On the Notebook
“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”—Frantz Fanon
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The struggle against colonialism is a struggle in two fronts: it is a struggle for social, political and economic independence but also a struggle for cultural independence: the colonized, condemned to provide the raw materials for the products of another’s consumption is also condemned to mirror the physical and cultural paradigms of dominance, and which he will never embody—he is driven to sterility, to madness.
The colonized is bled—physically and spiritually—so that the industrialized world can be what it is. Yes, even today. Colonialism—that shape-shifting chameleon—goes by many names, many resurrections.
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Césaire’s Notebook can be critiqued for being incomprehensible, frustrating, and disturbing but what cannot be denied is the Notebook’s power to serve as a finely-honed scalpel of change—its power to “clinically” remove the parasite of mental colonialism. The Notebook’s central metaphor is that of trying on different masks. As the poem’s narrator returns to his native land, a “desolate bedsore on the wounds of the water,” he is struck by the perceived futility of his fellow countrymen (and women; even though they rarely if ever appear in the poem!). Our narrator is conflicted and ecstatic as he tries on different identities and is moved and frustrated by his desire for his people to stop “hoeing and digging” and begin “cutting something quite, quite different really from the insipid cane.” The master’s head!
Disillusioned with the various masks the narrator is set to the task of creating a new identity—one that accepts both its African heritage and the legacy of slavery:
"No, we've never been Amazons of the king of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor wise men in Timbuktu under Askia the Great...I may as well confess that we were at all times pretty mediocre dishwashers, shoeblacks without amition, at best conscientious sorcerers and the only unquestionable record that we broke was that of endurance under the chicote [whip]..."
More than a reference to the color of skin, Negritude becomes a political and living identity—an identity of change for all those who
“have explored neither the seas nor the sky but those who
know all the nooks and crannies of the country of suffering
those whose only voyages have been uprooting
those who were domesticated and christianised
those who were inoculated with bastardisation”
Negritude deconstructs the power dynamics of the colonial world, it turns language into action-material (“beware of crossing your arms in the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle, because a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, because a man who screams is not a dancing bear”):
Language returns the accusations—destroys the mad logic of whiteness—of savagery to the “proper English lady who finds “a Hottentot’s skull in her soup tureen.” White becomes the color of evil; white-culture becomes poison. The “jiculi milk” which no French dictionary can identify becomes the antidote by which the colonized can envision a land “where everything is free and fraternal, my land.”
Negritude becomes the language of the oppressed rising, it becomes “Haiti where negritude stood up for the first time and said it believed in its humanity.” It becomes Toussaint--freed if not economically or politically at least in mind and spirit from the parasite of whiteness. Negritude “defies the white screams of a white death,” it becomes a celebration of life—bold and black and beautiful—a drum of rebellion breaking the “white pool of silence.”
At the end of the Notebook the narrator finally begins to understand the process of his own Negritude and is finally able to speak to the inhabitants of his land which were at first “so strangely chattering and dumb.”
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Some thoughts and questions:
The historian Eduardo Galeano writes of Europe’s legacy or rather shatters what we are often led to believe—that while colonialism was immensely painful it left the natives a legacy of railroads, schools, language, political institutions, PROGRESS (and not to mention “culture”):
“When Belgium left the Congo, a total of three Congolese held positions of responsibility in government.
When Great Britain left Tanzania, the country had but two engineers and twelve doctors.
When Spain left Western Sahara, the country had one doctor, one lawyer and one specialist in commerce.
When Portugal left Mozambique, the country had 99 percent illiteracy rate, not a single high school graduate and no university.”
Today, the same argument continues, we associate progress with industrialization and with Western paradigms of economic development and cultural references. Colonialism—that chameleon, that master of resurrection—continues unabated. Today it is called globalization, neocolonialism, progress for all, and which according to its prophets promises Ipads for everyone.
And yet, we have not come a long way from the times of the Notebook:
We live in times with the most profound wealth-inequalities: 1/3 of the world’s peoples live in extreme poverty (less than two dollars a day) this translates to:
· --640 million children in developing countries living without adequate shelter: or one in three.
· --400 million children who have no access to safewater: or one in five.
· --270 million children who have no access to health services: or one in seven.
· --Number of telephones per 100 people in Sweden, 162; in Norway, 158; in South Asia, 4.
