« Je me souviens des porteurs de mon enfance
qui dansaient avec le cercueil sur leurs épaules.
Des femmes menaçant de se jeter
dans le trou pour rejoindre leur mari.
Des chiens apeurés courant parmi les tombes
tandis que le vent fait balancer les palmiers
Comme une fillette qui joue avec ses tresses.
La mort me semblait si drôle à l’époque. »

L’énigme du retour est un fil tendu entre passé et présent, froid et soleil, contemplations et blessures. Dany Laferrière se frotte à la douleur des choses, s’y purifie, et prend de la hauteur jusqu’à trouver une forme d’apaisement et peut-être de sagesse au bout du parcours :

]]> http://castory.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/alas-you-will-die/ Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:27 +0000 anu http://castory.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/alas-you-will-die/

I recall a November day, he was not six months old and the master came into the shack…..

And this man was speculating over my son’s cradle, a slavedriver’s cradle.

MOTHER

Alas you will die.

REBEL

Killed….. I killed him with my own hands……

Yes, a fecund and copious death…….

It was night. We crawled through the sugarcane.

The cutlasses were chortling at the stars, but we didn’t care about the stars.

The cane slashed our faces with streams of green blades.

MOTHER

I had dreamed of a son who would close his mother’s eyes.

REBEL

I chose to open my child’s eyes to another sun.

MOTHER

……O my son…… an evil and pernicious death.

REBEL

Mother, a verdant and sumptuous death.

MOTHER

From too much hate.

REBEL

From too much love.

Spare me, I’m choking from your shackles, bleeding from your wounds.

REBEL

And the world does not spare me…… There is not in the world one single lynched bastard, one poor tortured man, in whom I am not also murdered and humiliated.

MOTHER

God in Heaven, deliver him!

REBEL

My heart, you will not deliver me of my memories……

It was a November night……

And suddenly clamors lit up the silence,

we had leapt, we the slaves, we the manure, we the beasts with patient hooves.

We were running like lunatics, fiery shots broke out……… We were striking. Sweat and blood cooled us off. We were striking amidst the screams and the screams became more strident and a great clamor rose toward the east, the outbuildings were burning and the flames sweetly splashed our cheeks.

Then came the attack on the master’s house.

They were shooting from the windows.

We forced the doors.

The master’s bedroom was wide open. The Master’s bedroom was brilliantly lit, and the master was there, very calm…… and all of us stopped….. he was the master……. I entered. It’s you, he said, very calmly…… Its me, it was indeed me, I told him, the good slave, the faithful slave, the slave slave, and suddenly my eyes were two cockroaches frightened on a rainy day…….. I struck, the blood spurted, it is the only baptism that today I remember.

———

Source: Lyric And Dramatic Poetry. by Aime Cesaire.

Translated by Clayton Eshelman & Annette Gail Smith

Dedicated to Raj Kumar’s Mother

“Et dans cette ville inerte, cette foule criarde si étonnamment passée à côté de son cri comme cette ville à côté de son mouvement, de son sens, sans inquiétude, à côté de son vrai cri, le seul qu’on eût voulu l’entendre crier parce qu’on le sent sien lui seul ; parce qu’on le sent habiter en elle dans quelque refuge profond d’ombre et d’orgueil, dans cette ville inerte, cette foule à côté de son cri de faim, de misère, de révolte, de haine, cette foule si étrangement bavarde et muette.”

Aimé Césaire, 1939, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Paris, Présence Africaine, 1983, rééd. 2008

]]> http://mardehistorias.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/para-refletir/ Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:21:05 +0000 Andreia Santana http://mardehistorias.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/para-refletir/ http://loqasto.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/aime-cesaire-poemas/ Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:49:01 +0000 loqasto http://loqasto.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/aime-cesaire-poemas/

.

Aguacero
bello músico
al pie de un árbol desvestido
entre las armonías perdidas
cerca de nuestras desencuadernadas memorias
entre nuestras manos de derrota
y pueblos de extraña fuerza
dejamos colgar nuestros ojos
y naciente
desenrollando el cordón de un dolor
sollozamos.

.

Aimé Césaire

Blues de la lluvia

.

Downtown Film Festival—Los Angeles (DFFLA) will host a screening tonight of Euzhan Palcy’s 1994 documentary Aimé Césaire – Une voix pour l’histore. The screening will be this evening , August 17th, 2009 at 7:00 pm at the Downtown Independent Theater, 215 S. Main St. (L.A. 90012). The festival series is hosted by Afrique 360 and sponsored by The Africa Channel and Sistahs’ Production.

