The poet Aimé Césaire was born in 1913 in the French Caribbean island of Martinique. Like many ambitious post-emancipation blacks in the archipelago during the early decades of the twentieth century, his parents, Fernand and Eléonore, were passionately devoted to instilling in their children a deep respect for education, and they made extra-ordinary sacrifices to ensure that all six of their children took full advantage of the opportunities available on the island and in the metropolis. These sacrifices on the altar of education were by no means insignificant, considering the social strictures on members of an ex-slave population in a plantation economy. When, for instance, the eleven-year-old Aimé, who was already an intense, even voracious, reader, won a coveted scholarship to secondary school (lycée) in Fort-de-France, the family moved from Basse Pointe – the poet's birthplace – to the capital in order to facilitate the studies of their gifted offspring.

Many anecdotes relating to the poet's infancy and early childhood in Basse Pointe emphasize the intense parental focus on schooling and, in particular, on the mastery of the French language, which, of course, was one of the pillars of the entire colonial system and a virtual guarantee of upward mobility. Not content with the pace and rigor of the primary school curriculum in Basse Pointe, Césaire's father, Fernand, conducted supplementary classes at home, awakening his children every day at 6 a.m. to give them instruction until 7:45.

Two momentous events in the biography of Aimé Césaire – one literary, the other political – have converged to give the impression of a sense of closure to his dual career. The first was his abdication, so to speak, from electoral politics in Martinique in 1993; the second, the publication of his complete poetry in Paris in the following year. This sequence of events, whether coincidental or not, affords us a convenient vantage point from which to sketch an overview of his reception both locally and internationally.

To begin with the artistic horizon of reception: it is undeniable that, despite the apparent marginality of much postcolonial writing, Césaire's creative corpus places him securely within the central purview of the European poetic canon. Though (or more accurately, precisely because) his work is permeated by an indictment of Western imperialism and colonialism, its formal attributes no less than its subject-matter situate its author in an omnipresent dialogue with past representatives of that canon, such as Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Rousseau and Mallarmé. As we have tried to show in some detail in the preceding chapters, to interpret Césaire's writing is to engage in an intertextual discourse that ranges from Greco-Roman to contemporary literatures. An inescapable consequence of this intertextual awareness is that his poetry is far more accessible to the sophisticated metropolitan French reader that it is to the local Caribbean audience. The exception that proves the rule may be the theatrical works; for the dramatic “triptych” on the black world comes closer than any of the author's other poetic compositions to being communicable to a less educated, popular audience.

The play, A Tempest marks the end of Césaire's concentrated exploration of the genre of poetic drama. After the creative storm that left the triptych in its wake, there followed a relatively extended interlude of silence, or at least, non-publication, on the literary scene. The interlude was only definitively terminated with the publication of a new collection of poems, moi, laminaire… (“me, laminaria … “) in 1982. To be sure, the silence had been broken at midpoint by the appearance of an ambitious edition of the author's complete works (œuvres complétes) in 1976 – an edition that included as a pendant (under the rubric Noria) a group of poems most of which had previously appeared in journals, notably Présence Africaine. If we exclude the lyrics of Noria, we are left with a picture of virtual inactivity on Césaire's part in the domain of literary composition for a period of just over a decade (1971 to 1982).

By contrast with this relative artistic quiescence, the 1970s were far from calm as far as the arena of politics is concerned. To some extent Martinique, like the rest of the New World, was experiencing the repercussions of the previous decade of turmoil – the social agitation of the 1960s, which saw the proliferation of radical student movements in the United States, Europe and the Third World.

