[New-Poetry] Aime Cesaire, voice of French Black pride, dies - Interview excerpts:

[amy king]

>From The liberating power of words - interview with poet Aime Cesaire - Interview


Aimé Césaire: I’ve always had the feeling that I was on a quest to reconquer something, my name, my country or myself.
That is why my approach has in essence always been poetic.


Because it seems to me that in a way that’s what poetry is.


The reconquest of the self by the self….


I think it was Heidegger who said that words are the abode of being.
There are many such quotations. I believe it was Rene Char, in his
surrealist days, who said that words know much more about us than we
know about them.


I too believe that words have a revealing as well as a creative function…


The Abbe Gregoire(1), Victor Schoelcher(2) and all those who spoke
out and still speak out, who campaigned for human rights without
distinction of race and against discrimination, these were my guides in
life. They stand forever as representatives of the West’s great
outpouring of magnanimity and solidarity, an essential contribution to
the advancement of the ideas of practical universality and human
values, ideas without which the world of today would not be able to see
its way forward. I am forever a brother to them, at one with them in
their combat and in their hopes…


I really do believe in human beings. I find. something of myself in
all cultures, in that extraordinary effort that all people, everywhere,
have made - and for what purpose?


Quite simply to make life livable!


It is no easy matter to put up with life and face up to death.


And this is what is so moving.


We are all taking part in the same great adventure.


That is what is meant by cultures, cultures that come together at some meeting-point….


I think it was in a passage in Hegel emphasizing the master-slave
dialectic that we found this idea about specificity. He points out that
the particular and the universal are not to be seen as opposites, that
the universal is not the negation of the particular but is reached by a
deeper exploration of the particular.


The West told us that in order to be universal we had to start by
denying that we were black. I, on the contrary, said to myself that the
more we were black, the more universal we would be.


It was a totally different approach. It was not a choice between alternatives, but an effort at reconciliation.


Not a cold reconciliation, but reconciliation in the heat of the fire, an alchemical reconciliation if you like.


The identity in question was an identity reconciled with the
universal. For me there can never be any imprisonment within an
identity.


Identity means having roots, but it is also a transition, a transition to the universal….


We are far removed from that romantic idyll beneath the calm sea.These are angry, exasperated lands, lands that spit and spew, thatvomit forth life.


That is what we must live up to. We must draw upon the creativity of
this plot of land! We must keep it going and not sink into a slumber of
acceptance and resignation. It is a kind of summons to us from history
and from nature….


And so I have tried to reconcile those two worlds, because that was
what had to be done. On the other hand, I feel just as relaxed about
claiming kinship with the African griot and the African epic as about
claiming kinship with Rimbaud and Lautreamont - and through them with
Sophocles and Aeschylus! …


I have never harboured any illusions about the risks of history, be
it in Africa, in Martinique, in the Americas or anywhere else. History
is always dangerous, the world of history is a risky world; but it is
up to us at any given moment to establish and readjust the hierarchy of
dangers. …


At any rate, it is for me the fundamental mode of expression, and
the world’s salvation depends on its ability to heed that voice. It is
obvious that the voice of poetry has been less and less heeded during
the century we have lived through, but it will come to be realized more
and more that it is the only voice that can still be life-giving and
that can provide a basis on which to build and reconstruct….


* And yet this century has not been one where ethics has triumphed, has it?


A.C.: Certainly not, but one must speak out, whether one is heeded
or not; we hold certain things to be fundamental, things that we cling
to. Even if it means swimming against the tide, they must be upheld.


In other words, poetry is for me a searching after truth and
sincerity, sincerity outside of the world, outside of alien times. We
seek it deep within ourselves, often despite ourselves, despite what we
seem to be, within our innermost selves.


Poetry wells up from the depths, with explosive force.


The volcano again.


No doubt I have reached the moment of crossing the great divide but
I face it imperturbably in the knowledge of having put forward what I
see as essential, in the knowledge, if you like, of having called out
ahead of me and proclaimed the future aloud.


That is what I believe I have done; somewhat disoriented though I am
to find the seasons going backwards, as it were, that is how it is and
that is what I believe to be my vocation.


No resentments, none at all, no ill feelings but the inescapable
solitude of the human condition. That is the most important thing.





1. Henri Gregoire (1750-1831), French ecclesiastic and politician, a
leader of the movement in the Convention for the abolition of slavery.
Ed.
2. French politician (1804-1893), campaigner for the abolition of
slavery in the colonies, Deputy for Guadeloupe and Martinique. Ed.


–The liberating power of words - interview with poet Aime Cesaire - Interview
 
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1997_May/ai_19557181/print

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