aimÉ cÉsaire and postcolonial humanism

AIMÉ CÉSAIRE AND POSTCOLONIAL HUMANISMAuthor(s): Jane HiddlestonSource: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 105, No. 1 (January 2010), pp. 87-102Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25655135 .

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AIME CESAIRE AND POSTCOLONIAL HUMANISM

J'ai toujours le sentiment d'une solitude sans fin.1

It is perhaps striking that, despite the popularity and acclaim of both Cesaire

and his work in the aftermath of his death in April 2008, Patrick Chamoiseau

should choose to emphasize the sense of solitude surrounding the father of

Caribbean letters. Chamoiseau expanded upon the extract from Texaco re

produced above when participating in a round-table discussion on 'Portraits

d'Aime Cesaire' in Oxford in May 2008 by commenting that one of his lasting images of Cesaire was that of the poet walking alone. Indeed, although his death was greeted by an outpouring of adulation in the press and the academic

community more broadly, much of his work testifies to a persistent sense of alienation. Many of the images of misery and degradation in Martinique that fill the early pages of the Cahier cVun retour au pays natal stress isolation and the failure of community. The inert town evoked on the second page 'ne s'entasse pas, ne se mele pas'; it is 'cette foule qui ne sait pas faire foule, cette

foule, on s'en rend compte, si parfaitement seule sous ce soleil'.2 The ravaged Martinican society is tense and withdrawn, stagnant as a result of the dispos session and mutual alienation of its members. Even the revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture is remembered not in action, but imprisoned alone in the Jura:

c'est un homme seul emprisonne de blanc c'est un homme seul qui defie les cris blancs de la mort blanche.

(C, p. 90)

Furthermore, if we juxtapose these images with Cesaire's career, it is not difficult to see why Chamoiseau chose to dwell on the sense of solitude. The

apparent incongruity between Cesaire's revolutionary literary fervour and his

political work in implementing the departmentalization of Martinique has caused him to be seen as a mysterious and controversial figure. He is un

doubtedly a major influence for subsequent generations, but the now popular writers of the Creolite movement condemn him for championing departmen talization rather than decolonization, as well as for drawing on French literary references at the expense of local Creole culture. His work is singular in its

orientation, and his vision of local culture is one with which later Martinican intellectuals fail to identify.3

1 Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco (Paris: Gallimard, 1992) p. 454.

2 Aime Cesaire, Cahier dun retour au pays natal (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books,

i995)> p. 74- Subsequent references to this edition are given in the text identified by the abbreviation C.

3 Raphael Confiant famously rails against Cesaire's inattention to Creole culture in Aime Cesaire:

une traversee paradoxale du siecle (Paris: Stock, 1993).

Modern Language Review, 105 (2010), 87-102 ? Modern Humanities Research Association 2010



88 Aime Cesaire and Postcolonial Humanism

If solitude and isolation plague both Cesaire the man and the Martinique

conjured up by his work, however, one of the major preoccupations of the Cahier is to invent some form of solidarity or collectivity to fuel in turn his anti-colonial revolt. To this end, he oscillates between affirming the Martini can's belonging to the specific category of negritude on the one hand, and

seeking to transcend that specificity in a celebration of universal humanity on

the other. The troubled relation between these two sides of Cesaire's thinking has been explored by critics such as Gary Wilder and Nick Nesbitt (see below), and certainly the broad humanism of the final lines of the Cahier can seem

to work against the poet's belief in the particularity of black experience. In

this article I shall review this apparent contradiction, but my purpose is at

the same time to look beyond it and to interrogate how Cesaire evolves and

adapts his humanism through his very evocations of black identity and expe rience. I shall explore how Cesaire comes to uphold the notion of'humanity' as a result of an ongoing desire to conceive a form of relationality important also to negritude. The affirmation of black identity turns out to hinge not so

much upon a shared ethnicity or culture, but on a desire for geographical and cultural expansion that feeds directly into the humanism championed by the

end of the Cahier. Concomitantly, Cesaire's assertion of a common humanity relies not on some notion of resemblance or shared experience, but on an

understanding of the need for an ethical relation with the other as other.4 If

the poetic self is alienated and isolated, then, he recommends a relation with

the other that offers proximity as well as preserving distance. Cesaire's rein

vention of humanism does not always succeed in maintaining the openness he

seeks, and it will be revealing to explore at the same time the slippage between

'humanite' and 'homme', since the latter implies an androcentrism that ex

cludes the feminine. Nevertheless, the aim of Cesaire's humanism, consistent

with his expansive vision of negritude, is to herald a movement towards the

other that will provide the basis for a powerful postcolonial ethics. Postcolo

nial humanism has been described by Neil Lazarus, in an article on Fanon, as

a radically new mode of thinking predicated on a formal repudiation of the

degraded European form, and borne embryonically in the national liberation

movement'.5 I want to argue in addition that Cesaire's thought sketches a

postcolonial humanist ethics, one that anticipates what Patrick Williams sees

4 Confiant also criticizes Cesaire for overlooking the 'bouillie culturel' of the Caribbean and for

privileging the clarte de l'universel' (Aime Cesaire, p. 58). Dominique Combe explains that the

Cahier 'semble a la fois trop et pas assez proche de l'universel pour les ecrivains antillais de la

generation post-cesairienne' (see Aime Cesaire: 'Cahier dun retour au pays natal' (Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France, 1993), p. 111). I want to argue that Cesaire's universal is not transparent but as multivalent as that of Confiant.

