- To a totally racist world, self-mutilated by its own colonial surgeries, Aimé Césaire restored mother Africa, matrix Africa, the black civilization. He denounced all sorts of dominations in the country, and his writing, which is committed and which derives its energy from the modes of war, gave severe blows to postslavery sluggishness. Césaire's Negritude gave Creole society its African dimension, and put an end to the amputation which generated some of the superficiality of the so-called doudouist writing. [Doudouist writing means tritely exotic, almost touristic local colorism.]
- This brings us to free Aimé Césaire of the accusation - with Oedipal overtones - of hostility to the Creole language. We have committed ourselves to understand why, despite an advocated return "to the deserted hideousness of our wounds," Césaire did not seriously associate Creole to a scriptural practice forged on the anvils of the French language. [. . . ] A man of both "initiation" and "ending," Aimé Césaire had exclusively the formidable privilege of symbolically reopening and closing the circle in which are clasped two incumbent monsters: Europeanness and Africanness, two forms of exteriority which proceed from two opposed logics - one monopolizing our minds submitted to its torture, the other living in our flesh ridden by its scars, each inscribing in us after its own way its keys, its codes, its numbers. No, these two forms of exteriority could not be brought to the same level. Assimilation, through its pomps and works of Europe, tried unrelentingly to portray our lives with the colors of Elsewhere. Negritude imposed itself then as a stubborn will of resistance trying quite plainly to embed our identity in a denied, repudiated, and renounced culture. Césaire, an anti-Creole? Indeed not, but rather an ante-Creole, if we could venture such a paradox. It was Césaire's Negritude that opened to us the path for the actuality of the Caribbeanness which from then on could be postulated, and which itself is leading to another yet unlabelled degree of authenticity. Cesairian Negritude is a baptism, the primal act of our restored dignity. We are forever Césaire's sons. [. . . ]
- Apart from the prophetic blaze of speech, Negritude did not set out any pedagogy of the Sublime. In fact, it never had any intention of doing so. Indeed, the prodigious power of Negritude was such that it could do without a poetics. Its brilliance shone, marking out with blinding signs the space of our blinkings, and it defused every thaumaturgic repetition much to the dismay of epigones. So that, even if it stimulated our energies with unehard of fervors, Negritude did not solve our aesthetic problems. At some point, it even might have worsened our identity instability by pointing at the most pertinent syndrome of our morbidities: self-withdrawal, mimetism, the natural perception of local things abandoned for the fascination of foreign things, etc., all forms of alienation. A violent and paradoxical therapy, Negritude replaced the illusion of Europe by an African illusion. Initially motivated by the wish of embedding us into the actuality of our being, Negritude soon manifested itself in many kinds of exteriority: the exteriority of aspirations (to mother Africa, mythical Africa, impossible Africa) and the exteriority of self-assertion (we are Africans). It was a necessary dialectical moment, an indispensable development. But it remains a great challenge to step out of it in order to finally build a new yet temporary synthesis on the open path of history, our history.
- Epigones of Césaire, we displayed a committed writing, committed to the anticolonialist struggle, but consequently committed also outside any interior truth, outside any literary aesthetics. With screams. With hatred. With denunciations. With great prophetics and pedantic concepts. In that time, screaming was good. Being obscure was a sign of depth. Strangely enough, it was necessary and did us much good. We sucked at it as if it were a breast of Tafia. We were freed on the one hand, and enslaved on the other as we grew more and more involved in French ways. For if, during the Negrist rebellion, we protested against French colonization, it was always in the name of universal generalities thought in the Western way of thinking, and with no consideration for our cultural reality. And yet Césairian Negritude allowed for the emergence of those who were to express the envelope of our Caribbean thought: abandoned in a dead end, some had to jump over the barrier (as did Martinican writer Edouard Glissant), others had to stay where they were (as did many), turning around the word Negro, dreaming of a strange black world, feeding on denunciations (of colonization or of Negritude itself), and were exhausted indulging in a really suspended writing, far from the land, far from the people, far from the readers, far from any authenticity except for an accidental, partial, and secondary one.
