Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

"It is. This poem is probably my favourite work of literature that I’ve ever read. It’s a kind of unshakeable beloved on my bookshelf and in my teaching. Aimé Césaire was a Martiniquan Marxist and politician. He was a teacher. Later in life, he became mayor and deeply involved in debates around what should happen at the end of French imperialism. He wrote another really significant book called Discourse on Colonialism , a work of political theory published in, I think, 1950. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land was published first in French, in book form, in 1947. But it was written in 1936 and conceived in Europe, while he was far from home. Césaire, as a Martiniquan French subject, went to France for his schooling and at the end of his studies was on vacation in the former Yugoslavia, looking out at the Adriatic Sea. He had the Homeric epics, particularly The Odyssey , in mind, but was also drawn back over the waves of imaginary waters to his homeland in the Caribbean. He wrote it upon his return to Martinique. So it’s a book-length poem that tells the story of what it feels like, as a French-educated subject, to return home both with new eyes and eyes that have a deeply intimate relationship with the Caribbean. In postcolonial discourse this journey and the thinking it occasions is referred to as the ‘colonial detour narrative’: the colonial subject is educated in the metropole and returns home as a person both in it and separate from it, and has been immersed in this painful canon that has taken them away from, to borrow Césaire’s already complicated term, “native” forms of art and expression and music and dance. “Geography is rendered complex by postcolonial criticism” So the plot is: here’s what it’s like to come home, to be back for fall, then Christmas. That makes it sound like a Hallmark movie, but the B-plot is: how is my poetry, my poetic voice, carrying these multiple traditions that are in conflict with one another? And: what do I see about the violence of canonical literary subjects that’s changed my relationship to the ferocity of my revolutionary imaginings? The poem ends with this really beautiful reimagining of history—goes back to an idea and an image that’s informed by the history of the Haitian Revolution of 1804—and imagines the slave ship cadavering itself in the harbour. Almost to think about what it would be like to exist in that state of postcolonial natality, where the subject is standing free on the prow of a boat, astride the Atlantic’s trade network, dismantling those routes of the Atlantic trade of enslaved peoples. It’s a revolutionary fantasy. The language of this poem is absolutely stunning. It’s rich with botanical knowledge, and it does all kinds of amazing work with Homeric tropes, and really, really interesting historiographic plunges, and indelible scenes that are very beloved. Students find this poem really, really hard the first time they read it—and then they fall in love with it. Usually by the third time. Absolutely, yes. Breton really fancied himself a kind of imperial discoverer of Césaire’s genius, for the purposes of white surrealism. So that preface is a little hard to teach. But I do agree with that! I’ve been thinking about this so much in the wake of some really interesting, evidence-based work about how comparison books (or comps) are used in the still extremely white publishing industry. Let’s just call them all features of white authenticating machinery, right? Actually, my copy of Césaire’s Notebook has a blurb from Robin D.G. Kelley, who is a Black Studies scholar, but certainly Sartre and Breton were used to sell this poem in France when it was finally published in French, ten years after it was written. And so, too, with many of the books we see by colonial and postcolonial writers, Black writers, non-white writers. It helps so much if you get a blurb from a famous white writer. And the publishing industry in New York and in London runs, to an extent, on people saying things like: ‘the narrator of this novel is the Philip Roth of feminist south India.’ Please no! So the point of comparison is the unmarked subject of the white man, and then we go from there. We still have this problem. Yes, totally. It goes two ways, right? It’s welcoming to audiences who might find it too foreign or too scary. But it also was a way of holding out other writers of colour from thinking that there’s space in the industry for all of us."