5 Neil Lazarus, 'Disavowing Decolonization: Fanon, Nationalism, and the Problematic of Repre sentation in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse', Research in African Literatures, 24.4 (Winter

1993), 69-98 (p. 93).



JANE HIDDLESTON 89

as the critical, oppositional, inclusive'6 humanism of subsequent postcolonial thinkers such as Fanon and Said.

Negritude and Expansion

In a detailed study7 Gary Wilder provides an astute analysis of the inter

mingling of universality and particularity in French republican, colonial, and racial discourses and practices. Wilder shows that the colonial humanism of the post-World War I period sought to create traditional Africans, to parti cularize African identity, and at the same time to force natives to conform to

republican values. The colonial state set out to assimilate Africans into French culture and politics, and yet at the same time they were preoccupied with the native's difference. The denunciation of the colonial system therefore required an engagement both with its universalism and with its drive to particularize the subjugated other. Thinkers such as Cesaire and Senghor were as a result

compelled both to affirm the universality of native experience as an antidote to French stereotypes and to claim a form of black specificity in a gesture of

rejection of the sweeping generalizations of colonial humanism. In his read

ing of Cesaire, then, Wilder explores the multidimensionality of the Cahier,

identifying a shift between the middle section, which affirms a primordial Africanity, and the final section of the poem, which slips into a cosmolo

gical universalism.8 In his conclusion, however, Wilder laments the way in which Cesaire seems to want to sweep aside this tension at the end of the

poem, and he argues that Cesaire's affirmation of a transcendental humanism undermines the double bind of which he seemed to be aware earlier in the

poem. Similarly, Nick Nesbitt identifies an inherent contradiction between 'the desubjectifying forces of the irrational and Cesaire's positive affirmation of the subject of negritude'.9 For Nesbitt, this inconsistency is a source of richness and complexity in the Cahier, and he seems not to share Wilder's reservations towards the rousing humanist call of the poem's conclusion. He nevertheless conceives the two prongs of Cesaire's critique, his negritude and his humanism, as opposed.

Wilder and Nesbitt are astute readers of Cesaire, but I nevertheless want to stress in response the contiguity between Cesaire's negritude and his hu

6 Patrick Williams, '"Faire peau neuve": Cesaire, Fanon, Memmi, Sartre, and Senghor', in Fran

cophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction, ed. by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (London: Arnold, 2003), pp. 181-91 (p. 191).

7 The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between Two World Wars

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 8 In addition to the book quoted above, see Gary Wilder, 'Race, Reason, Impasse: Cesaire,

Fanon, and the Legacy of Emancipation', Radical History Review, 90 (2004), 31-61. 9

Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003), p. 81.




manism. It is important that Cesaire's version of negritude never rested on a

determinate notion of black identity, but rather always consisted in an expan sive and open-ended celebration of the black man's mobility and contact with

the other. Cesaire's negritude is already infused with the humanist values up held at the end of the poem, and anticipates the ethical concerns that dominate the celebration of universal humanity. Even when he appears to champion the

specificity of black identity, Cesaire dissolves that specificity and describes

negritude as an opening out and a gesture of contact with otherness. For

Cesaire, 'ma negritude n'est pas une pierre, sa surdite ruee contre la clameur du jour' (C, p. 114); black identity is not fossilized into stone, and it is not deaf to the world it inhabits. Similarly, 'ma negritude n'est pas une taie d'eau morte sur Foeil mort de la terre' (C, p. 114); it is not opaque and unchanging, fixed at a specific point on the earth. Instead, elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol | elle plonge dans la chair ardente du cieF (C, p. 114): it is an active process, an

interminable movement reaching deep into the earth as well as high into the

sky. When described positively, negritude is conveyed using verbs rather than

nouns, suggesting dynamism rather than stasis, an action rather than a state.

It is a plunging that moves outward from its point of origin and penetrates both the soil and the air surrounding it. Black subjectivity is created through this active, vigorous contact with the universe. The anxious, alienated poet

upholds negritude not because it provides an identity, but because it is a way to imagine his integration in the world.

Cesaire's negritude also announces a reconfiguration of geographical space, which, far from simply returning the black man to Africa, brings him into

contact with territories across the world. First, it is significant that the 'retour'

of the title, referring to the poet's return to Martinique but also to the Martini

can's African origins, is not a unidirectional movement. The images of return

to a diseased Martinique that open the poem certainly work against exoticist

visions of a tropical land of the sort celebrated by poets such as Baudelaire, but the poet is not content simply to go back. The middle section of the poem

expresses a tension between the desire to integrate the poetic self back into

an originary community and the urge to explore the Martinican's diasporic contacts with the world. On one level, the poet is so disillusioned with the

Martinique he discovers that it seems he turns away from the community that

he also so avidly seeks. On another level, however, while coming to a halting

acceptance of the history of Martinique he also finishes by opening up the

land to the other locations and cultures with which it comes into contact.

