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The African e-Journals Project has digitized full text of articles of eleven social science and humanities journals.   This item is from the digital archive maintained by Michigan State University Library. Find more at: http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/africanjournals/

Available through a partnership with

Scroll down to read the article.

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ARTICLES 1.

LITERATURE AND IDEOLOGYINMARTINIQUE

_A1MJ C^SAIRE,FRAN1!?;!!: FANQN*

by P.A. Irele**

The Afro-American has three horizons -- firstly,that of his immediate American universe; secondly,that provided by the silhouette of Europe, which lieshistorically and culturally behind America., and ofwhich, as Paul Valery observed^, America Itself is anextension, and thirdly, that represented by Africa,the source of his racial origin. It is within thistriangular framework of references and responses thathis social and emotional life has been taking placeIn the course of his American existence.

This specific European dimension, Is perhaps evenmore sharply outlined in the awareness of the blackCaribbean. Britain and Prance having retained politicalcontrol for centuries In the West Indies, having shapeddirectly the history of large -areas In this part of theAmerican continent for so long a time, it. is only naturalthat the cultural history of the West Indies, particularlyof the French-speaking and the English-speaking parts,should In fact have been dominated by the Idea of Europeas the live source of Ideas and of values. At the sametime, the Idea of Africa, even In the negative form itoften took, formed part of the consciousness of theCaribbean and Intruded, upon his social as well as moralvision, keeping alive for him the three- polesness that I have outlined above.

of awar

It Is within this schemethe development of a new curin Martinique In the 20th century,

that Ient of

would like to examinesocial consciousnesstracing Its course In

# • #

Text of paper delivered at the Conference on"The Meaning of Africa to Afro-Americans" held atthe State University of New York, Buffalo, April20-23, 1969.

Dr. P.A. Irele is a Research Fellow In LiteratureIn the Institute of African Studies,

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the writ ings of the three outstanding writers thatthe isU) nd has produced so farf namely^ Rene Maran,Aims Cebaire, and Frantz Panon. For it seems to methat what characterises the evolution of the ideo-logical awareness that runs in a single progressivecourse through the writings of these three men is therole played by the opposition between Europe and Africa,with the West Indies in the middle, not only as anti-thetical terms in the system of social symbols thatgovern the West Indian collective consciousness, butindeed as social and political realities, as concretereferences within the contemporary world order. Further-more, this evolution has involved a clear shift fromthe simple expression of attitudes towards an elaborationof ideas, culminating, with Fanon, in the formulation ofa World view.

It would be well to begin our discussion by re-calling briefly the history of the association ofMartinique with France, as well as the social andcultural consequences of this association, as a pre-liminary background to our discussion. Martinique wasdiscovered by Columbus in 1502, and occupied by Francein 1635* and has remained French, with hardly anyinterruption, ever since. The introduction of the blackman into the island dates also from this latter date,and indeed, the political and social history of Marti-nique has been determined largely by his presence.The three most significant periods of this history canbe marked off with reference to him — the slave periodwhich ended with the emancipation of 1848, the colonialperiod which runs from this date to 194-6, when Marti-nique was integrated into the French nation; and thepresent period, which can therefore be termed "thecitizen period." Viewed externally then, the historyof Martinique ca.n be summed up as that of the progressivepromotion of the black man on the island.

The social and cultural corollary to this develop-ment can also be summed up in the well worn word:assimilation. It is however on this score that thehistory of Martinique shows an internal contradiction.

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Without going into details, I should only like topoint out that because this assimilation took placein a typical colonial context, it created the familiartensions that one has come to associate with thecultural and ideological situation in colonial societies.The racial ideology which, though unofficial, came tounderline and to sanction the objective socio-economicdivision of Martinican society — white upper class,mulatto middle class, black lower class -- alsoacquired a cultural significance insofar as acertain cultural differenciation existed between thesethree social categories, a differenciation accountedfor, as far as the lower class was concerned, by theAfrican element in the way of life of the black popu-lation. One significance of this situation, in thecontext of assimilation in Martinique, is that socialsymbols crystallised around this objective factor, posingEurope and white culture as synonymous and as the ideal,and Africa and black culture as the negative term ofthis ideal.

The unilateral character of French assimilationcould not but complicate this situation. • The socialsanction of French culture, inherent in the politicalascendancy of the French people, put a pressure uponthe black man in Martinique not simply to follow apositive course towards assimilation, but to accompanythe process with the negative gesture of the denial ofhis African antecedents. The social symbols thatgoverned collective life in Martinique were thus whollyweighted against the black man, and the purely socialfactors of his collective life combined with the culturalin what amounted to his negation by the dominating racialideology of Martinican society. This process of negationwas founded ultimately on an idea of Africa.

If I insist here on this ideological factor ratherthan on the purely social and economic aspects of thecolonial situation in Martinique, it is because of thespecial importance which it took here, due to the veryfact that the.official policy practised by the Frenchwas one of equality, and so the real conflict in the

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French-speaking Caribbean situation lay less on thesocio-economic than on the racial level. And in thisconnection, the negative significance given to Africacontributed to the mental'distress of the Antilleanin such a way as to emphasise the racial question ashis most dramatic problem.

Africa was a troubling presence in the mindand in the imagination of the average Antillean. Itrepresented for him a synonym for savagery, as opposedto the civilisation of Europe,, the image of blackness*which contradicted his dream of total'whiteness.3 Forhaving accepted the norms proposed by his own societyand taken as the only valid measure of his humanitythe degree of his approximation to the white ideal,he could not escape the fact of his own blackness.His own body remained for him, in an immediate andoverwhelming manner, a constant reminder of the globalaccusation directed against him by his own society.Perhaps nowhere more than in the French Caribbean wasthe inclination to self denial as strongly accentuatedin the collective attitudes that ruled social life amongblack people in America. The peculiar form then thatcolonial alienation took in Martinique, as in the FrenchCaribbean generally, was that the black man lived in astate of permanent dissociation from the social symbolswhich formed the framework of his social existence andof his emotional life.

