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Aimé Césaire and the Coloniality of Being

This text is the follow-up of the first meeting of the Third World in Theory Reading Group in the 2019-2020 academic year, that took place on the 10th of October 2019.

Since then, we’ve had six amazing meetings with very special guests presenting their thoughts and opening lively discussions with the group, and we still have four to go (check the dates of the upcoming meetings here). If you are interested in joining the reading group, please email us on lawdevelopmentconflict@gmail.com. We apologize for the delay in updating the TWT Blog, we are a reduced number of people working to make it all happen.

Better late than never, please enjoy some reflections on the decolonial must-read Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, its connections with Maldonado Torres’ On the Coloniality of Being and a contemporary poetic perception of the colonial subject, through the analysis of a translated song [poem] by the Brazilian rapper Djonga, Get Out! (Corra!). These reflections were presented by Angelica Silva.

 

Aimé Césaire

[…]

A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.

A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.

A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization. The fact is that the so-called European civilization – "Western" civilization - as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem; that Europe is unable to justify itself either before the bar of "reason" or before the bar of "conscience"; and that, increasingly, it takes refuge in a hypocrisy which is all the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive.

Europe is indefensible.

With this excerpt from the essay Discourse on Colonialism, we open the discussion about this fundamental work for the decolonial critique. Discourse on Colonialism is Aimé Césaire’s first and perhaps most important non-fiction publication, since most of his work is in poetry and in the theatre. Before getting into the essay, I would like to briefly talk about Césaire’s life and work for a better understanding of the meanings grasped from Discourse on Colonialism.

Aimé Césaire was born in the rural Basse-Point, at the French colony of Martinique, in 1913. In 1924 he was admitted to the Lycée Schoelcher, what was then the most prestigious high school in Martinique. Upon graduation, in 1932 Césaire moved to Paris for college with plans of becoming a teacher. Years later, Césaire will return to Martinique’s Lycée Schoelcher to teach (one of his future pupils will be a young Frantz Fanon).

In Paris, he began by necessity to question the Eurocentric nature of his education: Césaire was “experiencing the incipient cultural alienation that afflicted other Third World students thrown together on the metropolitan scene in the latter half of the prewar decade. Students of color, in particular, sooner or later found themselves drawn, if only in self-defense, into a radically critical stance towards European civilization and its arrogant claims to superiority”. Questioning French domination was all the easier thanks to the presence of a number of other like-minded intellectuals, including the Senegalese intellectual Léopold Sédar Senghor. All looking to create counter-cultural literature, Césaire and his colleagues were drawn toward Surrealism because of its formally radical elements. He and a few others launched a student journal called L’Étudiant Noir (The Black Student). Marxist in nature, L’Étudiant Noir served as a forum through which Césaire and other students of color could critique French civilization. It is in an article for the May 1935 issue that Césaire first coined the word “Négritude”.

Négritude is a literary and ideological response to the “colonial situation”, a psychological and cultural search for a black, “pan-African” identity untainted by Colonial domination. The movement claims for the valorization of African identity all over the world (Pan-Africanism), considering the African diaspora and submission of African peoples to European colonizers. Césaire and Senghor are considered the founders of the negritude movement.

In 1935, during his vacations in Yugoslavia, Césaire starts writing Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to my Native Land), a surrealist poem in which the author reclaims his Martinican black identity and exposes anger against white superiority.

My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against

the clamor of the day

my negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earth's

dead eye

my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral

it takes root in the red flesh of the soil

it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky

it breaks through opaque prostration with its upright patience.

(…)

What is mine

a lone man imprisoned in whiteness

a lone man defying the white screams of white death. (translated by Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith)

In 1939 Césaire returned to Martinique’s capital, Fort-de-France, and started teaching, but also continued his radical intellectual pursuits by starting a journal, Tropiques. At the same time, the fascist Vichy regime conquered France, resulting in an authoritarian and racist regime in France’s colonies. Tropiques became a meeting place of Marxist thought, Surrealist thought, and Négritude, with an interest in a revolution of the workers, a revolution of the mind, and a reclamation of precolonial African thought and practice (Kelley ix). As seen in Cahier, Césaire’s primary interest was fighting Colonialism’s cultural domination, and Tropiques’ Surrealist, Négritude-inspired perspective continued to feed Césaire’s growing thoughts on the subject.