The 'archipel arque comme le desir inquiet de se nier' (C, p. 90) is situated

between the two Americas, and 'ses flancs [. . .] secretent pour l'Europe la

bonne liqueur d'un Gulf Stream' (C, p. 90). Cesaire may be referring to the

use of slaves in the rum trade here, but his insistence on the position of



JANE HIDDLESTON 91

Martinique in this broader global topography succeeds in drawing attention to the expansive influence of Martinicans across the globe. From now on,

then, Martinique will not be bent over on itself but is figured as mon lie

non-cloture, sa claire audace debout a l'arriere de cette polynesie' (C, p. 90). It hovers at the Equator, the tightrope that links it to Africa, and lies next

to Haiti, 'ou la negritude se mit debout pour la premiere fois' (C, p. 90), as

well as to Florida, ou d'un negre s'acheve la strangulation (C, p. 90). It also

looks out on TAfrique gigantesquement chenillant jusqu'au pied hispanique de l'Europe' (C, p. 90), and again, though Africa is at the mercy of the scythe of death, the reference to the transportation of slaves to Spain figures their

scattered presence across the world. In the next stanza Cesaire lists in turn

the cities where slaves worked on the buildings:

et je me dis Bordeaux et Nantes et Liverpool et New York San Francisco

pas un bout de ce monde qui ne porte mon empreinte digitale et mon calceneum sur le dos des gratte-ciel et ma crasse dans le scintillement

des gemmes! (C, p. 90)

Exploited and violated, black slaves nevertheless leave their mark across the

map and transcend the confines of any originary location. Cesaire's redraw

ing of the topography announces a black presence across the globe and not

only in the various spaces (Martinican and African) to which he nevertheless 'returns'. As M. a M. Ngal observes, no one has travelled more than the black

man, and black subjectivity is shaped by this diasporic experience.10 The return to Martinique is far from a rediscovery of an originary iden

tity, then, but triggers a reflection on Caribbean relationality. In addition, it

evidently requires a detour via Africa, as Aliko Songolo notes: Te retour au

pays natal n'est apparemment qu'une etape d'un voyage initiatique plus long encore vers une autre terre "mille fois plus natale" V1 The Africa of the Cahiery

moreover, is once again not a determinate location or the signifier of an essen tial identity, but a space of transformation and creation. It is here that the poet gorges on Tait jiculi, pour qu'en toi je decouvre toujours a meme distance de

mirage?mille fois plus natale et doree d'un soleil que n'entame nul prisme' (C, p. 86). 'Jiculi' is a neologism, but critics have suggested connections with

Mexican and Aztec terms for a plant with hallucinogenic properties. In any case, the implication is that Africa will be not so much the birthplace of an originary black race, but a space of fantasy and self-invention. Similarly, references to African traditions are juxtaposed with other geographical terri

10 Aime Cesaire: un homme d la recherche d'une patrie (Dakar, Abidjan: Nouvelles Editions

Africaines, 1975), p. 66. 11

Aime Cesaire: une poetique de la decouverte (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1985), p. 45.




tories, and evoke not a lost culture but an affirmation of the irrational against colonial reason:

j'ai lasse la patience des missionnaires insulte les bienfaiteurs de Thumanite.

Dene Tyr. Dene Sidon. Adore le Zambeze. L'etendue de ma perversite me confond!

(C, p. 94)

The poet adopts masks in a gesture of uncontrolled, perverse defiance rather than as an assertion of identity. In a later passage, the poet also mocks his own attempts to pose as an African hero:

non, nous n'avons jamais ete amazones du roi de Dahomey, ni princes de Ghana avec

huit cents chameaux, ni docteurs a Tomboucrou Askia le Grand etant roi, ni architectes de Djenne, ni Madhis, ni guerriers. (C, p. 104)

The poet stresses his difference from this series of African heroes, and the

putative 'return' to African roots turns out to have been a gesture of recreation

rather than a movement back to an origin. If negritude in this way already has something of the creative mondialite'

later celebrated by Glissant and Chamoiseau, then it also transcends conven

tional topography as a result of its relationship with the cosmos. In the essay 'Poesie et connaissance' Cesaire affirms this larger dimension to his writing,

arguing:

toute grande poesie, sans jamais renoncer a etre humaine, a un tres mysterieux moment

a cesse d'etre strictement humaine pour commencer a etre veritablement cosmique.12

Concomitantly, in the Cahier, the black man not only journeys across the

world to the locations listed above, but also enters into contact with the

greater forces of the elements. In the section in which the affirmation of the

desire to partir' is repeated, the poet also asserts:

je retrouverais le secret des grandes communications et des grandes combustions. Je dirais orage. Je dirais fleuve. Je dirais tornade. Je dirais feuille. Je dirais arbre. Je serais mouille de toutes les pluies, humecte de toutes les rosees. (C, p. 86)

This invocation of the elements is importantly also a call for communion:

the poet would speak the language of nature and enter into harmony with

the natural universe. The earth is also conceived in relation to the sun, and

in distinctly Baudelairean tones Cesaire evokes Ta terre oil tout est libre et

fraternel, ma terre' (C, p. 86). The line contains intonations of Baudelaire's 12

'Poesie et connaissance', in L. Kesteloot and B. Kotchy, Aime Cesaire: Vhomme et Vceuvre

(Paris: Presence Africaine, 1973), p. 119.



