The poem—divided into stanzas of varying length and written in unrhymed free verse—begins with the refrain, repeated throughout, “At the end of the wee hours . . . ,” as the speaker wakes from a troubled sleep to survey the degradation of life in his small Martinican town. The dawn presages no hope: the speaker curses the “venereal sun” and the forces of civic order and religion, which he likens to an evil curse, or “grigri”: “Beat it . . . , you cop, you lousy pig, beat it, I detest the flunkies of order and the / cockchafers of hope. Beat it, evil grigri, you bedbug of a petty monk.” John Milton is evoked in the first stanza, the Antilles representing “paradises lost” in the wake of French colonialism.
Surrealism’s influence is evident throughout the poem. The narrator spews a stream of dark images of an Antilles devastated by colonialism. Following surrealism’s reliance on the subconscious and automatic writing, Aimé Césaire creates a feeling of spontaneous poetic consciousness. The natural beauty of the islands belies an endemic illness that persists from decades of European exploitation: “At the end of the wee hours bourgeoning with frail coves, the hungry Antilles, the Antilles pitted / with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited by alcohol” is “bursting with tepid / pustules, the awful futility of our raison d’être.” One cannot help noticing in these lines an echo of the French poet Charles Baudelaire, whose contradictory image of fleurs du mal (flowers of evil) becomes in Césaire’s poem “flowers of blood.”
The Antilleans are divorced from any sense of identity, having been stripped of it by European colonials. Antilleans, not given the opportunity to participate in white society, are in limbo, their own roots having been destroyed and their dream of material well-being thwarted by white supremacy and French empire, evoked here by the narrator’s allusion to “Josephine, Empress of the French, dreaming way up there above the nigger scum.” Césaire uses the pejorative nigger to reflect white racism.
Efforts to “civilize” Antilleans—through the French-based school system or through the Catholic religion—are futile because poverty and hunger are more pressing concerns: “. . . neither the teacher in his classroom, nor the priest at catechism will be able to get a word / out of this sleepy little nigger, no matter how energetically they drum on his shorn skull, for / starvation has quicksanded his voice into the swamp of hunger.” Furthermore, the history of the French aristocracy and Catholic dogma are ridiculously misplaced and alien to island culture.
The speaker passes from his memories of boyhood poverty and starvation to adulthood, and the reader is shown that conditions have not changed, as the speaker describes his present poverty and his house—a wooden shanty with a roof of corrugated iron, described as a rotting “carcass,” sparsely furnished, containing “spectral straw chairs, the grey lamp light, the glossy flash of cockroaches in a maddening buzz.”
The passing of the seasons is marked by the metamorphosis of nature—mango trees burgeoning in late summer, the cyclones and maturation of sugarcane in the fall, and the processing of sugar as winter approaches. But even Christmas, generally a time of celebration, brings little hope to Antilleans, who worry about not having enough to eat. It is as if this Christian feast—once foreign to precolonial Antilleans—remains a celebration in which they cannot fully indulge. Yet they attend church, and there is temporary joy in community, in singing, in sharing food and drink, and in worship. But as this joy climaxes, there is a foreboding that after this day life will return to its burdens of poverty and despair: “At the peak of its ascent, joy bursts like a cloud. The songs don’t stop, but now anxious and / heavy roll through the valleys of fear, the tunnels of anguish and the fires of hell.”
Once again, the refrain “At the end of the wee hours . . .” reveals the stark reality of the new day with its “aborted dreams” like a terminated fetus. The speaker flashes back to memories of childhood, his father a man—like Césaire’s own, striving to make a better life for Aimé and his six siblings—who could be driven to “towering flames of anger” from the pain of struggle. The speaker’s mother works as a seamstress in a sweatshop, and the speaker is “awakened at night / by these tireless legs which pedal the night . . . a Singer / that my mother pedals, pedals for our hunger and day and night.” Even the speaker’s grandmother is forced to beg for money, and over her bed, reflected by the feeble flame of an oil lamp, is a jar on which the word Merci is written in gold letters, Césaire here playing on the two meanings of the word: one denoting thanks (money given by passersby), the other a plea for “mercy.”
In spite of these travails, the speaker will not abandon hope but instead takes courage by reclaiming the dignity and pride of his “negritude”—his “Blackness”: “my negritude . . . takes root in the red flesh of the soil / it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky.” Thus after the ravages of slavery and French colonization, the speaker dreams of a better future that will be achieved through pride in his color, his culture, and his creation.
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.
Davis, Gregson. Aimé Césaire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Categories: French Literature, Literature, World Literature
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