In 1945 Césaire was elected as delegate to the National Assembly in Paris and as mayor of Fort-de-France as a member of the French Communist party. In 1950, after publishing four collections of poetry (After Cashier, Césaire published Les Armes miraculeuses (Miraculous weapons - 1944); Soleil cou coupé (Beheaded Sun - 1948); and Corps perdu (Lost Body - 1949)), Césaire first published Discoruse on Colonialism in Paris with Éditions Réclame, a small publisher associated with the French Communist Party (PCF). Five years later, he then edited and republished it with the anticolonial publisher Présence Africaine.

Discourse on Colonialism brings the idea of multidimensional racial hierarchy also points toward Césaire’s interest in the colonizer’s and the colonized’s identities. The colonized, Césaire notes, has a split identity: he/she is split between Europe’s grotesque definition of his/her blackness and his/her “actual” blackness that springs from the cultural richness of Africa. Determining a basic black identity is difficult enough, but the colonized in the West Indies have a third element to deal with: they reside in the Americas, a place of indeterminacy that is neither the homeland of Africa nor the colonizer’s homeland of Europe. It is a “circuit trangulaire”: the colonized’s identity is defined by the Caribbean (their actual home), Africa (their ancestral home), and Europe (their colonizer’s home).

For Césaire, the Caribbean is a “barren, uncreative space”. Négritude is the solution: a finding of one’s ‘blackness’ in the cultural heritage of Africa. That is not to suggest that Césaire wasn’t interested in writing about and reclaiming Martinique: he told Gérard Georges Pigeon in a 1977 interview, “mine is a telluric poetry: I am marked indisputably by the natural environment of Martinique.”. It is precisely Martinique’s uncomfortable third spot on the “circuit trangulaire” that makes it so existentially important. Seen from Europe’s perspective, Martinique is a paradise; seen from Africa’s perspective, Martinique is place of violence. Césaire called Martinique his “missed paradise”, and in his poetry he repeatedly explores his Martinican roots (most notably in Cahier). Certainly Négritude was a political movement, but for Césaire and many other Caribbean blacks it was also the starting point of a personal search for the subjective self. Thus Césaire’s interest in the geography of Colonialism brought together his poetic interests and his political interests.

In 1956, Césaire resigns from the French Communist Party, and publishes Lettre à Maurice Thorez (Letter to Maurice Thorez). He formed the Martinican Progressive party and continued to serve as mayor of Fort de France for more than 20 years.

In his resignation letter, Césaire starts by condemning the Stalinist methods and calling for a “honest self-critique” of the French Communist Party.

 The singularity of our “situation in the world,” which cannot be confused with any other. The singularity of our problems, which cannot be reduced to any other problem. The singularity of our history, constructed out of terrible misfortunes that belong to no one else.

[…] we are convinced that our questions (or, if you prefer, the colonial question) cannot be treated as a part of a more important whole, a part over which others can negotiate or come to whatever compromise seems appropriate in light of a general situation, of which they alone have the right to take stock. (Here it is clear that I am alluding to the French Communist Party’s vote on Algeria, by which it granted the Guy Mollet-Lacoste government full powers to carry out its North African policy — a circumstance that we have no guarantee will not be replicated in the future.  In any case, it is clear that our struggle — the struggle of colonial peoples against colonialism, the struggle of peoples of color against racism — is more complex, or better yet, of a completely different nature than the fight of the French worker against French capitalism, and it cannot in any way be considered a part, a fragment, of that struggle. I have often asked myself whether, in societies like ours (…) there was not rather a way to seek a form of organization as broad and as flexible as possible, a form of organization capable of giving impetus to the greatest number (…). A form of organization in which Marxists would not be drowned, but rather play their role of leavening, inspiring, and orienting, as opposed to the role which, objectively, they play at present: of dividing popular forces.

