Analysis of Léon Damas’s Bargain

“Bargain” (“Solde”), from Damas’s first collection, Pigments (1937), reveals the effects of centuries of exploitation by white European colonials. Damas’s message is even more direct in this poem than in Hiccup; the speaker is an adult who has fully assimilated white European customs and is forced to continue the farce as he makes his way in the world, dispiritedly repeating the refrain, “I feel like an awful fool.”

The poem—devoid of rhyme, and of varying meter and stanza length—furnishes a list of the ridiculous customs of white colonial society that the speaker finds so alien: clothing (“in their dinner jacket / in their shirt front / in their monocle / in their derby hat”); social practices (“in their mannerisms / in their bowings and scrapings / in their endless need for affectation”); perceived intellectual superiority (“with theories that they season / to the taste of their needs”).

Finally, the judgment that the speaker passes on himself is harsh and unforgiving, for unlike the child in Hiccup, he is not an innocent participant, but rather an active agent in the continued exploitation of his less fortunate countrymen. He has struck a “bargain” with colonialist whites, and he has sold out his own culture to succeed in white society.

He is thus complicit in the injustice perpetrated by “them” (white Europeans) for centuries:
“I feel like an awful fool / accomplice among them / panderer among them / cutthroat among them / my hands hideously red / with the blood of their ci-vili-za-tion.”

The irony of the poem’s final word, civilization, is felt in its emphatic division into syllables, forcing readers to slow their reading and ponder the implications of the word in light of the speaker’s bitter, cynical conclusion.

Works Cited

Damas, Léon. Pigments. 1937.