JANE HIDDLESTON 93

Invitation au voyage', but ironizes the exotic celebration of remote lands, and

forcefully affirms the black man's integration into the universe as well as the

power of his language to secure that cosmic harmony. Similarly, in a later

passage the poet remarks: a force de regarder les arbres je suis devenu un

arbre', and, a force de penser au Congo | je suis devenu un Congo bruissant de forets et de fleuves' (C, p. 94). The poet has the ability to transform himself into his environment, to become one with the natural world. Examples of such transformations abound in the Cahiery and are relevant for my current

purposes because they portray black subjectivity not as ethnically or culturally specific, but as invented through its expansive relation with the universe.

If negritude is championed at all in the Cahier, it is in the sense that it

figures the black man as a relational subject who moves between territo

ries and remains in touch with natural and elemental forces. Colonialism is

precisely a force that isolates and constrains in a way that is neatly encapsu lated by the image of Toussaint Louverture imprisoned alone in the Jura. Yet the Cahier constantly balances against one another images of expansion and

containment, and negritude explodes the constraints of colonialism precisely

through its evocation of the black man's dynamic relation with the world and the cosmos. In addition, in remembering the death of his grandfather the

poet observes Ta vieille negritude progressivement cadaverise' (C, p. 128) as

if to put an end to outworn notions of black identity, conceived under the

patronizing gaze of the slave-master who affirms 'c'etait un tres bon negre' (C, p. 128). Rather than adhering to the term negritude, which might retain that tone of condescension, the poet also proposes 'negraille', which 'retrouve dans son sang repandu le gout amer de la liberte' (C, p. 130). 'Negraille' is not a determined identity but a symbol of resistance. It is a term that is never

clearly defined or described in the poem, but that emerges at the culminating moment where the slaves rise up and take over the slave ship:

la negraille assise inattendument debout

debout dans la cale debout dans les cabines debout sur le pont debout dans le vent debout sous le soleil debout dans le sang debout et libre.

(C, p. 130)

If the danger with 'negritude' is that it might fall into repeating the patroniz ing, essentialized images of the 'bon negre', 'negraille' is nothing other than




a force of contestation. Indeed, this gesture of contestation without the affir mation of a content is what continues to define Cesaire's later definition of

negritude in his ?Discours sur la negritude':

elle est sursaut, et sursaut de dignite. Elle est refus, je veux dire refus de l'oppression. Elle est combat, cest-a-dire combat contre l'inegalite. Elle est aussi revoke.13

The notion of 'negraille' in the Cahier also offers a vision of black subjecti vity as a statement of revolt rather than a specific identity. Furthermore, that contestation brings with it the affirmation of the black man's integration into

the environment and his confrontation with the elements: standing up to the white man, the black man faces the sun and the wind, as if these in turn

channel his energy. The poet throws back at the colonizer the stale, racist

images of the black man's inferiority and commands the wind to sweep away old essentialisms that have no place in the construction of 'negraille'.

An Ethical Humanism

Hailed in the obituaries as a founding father of negritude', Cesaire presents in

the Cahier a vision of black subjectivity constructed by travel and by contact

with the world.14 Cesaire's version of negritude is emphatically not bound up with a strict racial identity but with movement and otherness. In this sense, as

for Senghor, negritude is already a humanism and any reference to the particu lar is conceived only as a reinforcement of the particular man's participation in the universal. Cesaire himself argued that the particular should necessarily be understood in relation to the universal, and he supported neither a narrow

form of particularity nor an empty, emaciated universality:

mon concept de l'universel est celle d'un universel riche de tout le particulier, riche de tous les particuliers, approfondissement et coexistence de tous les particuliers.15

Even more, Cesaire's vision of negritude, an example of the particular, was

itself all along a relational one, shaped by the black man's interactions rather

than by his roots. If it is a 're-enracinement', it is also a 'depassement' and an

enquete d'une nouvelle et plus large fraternite'.16 As critics such as Wilder

have pointed out, perhaps the danger with Cesaire's all-encompassing hu

manism is that it appears to undermine his awareness earlier in the poem 13 'Discours sur le colonialisme', suivi de 'Discours sur la negritude' (Paris: Presence Africaine,

1955), P- 84. 14 See e.g. James Ferguson's obituary in the Guardian, 21 April 2008. Cesaire is introduced as

'Martinican politician, intellectual and poet who was a founding father of the negritude movement':

<http://www.guardian.co.Uk/world/2008/apr/21/3> [accessed 12 June 2009]. 15 'Lettre a Maurice Thorez', L'Humanite, 24 October 1956 <http://www.humanite.fr/La-lettre

de-Aime-Cesaire-a-Maurice-Thorez> [accessed 12 June 2009]. 16 'Discours sur le colonialisme', suivi de 'Discours sur la negritude', p. 92.



