Like much of Aimé Césaire’s poetry, Prophecy possesses a stream-of-consciousness style in unrhymed, free verse with lines of varying length. The poet reminisces about Caribbean islands before European colonization, the fecundity of their vegetation, and the wonders of the animal world: “there where the vigorous night bleeds a speed of pure vegetation / where the bees of the stars string the sky with a hive more ardent than the night.”
This edenic world eventually becomes menacing, as colonizers (in this case, the British) arrive and disrupt the Caribbean paradise.
The poet identifies as his task the marshaling of oppressed peoples through his own poetry, “where the rainbow of my speech is charged to unite tomorrow with home.” This dream of unification, the commingling of races into a peaceful “rainbow,” is what the poet prophesizes as a response to the division of “isles” into “islets” by colonial powers, the poet watching the Caribbean islands “. . . dissolve little by little into British isles into islets into jagged rocks in the limpid sea of air.”
Yet finally, this image of dissolution is not permanent, for the poet remains undaunted, and he boldly claims that in this “limpid sea” of divided territories, “. . . my mug / my revolt / my name / prophetically bathe.”
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: French Literature, Literature, World Literature
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