 Aimé Césaire – Une voix pour l’histore (1994, USA, 56 minutes) is a monumental, three-part study that introduced American audiences to the celebrated author from the Caribbean island nation of Martinique, who coined the term negritude and launched the movement called the “Great Black Cry”. André Breton, the high priest of surrealism, described Césaire as, “a black man who embodies not simply the black race but all mankind, who will remain for me the prototype of human dignity.”

The 4^th Afro-Caribbean Arts Awards [Trophées des Arts Afro-caribéens] event will take place on September 21, 2009 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, France.

Previously known as the “Césaires de la musique” Afro-Caribbean Arts Awards have added two new categories this year— literature and cinema— in memory of the late Aimé Césaire and the legacy of the négritude movement. Franck Anretar, president of the Awards’ organizational committee, says that the Trophées des Arts Afro-caribéens’ main goal to celebrate the expression of cultural diversity through music, cinema, and literature. He adds, “France is the second maritime power in the world and we are proud to represent it in its wealth of diversity.”

As Afro-Europe International Blog reports, “although the name Afro-Caribéens refers to Afro-Caribbeans, artists from the overseas department Reunion and from the former French colonies in Africa are also nominated.” The categories include Artist of the Year, Best Group, Revelation of the Year, Album of the Year, Best Documentary, and Best Clip. The literature awards include, essay and fiction. For a list of the nominees, see http://afroeurope.blogspot.com/2009/07/nominees-of-trophees-des-arts-afro.html.

For more information, see the Trophées des Arts Afro-caribéens site at http://www.lestaac.com/

Colloques littéraires, concerts musicaux, expositions photos,  théâtre, danse ou cinéma: le deuxième festival culturel panafricain,  en Algérie, révèle de véritables trésors artistiques du continent.

             Manu Dibango, saxophoniste camerounais

 Et entre ceux qui ont assisté au 1er “Panaf “en 1969, déjà à Alger, et les plus jeunes, fans de l’algérien Khaled le roi du raï, des rythmes du Malien Salif Keita, du Guinéen Mory Kanté ou de Manu Dibango, le saxophoniste camerounais, ou encore du sénégalais Youssou N’Dour. Quinze jours de manifestations consacrées à l’Afrique et à ses cultures sur le thème de “la renaissance africaine” ont été ouverts le 4 juillet 2009  par une parade de chars représentant les 43 pays africains participant à ce festival.

 Aimé Césaire

L’oeuvre de Césaire est d’ailleurs mise en scène avec une reprise par la troupe sénégalaise Daniel Sorano de sa pièce “Une saison au Congo” qui se situe au lendemain de l’indépendance de l’actuelle République démocratique du Congo (RDC). Autre documentaire du sud-africain Ramadan Suleman consacré à “L’Algérie et les mouvements de libération africains”, avant de se rendre dans le centre-ville voir l’exposition “Mesli l’Africain” du peintre algérien Choukri Mesli qui présente une soixantaine de toiles au Musée d?art moderne et contemporain. 22.000 policiers ont été mobilisés pour assurer la sécurité du festival et Alger a toujours gardé son calme malgré cette effervescence culturelle.

by Mabogo Percy More, Hydrarchy, 12 May 2008

We the living shoulder the historical responsibility of ensuring that the deeds and words of the dead should not fade into oblivion unnoticed. Since the dead (ancestors) will always be there, confronting us directly or far off on the horizons of our being, our duty requires that we accept this responsibility with a clear consciousness. The death of Aimé Césaire – the Martiniquean poet, politician and revolutionary – last week calls on us to carry out the responsibility that we owe the dead.

That Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness exponents were influenced by the Black Power Movement of the Unites States of American comprising of luminous figures such as Kwame Toure (aka Stockely Carmichael) Elridge Cleaver, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, James Cone, Huey Percy Newton, Bobby Seale, etc., is a fact. However, what is normally ignored is that comparative to the African-American influence was another equally strong influence from the Caribbean Islands, Martinique, to be precise.

From this Island two figures stand out: Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. I mention Césaire first not because he was Fanon’s teacher and mentor and therefore older, but because he, together with Léopold Sedar Senghor who later became the President of Senegal, and Léon Gontran Damas from Guyana, through the Negritude Movement they formed as students in Paris during the early 1930s, were probably the foundational figures and sources of Black Consciousness philosophy and ideology in our country and elsewhere.

