This important text makes a number of points which are central to surrealist attitudes towards cultural identity and the effects of post-colonialism. But in elucidating the distinctions between negritude as promulgated respectively by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, Ménil raises questions that have a more general importance for our understanding of surrealism in terms of the uses of language ― and especially the subversive value of poetic language as it challenges meaning, in the process transforming language itself and the meaning resulting from it.
First published in René Ménil, Tracées. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1981.
Historically. black poetry preceded the philosophy commonly called negritude.
A remarkable fact It will so happen that black philosophy will be essentially constituted from a prime material which is poetic. It will so happen that the maxims, proverbs, metaphors and images, hyperbolic amplifications, lyrical cries and ironical antiphrasis will be transferred unaltered from the realm of poetry to that of philosophical discourse.
It was in Orphée nègre (Black Orpheus) in 1948 that Sartre inaugurated this method of ambiguity: with the poems in the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache he constructed the first theorisation of negritude. Senghor will practice the same method and take up the conceptions to which this method logically led (see the ‘Interventions aux congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs’, 1956 and 1959, and other francophone discourses).
If we were to compare the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal by Césaire (the official poet of negritude, its principal evangelist, according to Sartre) and the philosophy of Senghor (the official philosopher of negritude), who insistently and repeatedly uses the Cahier as authority, we would be in a position to measure within specific texts the margin which separates two languages and two orders of meaning: poetic language and meaning on the one hand and philosophical meaning on the other ― all that until now has been amalgamated and awkwardly mixed up under the same denomination of negritude. (It is true that the poet of negritude, just like Molière's Maître Jacques, changes his overalls to act as theoretician-philosopher of negritude without much warning.)
Let us therefore without delay read the Cahier, and then Senghor’s philosophical presentation.
One striking thing is the difference in climate, language and thought.
What is apparent everywhere in the Cahier is the lightness of spirit at work, meaning that there is a vivacity and vitality of spirit which ensures swift displacements and reversals of thought and feeling.
In contrast, which is another aspect, in Senghor’s philosophical texts we find an amazing awkwardness of conceptions.
More precisely, Senghor takes the Cahier as authority and here and there will draw upon a Césairian poem to define his black African. But how do the deduction and genealogy of the concepts operate?
From the outset we note a flattening out of the poetic text which, as it passes through Senghor, is divested of humour and of the inherent ambiguity of poetic meaning and conditions.
Many of the affirmations which in the Cahiers are ironic are found again with their meaning reversed in Senghorian doctrine, because they are taken literally and ‘too seriously'.
Let’s note in passing that Senghor’s misunderstanding (his misreading) is shared by the friends of blacks in the West and by many blacks in Africa and the Caribbean.
The Senghorian doctrine absurdly lays claim to just such a racist conception of the negro, which in the Cahier was borrowed from the white racist in order to throw it back at him in an ironic mode, and assigns it an inverse coefficient of positive value.
Here are the negroes as expressed by Césaire in the Cahier, but expressed by Césaire as white racists love and want them to be:
Gay and obscene, and to be rid of boredom, very hot on jazz,
I can do the soft-shoe, the Lindy-hop and the tap dance.
And for a special treat the muted trumpet of our cries wrapped in wah-wah.
Wait. . . Everything’s in order. My good angel grazes in neon lights.
I swallow sticks. My dignity wallows in vomit.
[Césaire 1969, pp. 64- 5]
lt so happens that the inconsistent negro absurdly denounced here in the style of tragic irony and by means of antiphrasis (‘everything’s in order’) becomes in Senghor the very consistency of the negro of negritude.
The humour of the text has been ignored. And it is in the light of this inconsistency that Senghor obstinately insists on measuring negro value in the world. Thinking that he is outwitting Descartes he will direct this statement at the Europe-of colonisation-and-racism; ‘I feel, I dance. and therefore I exist!’ But it works out really badly or comes at the right moment -―it depends ― since it was white racism that formed this devalued image of the negro as uniquely devoted to the practice of amusement (see Gobineau 43). And in this vein, we have this profession of faith: ‘Let Europe be the orchestra conductor, we other negroes, we would be content with drums (!) . . . All we will have to do is imperiously to mark the basic rhythm by stamping the groundwith our feet.’
We see Senghor's humour here, but unfortunately it is objective humour, without the benefit of self-understanding.
In the Cahier the antiphrasis and the ellipsis are continuously put in the service of the poetic digest. Ceaselessly the poet distances himself from what he is and what he says so as to produce the literary effect of derision.