This is not a desire to fight alone and a disdain for all alliances. It is a desire to distinguish between alliance and subordination, solidarity and resignation. It is exactly the latter of these pairs that threatens us in some of the glaring flaws we find in the members of the French Communist Party: their inveterate assimilationism; their unconscious chauvinism; their fairly simplistic faith, which they share with bourgeois Europeans, in the omnilateral superiority of the West; their belief that evolution as it took place in Europe is the only evolution possible, the only kind desirable, the kind the whole world must undergo; to sum up, their rarely avowed but real belief in civilization with a capital C and progress with a capital P (as evidenced by their hostility to what they disdainfully call “cultural relativism”). All these flaws lead to a literary tribe that, concerning everything and nothing, dogmatizes in the name of the party. It must be said that the French communists have had a good teacher: Stalin. Stalin is indeed the very one who reintroduced the notion of “advanced” and “backward” peoples into socialist thinking. I believe I have said enough to make it clear that it is neither Marxism nor communism that I am renouncing, and that it is the usage some have made of Marxism and communism that I condemn. That what I want is that Marxism and communism be placed in the service of black peoples, and not black peoples in the service of Marxism and communism. I would say that no doctrine is worthwhile unless rethought by us, rethought for us, converted to us.

There exists a Chinese communism. Without being very familiar with it, I have a very strong prejudice in its favor. And I expect it not to slip into the monstrous errors that have disfigured European communism. But I am also interested, and more so, in seeing the budding and blossoming of the African variety of communism. It would undoubtedly offer us useful, valuable, and original variants, and I am sure our older wisdoms would add nuance to or complete them on points of doctrine.

I say that there will never be an African, Malagasy, or Caribbean communism because the French Communist Party conceives of its duties toward colonized peoples in terms of a position of authority to fill, and even the anticolonialism of French communists still bears the marks of the colonialism it is fighting.

In the sixties Césaire’s focusing political and intellectual pursuits resulted in a “triptych” of politicized plays, La Tragedie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe) in 1963, Un Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo) in 1965, and Une Tempête (A Tempest) in 1969. A Tempest perfectly represents Césaire’s post-colonial thought: the pleas for a Third World revolt, the impossibilities of freeing oneself from the colonial mindset, and the hope for freedom.

Césaire spent the rest of his life continuing the struggle against Colonialism and its effects. He retired from politics in 1993, at age 80. An academic celebrity, he traveled and lectured extensively.

In 2005, Cesaire refused to meet the then French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy over concerns that Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party had pushed for a law which proposed to recognise the positive legacy of French colonial rule. The (February 2005) law was eventually repealed after a series of protests and manifestations.

Césaire died in 2008, leaving lasting legacies in literature and post-colonial, anticolonial and decolonial struggles.

 

Discourse on Colonialism

Discourse on Colonialism calls for the meaning of colonization against the version of the winner in the colonial relation. Césaire brings the angry perspective from those who suffer the experience of colonization – who had their territories, bodies and culture taken to the benefit of the colonizer.

Europe – the colonizer – imposes its force, economic system, its rule of law and bureaucracy. To do so, it annihilates the non-European history, memory and ancestry, as well as the possibilities of production of own perspectives and knowledge in order to guarantee its power through time. The law of the colonizer imposed in the colonies legitimizes the barbarism of colonization, which is trivialized, “mainstremized” and widely accepted in the Eurocentric world as the means to enable their civilizing mission. The lack of human values in this imposition makes the European civilizing mission a notorious farce with horrible consequences.

Cesaire points out that colonialism, beyond the figure of the colonizer, is the “shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies”.