Having coined the word “Negritude”, Césaire explained that the movement was not only a resistance to the French politics of assimilation, the attempt to turn a black person into a French with a black skin but more importantly a response to the alienating situation of being-black-in-a-white–anti-black-world.

In Césaire’s understanding, therefore, Negritude was not only negatively an intellectual reaction to an alienated black consciousness, a struggle against white racism and its degrading effects but was above all also positively an affirmation of the being of the black person. Negritude, in his definition, was “a concrete rather than an abstract coming to consciousness” of black people who lived in an atmosphere of rejection and developed not only an inferiority complex but were also ashamed of their blackness. This coming into concrete consciousness in an antiblack world generated one of the most persistent questions among black people: “Who am I”. Half devil or half child as Rudyard Kipling maintained?

What this actually means is that the question of identity becomes a pressing one in an antiblack social context. Thus Negritude also became, fundamentally, a preoccupation with questions of identity and liberation through self consciousness and self-definition. Césaire explained this issue of identity this way: “I have always thought that the black man was searching for his identity. And it has seemed to me that if what we want is to establish this identity, then we must have a concrete consciousness of what we are – that is, of the fact of our lives; that we are black, that we were black and have a history”.

In Césaire’s view, racism can neither be transcended by liberal notions of the mere equality of humanity nor by reduction to class consciousness, what is a precondition, however, for any overcoming of racism is the coming to concrete consciousness by Black people.

While Senghor’s Negritude was Africa-centered and much more oriented towards cultural consciousness and a metaphysical element that concentrated on the ontology of the being of the African, Césaire’s Negritude was, by contrast much more existentialist and thus focussed on the consciousness of black people in the context of colonial and racist situations. For him, Negritude was more of a mode of being-black-in-the-world, a consciousness of colour, race and history. In other words, Césaire’s posed the question of black existence through the lens of Negritude.

When asked how the word “Negritude” came about and about their struggle against racism, alienation and dehumanization when they were students in France, Césaire articulated a philosophy whose origins and content reads as if it were a narrative about the origins of SASO and Black Consciousness in Azania three to four decades later: “It was an elementary semantic step; we simply transformed the French adjective for Black… négre, into a noun by adding a suffix, -itude. We adopted the word `négre’ as a term of defiance. It was a defiant name. To some extent it was a reaction of enraged youth. Since there was shame about the word négre, we chose the word négre … we found a violent affirmation in the words négre and négritude.”

The reappropriation of the term black (negro) from its negative connotation to a positive one was articulated in Césaire’s famous epic poem, Return to my Native Land. Damas, a less known third member of the three founders of Negritude, in explaining why the term “Negritude” was coined, echoes Césaire: “The word ‘negritude’…had a very precise meaning in the years 1934-35, namely the fact that the black man was seeking to know himself, that he wanted to become a historical actor and a cultural actor, and not just an object of domination or a consumer of culture… The word ‘negritude’ was coined in the most racism moment of history, and we accepted the word négre as a challenge”.

These descriptions of the origin of Negritude as initially a student movement against racism and its effects of alienation, inferiority complex, identity problems, degradation, and unfreedom, together with students’ publications such as La Revue du monde noir (the Review of Black People), Légitime Défense (legitimate Defense), and L’Etudiant noir (The Black Student) bear unmistakably a striking resemblance to the origins and philosophical and ideological orientation of the Black Consciousness movement qua South African Student Organization (SASO) and its various journals such as SASO Newsletter, and Black Viewpoint.

Even though Fanon’s ideas exercised a tremendous influence on the direction and philosophical underpinning of Biko and the Black Consciousness movement, they however gave philosophical substance and content to what Césaire and the Negritude movement had already imparted. Fanon himself later said about Césaire : “ For the fist time a lycée teacher – a man therefore, who was apparently worthy of respect – was seen to announce quite simply to West Indian society ‘that it is fine to and good to be a Negro’” .

Indeed the major lessons Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement acquired from Césaire and Negritude was that a Negritudist has to perform certain functions: First, he or she must educate his or her fellow blacks (conscientize). Second serve as the spokes person of black people, be their voice and never allow white liberals and white leftists to speak on their behalf. Finally, the Negritudist must free black people psychologically and politically. Césaire’s significance to the thinking of Biko and the Black Consciousness movement, was not only the appropriation of a negative term and its transformation into a positive signification, but also the role he played as a teacher and inspiration to Frantz Fanon and Biko. The latter in his I Write What I Like, for example, invokes the name of Césaire more than three times as an explanatory model for understanding Black Consciousness. Césaire, as Fanon correctly points out, was indeed a man “worthy of respect”!.