JANE HIDDLESTON 95

of the tension between the universalizing and the particularizing drives of French colonialism. Certainly, it is important not to conceive the Cahiers conclusion as an effacement of the specificity of black lived experience, for ex

ample under slavery. The affirmation of the black man's relational subjectivity does not undermine the distinctiveness of his history as a colonized slave.17

Nevertheless, it is significant that black identity is diasporic, and its relational structure resembles that of the open-ended humanity also championed at the end of the Cahier. The isolated poet discovers the multidimensionality of any black community and uses this directly to conceive a broader, human rela

tionality that would preserve each subject's singular difference, regardless of race. Moreover, the expansiveness of both Cesaire's version of negritude and of his humanism is compelling since these announce an ethics that recurs in

postcolonial thinking many years later. The persistence of the term 'human' in the work of Cesaire and long after might be explained by the open-ended and diasporic structure of a postcolonial 'humanity', and by the manner in which notions of the human fuel what we might call postcolonial ethics.

Humanism has undoubtedly been criticized and denounced time and again in the history of philosophy, but both the term and the concept of some kind of shared humanity persist with astonishing tenacity. The Eurocentric humanism behind the colonial mission as well as the Declaration des droits de Vhomme is vilified by left-wing intellectuals from Sartre to Derrida, and

yet many thinkers, including Sartre and Derrida themselves, continue to in sist that the notion of humanity retains enormous critical force. I want now

briefly to trace the debate between Heidegger and Levinas on the question of humanism, and to use this dispute to conceive Cesaire's retention of the term 'humanite' as the starting-point for an ethical collectivity or solidarity. First, it is significant that Heidegger famously criticized Sartre's identification of existentialism as a form of humanism in his own 'Letter on Humanism', because 'every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one'.18 Humanism is not vilified per se, but because exist

ing incarnations of humanist thought are inevitably shaped by the mould of

metaphysics. In championing the dignity of man, Sartre and the humanist tra dition more generally finish by overlooking what Heidegger calls 'ek-sistence', the truth that we are given over to Being. For Heidegger we do not create and manipulate beings, but are both inside and outside Being. Humanism,

according to Heidegger, has tended to privilege man as manipulator, as acting 17 In the 'Discours sur la negritude' Cesaire describes the black community not in terms of

an identity, but as 'une communaute d'oppression subie, une communaute d'exclusion imposee, une communaute de discrimination profonde. Bien entendu, et c'est a son honneur, en commu naute aussi de resistance continue, de lutte opiniatre pour la liberte et d'indomptable elegance' (pp. 81-82).

18 Martin Heidegger, 'Letter on Humanism', in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. by David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 213-65 (p. 225).




on objects, rather than as delivered over to Being. Instead of using a notion of

humanity to describe the collective nature of ek-sistence, then, in Being and

Time Heidegger explains that Dasein, being there, is always Mitsein, being with. Mitsein means that relations with others are part of what constitutes

Being: we do not come into the world and then encounter others, but are

already constructed by our collective sharing of the world. For Heidegger, 'by reason of this with-like [mithaften] Being-in-the-world, the world is always the one that I share with Others. The world of Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt].

Being-in is Being-with Others/19 Heidegger s Mitsein does not elevate man to

a metaphysical status but posits Being as necessarily relational.

In Totalite et infini, however, Levinas in turn takes Heidegger to task for

privileging the freedom of Being over the ethical relation with the Other.

Indeed, although in the passages on Being-with Heidegger asserts that Being is constituted by relationality, he only briefly reflects on the presence of the

Other and identifies that Other as 'those from whom, for the most part, one

does not distinguish oneself?those among whom one is too'.20 Others are

simply there for Heidegger, but he spends little time considering the encounter

with that Other. For Levinas, on the other hand, the ethical relation with the

Other takes precedence over the freedom of Being. Moreover, what ontology obscures, and what ethics requires, is attention not to an other that can simply be incorporated into the self, but to the absolute, intractable Other. Against the 'totality of the ontological self, then, Levinas argues that this Other is

an 'infinity', it names an excess that is wholly resistant to knowledge or assi

milation and that needs to be respected for its impenetrability. Furthermore,

though also critical of metaphysical humanism, Levinas explicitly returns to

the concept of the human in his VHumanisme de Vautre homme. In argu

ing for increased attention to the Other, Levinas asserts: 'personne ne peut rester en soi. L'humanite de Fhomme, la subjectivite, est une responsabilite

pour les autres, une vulnerabilite extreme.'21 And although Levinas does not

argue explicitly for the ethical implications of the notion of humanity, he

redeploys the term precisely with the aim of reinforcing the ethical nature of

our relationality. We are human, then, to the extent that we depend upon and

are responsible for others. Even more, in recognizing the other's humanity we recognize him or her as a vulnerable Other to whom we have an ethical

obligation. In Cesaire's thought it is striking that the term 'humanite' is invoked pre

cisely at those moments where he emphasizes the necessity for an ethical

understanding of the relation to the other as other. If Heidegger's Mitsein

19 Being and Time, trans, by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962),

p. 155. 20

Being and Time, p. 154. 21 VHumanisme de I'autre homme (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1972), p. 97



jane hiddleston 97

lacks that ethical dimension, the return to 'humanite' announces an ethical

recognition not of sameness but of difference. As with negritude, the as

sertion of a common humanity for Cesaire is in no way an affirmation of

resemblance, but the requirement that the isolated self conceive himself in

relation to others that may be different. In the ?Discours sur le colonialisme', for example, colonization is condemned because it is chosification', it denies the other his humanity precisely because of his difference. The colonizer fixes and denigrates the other, making him into an object or thing, and this denies the dynamism and plurality of humanity. 'Chosification' is a negation of the Other as a dynamic, intractable Other and reduces human mobility to the confines of a static category.22 Equally, in the Cahier the poet laments:

ce pays cria pendant des siecles que nous sommes des betes brutes; que les pulsations de Thumanite s'arretent aux portes de la negrerie. (C, p. 104)

