Prelude (Prélude) is the first poem in René Depestre’s best-known collection, A Rainbow for the Christian West (Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien, 1967). It is written in unrhymed free verse and divided into four parts, the last of which is “prose poetry,” narrating a dream. Written in a stream-of-consciousness style typical of surrealist poets, the poem evokes strange, uncommon images.
From the beginning, the speaker shocks us into the realization that he is black: “Yes, I am a tempest-nigger / A nigger rooted in the rainbow.” Much of Depestre’s intent is apparent here: the tempests—both natural and political—of his native Haiti; his unmuzzled rebellion against racism (and the racist epithet “nigger”); the panoply of races in the world (the “rainbow” made up of colors, including the speaker’s own).
The speaker is a black “everyman” who criticizes white customs and religion: “I have come to stuff your ferocious laws . . . / Your tricks your taboos your white man’s lies!”
Having escaped the oppression of his native land, the speaker finds the same racism everywhere in the world and vows to expose it: “I devote myself to the stamp collecting of your cowardly acts / Here I am a brand new Black / I finally feel that I am myself / In my new solar geography / Me in the great joy of saying good-bye / To your ten commandments of God / To your hypocrisies to your bloody rites.”
One feels a sense of freedom as the speaker now refers to himself as “Black” (not pejoratively as “nigger”); and just as the Sun is the center of the universe, so too does the new consciousness of blacks assume a central place, represented by the speaker’s “new solar geography.”
Paramount to this rebirth of consciousness is the speaker’s return to his roots—the “savage stride” of his “NEGRITUDE”—his blackness. He will return to his indigenous voodoo spirituality—heretofore forbidden by colonizers as heretical.
At the end, the speaker recounts a surrealistic dream in which he confronts a prominent white family in antebellum Alabama. The family represents the white middle-class ideal. All of them fear the potential threat of the black intruder, but they attempt to appear worthy of his respect, despite wishing to annihilate him: “A beautiful family standing up in its scum! / A noble family who knows how to act like a family! / For the sake of impressing the nigger enemy of the family.”
The intruder, conjuring against the family its own Judeo-Christian traditions, assumes the figure of Abraham, making ready to kill them all: “His [Abraham’s] woodcutter-axe is my black-man-arm! / Tremble in your fruits and in your branches / White family of Alabama!” The poem ends with these lines, leaving unstated whether the intruder will spare the family as Abraham spares Isaac in the Bible.
Categories: French Literature, Literature, World Literature
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