The state of alienation, it is said, does notpresent a problem to the individual until it haspermeated to the consciousness, until it is extendedfrom the plane of pure reality to that of felt experience.The situation I have summarised for Martinique was infact accepted, to the extent that the average Antilleantook care to distinguish himself from the African, andcame to look upon himself as a Frenchman, whatever hiscolour. This attitude was justified insofar as theculture that he received was in fact French. However,the energetic refusal of Africa which usually accompaniedthe Martinican's affirmation of his Prenehness, introduceda problematic factor into this affirmation; it indicated

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clearly to the Antillean his moral dependence upon-the French and consequently his incompleteness, soto speak^as a human being. It created in his psychean incompleteness of self identification which tendedto engender in him a feeling of being somehow "abnormal",and fostered the kind of tensions that Fanon has descri-bed in his book Black Skins White Masks.^

The prevailing overt attitude remained howeverone of total acceptance of "white" values. This atti-tude is reflected in the kind of imaginative writing.produced in Martinique before the appearance in 1921of Rene* Maran's first novel, Batouala. Before Maran,literary expression conformed in its themes and formalpatterns to the French norm. Its tone was dictatedexclusively by the prevailing fashion in Paris, itssentiments largely determined by the attitudes of theaverage Frenchman towards the Antilles, The Caribbeanscene features in this literature, particularly in thepoetry, as a decorative element, never as a human scene.The French West Indian writer contributed mainly to theParnassian taste for the exotic, without ever feelingthe need to assert any form of individuality. In theyears between the end of the 19th Century and the 1stWorld War, Martinique experienced something of a literaryrenaissance,5 but produced nothing more than a literatureof acquiescence and of what one might call the exteriorregard.^

Rene Maran brought a new development into theoutlook of Martinican writing, in an indirect butdecisive way. It is worth remarking that Maran beganhis literary career as a symbolist poet, albeit at thedecadent stage. Born in 1887 in Martinique of Guyaneseparents, Maran did not really get to know his nativeland and his experience of the colonial situation wasto be made in Africa itself* He was taken to France atthe age of four and apart from occasional journeys toCentral Africa where his father was a colonial officer,spent all his youth in France, He attended College atBordeaux, and grew up in his education, in his attitudesand in his tastes a Frenchman. His French beginnings in

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literature were therefore, despite the colour of hisskin, perfectly natural. He published 2 volumes ofpoetry in the intimate vein of the later symbolistsin his early years, and came to be considered apromising regionalist poet, who blended a feeling forlandscape with a rare psychological insight, Theseare qualities which were later to be given forcefulexpression in his African novels. When it is consi-dered, however, that his 2nd volume of poems,entitled LaLJ[i£_JLnt£rJ;eure (1912) was composed almostentirely in Central Africa, where by 1910, Maran hadtaken up a post in the French Colonial administration,the cleavage .between the subtle and evanescent innerlife to which he gave expression in this volume, and theharsh glare of the African scene which he was later todocument in BatouaJ^a, cannot but strike one as being inevery way absolute.

Maran!s direct experience of Africa was to changethe course of his literary pre-occupations and to trans-form to a considerable extent his own social and humanawareness. His correspondence during this period conveysthe changes that this experience began to effect in hisoutlook, and which were to wrench him away from theimmaterial vision of his symbolist verse "and impel himtowards the mindful confrontation with human beings and 'with events which produced Ba

The sensitive nature which his lonely youth inFrance had bred in him did not prepare him for the shockof life in colonial Africa,, and it is perhaps becauseof this that, it made such a profound impression upon him.But apart from the immediate psychological impact whichhis experience had upon him, the fact of his blacknesscame to have a special significance for him in Africa.Maran does not seem to have been oblivious of this facteven in Prance, for in a letter to one of his friends,written in connection with an obscure love affair, heleaves us in no doubt as to what the fact of his black-ness meant to him:

"And then I am Negro. These five words carry withthem all the maledictions, because whatever I do, I remain,secretly, infinitely sensitive".'/*

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He may have, as a result, felt a distanceseparating him from his French colleagues and there-by acquired that measure of detachment necessary tocast an objective and critical eye upon the colonialsystem. Moreover, the irony of his own position asa black man administering other black men does notseem to have escaped him, and in one of his lettersthe inevitable feeling of his racial identity thatthis ironical situation inspired in him is givenclear expression. He writes:

"Here, with a.French heart, I sense that I amon the soil of my ancestors, ancestors that I rejectbecause I do not share either their primitive menta-lity or their tastes, but who are nevertheless myancestors".^

Maran's ambivalent attitude towards his Africanorigins implied however a minimum of identificationand indicates that his situation was that of a marginalman, placed at the sensitive center of a conflictualsituation. At any rate Maran had precise ideas aboutwhat he wanted his novel to do, for it is clear fromhis correspondence that he conceived it with a criticalintent. He spent seven years of careful labour uponit and though he was pre-occupied with the problem ofstyle in its elaboration^ this pre-occupation was infact largely motivated by his concern to render hisexpression adequate for the purpose which he attachedto the work. Without a doubt, this purpose was to givea testimony of the colonial situation, as he clearlyindicates in his correspondence.

Referring to a chapter he was preparing to compose,in one of his letters he writes:

"I shall bring together in it almost all thegrievances that these primitive races are accustomedto formulate against Europeans. I will need to animatethe customs and the dances that I describe in it; finally,employing a manner which delights me, I shall bind to-gether, imperceptibly and with a knot which at firstsight appears" loose, the plot to the whole of the folk-

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lore, the movement and the satires."-

Further on. In the same letter, he writes;"l am not dealing In exotlstn in the manner ofL ... (reference obscure) or of Loti. The descri-ptive passage, no more than the others, are notImagined,"10

In considering the work itself, the sameambiguity that we have noted In Maran's attitudecan be discerned in the picture of Africa which hepresents. His image is consciously tainted by theprejudices of the European, and this Is demonstratedby the main plot of the work which revolves around thetheme of sexual jealousy and expresses this theme interms of.an almost animal sensuality.

In an obvious sense and from the purely docu-mentary point of view, the novel presents an overallpicture of African life which is negative. Yet aclose examination of the work, of its levels of mean-ing, of Its narrative technique and of Its symbolicstructure reveals the profound Identification whichMaran had achieved within his own sensibility withAfrica, an organic sympathy with African life andpeople which belies the conscious detachment of Maran'srealism.