The reader of the Cahier notices very quickly, in fact, that what is said is meant sometimes literally — and sometimes the meaning is the opposite of the literal.
This play in the poetic discourse of the Cahier is explained by the very situation of Césaire's discourse. In the Cahier there is a Césaire who speaks. But Césaire‘s constant return towards himself in order to contest himself, to contest the colonial subject within him, brings forth an other-of-Césaire. A duality, But the principal interlocutor who will (explicitly or implictly) continually be interpolated so as to settle accounts with them is the personification of colonialism and white racism.
The poetic language of the Cahier is thus not simple, because the same language expresses three voices.
These three voices are to be understood in a continuous discourse without an explicit designation of the identity of the one who speaks — Césaire utilising the literary process of collage which consists of pasting the word of the other into the sentence without recourse to inverted commas and without announcing the entrance of this other onto the stage.
Senghor is blind, or wants to be blind (for the needs of his cause), to these ‘leaps’ in the writing.
Insensitive to the specific nature of the poetic enunciation which is floating, polyvalent, in perpetual drift and in full fixed explosion, he does not notice, or means to ignore, a whole world of Césairian aversions which are only implied, but which are readable between or behind the written lines. For this it is enough to take into account the context of the Cahier and its stylistic processes. Without forgetting the context of Caribbean culture arrived at by intellectuals around the 1930s in relation to modern modes of the sensibility (note in Légitime défense a refusal of folklorisation and of rural sluggishness).
In different scholarly studies of negritude, the analysts presently agree on distinguishing between two types: one Caribbean, that of Césaire; the other African, that of Senghor.
It is the start of a clarification.
To evoke here two mentalities to explain the differences would be to take inspiration from a ‘spontaneous naturalism’ itself masking a form of racism within the black world itself.
It is preferable to refer to the historical evolution (the historic social formation, that of social classes and intellectual elites, the social struggles and their ideological content, the development of the sensibility ― ethical and aesthetic taste and distastes ― as a function of the way of living, of social movements and so on) in the Caribbean and in Africa.
In summary, Césaire's rhetoric and his thought, the regime and register of his sensibility, can only be defined with reference to a Caribbean intellectual history ― in particular a stronger liaison with the critical spirit of the ‘Enlightenment’ (Voltaire, Diderot, Helvétius) than in Africa, with the ironic, irreverent and revolutionary French movement (for decades the Caribbean populations have been impregnated with a rationalist, secular and atheist ideology, that of Schoelcherism, the sharp end of anti-colonialism until recently), and with the progressivism of Jaurès and the thought of Marx, without forgetting western literary movements (romanticism, symbolism, surrealism) which echoed immediately among the Caribbean intelligentsia.
We note a difference in Senghor: the marked influence of the ‘good missionary fathers‘ and western anthropologists suggesting to him an idealism attached to the past and the belief in a ‘prelogical’ negro mentality, an academicism of thought which does not succeed in disturbing folkloric idiosyncrasy, a naturalist metaphysics which is afraid of movement and which evokes history only to immobilise it in archaisms and traditions when this is not simply part of ‘negro physiology’.
Fear of movement is such that a resolution of the problems of the black world today or tomorrow by means of effective social and human transformations is felt, according to Senghor, to have already been achieved in the Africa of the past (the renowned African socialism of primitive communities) or in negro ‘nature’ and ‘mentality’ (surrealism is alleged to be a feature of the negro-African mentality).
A passage of the Cahier was dedicated to Breton under the title ‘In the guise of a literary manifesto’. By passing into negritude, this passage will serve to establish in the most serious way that negroes are deprived of conceptual, analytical and logical reason, but in compensation are endowed with the ‘gift of emotion‘. Let's quote:
Because we hate you, you and
your reason, we claim kinship with
dementia praecox with flaming madness
with tenacious cannibalism
. . .
And you know the rest
that 2 and 2 make 5
that the forest mews like a cat
that the tree pulls chestnuts out of the fire. . . and so on.
[Césaire 1969, p. 55]
This passage is evidently a proud charge made against the civilisation of colonialism and its ‘reasons’. And evidently what is challenged is ‘colonial reason’, not negro human reason.
Moreover, what negritude will take for an anthropology (a description of negro mentality) is, at the same time, only the expression of political anger, essentially an aesthetic: a poetic art of word and image.