- With Edouard Glissant we refused the trap of Negritude, and spelled out Caribbeanness, which was more a matter of vision than a concept. As a project it was not just Aiméd at abandoning the hypnoses of Europe and Africa. We had yet to keep a clear consciousness of our relations with one and the other: in their specificities, their right proportions, their balances, without obliterating or forgetting anything pertaining to the other sources conjugated with them; thus, to scrutinize the chaos of this new humanity that we are, to understand what the Caribbean is; to perceive the meaning of this Caribbean civilization which is still stammering and immobile; to embrace, like Rene Depestre [Haitian writer], this American dimension, our space in the world; to explore, like Frantz Fanon, our reality from a cathartic perspective; to decompose what we are while purifying what we are by fully exhibiting to the sun of consciousness the hidden mechanisms of our alienation; to plunge in our singularity, to explore it in a projective way, to reach out for what we are . . . these are Edouard Glissant's words. The objective was prominent: if we wanted to apprehend this Caribbean civilization in its American space, we had to abandon screams, symbols, sensational communications, and turn away from the fetishist claim of a universality ruled by Western values in order to begin the minute exploration of ourselves, made of patiences, accumulations, repetitions, stagnations, obstinacies, where all literary genres (separately or in the negation of their limits) as well as the transversal (and not just pedantic) use of all human sciences would take their share. Somewhat like with the process of archeological excavations: when the field was covered, we had to progress with light strokes of the brush so as not to alter or lose any part of ourselves hidden behind French ways. [. . . ]
- To create the conditions of authentic expression amounted also to exorcising the old fatality of exteriority. Having only the Other's pupils under one's eyelids invalidated the fairest approaches, processes, and procedures. Opening one's eyes on oneself, like the regionalists, was not enough. Neither was scrutinizing this "fondal-natal" culture, as did the Haitian indigenists, in order to keep the essence of our creativity. We had yet to wash our eyes, to turn over the vision we had of our reality in order to grasp its truth: a new look capable of taking away our nature from the secondary or peripheral edge so as to place it again in the center of ourselves, somewhat like the child's look, questioning in front of everything, having yet no postulates of its own, and putting into question even the most obvious facts. This is the kind of free look which, having no outside spectators, can do without self-explanations or comments. It emerges from the projection of our being and considers each part of our reality as an event in order to break the way it is traditionally viewed, in this case the exterior vision submitted to the enchantment of alienation . . . This is why interior vision is revealing, therefore revolutionary. To learn again how to visualize our depths. To learn again how to look positively at what revolves around us. Interior vision defeats, first of all, the old French imagery we are covered with, and restores us to ourselves in a mosaic renewed by the autonomy of its components, their unpredictability, their now mysterious resonances. It is an inner disruption, and, like Joyce's, a sacred one. That is to say: a freedom. But, having tried to enjoy it with no success, we realized that there could be no interior vision without a preliminary self-acceptance. We could even go so far as to say that interior vision is a result of self-acceptance.
- French ways forced us to denigrate ourselves: the common condition of colonized people. It is often difficult for us to discern what, in us, might be the object of an aesthetic approach. What we accept in us as aesthetic is the little declared by the Other as aesthetic. The noble is generally elsewhere. So is the universal. And our artistic expression has always taken its source from the far open sea. And it was always what it brought from the far open sea that was kept, accepted, studied; for our idea of aesthetics was elsewhere. What good is the creation of an artist who totally refuses his unexplored being? Who does not know who he is? Or who barely accepts it? And what good is the view of a critic who is trapped in the same conditions? We had to bring an exterior look to our reality which was refused more or less consciously. Our ways of laughing, singing, walking, living death, judging life, considering bad luck, loving and expressing love, were only badly considered in literature, or in the other forms of artistic expression. Our imaginary was forgotten, leaving behind this large desert where the fairy Carabossa dried Manman Dlo. Our refused bilingual richness remained a diglossic pain. Some of our traditions disappeared without being questioned by any inquiring mind, and even though we were nationalists, progressivists, independentists, we tried to beg for the universal in the most colorless and scentless way, i.e. refusing the very foundation of our being, a foundation which, today, we declare solemnly as the major aesthetic vector of our knowledge of ourselves and the world: Creoleness.