· --Number of Internet users per 100 people in Iceland, 65; in Liechtenstein, 58; in Sweden, 57; in the Republic of Korea and the United States, 55; in Canada, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands, 51; and in South Asia, 2.
Such is the mad-logic of progress; the third world is still reduced to a source of cheap labor and natural resources; the fruits of these lands enjoyed by an industrialized world which imposes its cultural paradigms over the rest of us.
I read the Notebook as an assault against the sterility of the impossible: a sterility that condemns the developing-world to flawed models of development and to the mimicry of physical and cultural norms of beauty which we can never embody. And it raises for me the following questions:
How does the language of poetry succeed at doing away with the apparent inexpugnability of these times of “enduring” colonialism? How does language fail the poet and what—if anything—can fill in this void left by language/poetry?
And what do we make of Césaire’s use of French as oppose to Creole? What do we make of the lack of women appearing in the poem? Must we excuse him with the argument that such were the times?
How does Césaire merge his socio-historical consciousness with the creative consciousness of the language and to what effect?
In these times of recessions and revolutions (and to add to that, the looming threat of environmental degradation), what does the poet do with the ever-present feeling of social urgency? Are there artistic or ideological risks involved when engaging this urgency? In other words, does urgency dilute the poetic process, the way of arriving at this new language?
Unfortunately I do not know the answers to this questions and I only have questions and more questions.
As always feel free to discuss whatever struck your mind, or whatever I left out.
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ReplyDeletelauro, great post. i particularly liked your 'sterility of the impossible' idea although i'm not positive my understanding matches your intention.
ReplyDeletethe last piece i read by cesaire was his 'discourse on colonialism'. it begins with:
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.
A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.
A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
he's talking here of western civilization, one which be believes is unable to justify itself because of its lack of engagement with the problem of colonialism, its inability to solve the problems which it created; in short, western civilization is decadent and dying. he finally ends this opening sequence with "europe is indefensible" and works not only to brutalize the colonized, but also turns the colonizers into brutes, works to decivilize the decolonizers while claiming to be bringers of civilization. this was the part of his text i found most compelling/fascinating: that the colonizers become brutes and uncivilized in the process of bringing so-called civilization to the so-called brutes. it is a violence done not only to the physical and mental bodies of the others, but also the spiritual/moral/mental state of the self. it is a violence enacted all around.
which brings me to notebook of a return to the native land. the poem begins violent and it remains violent throughout. the language is dense and in its denseness violent. the sun is venereal. the antilles is hungry and pitted with smallpox. there is poverty, fear, death and mutilation and hunger and above all, fear. images of extreme poverty mingle with images of violence throughout the text, and the violence is done to both bodies and minds. above all of this is the specter of europe and whiteness perpetrating all of these violences.
there is a moment in which he says "One must begin somewhere. // Begin what? // The only thing in the world worth beginning: // The End of the world of course" (22). the end of the world in which people are killed, their languages are destroyed, their cultures replaced, all in the name of progress and civilization. the violence which crawls through this text is the violence of the colonized, a violence done not just to their bodies but to their own selves, divorcing them from their cultures and languages, to the point where one is foreign in one's own land. the violence is so saturated in colonialism (both to the colonized and the colonizers) that it must saturate the text if it has any chance of conveying the depths to which this radical destructive force goes.
anyways, i didn't really adress any of lauro's questions, sorry.
Great post, Lauro! I was especially interested in your interpretation of Césaire’s identity politics as a sort of visual superimpostion in his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, how language is turned into “action-material”… I was also struck with your question about the lack of women appearing in the poem, and “must we excuse him with the argument that such were the times?”
ReplyDeleteI like to think that every poem contains a fantastic quality to it, that I don’t need to necessarily question what isn’t there for some gender/socio/economic/identity reason, but rather the lack as an accepted world in which it may not be as important as the other issues on the page. So, I suppose, I was not as interested as to why women were not present (save the occasional reference to a woman/woman’s belly), though I can appreciate the deeper reading of what physically is not there in the poem. In thinking, I would venture it not as an “excuse… that such were the times” but rather that so many other issues were at play; also, because he seems to almost nod to them in a sort of universal way (“we”, “slaves” etc). Perhaps this was his way of including others, but for the most part it was quite narrative. It is an internal metamorphosis existing in an external conflict:
make me into a man for the ending
make me into a man for the beginning
make me into a man of meditation
but also make me into a man of germanation (37)
I felt it was more about race and identity politics than gender.
