In this unrhymed prose poem, Césaire develops the central image of torrential rain and its effects—both destructive and cathartic—on island cultures: “The rain, it’s the testy way here and now to strike out everything that exists, everything / that’s been created, cried out, said, lied about, soiled.” The rain is of biblical proportions and intent; it is at once a punishment for the abuses and “lies” of colonialism, and at the same time a means by which this ignoble past is erased so that oppressed peoples may rebuild their cultures from scratch.

In the poem’s second paragraph, the rain’s relentlessness is contrasted to human courage, which is never fully sustained. Playing on the two meanings of “fall” (the fall of rain and the fall of man), the poet contrasts the rain’s purposefulness with the fickle nature of humankind: “Where on earth did you hear that rain falls? / It is the courage of men which is dislocated. Rain is always wholehearted.” Rain is merciless in its assault, and it spares no creature. The poet seems to chide his people for their lack of courage and purpose, both of which he sees in the personification of the rain: “Rain exults. It is a / levy en masse of inspiration, a jolt of tropical sleep; a tumultuous assault against everything that burrows in warrens; the thrust counter-current / to gravity of a thousand crazed rounds of ammunition. . . .” The word ammunition lends a military quality to the rain, but unlike the rain, the poet’s own people have been unwilling to engage in violent revolution to achieve freedom.

The storm reaches a crescendo as lightning strikes, evaporating everything. But in the lightning’s destructive wake, there is peace: “Finally! The tree bursts with grenade. The rock explodes. Tenderness: now and then this great / repose. Tenderness: now and then this orchestra playing and intertwining steps like plaited wicker.” And yet revolution and its resultant peace do not come without a price; bloodshed and the devastation of the natural world are necessary sacrifices, or to reverse a metaphor, there must be a storm before the calm: “Tenderness, but that of adorable tortures: the setting in motion of a fire of bit-braces which drill / and force the void to scream star. It is blood.” But the sacrifice is worth the toll of lives, as the poet makes clear when he triumphantly proclaims, “No more monarchy.”

The poem closes with the evocation of the assegai dance, a ritual of African peoples in which the assegai—a spear—is brandished. The poet foresees the triumph of oppressed peoples, who will dance the victory dance of their African roots. In a final metaphor that echoes the title of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, the poet explains that the violence sown in revolution will result in a palliative “alcohol” of peace and renewal: “The vineyard of wrath has peddled to the very sky the alcohol of its repose and its salvation.”

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

Categories: British Literature, Literature

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