Aimé Césaire

A work of immense cultural significance and beauty, this long poem became an anthem for the African diaspora and the birth of the Negritude movement. With unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, a bouquet of language-play, and deeply resonant rhythms, Césaire considered this work a "break into the forbidden," at once a cry of rebellion and a celebration of black identity. More praise: "The greatest living poet in the French language."--American Book Review "Martinique poet Aime Cesaire is one of the few pure surrealists alive today. By this I mean that his work has never compromised its wild universe of double meanings, stretched syntax, and unexpected imagery. This long poem was written at the end of World War II and became an anthem for many blacks around the world. Eshleman and Smith have revised their original 1983 translations and given it additional power by presenting Cesaire's unique voice as testament to a world reduced in size by catastrophic events." --Bloomsbury Review "Through his universal call for the respect of human dignity, consciousness and responsibility, he will remain a symbol of hope for all oppressed peoples." --Nicolas Sarkozy "Evocative and thoughtful, touching on human aspiration far beyond the scale of its specific concerns with Cesaire's native land - Martinique." --The Times

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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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