The first quality that strikes one In thisrespect is the poetic Intensity of Maran's descriptivepassages. The whole work itself can be taken as onelong-prose poem in which the African scene is Investedwith an unaccustomed symbolic power, as In this evo-cation of sunset:

"Then broad streaks of crimson spread outacross space. Decreasing in hue,, from shade to shade,from transparency to transparency, these streaks beganto lose their way in the Immensity of the sky. And intheir turn, these shades and transparencies faded untilthey were no more. The undefinable silence which hadwatched over the agony and the death of the sun extendedover all the lands.

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"A poignant melancholy moved among the starsappearing in the horizon. The hot lands exhale mists,and the humid scents of the night get on the move.Dew weighs down the forest. One would almost thinkthat the feeble odor of the wild mint hums in thewind with the beetle and the hairy insects ...."

"Like a canoe brushing its way through wateryshrubs — how it glides evenly through the clouds —behold Ipeu the moon, all white, appearing.

"She is already six nights old".11

I quote this passage at some length, even in myinadequate translation, because such poetry had notbefore been expended upon the African landscape. Itreveals'a new feeling of passionate communion with theAfrican scene which we also find in Maran's evocationof the people, such indeed, that even when he intrudesthe prejudices he inherited from his French backgroundinto this evocation, they give ground before the compel-ling sincerity of his poetic insight into the communallife of his Africans.

Consider, for example,,another extract:

"Dancing and singing are all our life.We dance in honour of the moon, or tocelebrate Lolo the sun. We dance onaccount of everything, on account ofnothing, for the joy of it. We dancethe dance of the water of the earth andof the water of the sky, the dance offire, the dance of the wind, the danceof the ant, the dance of the elephant,the dance of the trees, the dance of theleaves,, the dance of the stars, the danceof the earth and of what lies within ..."12

What a passage like this communicates takes usbeyond the simple report of a fact but rather into thesharing of a, distinct and especial feeling of life.The immediate and intuitive coincidence of Maran's

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sensibility with his African subject that thesepassages reveal also explains his almost total re-organisation of the narrative scheme and resourcesof his novel along new lines which take the directionof the imaginative tradition of Africa itself. Thevery stylistic traits of the novel participate in itsAfrican atmosphere. In his dialogue, he recasts theFrench language in order to make it capture the verytone and the feel of speech of his African characters.Thus half a century before Achebe, the African proverbhad made its appearance in a novel written in a Europeanlanguage.

What is more, the very structure and movementof Maran's prose capture for us those elements in theoral tradition of Africa which give it its distinctiveflavour. It is a style full of those insistent re-petitions, of words and sonal values weaving a patternof refrains and of alliterations through his narrative,and which we can now recognise as deriving from thoseelements which compose the essence of the oral traditionof Africa.

Maran could not have achieved these effectsunless he had listened with an unusually attentiveear to African speech. In one remarkable passagewhich .indicates how well and closely Maran had observedhis Africans to the point of identification, be bringstogether these distinctive features to recreate thedistinctive rhetorical manner of the African country-side and to lend dramatic tensi6n to his narrative,13

Batouala, suspecting Bissibi'ngui of designs onhis wife Yassigui'ndja, invites his rival to an isolatedpart of the forest with the intention of killing him.The latter suspects what is in store for him, and pre-pares himself mentally^ko give blow for blow. Theencounter between the two men takes place in an ominous »atmosphere. But as they meet, they greet each otherin proverbs and carry on their conversation in allusivespeech. They then recount the fables, in which each manconveys his individual sentiment, the folktales expandingon the proverbs, elaborating in figurative language their

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purport. The two men fence with each other in wordsin this way until Batouala, unable to restrain him-self any longer, makes a pointed statement that un-covers starkly the dread issue that divides the' twomen.

We have then, in Batouala, something far inadvance of exotism, something more than a mere out-side representation of a foreign atmosphere, "but anevocation that goes a long way towards .restitutingthe inner quality of life in a specific human universe.Maran not only portrayed Africa in his novel, but byintegrating into the whole design of the work suchelements as would break through the confines of anexternally contrived representation, takes his readersfurther into the intimate recesses of African experience

This, more than the explicit anti-colonial pass-ages, makes Maran an innovator in modern African liter-ature, and indeed, the creator of the modern Africannovel. He pointed the way by this single work, by itsdemonstrative value, to those African writers in Frenchwho came after him, by achieving a reconversion of theEuropean language to render immediate the atmosphereof Africa* Furthermore, within this scheme of hisnovel, Maran also created an African, for the firsttime in French literary history, as a true tragicfigure, endowed with an authentic imaginative life.Maran impresses his hero upon our feelings and, indeed,upon our intelligence. The African thus comes aliveas a hero, that is, as a man with feeling, with hispassions, and above all, with his own manner of appre-hending the world,

Batouala also establishes a direct relationshipbetween the lives of his African characters and the'colonial situation, between the external framework ofAfrican life at a precise historical moment and thedestiny of individuals involved in it. It is from thisperspective that the novel performs the social functionwhich its author claimed for it in the preface he addedto the second edition, published after the work hadobtained the Prix Goncourt in 1921. We know that Maran,

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after the storm provoked by his novel, was dismissedfrom the colonial service and withdrew into stoic re-tirement. His writings afterwards indicate that hewas agitated by a personal conflict of loyalties.On the one hand, he continued to express his attach-ment to France and its culture by cultivating adelicate prose, with a dedication reminiscent ofFlaubert, and to the French empire by writing fourvolumes on its heroes and builders. On the otherhand, he also cultivated his African vein in a streamof animal and symbolic novels, the most remarkable ofwhich is Le livre de la brousse (1934). In particular,he poured his personal conflicts into an autobiographicalnovel, Un homme pareil aux antres (19^7).

Maran never 'committed1 himself politically, butthe true import of his career, especially when viewedagainst his background, resided in the fact that aWest Indian, utterly assimilated to French culture,had been confronted with the contradiction of hisposition and had begun to move towards a view of thingsoutside and beyond the French scheme of values. Thecritical intelligence which underlies, Batouala, as wellas the imaginative sympathy which he achieved in hisnovels with the African continent — and which implieda positive valorisation of the continent -- indicate areflective consciousness which was bound to affect thevision of the West Indian in his double relation toEurope and to Africa. For Maran had written out of aframe of mind which was not simply moral or liberal,but denoted a sense of concern and involvement, limitedperhaps in scope and intensity, but nonetheless real.

