MODL 5304 Postings

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1947) expresses Aimé Césaire’s understanding of black consciousness, which he called negritude. Césaire’s juxtaposition of European and African realities and expressions during and after colonialism reveals a need to distinguish black culture as something unique. Even in his style Césaire is defiant of western culture in that the effects of the Harlem Renaissance, French Surrealism, and Post-colonialism merge in the Notebook to create a long poem free from convention. Reading the Notebook is like being tossed back and forth between the Atlantic waves and the island of Martinique to the point of becoming seasick at the continual movement of fluid sensual imagery and concrete historical descriptions.
Césaire proposes three traits that have defined the white/black, European/African relationship for the past five centuries. He argues that even though Europeans uprooted Africans and tried to domesticate and Christianize them in the Americas, their “prodigious ancestry” continues and will throw off that tyranny (32). Although Césaire has “sworn to leave nothing out of our [black] history” he is selective in his memory (27). He boldly and rightly derides the enslavement and abuse of Africans by Europeans, but to pass all the blame of the transatlantic slave trade on whites and to present blacks as uprooted victims ignores African agency. The slave trade with Arabia and between kingdoms in Africa is documented well before Europeans discovered the Americas. Once transatlantic slavery ensued in the sixteenth-century, Africans sold Africans as slaves to Europeans.
Césaire’s argument begins to make more sense once Africans have been brought to the Americas and the historical process of domestication began transforming free men into slaves and eventually into humbled, second-class Americans under colonial rule. It is in this development that Africans were “inoculated with degeneracy” so they might be preyed upon (33). In Césaire’s phrase “remember-the-old-saying: beat-a-nigger, and you feed him” the propaganda of colonialism is found and the curse of Ham justified.
Closely tied to the idea of domestication is a Christianization that has been grounded into the minds of Africans so that they make the “sign of the cross without perceptible motive” (3). He criticizes the Eucharistic communion that religiously united whites and blacks, but realistically reinforced the hegemonic situation through “the bread, and the wine of complicity” (6). Instead, Césaire calls for a return to non-Christian practices that would separate blacks from whites as he chants the shamanistic mantra “voum rooh oh that the promised times may return” (21).
Césaire desired to be “a trustee of its [negritude’s] resentment” (37) and truly much anger concerning the past is expressed in the Notebook. Much of the power of the poem is found in the keen use of language which simplifies people into good and evil, black and white. Although many of Césaire’s sentiments are justified, the complexity of the historic relationship between Europeans and Africans are not resolved in his quest for negritude, but rather reduced to an unhealthy perception of “us” versus “them.”