In this sense, the colonial “encounter” is not the mere contact of different civilizations, since it aims to impose the Eurocentric civilization over others. Whereas the colonizer aims conquest, the colonizing act works to “decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism”.

Europe, who benefits from the horrors of colonization, normalizes racism and naturalizes its genocidal actions around the world. Cesaire writes: “Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack”.

Cesaire uses two European examples to highlight that the Eurocentric justification of colonialism and that of Nazism are similar in structure, method and intention. The rule of law,

(…) And yet, through the mouths of the Sarrauts and the Bardes, the Mullers and the Renans, through the mouths of all those who considered - and consider - it lawful to apply to non-European peoples "a kind of expropriation for public purposes" for the benefit of nations that were stronger and better equipped, it was already Hitler speaking!

For my part, if I have recalled a few details of these hideous butcheries, it is by no means because I take a morbid delight in them, but because I think that these heads of men, these collections of ears, these burned houses, these Gothic invasions, this steaming blood, these cities that evaporate at the edge of the sword, are not to be so easily disposed of. They prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.

The sadistic pleasure of dehumanization – dehumanizes non-europeans and dehumanizes themselves. Truly, there are stains that it is beyond the power of man to wipe out and that can never be fully expiated. And that becomes the common feature among all the colonized: their persona is marked by dehumanization, degradation, humiliation, pain, anger. My turn to state an equation: colonization = "thing-ification."

I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted - harmonious and viable economies adapted to the indigenous population - about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries, about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials. They talk to me about civilization. I talk about proletarianization and mystification.

First Cesaire talks about the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem.

In proletarianization and mystification, Cesaire evokes Marxist terms to inform the consequences of the imposition of Eurocentric values, labour relationships and the endless pursuit of the fetishized modern future.  Cesaire calls for ancestry – negritude, precolonial ways of existing in the territory. He has hope – colonization pass and people remain. But remain how?

In another connection, in judging colonization, I have added that Europe has gotten on very well indeed with all the local feudal lords who agreed to serve, woven a villainous complicity with them, rendered their tyranny more effective and more efficient, and that it has actually tended to prolong artificially the survival of local pasts in their most pernicious aspects.

So the real problem, you say, is to return to them. No, I repeat. We are not men for whom it is a question of "either-or." For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism. Nor is it the present colonial society that we wish to prolong, the most putrid carrion that ever rotted under the sun. It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days.

For some examples showing that this is possible, we can look to the Soviet Union. Cesaire links colonialism and capitalism as co-constitutive and undetachable:

[A]ll those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Western bourgeois society, try in divers ways and by infamous diversions to split up the forces of Progress-even if it means denying the very possibility of Progress - all of them tools of capitalism, all of them, openly or secretly, supporters of plundering colonialism, all of them responsible, all hateful, all slave-traders, all henceforth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action. From the historians or novelists of civilization (it's the same thing).

Negritude: Sheikh Anta Diop in his book Nations Negres et Culture. M. Gourou:

Need I say that it is from a lofty height that the eminent scholar surveys the native populations, which "have taken no part" in the development of modern science? And that it is not from the effort of these populations, from their liberating struggle, from their concrete fight for life, freedom, and culture that he expects the salvation of the tropical countries to come, but from the good colonizer - since the law states categorically that "it is cultural elements prepared in non-tropical regions which ensure and will ensure the progress of the tropical regions toward a larger population and a higher civilization."

Cesaire and Maldonado Torres - Bantu ontological:

Now then, know that Bantu thought is essentially ontological; that Bantu ontology is based on the truly fundamental notions of a life force and a hierarchy of life forces; and God that for the Bantu the ontological order which defines the world comes from and, as a divine decree, must be respected. Wonderful! Everybody gains: the big companies, the colonists, the government – everybody except the Bantu, naturally. Since Bantu thought is ontological, the Bantu only ask for satisfaction of an ontological nature. Decent wages! Comfortable housing! Food! These Bantu are pure spirits, I tell you: "What they desire first of all and above all is not the improvement of their economic or material situation, but the white man's recognition of and respect for their dignity as men, their full human value."