CREOLENESS
- We cannot reach Caribbeanness without interior vision. And interior vision is nothing without the unconditional acceptance of our Creoleness. We declare ourselves Creoles. We declare that Creoleness is the cement of our culture and that it ought to rule the foundations of our Caribbeanness. Creoleness is the interactional or transactional aggregate of Caribbean, European, African, Asian, and Levantine culture elements, united on the same soil by the yoke of history. For three centuries the islands and parts of continents affected by this phenomenon proved to be the real forges of a new humanity, where languages, races, religions, customs, ways of being from all over the world were brutally uprooted and transplanted in an environment where they had to reinvent life. Our Creoleness was, therefore, born from this extraordinary "migan," wrongly and hastily reduced to its mere linguistic aspects, or to one single element of its composition. Our cultural character bears both the marks of this world and elements of its negation. We conceived our cultural character as a function of acceptance and denial, therefore permanently questioning, always familiar with the most complex ambiguities, outside all forms of reduction, all forms of purity, all forms of impoverishment. Our history is a braid of histories. We had a taste of all kinds of languages, all kinds of idioms. Afraid of this uncomfortable muddle, we tried in vain to anchor it in mythical shores (exterior vision, Africa, Europe, and still today, India or America), to find shelter in the closed normality of millenial cultures, ignoring that we were the anticipation of the relations of cultures, of the future world whose signs are already showing. We are at once Europe, Africa, and enriched by Asian contributions, we are also Levantine, Indians, as well as pre-Columbus Americans in some respects. Creoleness is "the world diffracted but recomposed," a maelstrom of signifieds in a single signifier: a Totality. And we think it is not time to give a definition of it. To define would be here a matter of taxidermy. This new dimension of man, whose prefigured shadow we are, requires notions which undoubtedly we still don't know. So that, concerning Creoleness, of which we have only the deep intuition or the poetic knowledge, and so as not to neglect any one of its many possible ways, we say that it ought to be approached as a question to be lived, to be lived obstinately in each light, in each shadow of our mind. To live a question is already to enrich oneself of elements besides the answer. To live the question of of Creoleness, at once freely and prudently, is finally to penetrate insensibly the immense unknown vastitudes of its answer. Let live (and let us live!) the red glow of this magma.
- Because of its constituent mosaic, Creoleness is an open specificity. It escapes, therefore, perceptions which are not themselves open. Expressing it is not expressing a synthesis, not just expressing a crossing or any other unicity. It is expressing a kaleidoscopic totality, that is to say: the nontotaletarian consciousness of a preserved diversity. We decided not to resist its multiplicity just as the Creole garden does not resist the different forms of yam which inhabit it. We shall live its discomfort as a mystery to be accepted and elucidated, a task to be accomplished and an edifice to be inhabited, a ferment for the imagination and a challenge for the imagination. We shall conceive it as a central reference and as a suggestive explosion demanding to be aesthetically organized. For it has no value in itself; in order to be pertinent, its expression must be the result of a serious aesthetic approach. Our aesthetics cannot exist (cannot be authentic) without Creoleness.