Slaves were subjugated because, with their black skin, they were not con

ceived as fully human. Furthermore, on the following page Cesaire describes the negre on the tramway, perceived by the giggling women as 'comique et

laid5, in terms that suggest they too dehumanize him. Not a man but a 'negre', his body is torn apart by poverty, and that poverty has made him a distorted,

jumbled collection of features and limbs devoid of humanity:

elle avait creuse Torbite, l'avait fardee d'un fard de poussiere et de chassie melees. Elle avait tendu Tespace vide entre l'accrochement solide des machoires et les pommettes d'une vieille joue decatie. Elle avait plante dessus les petits pieux luisants d'une barbe de plusieurs jours. Elle avait affole le coeur, voute le dos. (C, p. 108)

The man's eyes are replaced by dust and the heart is unhinged, as if he were no

longer a living being. It is the unfamiliar form of his body that is denigrated and ridiculed; it is his difference that it is comical and ugly, as well as the

marks of his poverty and oppression. In a further irony, moreover, Cesaire's use of the terms comique et laid' refers back to Baudelaire's 'L'Albatros', the

clumsy but beautiful bird longing for freedom, and this comparison reaffirms the black man's search for freedom. The poet's admission of his complicity

with the giggling women, together with his use of the French intertext, never theless stresses the weight and prevalence of colonial and racist ideology, as

well as the knowledge that the educated poet's contestatory force is limited. His revolt lies in the affirmation of the black man's humanity, rather than in the (false) claim for a shared black history.

Cesaire's assertion of the humanity of the oppressed is, then, at the same time a recognition of human diversity. It is at the turning-point, when the

poem shifts away from description of the misery of Martinique to an affir mation of resistance, that the term 'homme' first enters the lexicon of the

22 'Discours sur le colonialisme, suivi de 'Discours sur la negritude', p. 23.




poem, and signifies both the alterity of diverse others and the persistence of a

minimal ethical obligation. The poet affirms:

comme il y a des hommes-hyenes et des hommes-pantheres, je serais un homme-juif un homme-cafre

un homme-hindou-de-Calcutta

un homme-de-Harlem-qui-ne-vote-pas.

(C, p. 84)

Gregson Davis argues that Cesaire is alluding here to the African tradition of donning animal masks for ritual performances, and certainly the poet is suggesting that Jews, Blacks, and Hindus have been treated as animals.23

Nevertheless, the repetition of the term 'homme' also implies that, despite the diversity of these oppressed others, their shared humanity necessitates a

relation that has been denied. The labels 'juif, cafre', 'hindou-de-Calcutta', and 'Harlem-qui-ne-vote-pas' reduce the individual to categories, even sub

categories, of humanity, and yet the persistent repetition of 'homme' serves to

reinforce the humanity that the label is used to denigrate. The poet goes on

to protest: Thomme-famine, l'homme-insulte, l'homme-torture on pouvait a

n'importe quel moment le saisir le rouer de coups, le tuer ? parfaitement le

tuer' (C, p. 84). He stresses the way in which the sorts of label quoted above are used to justify dehumanizing treatment even though the repeated term

'homme' signals the ethical violation implied by such treatment. Furthermore, in the next few lines even the term 'homrne' finishes by disappearing:

un homme-juif un homme-pogrom un chiot un mendigot.

(C, p. 86)

It is as if the labels 'juif' and pogrom' undermine the humanity of 'homme'

until all that is left is the animal: the beggar is not even considered to be a man.

Cesaire's affirmation of humanity upholds diversity, then, but not reductive

categorization. The insistence on the term 'homme' emphasizes the violence

of the stereotyping brought by the overuse and abuse of identity categories. The closing pages of the Cahier also serve to elucidate the relationality of

both black identity and humanity. It is here that Wilder perceives a disap

pointing withdrawal from the exploration of the tension between particularity and universality undertaken elsewhere in the poem, since black identity is in

tegrated into Cesaire's cosmological humanism. But if it is true that Cesaire

does not posit negritude and humanism as contradictory here, once again 23 Aime Cesaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, i997)> P- 29



JANE HIDDLESTON 99

this is because both concepts for him imply an understanding of the black

subject in relation to the world. Black experience may be historically specific, but black subjectivity is created out of its contacts with the world and with

humanity as a whole, and even more, it is the celebration of these contacts

that serves as a force of resistance against the constraints of colonialism. The

poet now beseeches:

lie-moi de tes vastes bras a l'argile lumineuse lie ma noire vibration au nombril meme du monde lie, lie-moi, fraternite apre.