We the followers of Césaire in this country are grieving over this man “worthy of respect” who was, so to speak, the unshakable affirmation of black personhood. Someone just dead remains alive. I believe that Césaire still is because it is difficult to say he was. He retains, at the beginning of his absence, a towering presence. The ambiguity of presence in an absence characterizes the death of people who have made an indelible mark in the lives of others.

A theater company in Nîmes, southern France, has adapted Aimé Césaire’s essay Discours sur le colonialisme for the stage, with performances scheduled for this weekend. The Compagnie Le Grac de Saint-Étienne had originally staged the play, which is titled If faut render à Césaire (which could be loosely translated “To give back to Césaire” or “To give Césaire his due”) last November, but are returning to the Le Mobile Homme Theater to reprise their performance. Discourse on Colonialism, originally published in France in 1955, chronicles the brutal impact colonialism has had on both the colonizer and the colonized. In the text, Césaire remind us that “the relationships between consciousness and reality are extremely complex… It is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society.”

For more (in French) go to http://www.midilibre.com/articles/2009/06/11/20090611-NIMES-Un-pamphlet-de-Cesaire-adapte-au-theatre.php5

To mark the 110^th anniversary of her birth, the Miami Herald has published a brief essay reflecting on Lydia Cabrera’s work, especially on her producing the first translation into Spanish of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Cabrera (1899-1991) was a Cuban anthropologist and poet recognized as one of the early experts on Santería and other Afro-Cuban religions. Her book El monte was the first major anthropological study of Afro-Cuban traditions.

Cabrera based her translation of the Cahier on the 1939 version published by the journal Volontés in Paris. It was published in 1943 under the title of Retorno al país natal and was the first translation of Césaire’s masterpiece in any language. It was moreover, published with illustrations by Cuba’s best-know surrealist painter, Wilfredo Lam and an introduction by Benjamin Péret. Péret wrote that “for the first time a tropical voice resounds in our language, not to season an exotic poetry but to allow true poetry to shine.”

For the essay (in Spanish) go to http://www.elnuevoherald.com/galeria/artes/story/468141.html

La concesión en 1992 del premio Nobel de Literatura a Derek Walcott (nacido en la caribeña isla de Santa Lucía), planteó entre muchos críticos y estudiosos la formulación de la siguiente pregunta: ¿Es lícito incluir a los países antillanos, con abstracción de sus lenguas, en el marco de la cultura latinoamericana o, por el contrario, y apoyándose precisamente en el peso de sus idiomas, es pertinente remitidos a la cultura de la potencia metropolitana que los colonizó y en cuya lengua se expresan?

Esclavos negros en las Antillas, litografía de Deroy F. Biard.

En lo que respecta a países de las Grandes Antillas como Cuba, Santo Domingo (que, conjuntamente con Haití, conforman lo que habitualmente se denomina La Española) y Puerto Rico no habría ningún problema en este sentido, ya que los dos casos se confunden en un mismo origen: la unidad lingüística de las islas (salvo Haití) en relación con España y con todo el continente que habla el idioma castellano. Más difícil resulta en cambio “clasificar” socio-culturalmente a las demás islas, amparadas por intereses tan diversos como el británico (Bahamas, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad), el norteamericano (islas Vírgenes), el francés (Martinica, Guadalupe) y el holandés (Curaçao, Aruba), sin olvidar tampoco la influencia inglesa, francesa y neerlandesa en la Guayana continental. La herencia francesa, evidente en la conformación cultural de Haití, Martinica y Guadalupe, no riñe con la acepción de lo “latinoamericano”, aunque no ocurre lo mismo con las sociedades insulares pertenecientes a los ámbitos inglés y neerlandés. Existe, en efecto, una cierta actitud de rechazo por parte de algunos antillanos de lengua inglesa en ser incluídos bajo tal denominación, alegando la relativa incidencia del ingrediente “latino” en su cultura, aunque tampoco los asiste toda la razón al ampararse gregaria e incondicionalmente bajo el sospechoso rótulo de “West Indies”, de inequívoco origen sajón. Hace más de medio siglo salió al paso de dicho celo patrocinado por la política cultural inglesa el poeta cubano Nicolás Guillén cuando cantaba: “West Indies, en inglés. Y en castellano, / las Antillas … “

