraded to merely existing to these slaves. We can say that it was bad, but I don’t think we can truly be able to even sympathize because we are so disconnected from the emotions they were experiencing. In personifying everything, including life itself, Cesaire come very close to evoking the emotions and attitudes felt by the slaves of his town, and probably other towns as well.

He continues, “you don’t know how to dispose of your aborted dreams, the river of life desperately torpid in its bed”. The French came in and uprooted any plan, hope, dream that these people had. Cesaire uses the word ‘aborted’ to describe the dreams which further emphasized the fact that these people no longer had a future. They simply existed from day to day. Describing the dreams as a fetus implies that people had talents, trades, skills, plans, and hopes all in the making, but none of that mattered when they were overtaken. Imagine working towards a degree or building a business when you were taken and enslaved, what do you do? What if, born into slavery, you realized one day you are an extremely talented architect, what do you do? Should you try to live it out? Should you try to be something great? I’m sure even the slaves that made profound declarations of having a future and a profession were made fun of simply because their situation looked so desperate. There was a battle between how to move past the hope and holding on to some idea of a different future.

I honestly do not believe that Cesaire would have been able to evoke these same feeling had he not been a Surrealist writer. His combination of all these images is what made his descriptions come to life. His calling life, prostrate, hesitant, pitiful, torpid, etc brought us closer to the experience of a slave in colonialism. These surrealism images or eeriness and disparity gave such a profound portrayal of the life and feeling of a slave.