- Creoleness is an annihilation of false universality, of monolingualism, and of purity. [. . . ] Creoleness is our primitive soup and our continuation, our primeval chaos ad our mangrove swamp of virtualities. We bend toward it, enriched by all kinds of mistakes and confident of the necessity of accepting ourselves as complex. For complexity is the very principle of our identity. [. . . ] But what seemed to us a defect may turn out to be the indeterminacy of the new, the richness of the unknown. That is why it seems that, for the moment, full knowledge of Creoleness will be reserved for Art [. . . .] In multiracial societies, such as ours, it seems urgent to quit using the traditional raciological distinctions and to start again designating the people of our countries, regardless of their complexion, by the only suitable word: Creole. [. . . ]
- Altogether different [from Americanness, which the authors describe as the progressive adaptation of the West to the New World] is the process of Creolization, which is not limited to the American continent (therefore, it is not a geographic concept) and which refers to the brutal interaction, on either insular or landlocked territories - be it immense territories such as Guyana or Brazil - of culturally different populations: Europeans and Africans in the small Caribbean islands; Europeans, Africans, and Indians in the Mascarene islands; Europeans and Asians in certain areas of the Philippines or in Hawaii; Arab and Black Africans in Zanzibar, etc. Generally resting on a plantation economy, these populations are called to invent the new cultural designs allowing for a relative cohabitation between them. [Creoleness involves a double process:]
--the adaptation of Europeans, Africans, and Asians to the New World; and
--the cultural confrontation of these peoples within the same space, resulting in a mixed culture called Creole.
[Because this double process has operated in colonized places other than the Caribbean,] the Caribbean Creoles enjoy, therefore, a double solidarity:
--a Caribbean solidarity (geopolitical) with all the peoples of our archipelago regardless of our cultural differences - our Caribbeanness; and
--a Creole solidarity with all African, Mascarian, Asian, and Polynesian peoples who share the same anthropological affinities as we do - our Creoleness. [. . . ]
UPDATING TRUE MEMORY
- Our history (or more precisely our histories) is shipwrecked in colonial history. Collective memory is the first thing on our agenda. What we believe to be Caribbean history is just the history of the colonization of the Caribbeans. Between the currents of the history of France, between the great dates of the governors' arrivals and departures, between the beautiful white pages of the chronicle (where the bursts of our rebellions appear only as small spots), there was the obstinate progress of ourselves. The opaque resistance of Maroons allied in their disobedience. The new heroism of those who stood up against the hell of slaver, displaying some obscure codes of survival, some indecipherable qualities of resistance, the incomprehensible variety of compromises, the unexpected syntheses of life. They left the fields for the towns, and spread among the colonial community to the point of giving it its strength in all respects, and giving it what we are today. This happened with no witnesses, or rather with no testimonies, leaving us somehow in the same situation as the flower unable to see its stem, unable to feel it. And the history of colonization which we took as ours aggravated our loss, our self-defamation; it favored exteriority and fed the estrangement of the present. Within this false memory we had but a pile of obscurities as our memory. A feeling of flesh discontinued. Sceneries, said Glissant, are the only things to convey, in their own nonanthropomorphic way, some of our tragedy, some of our will to exist. So that our history (or our histories) is not totally accessible to historians. Their methodology restricts them to the sole colonial chronicle. Our chronicle is behind the dates, behind the known facts: we are Words behind writing. Only poetic knowledge, fictional knowledge, literary knowledge, in short, artistic knowledge can discover us, understand us and bring us, evanescent, back to the resuscitation of consciousness. When applied to our histories (to this sand-memory fluttering about the scenery, the land, in the fragments of old black people's heads, made of emotional richness, of sensation, of intuitions) interior vision and the acceptance of our Creoleness will allow us to invest these impenetrable areas of silence where screams were lost. Only then will our literature restore us to duration, to the continuum of time and space; only then will it be moved by its past and become historical.