In this sense, Cesaire calls for the material discussion in which European intellectuals hide behind in order to protect a project of power that necessarily victimizes the colonized. Epistemic violence to shift narratives and histories to normalize the European superiority.

Cesaire reinforces the intentional hypocrisy of the European bourgeoisie in reducing the most human problems to “comfortable, hollow notions”

(…) the striking thing they all have in common is the persistent bourgeois attempt to reduce the most human problems to comfortable, hollow notions: the idea of the dependency complex in Mannoni, the ontological idea in the Rev. Tempels, the idea of "tropicality" in Gourou. What has become of the Banque d'Indochine in all that? And the Banque de Madagascar? And the bullwhip? And the taxes? And the handful of rice to the ?10 Madagascan or the nhaque? And the martyrs? And the innocent people murdered? And the blood-stained money piling up in your coffers, gentlemen? They have evaporated! Disappeared, intermingled, become unrecognizable in the realm of pale ratiocinations.  It is not by losing itself in the human universe, with its blood and its spirit, that France will be universal, it is by remaining itself." That is what the French bourgeoisie has come to, five years after the defeat of Hitler! And it is precisely in that that its historic punishment lies: to be condemned, returning to it as though driven by a vice, to chew over Hitler's vomit.

 

How contemporary, up-to-date is this!

A beast that by the elementary exercise of its vitality spills blood and sows death - you remember that historically it was in the form of this fierce archetype that capitalist society first revealed itself to the best minds and consciences.

This man exists throughout history: Bolsonaro, Trump, Erdorgan…

 The setting is changed, but it is the same world, the same man, hard, inflexible, unscrupulous, fond, if ever a man was, of "the flesh of other men."

"a throne made of human excrement and gold"

Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeoisie, as a class, is condemned to take responsibility for all the barbarism of history, the tortures of the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, warmongering and the appeal to the raison d'Etat, racism and slavery, in short everything against which it protested in unforgettable terms at the time when, as the attacking class, it was the incarnation of human progress. The moralists can do nothing about it. There is a law of progressive dehumanization in accordance with which henceforth on the agenda of the bourgeoisie there is - there can be - nothing but violence, corruption, and barbarism.

His doctrine? It has the virtue of simplicity. (M. Caillois)

That the West invented science. That the West alone knows how to think; that at the borders of the Western world there begins the shadowy realm of primitive thinking, which, dominated by the notion of participation, incapable of logic, is the very model of faulty thinking.

Gobineau said: "The only history is white." M. Caillois, in turn, observes: "The only ethnography is white." It is the West that studies the ethnography of the others, not the others who study the ethnography of the West.

Caillois ideas are relevant to express “the state of mind of thousands upon thousands of Europeans or, to be very precise, of the state of mind of the Western petty bourgeoisie” (the white man’s burden).

Then Cesaire criticized the bourgeoisie state / nation: “It is a fact: the nation is a bourgeois phenomenon.” About Edgar Quinet (quote from the quote: and in those places which were not invaded by the barbarians, barbarism was born spontaneously.) We observe the rise of Bolsonaro, for instance.

And now I ask: what else has bourgeois Europe done? It has undermined civilizations, destroyed countries, ruined nationalities, extirpated "the root of diversity." No more dikes, no more bulwarks. The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, gregariousness, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.

The proletariat – capitalism must be eradicated in Europe. It is the only salvation of Europe.

 

On Maldonado-Torres On the Coloniality of Being

What is the coloniality of being?

The concept of the coloniality of Being is best understood in light of the discussion of the ego conquiro and Manichean misanthropic skepticism in the first section. I argued that the ego conquiro and misanthropic skepticism remained unquestioned by Descartes’s formulation of the ego cogito and his methodic doubt. He could imagine an evil demon who deceives people about their apparent certainties, but could not observe an ego conquiro at work in the consciousness of the European (and, if we follow Dussel and Quijano, in his own presuppositions as well) and how it made everyone to take for granted the inhumanity of colonized peoples.