Derek Walcott, Premio Nobel 1992

Brian King, poeta antillano en lengua inglesa, resume el contenido de algunos de los temas dilectos de los escritores del área: “algo sobre Colón, Drake o Toussaint L’Ouverture”, es decir, las mismas motivaciones caras a muchos de los escritores latinoamericanos de la parte continental. A este respecto es necesario señalar el ejemplo de un libro como La pérdida de El Dorado, de V.S. Naipaul –triniteño de origen hindú que escribe en lengua inglesa, auténtico representante del vasconceliano “crisol de razas” –, que plantea una vez más el debate sobre la identidad cultural de las Antillas al tiempo que postula las afinidades –reales o eventuales-­ entre las sociedades insulares y continentales de América Latina. Se puede advertir fácilmente cómo dos de los temas más dilectos de la historia latinoamericana son recreados en esta obra a través de una lengua diferente a la española en la que inicialmente se expresaron: a) la leyenda de la ciudad del oro, gestada durante las jornadas de la Conquista y jamás agotada del todo, y b) la realidad de la lucha anticolonialista en los albores decimonónicos.

Otro escritor del Caribe, Alejo Carpentier, recreó a su vez y en forma magnífica el periodo político de finales del siglo XVIII y comienzos del siglo XIX en dos obras fundamentales, El Siglo de las Luces y El reino de este mundo, obras en las que, a través de la incidencia histórica, se da vida a dos de las figuras capitales de la idiosincrasia antillana: Victor Hughes, el transplantador de las ideas jacobinas de la Revolución Francesa al Caribe, y Henri Christophe, el rey negro que quiso hacer de Haití una variante tropical del fasto versallesco. No hay que olvidar tampoco que fue otra isla caribeña –Cuba-­ la que contempló la última batalla anticolonialista en 1898.

A las preocupaciones ideológicas y sociales es preciso agregar un factor determinante para comprender la identidad antillana: el común ancestro africano que subyace en todas esas comunidades y que se inició en una fecha exacta: 1517, cuando remesas enteras de negros fueron llevados como esclavos a las plantaciones de azúcar de las islas para acele­rar su explotación. Ya en 1771 las consecuencias del tráfico rinden beneficios no sólo económicos sino culturales: la representación en Londres de la obra teatral El hombre de las Antillas conoce un éxito inusual y gracias a ella la sociedad londinense aplaude una versión edulcorada de su política racial.

El escritor Aimé Césaire

La gran preocupación de los pensadores y escritores antillanos por reivindicar la cuota africana de su sangre y de su cultura ha tenido muchos adalides, aunque la figura cimera de tales pretensiones es, sin duda, Marcus Garvey, un jamaicano que con su movimiento Pro-Retorno a Africa, convulsionó en los años veinte de este siglo a la sociedad antillana contando con millones de simpatizantes en todo el continente. La mejor recreación a nivel estético de esta inquietud provino de un escritor de la Martinica, Aimé Césaire, que con su celebérrimo libro Cahier d’un retour au pays natal aportaba nuevas razones para un regreso que a la postre resulta más paradigmático que real, es decir, más a nivel de toma de conciencia que de éxodo racial. Césaire, tras su profesión de fe surrealista (Les armes miraculeuses) continuó llamando la atención sobre los temas que más directamente inciden en el pasado antillano y prueba de ello es su obra La tragédie du Roi Christophe, pretensión en la que, más allá de las fronteras del idioma, se hermana con el esfuerzo que en tal sentido hizo Carpentier.

Bajo estos presupuestos de carácter sociológico, el desarrollo de la literatura antillana se acerca cada vez más, por encima de la diversidad de lenguas –en las que, y no por casualidad, el creóle se filtra con frecuencia–, a la preocupación temática de los escritores del continente latinoamericano. A los nombres conocidos de lengua española (desde Martí a Lezama Lima pasando por Pedro Henriquez Ureña, Carpentier y Julián del Casal, valga el ejemplo) y a los franceses (Césaire, Jacques Roumain, Jacques Stephan Alexis, entre otros), es preciso agregar escritores del área antillana de expresión inglesa como Edward Brathwaite con su trilogía Rights of Passage, Mask y Islands, y que, junto a Derek Walcott, ha patrocinado empresas culturales de gran importancia como la revista Bim, difundida en toda la zona, Europa y las dos Américas. Cabe destacar también al escritor guyanés A. J. Seymour, que sirve de transición entre la vieja escuela que seguía las normas de la “Rule Britannia” y la nueva poesia antillana.