A translation exists of the Cahier into prose — let’s say, rather an equivalence in prose since, properly speaking. it is impossible to translate poetry into prosaic language. Isn’t the characteristic of poetry to express what prose cannot?
that the tree draws the chestnuts of fire
And this equivalence is not the Senghorian prose of negritude. It is the prose of Césaire himself in the Discourse on Colonialism (1955).
In this blazing pamphlet we find the best of the philosophy and the concepts which underlie the Cahier — a responsible and rational vision of the destiny of the colonies in the modern world.
The project of the negro without retardation, without diminution, which takes on its shoulders its whole human burden, the burden of all humanity, of the whole human species.
In the Cahier, poetry lays bare Caribbean reality, situated and dated in the chain of historical events.
Let’s quote at random this passage:
And I laugh at my old childish imaginings.
No, we have never been Amazons at the court of the King of
Dahomey, nor Princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels,
nor doctors at Timbuktu when Askia the Great was king, nor
architects at Djenné, nor Mahdis, nor warriors. We do not feel
in our armpits the itch of those who once carried the lance. [. . .]
I want to confess that we were always quite undistinguished
dishwashers, small-time shoeshiners, at the most fairly
conscientious witch-doctors, and the only record we hold is
our staying power in wrangling over trifles. . .
[Césaire l969, pp. 66-7]
What is shown here is an avatar of Caribbean colonial history. What is shown here is a historically situated misfortune, already surmounted through anger and indignation, already surpaassed through poetic vision.
In the Senghorian expression of the presence of black people colonial misery described above ― a historical and thus passing misery — into a congenital misery due to some negating features of ‘psycho-physiology’, in other words of the ‘nature’ of blacks (that they are non-technical, incapable of taming nature, devoted to sensuality, abandoned to the cosmos, and so on).
The historic sense of the Cahier (the negro who is sometimes lazy or gives up, sometimes in revolt or reliant on others), by passing into negritude, becomes the absurd and stupid non-sense of the natural black body.
Cesairian grammar and Senghorian grammar. A dynamic versus static use of the word.
In the Cahier, Césaire makes words say what he wants them to say. Words are thus called up in the Cahier to enunciate feelings and vision in proportion to the poetic work. And if they did not exist as such, well, then the poetic word creates them!
Senghor is respectful of words ― which make him say what they want. He kneels down before etymologies and asks their opinion.
This withdrawal to the root of words, this scholarly terrorism of prefixes and suffixes is probably not the best method of inventing new feelings and conceiving a historically conceived future for the black world. On the contrary, it will favour the return into the past, the enclosure in archaisms, the re-birth of traditional conformisms, which amaze the West in precise proportion to how bizarre they are.
The Cahier, hewn from the Caribbean imaginary, has sought to be the historic contemporary of the modern negro.
Senghorian negritude will be the definitive mythological contemporary of the African past.
It is not that in the Cahier Césaire does not make a significant contribution to the elaboration of negritude.
What must be questioned is the how of the operation.
It can be seen that poetic density and modulation of tone are not the same throughout the Cahier ―which can be explained by the additions made to the original text of 1939.
Yet the final part of the poem hands down a message of a pedagogic and political character whose expression is close to prose. It may be thought that in this part of the Cahier, the political consciousness of the situation of black people in the world has taken precedence, ‘in the heat of revolution’, over poetic consciousness, and has partly dismissed aesthetic reverie.
We then have a means of defining the ‘negro of value’ as opposed to the ‘old negritude which turns itself into a corpse’.
It is this part of the Cahier which will constitute the most substantial content of negritude mythology, in passing intact from the poem, where it is situated in spite of everything, to the realm of philosophical prose. It will be considered literally without regard to the inherent inflections of context and the coefficient of uncertainty which, as we have said, characterises any text interpreted as a poetic text.
Several concepts then appear that we state in neutral writing, in other words by freeing them as much as possible from the metaphorical impregnation of the Cahier as much as from the mythological garb with which Senghor clothed them. In short, we will try to name these concepts simply:
― communication with the universe; human participation in and of the universe;
― non-science, non-denomination techniques of colonised blacks;
― a grasping of the essence of things (?);
― pride of the omniscient white victors and rehabilitation of those (the blacks) who were unable to invent anything under the conditions of colonisation;
― a will to and guarantee of regeneration, liberation and blossoming of the black world;
― universal love of the human species and anti-racism (humanism) linked to the necessity to ‘cultivate’ the black race.