In this account of Aimé Césaire's dual career as verbal artist and statesman I have pursued a flexible chronological scheme. The order of publication of his major literary works (chiefly collections of poems and plays) has determined the sequence, no less than the rubrics, of the chapters. I have sought to present and describe these key compositions in their historical and biographical context. The term “biographical,” however, requires stringent qualification: my focus is predominantly on the life of the mind – the intellectual and aesthetic evolution of the poet as I attempt to sketch it. Literary texts are therefore very much in the foreground of my account, with the political and socio-cultural extensions providing a backdrop for the discussion of the art and ideology. As ultimate justification for this dominant focus, I can do no better than to quote Césaire's own words on the subject of a putative “biography”:

I am in the habit of saying that I have no biography. And in truth, in reading my poems, the reader will know about me all that is worth knowing, and certainly more than I know myself.

In view of my concentration on the literary æuvre I have relied on frequent citation of the original French texts, accompanied, except in the case of prose excerpts, by English renditions. At stake in this bilingual mode of presentation is a principle I regard as paramount in any serious attempt to characterize the accomplishment and growth of a verbal artist: the obligation to make his actual words accessible to the reader.

Césaire's first published poem, “Journal of a Homecoming” (Cahier d'un retour au pays natal), has also remained his best known. Several facets of this “greatest lyric monument of our time,” as Andre Breton famously styled it, make it unique within the Césairean poetic corpus. By virtue of its length alone (it occupies approximately 50 pages in the Maximin-Carpentier edition) it stands apart from the rest of the author's lyric output, which otherwise manifests a pronounced partiality for the short poem. Despite its length and broad thematic sweep, however, it is manifestly the poet's most accessible and, not surprisingly, most quoted, translated and anthologized opus. Its relative accessibility, as compared with most of Césaire's subsequent poetry, is due in part to the youthful author's explicit desire to play the role of major spokesman for the black world. So ambitious a role obviously requires a certain straightforwardness in the coding of the “message,” and indeed Césaire, while forging the densely metaphorical style that is his signature, spectacularly succeeds, in the pages of Cahier, in creating a sustained lyric prose-poem whose basic “message” is fairly transparent to the careful reader.

Cahier is fundamental to Césaire's œuvre from more than one crucial vantage-point. Nothing symbolizes the poem's foundational status more strikingly than the story of its many metamorphoses in print.

Although it was the long prose-poem “Journal of a Homecoming” that inaugurated Césaire's poetic career, its magnitude proved to be unrepresentative of his subsequent lyric production as a whole. If we exclude the lyric dramas, the collection of discrete, relatively short poems of which “Miracle Weapons” was the harbinger has been his preferred genre of publication up to the present. The appearance of these compact volumes of poetry has been intermittent, but it is of capital importance to note that there have been no less than seven to date (the tally includes Cadastre, which is essentially a re-edition and partial revision of previously published poems). The preponderance of short lyric collections in his overall output spanning approximately half a century tells its own tale: it is on these brief, highly polished gems that Césaire the poet has chiefly staked his reputation. In this chapter I hope to illustrate, by means of concrete examples, the poet's increased mastery of his favorite genre in its major registers.

The postwar literary activity of Césaire in the 1950s is rather neatly framed by two clusters of published lyric verse. The beginning of the decade saw the appearance of Corps perdu (“Break Neck”), which came virtually on the heels of Soleil cou coupé (“Sun Cut Throat”), published two years previously.

Césaire's path to maturation, both as verbal artist and as elected politician, reached a critical dividing fork in 1956. As we have seen in regard to our earlier discussion of his famous “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” the now more experienced and self-confident deputy mayor made the crucial decision in that year to sever his formal ties with the French Communist Party and to found his own organization in his native island (the “Martinican Progressive Party”). This rupture with the central metropolitan bureaucracy converged, in the sphere of his literary production, with a turn from lyric poetry to what might be called lyric drama. It is easy to explain this shift in literary genre as motivated by the sincere desire on his part to narrow the gap in communication between avant-garde writer and provincial audience, and Césaire himself has avowed as much in published interviews. The particular form that his dramaturgy took, however, belies such a clear-cut explanation; for his very first experiment in the new genre, “And the Dogs Kept Quiet” (Et les chiens se taisaient) is composed in a style only marginally less grandiloquent and “surreal” than that of his lyric poetry up to that juncture.