(C, p. 134)

The poetic self is integrated into the very stuff of the earth, and his black iden

tity is connected with the core of the world as if by an umbilical cord. Black

subjectivity is also global, linked to the history of humanity as well as to the natural world. At the same time, moreover, this affirmation does not serve as a

final apotheosis or endpoint. The final assertion, cje veux pecher maintenant la

langue malefique de la nuit en son immobile verrition!' (C, p. 134), evokes at once stasis and movement, movement in stasis, but not completion.24 The in

terpenetration of negritude and humanism is not a culmination but sets both

concepts in motion; both continually evolve as a result of their contact with the other and with the world. For Brent Hayes Edwards, the Cahier repeatedly uses structures of anaphora, but these are also always unfinished, and the

poem's ending can also be seen as signalling process rather than product.25 Apparently moving towards a Hegelian dialectic, Cesaire never completes the

synthesis. Indeed, the very ethics of Cesaire's humanism lies in his refusal to fix and pigeonhole difference in the manner of the colonizer and slave-owner. An endpoint would serve only to establish a newly static form.

If Cesaire clings to a notion of humanity as part of an ethical resistance to colonial oppression, then, it is because the term implies diversity together

with an ethical relationality. It recommends both proximity and separation. The term 'homme', however, is in itself pared down in meaning; it names a

collectivity but without essence or substance. Towards the end of the poem, for example, we read 'tenez, je ne suis plus qu'un homme, aucune degradation, aucun crachat ne le conturbe' (C, p. 118), and this suggests that the poet's status as a man is the one thing that resists the humiliation he suffers. Reduced

by oppression and exploitation, he is nevertheless a man, and, as for Holocaust writers such as Robert Antelme, basic humanity is what the oppressor tries

24 James Arnold comments on the link between Cesaire's 'immobile verrition' and Breton's

'explosante fixe'. Reminiscent also of Rimbaud, the image conveys the idea of holding onto a moment of pure energy and dynamism (see Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aime Cesaire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 167).

25 See 'Aime Cesaire and the Syntax of Influence', Research in African Literatures, 36.2 (Summer 2005), 1-18.




to eradicate but cannot. This humanity, however, has nothing more than a

minimal signification, in that it implies a relationality without content. Man

is not defined by positive characteristics; he is, for Martin Crowley, Thomme

sans', the 'sans' indicating 'tout ce qu'il faut soustraire a Thomme pour qu'il soit ce qu'il est\26 Crowley also argues that what is common to humanity is

finitude?all that we share is our human vulnerability. In Cesaire too, then, affirmations of humanity and of the resistant force of Thomme' propose no

shared identity other than the relationality that demands the recognition of

the others difference and vulnerability. Furthermore, in 'Le Pur-sang, from

Les armes miraculeuses> humanity is asserted by means of the affirmation 'mais

moi homme! rien qu'homme!'.27 The 'rien que' here again implies that the

term 'homme' brings a minimal definition: it is not a substance but a demand

for the sort of ethical treatment denied to black people and slaves. The human

retains resonance precisely because of the term's very sparsity. This attempt to hold on to the notion of humanity as a pared-down, open

signifier of an ethical relation is, of course, one that risks failure, as all too

often the 'human' is confused with the more exclusive term 'man'. Jacques Derrida's Politiques de Vamitie is a systematic exegesis of the androcentrism

underlying the history of the concept of democracy, and of the blurring of

community with fraternity. Cesaire is not mentioned in Derrida's study, and

yet he is certainly guilty of a troubling slippage from 'humanite' to 'homme'

that finishes by privileging masculinity. If 'humanite' designates nothing but

a common vulnerability that must be respected, the term 'homme' loses that

openness in its implicit insistence on the masculine. In addition, the poet's affirmations of his status as man may explicitly stress a minimal content, and

yet the coupling of some of these images with evocations of virility clearly excludes the feminine. The assertion in the Cahier that 'je ne suis plus qu'un homme' is immediately preceded by 'ma priere virile', and indeed, as we have

seen, the closing image of the black man connected 'au nombril meme du

monde' results in a call for fraternity. Cesaire also uses images of masculine

muscular strength, of 'la male soif et l'entete desir', to convey the physical distress caused by the male poet's alienation from a shared brotherhood

(C, p. 88). The critic Hedy Kalikoff has usefully set such images in context,

and argued that the poem also undermines its apparent ethic of masculine

heroism.28 The claim for representativity expressed in the dictum 'ma bouche

sera la bouche des malheurs qui n'ont point de bouche' (C, p. 88), for example,

26 L'Homme sans (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Lignes, 2009), p. 15. 27 'Le Pur-sang', in Les Armes miraculeuses, in Aime Cesaire: The Collected Poetry, ed and trans,

by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,

1983), P- 96. 28

'Gender, Genre, and Geography in Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal\ Callaloo,

18 (1995), 492-505



JANE HIDDLESTON 101

is withdrawn in the exclamation mon heroisme, quelle farce!' (C, p. 108). The

poet knows, after the episode on the tram, that he cannot speak in the name

of all suffering black people. Despite this internal self-questioning, however, there remains an imbalance between Cesaire's open humanist ethics and his insistence on manhood. Humanity is an ethical term, but perhaps 'man' slips into the exclusionism that humanism seeks precisely to disallow.

