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… Read More ›
“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…. Read More ›
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… Read More ›
Initially, one might read the opening line of this four-stanza poem as a reference to Aimé Césaire’s own recourse to barbarity as a means of violent rebellion: “This [barbarity] is the word that sustains me / and smacks against my… Read More ›