‘I think (others do not think, or do not think properly), therefore I am (others are-not, lack being, should not exist or are dispensable)’.

In this definition, Cesaire brings the idea of the ideology of colonialism, something that involves the direct taking of land, the massacre of peoples and their ancestry, the imposition of the rule of law, and, also, involves its permanence through time. The ideology of colonialism means that the European culture, behavior and violence are power, hence the mimicry of the colonial power gives access to power.

Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism is pertinent for the current global geopolitics. What he criticizes first in “Europe is indefensible” and then with the dangers of the American power (and the evolution from mercantile-industrial-imperial capitalism) in the context of bourgeois nation states evokes the idea of a constant, uninterrupted imposition of the colonial ideology. Racism, intellectual superiority and capitalism are co-constitutive and inseparable, substantiating the model of global power that, from time to time, calls for its Hitler.

The structures of domination that Cesaire exposes – the European bourgeoisie, the colonial power, the nation state – epistemically reinvent themselves and remain imposing the colonial ideology in the present.

Anibal Quijano named this ideology, this pattern of power, coloniality of power. This coloniality is composed of three overlapping spheres of domination, co-constitutive and inseparable: coloniality of power in itself – or the geopolitical aspect; coloniality of knowledge – the epistemological aspect; and coloniality of being, the formation of the colonial subjects who must exist between their annihilation or their transformation into the endless pursuit of the power of the colonizer, becoming the colonizer. Coloniality of being carries the problem of racism and androcentrism.

The barbarianism, to use Cesaire’s words, of such hierarchization, enables the ashamed desire for tyranny that grows around the world in the 21^st century.

Not that Bolsonaro or Trump were born spontaneously. Coloniality of power is also means to have access to power. The colonized, in order to have power in the modern-colonial world-system, must mimic colonialities. The colonized people demand power. And, in doing so, they guarantee power to their own tormentor.

To finalize I would like to bring the importance of art and poetry to Cesaire’s persona. A great fan of jazz, poet, who wrote several plays. Cesaire managed to subvert the “European opportunity” and reach intellectual and political relevance because of his subversion.

Taking the opportunity to bring poetry to the contemporary colonial subject, I translated from Portuguese to English the song by the Brazilian rapper Djonga, Corra!, that refers to Jordan Peele’s thriller Get Out!. This is for us to finish this reflection bringing our own present reality to the perennial violence of coloniality of power.

Let us think and enjoy. I linked Djonga’s video at the end of this post.

 

Get Out (Djonga) ^[1]

Love… Look what they’ve done to our people…

Love, this is our people’s blood!

Love… Look at our people’s anger!

I will…

I swear that, today, I will be different.

There were millions of us, then there came villains

Our attack wasn’t enough,

I went with a stick, they had gunpowder.

I saw my people frightened…

And sometimes I think that nothing I’d try to do would change it.

Self-esteem is like trust, it can only be broken once.

I’m picking up the shards (not the building, I am old).

I’m ancient in the art of rebirth from the ashes,

as much as the good driver is in the art of parallel parking.

I am in the art of making it…

They are the answer to hunger,

they are the aimed revolver,

you are the answer for “why do so many Einsteins die in the slum, why don’t they rise”?

You are my fear at night,

you are a well told lie!

You are the damn system that sees my suffering and turns it into a joke, damn it!

I saw the minors taking in guns,

you were mufflers.

I saw my father crying despair, unemployment…

Why, bro?

I don’t wanna a pizzaiolo life, but to own the pizzeria.

They want me to be satisfied with nothing –

without my people “everything” wouldn’t exist!

I said: “Hey, mind the way you get to my land!”

He answers: “Who said this is your land?”

On that night I taught you things about love,

during the day I had only lived hate.

God gave me the cold but not the blanket.

Forgive me, love, but I can only see sodium on the road.