I found myself drawn to Césaire’s format of this long poem, as it always seems to be in flux, almost in competition with itself. Sometimes it’s very long prose. Sometimes it’s build purely on repetition and punctuation seems to take a back-seat, almost a long sort of free-associative trance. Sometimes there are indentations. Sometimes there are ellipses. It goes on. And there is no “formal” shift from one form to another (meaning: it is not broken into sections via form; though one could argue the beginning was rather prose-like and then he delves into a scattered world framed by poetics, but even the beginning isn’t completely uniform). I feel this is because the journey itself is rocky and unpredictable. There are meditations and repetitions to create a sense of talking to oneself, and there are blocks of prose to create landscape. When they push up/back/against each other it creates a wonderfully haunting effect, like they are trying to talk to each other, to respond… and it doesn’t quite happen as expected. The end, though, I found stunning, because it seemed to end in prayer (“Lord” and “Dove” are proper nouns, addressed to) and was a free-flowing experience in which repetitions piled on top of each other; he talked of real things (shoulder, blood, etc) and ethereal things (stars, “the very navel of the world” [51]). You held the illusion that he may have had several “homes” in which to journey.
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ReplyDeleteI second Drew and Megan--great post, Lauro. There's so much in this amazing and powerful poem to talk about, but I want to talk about one of your questions in particular. You asked about the significance of Cesaire's use of French as opposed to Creole, and I have a number of stray and perhaps not-so-organized thoughts on this. First off, I think that Cesaire's use of the language of the oppressor is radical and powerful. Instead of resisting colonization through writing in Creole, he colonizes the colonizer's language itself, blows it apart, wrests its power away from the oppressor and bends it to his own will and to his own ends, aided by the spirits of poetic revolutionaries like Rimbaud and other surrealists. (In fact, I kept hearing echoes of A Season in Hell throughout the poem, and I know that Cesaire admired Rimbaud and taught him to his high-school students.)
DeleteSecond--and perhaps this is arguable--I feel that Cesaire's use of French is apt because his revolution isn't really nostalgic about anything in his country's (cultural) past, and there seems to be nothing in his cultural present that has not been degraded by colonization. His poem doesn't really attempt to resurrect an ancient (cultural)ideal in resistance to present-day oppression (as Yeats's poetry tries to resurrect an ancient, ideal Ireland to counter-act the forces of English colonization). Cesaire doesn't try to salve the tremendous wounds that colonization has inflicted on the people of the Antilles; instead, he holds the wound open for all to see, and I sense that his vision of rebirth can only happen through coming completely to terms with the immense suffering that colonization has caused, including the loss of a native language. Moreover, Cesaire's conception of negritude, as I read in the notes, unites all blacks under a consciousness of mutual suffering, exploitation, and denial of human dignity at the hands of the colonizer, rather than on the basis of race, genetics, or even a shared past. All this is a way of saying that Cesaire's poem, I feel, is concerned above all with a radically new birth of consciousness out of the flames of the funeral-pyre of oppression ("I am forcing the vitelline membrane that separates me from myself") and the creation of a wholly new world that can only be erected on the ruins of the old ('the end of the world is the only thing worth beginning' etc.). Because of all this, I think it's important that Cesaire writes in French--he meets the suffering and despair of his country's present head-on in every way, and looks only to the future in which a completely new bond--one of mutual suffering and triumph--will unite all those that have been oppressed because of skin-color.
I hope this makes some sense, although I worry that I haven't connected every dot in my thinking.
I wondered about the way language works in this poem a lot. First, as Lauro mentioned in his excellent post, Cesaire's using French, one of the dominant languages of colonization. Then there's the fact that this book was brought some amount of fame by Andre Breton's introduction. Breton, of course, being a white French writer - the colonizer identity. While reading up on Breton, I found a quote on wikipedia about how, when he lived in Mexico as some kind of French cultural ambassador, he referred to it as "the most surrealist country in the world" (itself such an ethnocentric statement). Plus the book's translation into English.... I find this fascinating, all the layers of people's experiences and expectations that were brought to the Notebook before it made its way into our hands this semester. How can we read this book after all this without colonizing the text ourselves?
