Aimé Césaire

Return to My Native Land

Macy HB

like a woman whose lyrical walk you have noticed but who suddenly calls upon a hypothetical rain and commands it not to fall

Its coming was first felt in the prickling of desires, a thirst for new tenderness, the budding of vague dreams, then suddenly it took wing in the violet silk rustle of its great wings of joy, and over the borough it plunged down and burst open the life inside the huts like an over-ripe pomegranate.

At the end of the small hours, this town, flat, displayed… it crawls on its hands without the slightest wish ever to stand up and pierce the sky with its protest. 

And my strange father nibbled by a single misery whose name I’ve never known, my father whom an unpredictable witchcraft soothes into sad tenderness or exalts into fierce flames of anger.

I want to rediscover the secret of great speech and of great burning. I want to say storm. I want to say river. I want to say tornado. I want to say leaf, I want to say tree. I want to be soaked by every rainfall, moistened by every dew. As frenetic blood rolls on the slow current of the eye, I want to roll words like maddened horses like new children like clotted milk like curfew like traces of a temple like precious stones buried deep enough to daunt all miners. The man who couldn’t understand me couldn’t understand the roaring of a tiger.

Not a corner of this world but carries my thumb-print and my heel-mark on the backs of skyscrapers and my dirt in the glitter of jewels! Who can boast more than I? 

And the woman who had a thousand names / fountain and sun and tears / and her hair like a young fish / and her steps my climates / and her eyes my seasons / days without harm / nights without offence / stars of confiding / wind of complicity 

It’s you, burden of an insult and a hundred years of the whip. A hundred years of my patience, a hundred years of my effort simply not to die.

The only thing in the world that’s worth beginning: the end of the World, no less. 

Twenty times over in the tepid warmth of your throat you will develop and entertain the same poor comfort that we are no more than mutters of words and you do it in vain. 

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