And now what does the transposition of these concepts in a philosophical systematisation which will occur after the event give us? To uproot a sentence from a poem in order to introduce it unchanged in a philosophical and political talk, as Senghor does (as, it should be said, does Césaire himself when he lays out negritude’s theses) poses problems.
The constitution of negritude by Sartre and then by Senghor brings elements which are not negligible for the way these problems are approached.
In his work of theorisation Sartre, who is a philosopher, visibly has scruples from which he divests himself by turning negritude into a phantom, after having taken the trouble to give it consistency with the substance of black poems: negritude, he concludes, is the point of crisis in a dialectical progression. Lt needs to ‘destroy itself‘ in the humanism of a ‘society without races’. Senghor, who does not subject himself to any rigour as he produces his concepts, since his ‘truths’ are ‘intuitive’, is anxious to repeat that his conception of the negro and negritude are as eternal as God the Father, which reveals the mythological dimension of the doctrine.
To establish his timeless conceptions, he submits the statements of the Cahier to a treatment which recalls the way the Egyptian Pharaohs embalmed the dead. The meaning which, in the poetic writing, was as mobile, floating, ambivalent and elusive as it should be in poetry, in short the meaning which was in suspense, is suddenly petrified in full flight and lapses into clumsy axioms. The richness of the potential connotations evaporates to subside into depressing and meagre sentiments: ‘the negro is emotion’; ‘the negro is rhythm’.
The Cahier had stated:
Heia for those who have never invented anything
those who never explored anything
those who never tamed anything
. . .
Heia for joy
Heia for love
Heia for the reincarnation of tears and the worst pain brought back again. . .
[Césaire l969, pp. 75-7]
To depart from this text in order to conclude, as Senghor does, with the congenital non-technical nature of blacks, to proclaim the positive value of this non-technical nature, and to affirm, finally, the radical opposition of mental faculties of blacks (emotion) and whites (reason) ― this arises from a misunderstanding. Because no precise analysis will reveal in this passage of the Cahier a definition and description of black mentality as excluding an aptitude for logic and the use of technology. No precise analysis will see non-technical nature erected as a value in it and proposed as an ideal of life. Quite the contrary: in establishing the poetic meaning of the text, such an analysis places us before a historic fact, nothing more, and not before a required value. It reveals that this avatar of the history of colonised black peoples is accepted in a consciousness which authenticates itself, but that the avatar is finally accepted in the form of a challenge, that the irony and bitterness which underlie the discourse signify that the deficiency (the non-technical quality) which is formally acknowledged has already been surpassed in the generosity of a voluntary historical project.
A black person appears in the Cahier whom the reader knows is constituted by means of literary amplification and poetic hyperbole.
But these blacks ‘who give themselves up to the essence of all things/ ignorant of surfaces but struck by the movement of all things’ [Césaire 1969, p. 77] ― who are they?
Among blacks, the man in the aesthetic attitude is not to be doubted. Homo estheticus: the white person or black person seized by emotion and gently drifting into imaginary worlds. Man in aesthetic practice.
Negritude is an aesthetic which is mistaken about its own identity and which considers itself to be an anthropology — for the realist truth of a mentality.
Conceived as it was by three poets ― Césaire, Damas and Senghor himself ― this is not surprising.
A poem like the Cahier ― which expresses a historic vision of the drama of black people in the world and which is commanded by a vigorous creative imagination ― finally contains more objective truth than philosophical prose, which invents stories logically through the aligning of dead concepts.
The terrorist dogmatism of Senghorian negritude (peremptory affirmations, rigid axioms) should not fool us. The function of dogmatism is to hide what is to be discussed and it presents the problem itself as the solution. Negritude insistently poses problems which expect no solution because these are — beyond real problems — illusory problems. To follow Senghor and wonder whether the negro is emotion is, as in the fable, to follow the Pied Piper out of the city.
The fact is that negritude is a mythology which, as such, should be read as imagery and in the very terms of its mythological functioning. Senghor’s negro should be read not so much within verbal discourse as in the visual register of advertising metaphors.
43 Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882). French novelist and man of letters credited with developing the theory of the Aryan master race in An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-5) [trans.].
SOURCE: Ménil, René. “The Passage from Poetry to Philosophy,” in The Surrealism Reader: an Anthology of Ideas, edited by Dawn Ades, Michael Richardson, Krzysztof Fijalkowski (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 150-159. A drawing by Wilfredo Lam comprising p. 155 is not reproduced here. Originally published as “Le passage de la poesie à la philosophie” in: René Ménil, Tracées (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1981).
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