This sense of involvement implicit ym Maran'swork becomes explicit in the work of Aime Cesaire,who was to give a definite figure to the hesitantsocial vision of his predecessor. In the great poem

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by C^saire,^his first work, Cafaier jd'un re tour aujpaysnatal (1939) the contained lnM^atTorT*of~Maran"explodesinto open revolt, and into a new determination. WithCesaire, moral, concern is transformed into passionatecommitment.

Cesaire!s literary work, especially when consi-dered in conjunction with his political activities,represents more than the expression of an attitude ora symbolic gesture, but rather a privileged form ofaction -- that is, poetic action, whose direction isthe activation of the mind of the West Indian andwhose purpose is the total transformation of his modeof insertion in the world order. Ce'saire inscribeshis poetry within a historical vision and ascribes toit a function ~- that of formulating for the West Indiana new form of historical existence.

That Cesaire wa.s brought to embrace his vocationas a poet of the black consciousness is due not only tohis temperament but also to a combination of factorswhich converged upon him, at a precise moment in history,to determine this vocation for him, Between Maran andCe'saire lies a development which gathered force duringthe inter-war years, and which favoured the emergenceof a new current of feeling and of ideas in the FrenchCaribbean. The atmosphere:of spiritual distress thatsettled upon Europe after the carnage of the EirstWorld War* and the background of economic difficultiesand political tension determined an intellectual climatein which the old ideas and values that appeared to havesustained European Civilisation began to be called intoquestion. The Surrealist movement is the natural childof those times, The confrontation between Fascism andCommunism which began to split Europe, and the generalmoral unease that pervaded the European continent leftan impression on black intellectuals in Europe: Europehad been shown to be frail and vulnerable. In America,the Negro Renaissance expressed in. literature the newmood of affirmation that" was spreading through the black

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population, and in Haiti, the Indigenist movement,led by Dr. Price-Mars, had begun to question theprimacy of European values in the collective expres-sion of black men whose historical and racial ante-cedents — and consequently, cultural and spiritualessence — derived more from Africa than from Europe.And of course, the protest theme, in relation to theracial problem, which was the keynote of all thisliterature brought home to the French Caribbean thefact of the colonial problem on his island.

It was in Martinique that the immediate follow-up to Maran's gesture was to come, in the form ofEtienne Lero's manifesto, Le'gitime defense, whichappeared in 1932 in Paris. Lero attacked the lack ofrelevance of the accepted literature of Martinique:

"A foreigner would look in vain in this liter-ature for an original or profound accent, for thesensual and colourful imagination of the black man,for an echo of the resentment as well as the aspirationof an oppressed people. "14-

Etienne Lero died shortly after, and it wasupon Ce saire that his mantle came to fall. Cesaire,who was a student in Paris at the time, had met Leo-pold Senghor, also a student and together, they haddiscovered, each for himself, a new meaning of Africa.For Cesaire, Africa meant self recognition as a WestIndian, because it illuminated a whole new dimensionof himself which had been obscured; it meant seeinghimself anew and aright.

The result is Cah-ier d'un re tour au pays natal.The poem cannot, I think, be fully comprehended exceptin its Caribbean context, that is within the tripleframe of reference with which I began this discussion.The dialectic which informs the poet's mental andspiritual progression as it unfolds in the poem isfurnished by that historical arrangement which hasplaced the West Indian in a simultaneous relationshipwith Europe,. America and Africa, constituting theminto his poles of social and moral awareness. And it

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is to set right the lopsidedness of this arrangementthat Aime* Ceisaire sets out on the voyage of self dis-covery of which Cahier is an account.

Canier recounts a quest -~ it reveals it-self indeed as "Ehe epic of a singular consciousness.It retraces for us the exploration of the torturedlandscape of the West Indian mind in an exceptionalact of introspection., as well as its movement towardsa sense of direction and purpose, its tormented grop-ing towards a sense of fulfilment.

At the beginning of the poem, Ce'saire unfoldsfor us a panorama of the incoherence and futility ofhis native island, enstranged from itself and con-demned to a sterile inauthenticity:

"At the end of the dawn, the city —flat, sprawled, tripped up by its com-mon sense, inert, winded under the geo-metric weight of its eternally renewedcross, at odds with its fate, mute,baffled, unable to circulate the .pithof this ground, embarrassed, lopped,reduced, cut off from fauna and flora."1-5

The material squalor of Martinique, conveyed ingraphic images of physical degradation, is then seenas being only the outward sign of the moral desolationwhich has made a waste land of the collective conscious-ness of its Inhabitants and drawn a shroud over theirspiritual life:

"At the end of the dawn, the greatmotionless night, the stars more deadthan a perforated balafon."1"

But it is less in anger than with a motion oflove that Ce'saire descends into this hell in quest ofredemption for himself and for his people:

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"To flee. My heart was full ofgenerous hopes. To flee... 1should arrive lithe and young inthis country of mine and I shouldsay to this land whose mud is fleshof my flesh: !I wandered for a longtime and I am returning to the desertedfoulness of your wounds'. I shouldcome back to this land of mine and sayto it: 'Embrace me without fear...If all 1 can do is speak, at least Ishall speak for you'",!?

Cesaire's identification, in a total fusion ofbody and soul with the tragic fate of his people, hasa quality of religious dedication, and his commitmentwidens his "open consciousness",„ defining for him thetotal area of his passion;

"Mine, these few thousand death-bearerswho circle in the gourd of an isle., andmine, too, the archipelago bent likethe anxious desire for self negation as•if with maternal concern for the mostfrail slenderness separating the twoAmericas.; and the womb whichtowards Europe the goodGulf Streams, and one ofdescent slopes between 'which thefunambulates towards Africa. Arid my un-fenced island, its bold flesh upright atthe stern of this Polynesia] and rightbefore it, Guadeloupe slit in two at thedorsal line, and quite as miserable asourselves; Haiti, where Negritude stoodup for the first time and swore by itshumanityj and the droll little tail of •Florida where a Negro is being lynched,and Africa caterpillaring gigantically

spixisliquor of thethe two I. no an-

y i

:

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up to the Spanish foot of Europe,its nakedness where death cuts awide swath.18

Here is the racial consciousness taken form,amid the far flung abjection to which Europe hasreduced the black man, and rising to the surfaceof the West Indian consciousness. It is Europe thatnow wears a sinister mask:

"in leaving Europe wracked with criesand silent currents of despair, inleaving Europe which timorously re-covers itself and, proud, overestimatesitself. I claim this egotism beautifuland adventurous and my labour reminds meof an implacable prow."

