The fifth independent collection of poetry by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Nocturnes was published in 1961, the year after Senghor became president of Senegal, and it was awarded the International Grand Prize for Poetry from the Poets and Artists of France. The collection is divided into two sections.
The first and longer section, “Chants pour Signare” (Songs for Signare), is a group of love lyrics originally published in 1949 as “Chants pour Naëtt” (Songs for Naett), written for Senghor’s first wife, Ginette Eboué, before being “tactfully reworked out of deference to his [second] wife, Colette Hubert [a French woman]” (Vaillant 302). “[U]se of the historically specific term signare,” says Melvin Dixon, “suggests a merger of the two actual women, for a signare was an aristocratic mulatto woman of the 18th and 19th centuries who was usually kept as a mistress by French military personnel, much like the quadroon or octoroon who appeared in Louisiana…” (xxxiv).
The 24 poems in “Songs for Signare” are untitled (except one), and each indicates accompanying instrument(s) ranging from gorong (drum) or khalam (stringed instrument) to jazz orchestra. Highly imagistic, these poems express love through densely metaphorical language often used to depict simple scenarios. For example, the poet knows his love’s “music” with his eyes covered (“I was sitting…”) or recollects their return home through “mangrove swamps” (“Your face beauty…”); his love is depicted waiting at the port for the boat bringing mail (“To forget all the lies…”) or running her hands through the poet’s hair when he is tired (“The head of mine…”).
His love’s beauty is conveyed through the image of a “smile that sets [the poet] a riddle” (“You have stripped…” 1.6). The way he adores her is imaged through the poet’s taking “long parched draughts” of her face (“Was it a Mograbin night…” 3.1). Pursuing and winning her is conveyed through the metaphor of “Dyogoye the famished Lion” (2.1) bringing “to bay” an antelope that has “soft panting… flanks” (1.4) and that undergoes a “jubilant death rattle” (“She flies she flies…” 1.6). Missing his love is depicted as “hat[ing] the Orient face of the blue Beloved” (1.3) ocean as it carries him away (“A long journey…”).
Like others of Senghor’s poems, Nocturnes celebrates black womanhood using imagery of woman as land, homeland, and Africa—e.g., “When shall I see again, my country, the pure horizon of your face? / When shall I sit down once more at the dark table of your breast?” (“Long, love have you held…” 1.4–5). Black women are celebrated as the poet “dream[s] of the girls at home, like dreaming of pure flowers” (“To forget…” 2.2) or as “Ebony flutes” (“Song of the Initiate” 1.1). According to Janice Spleth, “the woman in the poems becomes a personification of the poet’s African ideal and… is described physically in terms of the African terrain and especially the childhood paradise” (91).
Yet Nocturnes also utilizes imagery that can apply to any woman—e.g., “your smile like the sun on… my Congo” (“A hand of light…” 1.2)—or to white or mixed women—seen in the image of Signare, who has “the blues eyes of a fair negress” and “skin with bronze” (“Relentlessly she drives…” 2.3,6), or in metaphors such as “black patina, ivory patiently ripened in the black mud” (“Song of the Initiate” 2.2).
“Songs” also continues the celebration of African culture of the Negritude movement, which Senghor helped to found, as seen in the call that they “shall be steeped… in the presence of Africa” (“And we shall…” 1.1), or the honoring of African folk wisdom via the “Benin wizards” and “the High Priests of Poéré” (“You have stripped…” 2.3–4). Part of this celebration is conveyed through links between “Eden-Childhood-Africa” (Vaillant 302) and through “an idyllic pastoral Africa” that is “contrasted with the harsh realities of civilised Europe” (Reed and Wake ix): “For a long time I shall sleep in the peace of Joal / Till the Angel of Dawn gives me up to your light / O Civilisation, to your harsh and cruel reality” (“Roads of insomnia…” 3.2–4). Alternate to the theme of the “manna” of childhood (“A long journey…” 2.1) is the theme of aging, as found in “It is surprising…”
The second section of Nocturnes, “Élégies” (Elegies), contains five slightly longer poems, two of which were previously published in Présence Africaine and all of which are traditional elegies in the 17th-century use of the term: “reflective poems that lament the loss of something or someone (or loss or death more generally)” (Bedford Glossary 130).
“Elegy of Midnight” depicts a persona suffering from insomnia, surrounded by the unbearable light of books, whose anguish is “momentarily alleviated by a… fantasy of making love” (Kennedy 192) and who prays for “the Kingdom of [his African] Childhood” (4.3). Here woman is depicted as “deep earth laid open to the black Sower” (3.2), and the tortured insomniac will “sleep at dawn, [his] pink doll in his arms / [His] doll with green eyes and golden, and so wonderful a tongue / Being the tongue of the poem” (4.12–14). The poem thus continues the themes and imagery found in “Songs.”
“Elegy of the Circumcised” likewise expands on the themes of childhood innocence and aging found in “Songs.” Depicting the rite of circumcision as a necessary passage from the “friendly Nights… of Childhood” (3.7) into “the noontime of… age” (3.9), led by the “Master of the Initiates,” whose “wisdom” is needed “to break the cipher of things” (4.3) and undertake adult male duties, the poem depicts the loss of childhood as a rebirth through song and poem: “The Phoenix rises… over the carnage of words” (4.8).
In “Elegy of the Saudades” (nostalgia) the poet depicts learning the Portuguese origin of his name—“Senhor the name a captain once gave his faithful laptot [a soldier of the Senegalese light infantry]” (1.4)—and imagines the colonial history that led to or came from this colonial encounter.
“Elegy of the Waters” calls for “Rain on New York… Moscow… China” (3.7–9) to put out the “Fire! Burning walls of Chicago… / Fire on Moscow” (9–10) and renew life.
The final poem, “Elegy for Aynina Fall,” is “a dramatic poem in praise of Aynina Fall, who led striking workers to protest the harsh conditions of labor in the construction of a railroad” (Dixon xxxiv).
Bibliography
Kennedy, Ellen Conroy, ed. The Negritude Poets: An Anthology of Translations from the French. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1975.
Murfin, Ross, and Supryia M. Ray. “Elegy.” In The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. 2nd ed., New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.
Senghor, Léopold Sédar. The Collected Poetry. Translated and introduced by Melvin Dixon. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991.
———. Nocturnes. 1961. Translated and introduced by John Reed and Clive Wake. African Writers Series. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1969.
Spleth, Janice. Léopold Sédar Senghor. Twayne’s World Author Series, French Literature, edited by David O’Connell. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
Vaillant, Janet G. Black, French, and African: A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.
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