In the years following the First World War, black South Africans publicly defied white systems of control both in urban centres like Johannesburg, to which many migrated to work on the mines, and in the rural areas. Throughout the country, blacks boycotted stores, mounted strikes, and demonstrated against the pass system. This post-war political activity culminated in the mineworkers' strike of 1920, ‘an event of major significance. Of a total of thirty-five mines, twenty-one had been affected, and not far off a half of the black workforce had participated at some stage’ (Bonner 1979: 274). One of the consequences of the strike was the establishment of a weekly newspaper by the Chamber of Mines (Willan 1984: 251–3): the first issue of Umteteli wa Bantu appeared in May 1920. Umteteli's contribution to Xhosa literature was considerable until 1956, when it became Umteteli wa Bantu e Goli, changed its policy and adopted a magazine format: its pages were filled with creative writing of the highest order. Two poets were particularly prominent in its early decades. After 1927, a steady stream of historical and cultural articles, gossip and poems flowed from the articulate pen of Nzululwazi, ‘Deep knowledge’, one of a number of pseudonyms employed by S. E. K. Mqhayi, the dominant figure in the history of Xhosa literature.

In societies with an oral culture the social circulation of verbal genres is governed by precise rules stipulating which social units may produce them and which consume them. This etiquette is itself an expression of power relationships: certain groups produce genres which others are not allowed to perform; some groups enjoy the exclusive privilege of hearing speeches which others must perform for them. But these power relationships which are bound into the practice of oral art are not independent of other power relationships based upon moral, economic or political criteria.

On one level, power in the realm of institutional orality may seem to be merely consequent on other already-held social power, the former being nothing more than a distinctive sign of the latter (as it may be in the case of dress, for example). However, on another level, orality may also constitute itself an effective tool of power in that speech may have a direct effect through its performative or ideological functions.

In this chapter, I examine the range of relationships between social power and the practice of orality in Dyula society. The Dyula are an ethnic group based around Kong, a large village of 1,500 inhabitants in north-eastern Ivory Coast.

Scholars have time and again emphasised the rhetorical power of verbal art, its potential as a source of power and knowledge (Abrahams 1972). The very enactment of verbal art is, indeed, an attention ploy, foregrounding the persona of the performer and giving him or her access to certain privileges and power over an audience. Thus for as long as he or she performs, the performer can be said to have assumed an authoritative role: he or she is a potential source of power.

But if verbal art is a source of power, the converse cannot be ruled out: power as a source of verbal art, or rather power as a controlling force influencing the form and content of verbal art. In this domain, one could subsume all verbal art forms enacted in the service of power play, or consciously cultivated to depict, project and enhance personal charisma. It is, perhaps, in the exercise of royal power that this is best exemplified:

History has witnessed many contrasts in the role of oral art in Africa. Oral art, which here refers to all artistic forms orally presented to an audience, often exalts, but also castigates rulers. Oral art may exhort people to demonstrate strength, courage and prowess and yet lull others into humility and silence before dominant powers. Examples are plentiful of oral art which became part of the colonising process in praising the colonisers and also of oral art as a tool of the anti-colonial struggles.

The status of oral art in Africa has been no less variable. From a prestigious status as a mechanism for criticising rulers, and for producing pedagogues and custodians of community values, knowledge and history, oral art was denied a place in world civilisation during the dark era of colonialism and foreign domination (Thiongo 1986; Fanon 1967). The neo-colonial character of post-independence Africa has meant that the situation in contemporary times has changed little, despite the frequent appearance of oral art performances at state banquets or state visits.

Cultural nationalism, which here refers to a sense of national cultural unity and identity, suggests the overcoming of some of these contradictions. Cultural nationalism was an inseparable companion of the political nationalism of post-independence Africa seeking to free the newly independent states from the humiliation of belonging to colonial empires.