The very movement of rejection and of revolt towhich these words bring us in the logical progressionof Ce'saire's spiritual adventure initiates in its turna new motion towards self affirmation, for which Ce'saireinvented the word "Negritude" in the well known pass-age of his poem:

"My Negritude is not a stone, itsdeafness thrown against clamour ofthe dayj my Negritude is not a speckof dead water on the dead eye of theearth, my Negritude is neither a towernor a cathedral. It thrusts into thered flesh of the soil, it thrusts intothe warm flesh of the sky, it digs underthe opaque dejection of its rightfulpatience."20

It is at this point where we watch the resurgenceof the poet's "consciousness that the dialectic of Cesaire'spoem reveals itself most distinctly. The poet has passedthrough a succession of phases that are like a purgation,

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ARTICLES 18,

each phase involving a metamorphosis of the self,'and leading to the definition a new being. Thepoem becomes the dramatic exteriorlsation of amental rite of passage, by which the poet gainsaccess to a higher level of experience both of him-self and of the world. The dominant theme here*as "i.n all Cesaire's poetry, is that of a perpetualmovement of the self, realising ever more fully itsintegration into a more substantial whole, in otherwords an intensification of being. The imagery herealso presents us with a symbolic representation oftotality, the poet himself plante.d at the live centerof a whole universe of vital responses, so that whenhe comes to celebrate his race, it is in terms of aspirituality that draws its energy from a full, or-ganic and intense cosmic participation:

"truly the elder sons of the worldporous to all the breath of the worldfraternal space of all the breath of the worldbed without drain of all the waters in theworld spark of the sacred fire of the worldflesh of the flesh of the worldpanting with the very movement of the worldTepid dawn of ancestral virtuesBlood 1 Blood! All our blood stirred by themale heart of the sunThose who know the feminine nature of themoon's oily fleshthe reconciled exultation of the antelopeand the star those whose survival moves inthe germination of grassEial perfect circle of the world and closeconcordance!"21

Cesaire's negritude then, is not only a personalbut also a collective vision, a vision of the racefounded upon a novel apprehension of the meaning ofAfrica, which serves as the mediating symbol of a newconsciousness. Africa has, in an immediate way, a

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ARTICLES 19.

polemical significance -- the contestation of the•colonial hierarchy of values implies the glorifi-cation of Africa, the constitution of a countermyth, a wilful act., in the two senses of the word, ••whose purpose as Cesaire puts It, is "the inventionof souls."22

This relative and negative aspect of Negritudeexplains its excessive romanticism, its exaggeratedemphasis, its irrationalism even. But these were notwithout their positive side. If we consider theAfrican myth in the work of Cesaire from the Caribbeanperspective* it is easy to recognise the fact thatAfrica signified for him a means of mental liberation,as well as a symbol of spiritual salvation.

For the Martinican wallowing in a quagmire ofself refusal, Africa offered self acceptance. TheAfrican past came as a historical justification forhis claim to a plenitude of being -- it gave a posi-tive dimension to his historicity by extending hisawareness beyond the demoralising past of slavery.It also permitted him to recover his authenticitythrough the recognition cf his cultural attachmentto Africa. By breaking the vicious circle of inhi-bitions set up in the Caribbean mind, it restoredhim to his wholeness.

The African myth also has another significancefor Cesaire as the source of his poetic values andthe foundation of his poetic vision. Cesaire'sAfrican vision is situated within the Surrealistphilosophy, which can be summed up as a quest fora fresh mode of experience and of knowledge. Poetrybecomes a vital act, which creates a structure ofapprehension of a mystic, as opposed to a rationalkind. The spirituality of Africa appeared to Cesairetherefore not only as a personal heritage, but also asan ultimate sanction for his poetic aspiration towardsthe primary and the elemental. Africa, in a word., isa symbol which serves as a transcendental reference forthe poetic vision of Aime* Cesaire,

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ARTICLES 20.

The African sentiment of Cesaire animates thenhis messianic vision. His experience of Africa isimaginative and symbolic, but it has an active pur-pose. The poet assumes the role of a prophet, lead-ing his people towards a new world of social experienceand human awareness, towards a new order of existenceand of being:

"Now I know the sense of the ordeal:my country is the 'night lance' ofmy Bambara ancestors.

"And I seek for my country not heartsof dates, but hearts of men who beatthe virile blood to enter the citiesof silver by the great trapezoiddoor..1' ...2J

When Cesaire's work is considered in'its entirerange, the distinctive fact that specifies it can beseen to be social commitment expressing and realisingitself in imaginative terms. There is at work in itthe will to bring the black man's consciousness to atotal coincidence with its historical determinationand thus to illuminate it. Ce'saire's negritude,romantic, passionate, exacerbated even, reveals itselfin this light as no more than the deliberate and lucidassumption by the black man of his destiny.

•x-

In this respect, Cesaire struck a completelynew note in the literature of Martinique and createda new mode of vision and of expression, the significantaspect of which is the pre-occupation that we findhenceforth in the work of a whole new generation ofwriters with the situation of the black man in the FrenchCaribbean and: in the world. Novelists such as Juminer

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ARTICLES

a n d '/ o i J>-. ''. j pc e bb IM > r ,belong t o t h i s geuer-.-i, >what I ' d l i k e lo I*„> "vi r l /F r a n t z Fanon, i n -iIs •;•.. .h e r i t a g e . AjAtiO'.^i ivc l i m a t e of tiT.uiii. • •• -r :.. •' .Ce*saire i n Mar'-u qn-can t h u s bv of.c-. , . [. . •the effort , ; .••< -J,..- ,-t h e f r e q u t t . l i • • • . - ( , • , . , ,

departureC

as wellrence.think,was a. rterms,symbolson theconst!Imen. Sthan Cethingc.was to

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What

'.'

i -~>w

ati xaiuii:, t i o n of t h e b l a c k m a n ' s c o n d i t i o n i n t h eounce o ,)" t n e c o l o n i a l s i t u a t i o n i n theCi<.'! i)t»;.-.:n.. 'mo. i t ; i t c w i d e r impj I c a t i o n . . .""r.oii. ii • r-if.pi-t- h e r e I s no l e s s t h a n a LUOIU..