The relation between 'humanite' and 'homme' might be treated with greater vigilance, then, and certainly in later versions of postcolonial humanism the

virility implicit in Cesaire's initial concept of Thomme' starts to evaporate. Fanon's powerful humanist contestation in the closing pages of both Peau

noire, masques blancs and Les Damnes de la terre is one that at times shares the masculinist bias of Cesaire's thinking.29 Yet Fanon's theorization of the alienation of the colonized precisely includes a reflection on prejudices sur

rounding the black man's virility, and his conception of the black man's self-affirmation requires the transcendence of such stereotypes. Moreover, it is important for my current purposes that here too the concept of the human

brings the obligation to respect and take responsibility for the other's vulnera

bility in a way curiously reminiscent of Levinasian ethics. Fanon and, indeed, Cesaire privilege freedom in a way that distances their thinking from that of

Levinas, and yet Fanon's closing question precisely stresses how the notion of humanity brings an awareness of the simultaneous proximity and unfa

miliarity of the other: 'pourquoi tout simplement ne pas essayer de toucher

l'autre, de sentir l'autre, de me reveler l'autre?'.30 Fanon urges a form of collective solidarity predicated on a minimal, dynamic notion of 'humanite': he calls for a visceral contact and with the other as other. Similarly, Sen

ghor's identification of negritude as a humanism involves an understanding of connections between subjects, and with the world: he also promoted a ' "confrontation", "participation", "communion" du sujet et de l'objet'.31 Much

later, Edward Said closely identifies postcolonial critique with humanism, and humanism once again connotes an ethical encounter and engagement with difference: 'humanism is the exertion of one's faculties in language in order to

understand, reinterpret, and grapple with the products of language in history, other languages and other histories'.32 A grand and yet curiously empty term, then, 'humanity' continues to hold sway in postcolonial thought because it

requires an understanding at once of collectivity and of irreducible otherness. A concept that risks backfiring by falling into excessive generalization, or by

29 It is frequently recognized, for example, that Fanon vilifies the black woman's love for the white man in Mayotte Capecia's Je suis martiniquaise, but expresses more sympathy for the alienation of Jean Veneuse in Rene Maran's Un homme pareil aux autres (see Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1995)).

30 Peau noire, masques blancs, p. 188. 31

Leopold Sedar Senghor, 'Negritude et humanisme', Liberte I (Paris: Seuil, 1954), p. 9. 32 Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. 28.




masking a hidden agenda (such as Cesaire's intermittent androcentrism), it

nevertheless persists because it gives Mitsein an ethics. Humanism remains a defining concept in postcolonial thought, despite the

bagginess of this ageing term. The dynamism of the notion of humanity as far

back as Cesaire's Cahier perhaps offers insight into its endurance. For Cesaire,

humanity is what the colonizer and slave-owner sought to eradicate, and yet it is precisely in affirming his humanity that the black man revolts against colonial oppression. This championing of humanity is not a turn against the

premisses of negritude, but a continuation of the diaspora and ethical connec

tivity at the heart of black subjectivity despite the tyranny of the slave trade. It

draws attention to our universal vulnerability but also calls for mutual respect. And though this respect is what was denied to black people in specific ways under colonialism and slavery, the assertion of the slave as 'homme', or at

least as 'humain', reinforces the universal ethical obligation that the master

and colonizer defied. Cesaire's humanism risked toppling into androcentrism, and his explicitly virile images of man suggest that he struggled to maintain

the openness and expansiveness he sought. An anxious, solitary figure, Ce

saire at times hastily affirms an unthinking solidarity that excludes feminine

difference, despite his impassioned desire to reach the other. Nevertheless, it

is perhaps significant that a feminist thinker such as Judith Butler should in

the end reaffirm a humanism close to some aspects of that of Cesaire. For

Butler, human life is grievable life', one whose vulnerability and value have

been recognized. Most importantly, for Butler the condition of humanity is

one in which we are, from the start, given over to the other'.33 What defines our humanity is our vulnerability and our dependence on each other. Our

inherent relation with the other 'makes us vulnerable to violence, but also

to another range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives, at the other'.34 The

endurance of humanism in postcolonial thought, then, perhaps results from

its ability to figure the collective while requiring that the other be conceived

ethically. Cesaire may have intermittently fallen into the trap of confusing

humanity with masculinity, but the focus of his endeavour remains the desire

to celebrate humanity as the sharing of differences. This ethical relationality is the uneasy but urgent antidote to the solitude and isolation lamented by the poetic persona and used by critics to define Cesaire the man. Cesaire's

diasporic humanist solidarity is a halting step on the road to the construction

of a postcolonial ethical criticism.

Exeter College, Oxford Jane Hiddleston

33 Undoing Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 23.

34 Ibid.



aimÉ cÉsaire and postcolonial humanism

Documents

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jstor archive

sense of solitude

terms conditions of

lasting images of cesaire

cette foule

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