Maybe they are the cause of the drought and reason for the fence splitting us:

so they can accuse us of being too divided!

They have appropriated of everything.

My mind says: “Get out, Gustavo, run! You know how bad this is for you!”

For them, merits are good grades,

for us, distinction is not enough.

For my people any money is the world,

for theirs, any money is spare change.

I am wrong before starting:

delaying us is a pleasure for those who are controlling the game.

“- Don’t shiver, don’t whine, shut up, bitch! I am your fucking master!!!

I’m everything! I’m video, I’m photo, I’m frame!

You have to sell yourself to me if you want a Grammy!

I’m the death, the devil, the demon, the antic haunting you when your eyes are closed!”

While they enjoy your weeping

I will exist to make you smile, love

I am your bulletproof vest,

Your “talk-proof” ear…

I will take our world back.

 

https://youtu.be/QcJ9oxMj6JI

 

 

 

References

Césaire, Aimé. 2001. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Translated by Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith. Wesleyan Poetry.

———. 2000. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. Montly Review Press New York. Ebook. https://libcom.org/files/zz_aime_cesaire_robin_d.g._ kelley_discourse_on_colbook4me.org_.pdf.

———. [1956] 2010. “Letter to Maurice Thorez”. Translated by Chike Jeffers. Duke University Press, Social Text 103, vol. 28, no. 2; French original © 1956 Présence Africaine.

Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Gobineau, Arthur. 1856. The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott. Ebook. https://archive.org/details/moralintellectua00gobi/page/n8

Heidegger, Martin. 1970. Carta Sobre el Humanismo. Translated by Rafael Girardot. Madrid: Taurus.

———. 1996. Being and Time: A Translation of Sein Und Zeit. Suny Press.

Khana, Munejah, and Misba Majeedb. 2019. “Negritude: Reclaiming Native Culture and Identity in Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest”. Online International Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 9, no. 2: 296 – 302.

Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2004. “The Topology of Being and the Geopolitics of Knowledge.” City 8, no. 1: 29–56.

———. 2007. “On the Coloniality of Being.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3: 240–70.

Quijano, Anibal. 1992. “Colonialidad y Modernidad / Racionalidad.” Perú Indígena 13, no. 29: 11–20.

———. 1999. “!Qué Tal Raza!” Ecuador Debate 48, Diciembre: 141–152.

———. 2000a. “Colonialidad del Poder y Clasificacion Social. Festschrift for Immanuel Wallerstein, part I.” Journal of World Systems Research XI, no. 2: 342–386.

———. 2000b. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.” International Sociology 15, no. 2: 215–32.

———. 2007a. “Coloniality and Modernity / Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3: 168–78.

———. 2007b. “Questioning ‘Race’.” Socialism and Democracy 21, no. 1: 45–53.

Restrepo, Eduardo, and Axel Rojas. 2010. Inflexión Decolonial: Fuentes, Conceptos y Cuestionamientos. Colección Plíticas de la Alteridad. Popayán: Universidad del Cauca.

Rowell, Charles H. 1989. “It Is Through Poetry That One Copes With Solitude: An Interview with Aime Cesaire”. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Callaloo, no. 38: 49 – 67.

Snyder, Emile. 1973. “Aime Cesaire: The Reclaiming of Land”. The Dalhouse Review, 720 – 732.

Websites:

• Reuters - Aime Cesaire
• Brittanica - Aime-Cesaire
• Ile en ile -Aime cesaire

 

 

[1] This is the author’s translation of Corra!, a song by Djonga, a Brazilian rapper, part of his 2018 album O Menino Que Queria Ser Deus (The Boy Who Wanted to Be God). In a deep reflective lyricism, Djonga’s poetry in Corra! sings about the varied types of colonial violence by establishing a parallel with the film Get Out (2017), by Jordan Peele. (‘(2) Djonga - CORRA Pt. Paige (Clipe Oficial) - YouTube’ n.d.)

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by Radha D'Souza