. f W {"•!••- e; ;;>i,e:j;e. He examines i n Lh.^rot U.i '- e>• i.'.t ^tirT; and the v a r i o u s mode". .>.'

11 ' l - r ' d ; mar: t.o h i s c o n d i t i o n . T) - i u -oi « ,. vcr OJ' i he M e e k m a n ' s r e l a t i o n ti- i-1

i, > io !>')o • i-'-.ityd him i'^v hi B ur, . <u!-i,o -,. ':.3p u ' o ; ;?u t h a t , i n Panon'„> ? u , > [\\,• , ' > -i, ji'jrv '-han ct dofenhi^'O r ^ a . - t i >< . ' . )•" - V ; ; 1 , : J U : ' I I J .> ,- '• L i a l ;* t i s ' . r i C L ( , f , > . " l K i i 1 J ; i • ' -

" . o i c ' •.••'•io " t i i t . i a t e d by t h e whLti ;.uvi, ..r . • ' ' / :'.'>•-C'ent; , i o u c r a t e d by i;he bja. '- irun ' •• i

,.MI,I,O>: ^i - v ' - i / i b t h e w h i t e man, iF«" ...:, f-- j t . -i; s i , .. 'xt-iei i i .arieqnate^ and t i i a t tn-r- r •,--.'; • ont'.-- h ' ...-,.' IXHIVJ dilemma i s t o breai-' fbo oj v i efui i • ' ' 'JI ' "Li .HicAreiy, by r e v j n d i f j i ITJ1 h : i .n o ' .-- ivl i d , ,11 in, •which on ly r e Ln^oro.>'_ T h i r . elh u t . ..M>)',/ ..:= a man. The f i n a l p e r o r a t J - i u h1

i i l i u * i. rat.oL; v e r y wel l h i s p o i n t of v i e w .

''I a s a man of c o l o r want o n l y "Dhi?:;T'tf-it t h e t o o l n e v e r p o s s e s s o r I •• ' 'iciri"i,-s i-h(; e n s l r v e m e n c of moi b> a, ..•ci-u- i^ i ' cvf i 1 . Tha t i c , of -/n\,i«)i,'io> . 'jh;i >,. i c be p o s s i b l e o ^ UN

> •-'< 'J i .-"'".over '-".net t o 3ove m .n >rx.,in > y "r1 .- HIM,'1, t<e. '2'.1

ii i r, ^n • ..hr? t-r ac t h u m a n i t y , how>:v. .% .:,,ii i>'a."on,proposer , .-> r t h e end of t h i s s t u d y . B-t \il~ipt -'.u r,u

vr.'jut"i-"j i. -• f t i ' t jsn wac t h e p o i n t t t i a t tli^ >'o"! •-•iir-lGituotlf*1 . i,T"S an economic r a t h e r t h a n a •_•"?>r" r. i • r;:'ue:ii n er .pciu1 1 . Vnat t h e b l a c k man was n o t ;>ppj c.-Tjed a j aMat!" FT,nn p_e _i

tso, h u t I n h i s p o s i t i o n a.** ~ui\lor>f '• v^: i,oan •"*-. Miomj'"" "a t i - i ; o ry . Tlrlr; vievj 1 B oh-;", HOSLV an ovo r -r.In~..K"ih~n~L, hnl wo can u n d e r s t a n d , i t t o MOI.O Ih.u. ^ancn"M.r ^e>. Li'!i, bi'irind and b e n e a t h t h e r a c l a j c l o a k OJ" t n efo.'.ooJ -JJ / I t ' i ;1 s..j on . t n e m a s t e r - s l a v e i1;1' a t i o n b h i n on

hook

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ARTICLES 23.

which it was founded. And his purpose is' not simplyto oppose the master, but the world of master andslave, as Albert Camus has put it.26

I do not think myself that Panon was rejectingNegritude outright, He was too perceptive to throwthe baby out with the bath water. But he was dis-concerted by the vague formulation that it began toreceive in the writings of Senghor, while admiringthe will that animated the movement, as exemplifiedin the poetry of his countryman, Cesaire. More thananything else he wanted to see in it an original con-tent, perhaps even* at this stage, a clear social asopposed to a mere mystic content --an empiricalsignificance, in a word.

At any rate* his Algerian experience was togive unity and definition to his ideas. In 1952, atthe age of 26, Panon was sent to Algeria, to serveat the French hospital at Blida, as a psychiatrist,The parallel of Panon1s career in the French servicewith that of Maran is difficult not to make. LikeMaran before him, Panon was brought face to facewith the colonial situation, in a new sphere of itseffects -- the disruption of the psychic life of itsvictims. His defection to the Algerian rebellionand his subsequent role as'the theoretician of therevolutionary thinking of Algerian nationalism reflect,more than his sensitive reaction to the brutal characterof the colonial reality, his thirst for a meaningfulcommitment, through action, to a new image of man.

Panon's analysis of the colonial situation isinscribed within this humanistic perspective. Moreconcretely, he saw colonialism as the elevation ofone set of men at the expense of another set. In thesame measure that the colonial master extends his humandimension - through economic advantage and the moralsatisfaction that he derives from it -- In that samemeasure is the colonised slave Impoverished In bodyand soul, depersonalied, reduced In his human statureand even nature. Colonial rule tends to drive a wedgebetween colonised native and his normal adherence to ,his essential humanity. This is'the situation as per-'ceived by Panon which Sartre In the very first sentence

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ART] CLEC

of h i s preface to p^nn^s sums up in these word??:

"Not BO very long ago, the ear th•-lari.beivo1 r\000 mil l ion inhabi tants :r->00 ffiJlioi) men, and 1,300 mill ioniu.fi ver., "27

The Bnarp divis ion between the two categories ofin-' :• ~ri dual ;•' tha1- cons t i tu te colonial scileoy assumesa . vJ s ignif icance from th i s point of vievi. Colo-nj.rnir.rn I," «fi jf-.' aul t , maintained by force t upon thecoriScJounneR'3 ;.>J the na t ive .

