“On the State of the Union” is indicative of how Aimé Césaire’s vision of négritude had evolved from the concerns of being a Martinican struggling for racial equality with white Europeans into a universal view of civil rights for Blacks.
In the first stanza, the poet imagines an address to the U.S. Congress in which the state of the union is described as “tragic.” In a series of metaphors, the poet compares the United States to a “mine without ore, / cavern in which nothing prowls, / of blood not a drop left.”
The second stanza evokes the memory of Emmet Till, a young Chicago Black who was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling suggestively at a white woman. The case became an impetus for the nascent Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. The description of Till’s vibrancy is in direct contrast to the bloodless Earth of the first stanza:
“EMMET TILL / your eyes were a sea conch in which the heady battle / of your fifteen-year-old blood sparkled. / Even young they never had any age, / or rather more than all the skyscrapers.”
But Till’s youth was no match for the centuries of persecution of the weak by the strong, the influence of the past that drove whites to lynch Till, and the poet alludes to the Salem witch trials, and even further back to the beginning of biblical time, when Cain slew Abel:
“five centuries of torturers / of witch burners weighed on them, / five centuries of cheap gin of big cigars / of fat bellies filled with slices of rancid bibles / a five century mouth bitter with dowager sins, / they were five centuries old EMMET TILL, / five centuries is the ageless age of Cain’s stake.”
In the third and final stanza, the poet vows to remember Till and his blood that was shed, “may it mix with my bread.” He then addresses Till directly, asking the rhetorical question,
“Hey Chicago Boy / is it still true that you’re worth / as much as a white man?”
He knows that Till’s life was never worth that of a white man’s, which is why Till was murdered in cold blood. Still, the poet imagines the hope that Till must have felt, seeing the Mississippi River in the springtime before his death:
“Spring, he believed in you. / Even at the edge of night, at the edge of the MISSISSIPPI rolling its / bars, its barriers, its tomb-like avalanches between the high banks of racial hatred . . . loosener of fear clots, dissolver of the clots of hatred swollen with age and in the flow of blood- / streams. . . .”
But in the end, the white murderers, mounted on “bizarre immemorial billygoats,” perhaps a pejorative image of their backwardness, attacked and killed Till, with their disdainful appellation for him as “Chicago Boy.”
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.