Los temas sociales impregnados a veces de una dosis lírica son frecuentes, tal como ocurre con las obras de Geoffrey Drayton (Buzos negros), H.D. Garberry (Naturaleza), Daniel Williams (Nosotros, que no conocemos la nieve) y la gran dama de la poesía antillana, Louise Bennet (Jamaica Labrish). En el plano especificamente narrativo es preciso señalar la fértil evolución del género desde que, varios decenios atrás, Tom Redcam inaugurara con su novela Becka’s Buckra Baby la narrativa antillana de habla inglesa. George Lamming, de Barbados, ha escrito un libro sobrecogedor, In the castle of may skin, en el que la psicología alterna con aspectos fundamentales de la vida social, línea que se prolonga en textos como Of age and inno­cence y Season of adventure. También con su Vasto mar de los sargazos Jean Rhys se une a la corriente intimista que a menudo intenta vitalizar la naturaleza, variante de lo que en la década de los años veinte se conoció en Latinoamérica como narrativa neonaturalista o “telúrica”. El ya men­cionado V.S. Naipaul es también autor de obras como A House for Mr. Biswas, versión antillana de la Madame Bovary francesa y de La Regenta española, y en la que el papel de la mujer y la psicología de la trama adquieren rubros magnífi­cos. Otra obra suya, marcada por preocupaciones idénticas, es The suffrage of Elvira.

Finalmente, es necesario considerar la producción del guyanés Wilson Harris, autor de novelas como The Far journey of Oudin, The secret Ladder, Ascent to omni y, sobre todo, Palace of the Peacock, que por muchas razones –la recreación de la proble­mática de la sabana y la selva de su país, la psico­logía de sus habitantes puestos casi en un punto límite y una no disimulada vitalización del ele­mento fluvial– se aproxima a hitos de la litera­tura continental como La serpiente de oro, de Ciro Alegría, o Los pasos perdidos, de Alejo Carpentier.

Exhibition (till July 25, 2009) at Exit Art in Manhattan on the 20th black arts and political movement. Curated by New Yorkers Papo Colo, Tânia Cypriano, Rose Myriam Réjouis, Franklin Sirmans and Greg Tate. Includes a party on June 18 (7 till 11pm) with Baye Kouyaté and Les Tougarakes, Dallam-Dougou, and DJ Turmix, and a Brazil-focused film series.

Mexico’s Fondo de Cultura Económica Press has just issued an anthology of work by Martinican poet Aimé Césaire in Spanish translation. The volume, translated, edited and introduced by Phillippe Ollé-Laprune, includes poems, prose and one play (La tragedia del rey Christophe). It also includes an interview with the poet. In its review, La Jornada recommends the collection as a point of entry into the work of this poet who, as André Breton said, produced “words as beautiful as fledgling oxygen.”

For the review (in Spanish) go to http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2009/05/27/index.php?section=cultura&article=a04a1cul

NY1 (New York One), the New York City cable news station, has reviewed the Négritude exibit at the Exit Art gallery. Négritude, an experimental multi-disciplinary exhibition, explores the visionary 20th century political and artistic movement of the same name — coined by the Martinican poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Césaire in the 1930s — which flourished among Black intellectuals in post-World War I Paris and later spread to Africa, the United States and the Caribbean. [See our earlier post Négritude, an experimental multi-disciplinary exhibition at Exit Art in NYC for more details.]

The review from NY1 is mostly descriptive, but the video (accessible through the link below), walks you through the exhibit, which gives you a sense of its visual impact in case you are interested but unable to make it to New York.

For the video go to http://www.ny1.com/content/ny1_living/99619/exhibit-measures-black-movement-in-island-increments/Default.aspx

Le superbe texte d’Aimé Césaire “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” a été mis en scène et lu vendredi 17 avril à la villette dans le cadre de la manifestation “Kreyol Factory”.

Il était lu par Jacques Martial, sur une scène vide emplie de mots, et rien que de ceux-là. Une salle dans l’attente et l’émotion entière de la langue de Césaire, virevoltante, émouvante, suprenante, incandescante dans la bouche de Jacques Martial. 
Public assailli par les mots qui le poussent vers.
Une scène comme hors du temps.