Panon's Dre-uccupatioiis In the tvio books tha tissued o'i( of hit, Axgei'jan experience i-evo.lve aroundth i r. problem, kz n psyohologisti he i s concerned,T think, prt mari \y wJ th the subject ive stnr.es of theco'ornsq&ri peop'jen» 1 n l^nLjLj^LAlLJ^exme,'^ b^ present.-s H ooclologiool account of thetransformations *•;•) A ' re r ian society thn.'ioiigh the changesin .-"ocJal a r s.it.n.je,^ Lh"»t are brougtit abont by thetioct fc>'^.i t" of the v-•/•ilntion, Oo'oct:; ?,.vip" Ire now mean™inn,ib humari relatio-iu are mociifiei, oevr v;]ues nt-eerefito^ s," the Alp,f,>rtann Mljutu flvrlr m'>;.i.o

thai

ID t'l

t y r e .

vi cv-1

icr .r "y ;- [ ;:i<;i t i o n . The s i j"irfnY-n• >Sc> =•','•>•>-i hi o t-a'-ro p l a c e f i p s f J r i.r_e

If 3 <>ations

i ' o ra .

'.o i rcu- i-h'c po in t , of viev, i:h.-\t uc p.ecuviolence the eoloi j u r.itua

t i o r : w i th vai i oh he j.ysifi 'nk; lfrsv )">ook, jj,1-1-!^^-.- s ^eaii Huhrnar.UiP h i t ; 1 h o u g h t by sayinf; thc . t " \'o<'t h im,violence i „"• a roTia of psychic therapy //hich he pre-r.cribes, \ r r " ii^ral s tn se , to cure the crlcknessbrought iot',', i))v m'iv.1 of colonised mnn b:.! ;•!:-• s i t u a -t i on . J<laorsiu i* -1:- 1 he- coloniser usea oonr't.int forceon bio ;r ict ; i i , h" sows in the mind of ir.o l a t t e r thesoe'ly '•>! -i r.Tii-'Jor.)('..-, ^/ill which t^'iew root '~>nw ;;nr°adGi t s pc* r-r;.nrMit. RC>O?>I ii, warping and cramping i t , Colonialal iein+o

or, J& t^o I n t r o d u c t i o n h e r e of a atr-K body' -iv i " : M v f eoiKToJ ousnesa o r tjt^ c a l l von, 7'he

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ARTICLES 25

colonised native is thus a pathological case; in thecircumstances, therefore, the only remedy is that thecolonised masses take up arms against their overlordsin order to recreate themselves as men. The emphasisthen is upon the creative role of violence, whichdilates the cramped muscles and restores the normalcorrespondence between the body and the soul in thecolonised native.

The rest of Fanon's thesis is devoted to anexamination of the political and social implicationof this fundamental idea, I cannot render an adequateaccount of Fanon's political thought in this survey,and I would like simply to limit myself to pointingout what appears to me to be of significance in it, inrelation to my general theme, before passing on to somegeneral conclusions.

First, Fanon minimises the racial factor infavour of the socio-economic, which cuts across ethniccategories. His comments on the national bourgeoisiein the colonial and newly independent countries and hisview of the disinherited peasants of the rural areas asthe only authentic revolutionary group is intended tobring home the fact that the issue at stake is that ofprivilege/ and advantage, not race. And preciselybecause of this standpoint, he discounts an alliancebetween the masses of the underdeveloped countries andthe proletariat of the advanced nations, who enjoy thematerial fruit of the colonial set-up and therefore havean interest in its maintenance. Hence the class struggleacquires in his thinking a new dimension, indeed auniversal character, in which the third world is opposedto the advanced nations. It is therefore with somejustification that Fanon has come to be accepted as atheoretician of the third world, although only briefallusions are made in his work to the entity.

It is .this determination to go beyond theappearance to the reality, from the contigent to theessential, that accounts for his final criticism ofnegritude, which was his starting point. Its all —

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ARTICLES 26.

embracing character is belied by the £-<"..realities, because the condition of b] >;„ ••takes on varied and dissimilar forms, ty->vtant still, he came to see it as the ju< oj >the new native ruling class in the posi -c iperiod, which in Its emphasis on the 3ii."i..u'ttended to become in turn an alienating piu «insofar as it could not lead ,on to socl.il .uHe came therefore to restore the relative

jples..rnpor-• of

tial,al

«".iophy,.u. don',*character

of the movement, already pointed out by-.Sartre andagainst which He himself had protested,29 but nowin a different direction -- the social transformationof the emerging countries. It is in this sense thatI consider his .thinking to be not so much a breakwith negritude as a transcending of the movement.

We have then in the work of these threedominating figures in the literary and intellectualhistory of Martinique a distinct progression, Thedevelopment that strikes one when their writings areseen within the historical perspective • that I have-attempted here to establish for them is the mannerin which the social consciousness that they revealis transformed and extended from one writer to another,its progressive amplification.

Rene Maran has been hailed by Senghor as aprecursor of the Negritude movement,30 and rightlyso, if one is to judge by his influence. His firstnovel Is a protest against colonial rule, and servedas an initial inspiration for the literature of revolt;of the French-speaking black writers., although it didnot open out to them in an explicit or distinct waythe racial perspective of their movement. It was thework of a liberal humanist, More significant for theinfluence which Maran was to exercise is the imaginative

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ARTICLES 27.

sympathy with Africa which he achieved as an artist,as opposed to the intellectual understanding of theliberal. If we compare his African novels to thoseof Joyce Gary, for instance, this distinction becomesclear.* as the validity of Senghor's designation ofMar an as the forerunner of a 'movement he himself andAime Cesaire have come to incarnate.

ForaffirmationAime Cessaire,

the African vision Is at the heart of theof racial identity that we associate with

for whom the black world appears to benot only a community of suffering and of interests, butalso a community of values. And in the kind of mysticentity that his poetry celebrates, Africa^the originalmotherland of all black people,appears as'the ultimatesource of warmth and life.

Prantz Panon however,, while remaining in thesame current of development, takes us from this highpoint and leads us towards another. He too had aracial sentiment, and even a vision of the race, butone that becomes bred to a new awareness, that of theentire humanity of the under-privileged.. There isthus in his work not only a widening of the sociologicalperspectives of the racial consciousness that was passedon to him* but also in a fundamental sense, a refinementof vision* in his mariner of giving this consciousness anew relevance with reference to the Third World.