ReplyDeleteSo like Megan, I was interested in the way the poem is formed, with long prose-like sections broken up by more traditionally poetic sequences. Also, there's a lot of stanza breaks that contain some pretty intense enjambment. It's as if sometimes the writing broke down on itself. Unlike a lot of poems, which feel so polished, so well-crafted, this long work feels like a kind of look into the actual act of writing. The way the poem is organized is almost like watching Cesaire fail at times to get the line breaks right, to find the right word. As if that's why the Creole occasionally breaks in, why the references get a little thick.
My copy of the Notebook is used and its previous owner was obviously an eager little beaver. This poor kid made notes everywhere, and when he/she failed to find an answer, he/she just wrote a question mark next to the problem word or line. It was kind of funny, as any slightly foreign word had a note next to it, every reference spelled out. There was the idea that this student felt the book was a kind of math problem, that it had to be figured out. Which is strange and hilarious and kind of lovely, I think.
Anyway, all these little notations made me think about how what we bring to a text can sometimes weigh it down. What does it mean to read this book, which I found even in its images of blood to have a startling beauty in its heightened sense of language and world-building, so many years later, with more of an understanding about the widespread failures and still-felt consequences of colonialism. This book still feels incredibly relevant, but maybe the relevance is kind of tragic in that it seems so personal to Cesaire.
As I was lecturing on socialization this Friday, I felt the enormity of the concept crash down on me in the form of Cesaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. I was explaining how socialization is the process of acquiring a culture and what that entails, and suddenly I felt this weight and closure of the Notebook, the centuries and centuries of struggle, abuse, oppression and the beliefs that sustain them. I began explaining the book to my students, and I felt that it helped bring the concept home to them.
ReplyDeleteThis is one living example of how I feel Notebook brings the socio-historic consciousness quite literally alive and present. Cesaire does this only through the creative consciousness and language. I have lectured on socialization and taught the concept for years, but with Cesaire in my head the process moved with all sorts of horrific manifestations. It morphed from this intellectual understanding to a personal or emotional understanding. Lauro talked about Cesaire operating with the precision of a surgeon. I agree with the image but the surgery takes place in totally non-sterile conditions that lead to infection. I feel the intellectual many times sanities and objectifies social phenomena to the point injustice and oppression and revolution become this formula with nothing human behind it. I also feel that the cost is often thought of vanishing once an event has reached some sort of leveling point, like look the French left this country or the British were driven out….
I feel that Notebook in its language and structure created a living history of crushing structures, which apply pressure in an ever-expanding manner. So the poem in its first half felt very smothering. I as a reader felt smothered by the colonial force, and than the colonial force becomes a global force. Within the first 10 or so pages, I became drawn into the accumulation of this energy through his long lines and longer sentences, sparseness of punctuation, and his continued repetition of the line: at the end of daybreak.
Than, the lines seem to open up in terms of shape and tone when he begins the contemplation of: to go away. The interesting part of this opening up is that it doesn’t really open up, it just changes the platform of accumulation. I noticed that the shorter lines and the white space gave a different breath to the poem, but I also felt the commas dropping away into another form of struggle, examples of this can be found on pages 18 and 19. The breaking away, moves from the struggle of subsistence to the struggle of existence and identity.
For me the poem is constantly contracting and expanding. And this flux gives life to the skeletons on the page. It is like I see the festering wound created within the system, break from a system and reintegrate. But this is not a complete or ending phenomena. It simultaneously lives in me and in the world around me.
Sorry about late post again. Trying to catch up and get back to my normal cycle of going about a day & readings & thinking in English...
ReplyDeleteI don't know if it is just me but I almost could see the connection between Melancholia, the movie and this book. Both of them were strange experience of expansion of self, animation of the world in the rhythm of pulsing strange cosmic force that runs this universe. I felt like the repeating "At the end of daybreak", the sections of repeating chanting "voum rooh oh", "eia" become pulse that is throbbing; they have been always there, like even though you always live in pulse, when you become aware of your pulse is when you are having severe migraines, the crisis is what brings back the pulse back into our view, page; the movement of planets Melancholia opens with; the repeating phrases become visible in "the world of white", and "end" of daybreak.