La lecture fait partie d’un déploiement d’artistes et de créativité autour de l’exposition Kreyol Factory, à la Villette. L’exposition elle-même est une pure merveille de création, de découverte des mondes de la créolité, des Antilles aux Caraibes, de Paris à New York.

A voir et à entendre, absolument !

Négritude, an exhibit opening on Saturday May 9^th at the Exit Art gallery space in New York City (see link below), explores the visionary 20th century political and artistic movement of the same name—the inspiration of  Martinican poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Césaire in the 1930s—which flourished among Black intellectuals in post-World War I Paris and later spread to Africa, the United States and the Caribbean. There is an opening reception on May 9^th from 7-10pm for the exhibit, which runs through July 11, 2009.

The exhibition, the joint work of Papo Colo, Tânia Cypriano, Rose Réjouis, Franklin Sirmans, and Greg Tate, seeks to define Négritude as an “archipelago”, or an extensive concept and movement, with many “islands”, or perspectives, representing African-American, African, Caribbean and South American cultures. Each of the participants was asked to curate their “island” by presenting a visual exhibition or series of public events that detail their own experience, interest, or study of Négritude.

Colo’s “island,” for example, uses live cotton and sugar plants to reference two of the earliest slave-grown commodities in the Americas, and will involve the participation of students in the process of creating his installation. Stacks of paper, printed with the images of Négritude icons such as Malcolm X, Pelé and President Barack Obama, will be included on the “island.” Cypriano, in turn, explores Afro-Brazilian culture through a ten-week screening series that touches on topics from capoeira to samba, Quilombos to religion, racism in soap operas to the globalization theories of philosopher Milton Santos. Réjouis argues that Négritude, as Aimé Césaire envisioned it, was a form of “dark play,” a notion she explores through the work of artists Wura-Natasha Ogunji and Haitian-American artist Vladimir Cybil Charlier-Juste, and performances by African-Hungarian music group Dallam-Dougou and poet Saul Williams. Tate presents a three-room “Black Mystery Anti-Panopticon,” envisioning Négritude as a “place” for mystery and funk, music and soul. A DJ shrine, created by Tate and the artists Xaviera Simmons and Arthur Jafa, will provide a site for weekly performances.

  For more on the exhibit go to http://www.exitart.org/site/pub/main/index.html

 The photo above is by renowned photographer Mario Cravo Neto, one of the artists featured in the exhibit. He is a resident of Bahia, Brazil and a follower of Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion.

The French Cultural Centre in Libreville, Gabon, played to a packed house last night during the official presentation ceremony of a book edited by the University Press of Gabon (PUG) in remembrance of the Martinique poet and politician, Aimé Césaire, who passed away on April 17, 2008 in Fort-de-France. In Césaire, le veilleur de consciences “we have attempted to erect a lyric memorial to this great poet,” said Steve Robert Renombo, one of the co-authors of the book. “It’s a book of the heart.”

The book launch followed a mass gathering the day before to mark the first anniversary of the death of Césaire, “the advocate for negritude.” 

The photo above of Césaire in 1993 is by Chester Higgins Jr. for The New York Times.

For more go to http://www.apanews.net/apa.php?page=show_article_eng&id_article=96689

Le Grand Camouflage. Ecrits de dissidence (1941/1945), edited by Daniel Maximin and published by Seuil (Paris), gathers the essays written by Aimé Césaire’s wife, Suzanne, between 1941 and 1945, when the couple founded and edited the influential journal Tropiques.  The book will be launched on May 7^th at the Musée Dapper in Paris. On May 10^th, as part of the activities connected to the Kréyol Factory exhibit at La Villette in Paris, the couple will be commemorated during the Aimé and Suzanne Césaire Day. In addition to Suzanne’s essays, which Maximin describes as « the greatest and most luminous texts on Antillean identity besides Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs,” the book includes writings by René Menil (co-editor of Tropiques), André Masson, André Breton, and Aimé Césaire.

The essays collected in the volume have a single place of origin-a memorable spring day in April 1942, which the Césaires spent walking on the Absalon forest near the Mont Pelée volcano in northern Martinique with a set of new friends: René Ménil, André Breton, his wife Jacqueline Lamba and their daughter Aube, André Masson, Cuban painter Wifredo Lam and his wife Helena-all of whom later acknowledged that their lives had been changed during that day spent in the moist and luxuriantly tropical forest.