Thus the development that we observe in theevolution of literary and ideological expression bynatives of Martinique has a qualitative aspect. Thisis not without significance in another important respect,We can observe also in this evolution the movement fromcollective feeling to the creation of social ideas.Artistic expression is seen to provide the first signi-ficant indication of a self-consciousness on the partof the blacks -- of a collective affective state --which later crystallises, as it were., into self-aware-ness. This in turn finds intellectual projection inideology. In the particular case of the Negritudemovement, of which the developments summarised here

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ARTICLES 28.

constitute an important sector* it is of interestto note the divergent directions which the intel-lectual activity of the French-speaking blackwriters has taken, as represented oh the other onehand by the conservative social philosophy of Leo-pold Sedar Senghori^4- and the revolutionary social-ism of Fanon on the other. Both stem from the sameoriginal source, and they have a certain unity inthe sense that they both represent the outward move-ment of the black subjectivity towards the objectivereality of social factors.

Finally, with relation to our general theme,we might consider the significance of Africa itselfas a focus of feeling and of ideas, and indeed ofaction* for the Martinicans. Their case stands out'in the long run as a particular illustration of amore general Afro-American phenomenon. It formspart of a recurrent and consistent pattern of responsesthat seems today to have become established as an his-torical cycle. Maran* Ce^saire, and Fanon belong thento the gallery of figures peopled by other Afro-Ameri-cans such as Blyden* Du Bols, Garvey, and in our ownday, Malcolm X, who have turned to Africa in questof a meaning for the collective experience of the blackman in the modern age.

We know that this phenomenon of the emotionaland intellectual "return to Africa" by the Afro-American is the result of a reaction to the Americanexperience, or In a wider framework, the Westernexperience. It also bears traces of a certain atavism,although In the case of the Intellectuals, an atavismof a positive kind, comparable Indeed to the return tothe European source by other Americans such as HenryJames and T.S. Eliot* and In a sense more relevant thantheirs, in its effective contribution to the historicaland moral resurgence of the African motherland. But theultimate significance of the phenomenon for Africa seemsto me to reside elsewhere. , r-

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For when the contribution of these exiledsons of Africa is taken together with that of theWestern educated Africans in the development ofmodern African consciousness32 it will be seenthat in fact the actual spiritual transformationof Africa has been effected through the agency ofblack men. The entry of Africa into the modernera, though made inevitable by the encounter withWestern ideas and technology., was made possiblehistorically by the action of her own children,both immediate and remote. Ideology in the blackworld has a fundamental unity in that it was calledinto being by the encounter and the resultant clash,between Europe and Africa, and in response to thesociological consequences, in their varied forms,of this historical fact. And out of this globalresponse has been evolved the new mental universeof the modern African.

* •# *

References

1. Paul Valery: Regards sur le monde actuel,Paris, 1945.

2. For a fuller discussion, see M. Leiriss Contactsde civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe,Paris, 1955; and the present author's doctoralthesis, Les origines de la Negritude a la Marti-nique 9 University of Paris, 1966» — -

5. Cf. Leiris, op.cit., and P. Fanons Peau noiremasques blancs (Paris, 1956)1 Eng0 tr. BlackSkin White Masks (Grove Press, New York, 1967)=

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ARTICLES 30.

4. See Fanon, op.cit., in particular chapter 6entitled "The Negro and Psychopathology".

5, Cf. A. Viatte: Histoire litte'raire de i

6, R. Bernabej "L1 evolution de la poffsle martiniquaise on les voles de 1'authenticity*1,Fort de France, Nos. 3-4, May, 1964,

7, Quoted by Charles Kunstler, "Le coeur, l"esprit etla raison chez Rene* Maran" In Hormmge__|_Re<riMaran, Presence Africaine, Paris, 1955., p,5H.

8, Quoted by L, Bosquet, In introduction to R, Maran,(Paris,, 1924)., p,15«

9. Quoted by M, Gahisto^ "La geD.es€3 de Batouala.*' inHonima_ge_ op.cit., p. 1,36,

10. I b i d . , p.137-

11. R. Maran: BaJ;_£uala P a r i s , 1938 ed. p .56 ,

12. I b i d . , p .94 ,

13. Ibid, Chapter X, pp. l4?-l60.

14. Quoted by L. Damas:P a r i s , 19^7* PP» 1-3-15. For a "' << ' e r "accountof these developments that werf • lead to theNegritu'de movement, see L, Kesl • >t,

* >

A. IreTeT*~rrNegri*tude "or"Black ci '.,ral nat ional ism"i n Journal 9jM[|odj^r^ oainbx'idge, Vol. I l l ,N o . 3 , i9"55T"

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ARTICLES 31.

15

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21 .

22.

23

24

25

26

A. Cesaire;Paris, J M i r T F T 'the bilingual edition, with the Englisht i t l e , R^urn_>t£jTT2lNa^ive Land, Paris,1968, p.13.

Ibid., p.21.

Ibid., p.41.

Ibid., p.47.

Ibid., p.73-

Ibid,, p.101.

Ibid., p.103.

A. Cesaire: "L'faomme de culture noir et ses res-ponsabllltes" in Dejixij|me_J? ^et artistes nolrs, Presence Africaine, Paris,

CaMer, 1968, p. 127.

Cf. B. Jumlner, Le£_^tards_ (Paris, 196l), andAu seull d'un nouveau cri,(Paris, 1963)1T 7 ~ ^ ^ T 7 ~ ' ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ (Paris, 1955) >

Gllssant,^ g ^ ( , 1958), Le Quatrieme sl'ecles~J I9'64), and the lT~ ^ ^ ^ ~ T : ? * 7)

X ) ^^^1965) containing his principal collections ofpoemsj G. Desportes, S_ous_l'

6p

p p _ _ g , £j£g.....J,j.lLA?..J:.g.Paris, 1961, and anthologised poems In Damas,op. cit. ,

Panon: op.cit., p.231.

A. Camus, L'homme revolt^, Paris, 1951.

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ARTICLES 32.

27. J-P. Satre, Preface to TheJsfretchednof_the_Ea£th,Hammondsworth, 19 673 p.?.

28. Translated Into English under the title, Sl New York, 1965-

, pp. 132-135

30., L.S. Senghor, "Renl* Mar an, pr/cur.seur de l aNigr i tude" , In Hominagjs, o p . c i t . pp. 9-13

31. Cf, L.S, Senghor,1964.

Lli:lSl'3lASLn•' New York,

32. Cf. R. July; |London, 196BT