Initially, one might read the opening line of this four-stanza poem as a reference to Aimé Césaire’s own recourse to barbarity as a means of violent rebellion: “This [barbarity] is the word that sustains me / and smacks against my brass carcass.”

The reader comes to realize, however, that it is the barbarity of others, of the unjust and dishonest, that feeds the poet’s desire to resist and rebel against “the barbarous / bones of the cowardly prowling beasts of the lie.”

The powerful frankness of the poem lies in its clear imagery and its absence of rhyme and fixed meter. The barbarity of colonizers has died, and yet it resurrects itself in the present at various times, deaf to voices of protest, including the poet’s, as he puts it: “Barbarity of the dead circulating in the veins of the earth / who at times come and break their heads against the walls of our ears / and the screams of revolt never heard.”

Aimé Césaire

In the poem’s final stanza, there is a warning to those who might forget the prevalence of barbarity in the world. Barbarity is evoked as a series of fierce animal images: “barbarity I the spitting cobra / awakening from my putrefying flesh / suddenly a flying gecko / suddenly a fringed gecko.”

In the ominous final lines of the poem, the entity of barbarity personified warns that the only means of escape is by death: “I adhere so well to the very loci of strength / that to forget me you must / cast the hairy flesh of your chests to the dogs.” This final image, of the human corpse become carrion, is the obverse of the more hopeful image of the living resister of barbarity in the poem’s beginning, whose “brass carcass” cannot be penetrated.

Works Cited

Césaire, Aimé. The Collected Poetry of Aimé Césaire. Translated and edited by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, University of California Press, 1983.

Categories: British Literature, Literature

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