The visitors had stopped in Martinique on their way into exile in the United States with a group that also included Claude Lévi-Strauss and Anna Seghers. Breton, entering a shop to buy a ribbon for Aude, chanced upon a copy of Tropiques, in which he discovered the work of the Césaires and other poems of négritude. The discovery led to many artistic friendships and fruitful collaborations, some of which are evident in this collection.

«Le grand camouflage,» the title essay, was written by Suzanne Césaire in 1945, and is « an echo of that day in the forest, a poetic-political text of great energy, both lyrical and anchored in the geography and anthropology of Martinique. » Together with the other essays collected, Maximin argues, it placed the Antilles on the map of political and literary modernity.

In addition to the seven essays of Suzanne’s gathered here, she wrote a play, Youma, aurore de la liberté, based on the novel by Lafcadio Hearn, which was produced in Fort-de-France in the early 1950s. After that, Suzanne stopped writing, for reasons that have never been revealed. Suzanne and Aimé, who had four children together, separated in 1963, three years before her death from a brain tumor at age 51.

For more information (in French) go to http://www.liberation.fr/livres/0101563563-suzanne-l-aimee-de-cesaire

As we wrote last Friday April 17 (“Aimé Césaire Stamp Will be Released on April 21^st“), a postal stamp commemorating the Martinican poet and politician’s career was available for sale today.  The statement that accompanied the release praised Césaire as “without doubt one of the greatest poets of the 20^th century, one whose vision of the world left a profound mark on French and world literature.”

Only two other political figures in French history have been honored with stamp issues on the first anniversary of their deaths: Charles De Gaulle and François Mitterand.

Czech writer Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has published a collection of essays entitled Une Rencontre (An Encounter). Available in French, the book offers a series of portraits of Kundera’s favorite writers and artists. Among them we find Anatole France, François Rabelais, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Philip Roth, Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco and D. H. Lawrence.

Three Caribbean writers are included among his favorites: Haitian poet and novelist René Depestre, author of Bonjour et Adieu à la Négritude and Hadriana dans tous mes rêves; Patrick Chamoiseau, author of Texaco and, most recently, Biblique des derniers gestes; and Aimé Césaire, author of Cahiers d’un retour au pays natale.

For the news item (in Italian) go to http://www.libero-news.it/articles/view/530000

For the review in Le Monde see http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2009/03/20/une-rencontre-de-milan-kundera_1170397_3260.html

The book is available from FNAC at http://livre.fnac.com/a2449155/Milan-Kundera-Une-rencontre?PID=1

The image above is a 1953 portrait of René Depestre by Berni. It illustrated a 2004 interview with the author, which can be found, in French, at http://gradhiva.revues.org/index261.html

As part of the graduate course Texturas Caribeñas [Caribbean Textures] the University of Havana will present the documentary directed by Martinican director Euzhan Palcy. The film is open to the public and will be followed by a discussion. It will be screened on April 9^th at 3:00pm (Manuel Galich Room).

L’Ile veilleuse (The Vigilant Island) is Part 1 of a three-part study titled Aimé Césaire: Une voix pour l’histoire. [Parts 2 and 3 are Au rendez-vous de la conquête (Where the Edges of Conquest Meet) and La force de regarder demain (The Strength to Face Tomorrow).] This monumental work introduces the celebrated Martinican author, Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), who coined the term négritude and launched the literary movement called the “le grand cri nègre” [the Great Black Cry]. Palcy, internationally acclaimed director of Sugarcane Alley and A Dry White Season, weaves Césaire’s life and poetry into a vast tapestry featuring many of the most important artistic and intellectual figures of the past six decades. André Breton, the high priest of surrealism, describes Césaire as “a Black man who embodies not simply the Black race but all mankind, who will remain for me the prototype of human dignity.”

In L’Ile veilleuse, Césaire shows us his pays natale – its volcano, beaches and colonial towns – a tropical crossroads where Europe, Africa and America meet. From this cultural core, Césaire, his wife Suzanne, and philosopher René Menil founded the seminal literary review Tropiques in 1939, which influenced Caribbean intellectuals like Wifredo Lam, René Depestre and Frantz Fanon. After World War II, Césaire served as mayor of Fort-de-France and Martinique’s representative to the French National Assembly. He discusses the difficulty of balancing the life of a poet with that of a practical politician for over 50 years.

For full description of Palcy’s film, see http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0115