THE THEMATICS OF EXISTENCE
- Here, we do not think that we are outside the world, in the suburb of the universe. Our anchorage in this land is not a dive in a bottomless pit. Once our interior vision is applied, once our Creoleness is placed at the center of our creativity, we will be able to re-examine our existence, to perceive in it the mechanisms of alienation, and, above all, to grasp its beauty. The writer is a detector of existence. [. . . ] The Creole literature we are elaborating takes it as a principle that there is nothing petty, poor, useless, vulgar, or unworthy of a literary project in our world. We are part and parcel of our world. We want, thanks to Creoleness, to name each thing in it, to declare it beautiful. To perceive the human grandeur of the djobeurs. [. . . ] To understand the vegetable market. To elucidate the function of the tale-tellers. To accept again without any judgement our "dorlis," our "zombis," our "chouval-twa pat," our "soukliyan." [the words are names of supernatural beings . . . ] These realities ought not to be described ethnographically [. . . but] we ought to show what, in these practices, bears witness to both Creoleness and the human condition.
THE CHOICE OF ONE'S SPEECH
- Our primary richness, we the Creole writers, is to be able to speak in several languages [. . . ] Out of this compost we must grow our own language. [. . . ]
- The Creole language is not a dying language, it changes continuously, loosing, at times, a few secret variegations only to find at other times unheard of accents [. . . ] It is comparable to this snake which, though it has been chased around the hills, reappears in our huts without warning, because Creole is linked to our very existence [. . . . ] The Creole poet writing in Creole, the Creole novelist writing in Creole, will have to be at once the collectors of ancestral speech, the gatherers of new words, and the discoverers of the Creoleness of Creole. [. . . ]
- But our histories, for once generous, gave us a second language. At first, it was not shared by everyone. It was for a long time the language of the oppressors - founders. We did conquer it, this French language. If Creole is our legitimate language, we gradually (or at once) were given and captured, legitimated and adopted the French language (the language of the Creole white class). Creoleness left its indelible mark on the French language, as did other cultural entities elsewhere. We made the French language ours. [. . . ] Our literature must bear witness of this conquest. [. . . ] Creole literature written in French, therefore, soon invest and rehabilitate the aesthetics of our language. Such is how it will be able to abandon the unnatural use of French which we had often adopted in writing.
- Outside all kinds of fetishism, Language will be, therefore, for us, the free, responsible, and creative use of languages.
CREOLENESS AND POLITICS
- The claims of Creoleness are not just aesthetic in nature, as we saw, they also have important ramifications touching on all fields of activity in our societies, and especially the most fundamental ones: politics and economics. Indeed, Creoleness claims a full and entire sovereignty of our peoples without, however, identifying with the different ideologies which have supported this claim to date. This means that it distrusts, in the first place, some sort of primary Marxism which has it that cultural and therefore identity-related issues will find a solution once the revolution is achieved. [. . . ] We also want to distance ourselves from this somewhat narrow nationalism that perceives the Martinican as a stranger to the Guadeloupan, and vice versa. Without denying the differences between our peoples, we would like to say that what unites them is vaster than what opposes them [. . . . ]
- Creoleness sketches the hope for the first possible grouping within the Caribbean Archipelago: that of the Creolophone peoples of Haiti, Martinique, Saint Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and [French] Guyana, a grouping which is only the prelude of a larger union of our Anglophone and Hispanophone neighbors. This is to say that, for us, the acquisition of an eventual mono-insulary sovereignty will be but a stage (a very brief one, we hope) in the process toward a Caribbean federation or confederation, the only way to stand up efficiently to the different hegemonic blocks that share the planet among themselves. [. . . ]
- [O]ur preference is for a multi-partisan, multi-unionist, and pluralist regime, which breaks radically with the fantasies that are the providential man or the nation's father who did so much harm in many countries of the Third World and Eastern Europe. By this we are not adhering to the Western political models, we are simply recognizing that equality between people cannot be obtained in a durable fashion without the freedom of thinking, of writing, and of travelling that goes with it. For us, there are no formal freedoms. All liberties, provided they do not stand in the way of the functioning of society, are good.