Cabrera's Césaire: The Making of a Trans-Caribbean Zone

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann

MLN, Volume 134, Number 5, December 2019, pp. 1037-1058 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2019.0111

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/748165

[ Access provided at 20 Aug 2020 23:22 GMT from University of Toronto Library ]
 Cabrera’s Césaire: The Making
of a Trans-Caribbean Zone
❦

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann

It is a little-known fact that Aimé Césaire’s first book was Cuban.1 In

1943, his poetic opus “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” (Notebook
of a Return to the Native Land) was published in book form for the
first time in Havana. His first book in French, Les armes miraculeuses
(Miraculous Weapons), would be published three years later by Gal-
limard in Paris, and in 1947 two later versions of “Cahier d’un retour
au pays natal” would appear in book form: a French version by Bordas
in Paris and a French-English edition by Brentano’s in New York.2 The
limited edition Cuban book, printed as Retorno al país natal (Return

1
I would like to thank Esther Whitfield, Thangam Ravindranathan, and Paget Henry
for their formative guidance in the conception and development of this essay and
for reading several early drafts; Erika Renée Williams, Francés Negrón-Muntaner,
Flora González Mandri, Michelle Clayton, Chana Morgenstern, Shaylin Hogan, Maria
Gonzalez-Gil, and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel for invaluable feedback on later drafts;
Kora Verón and Alex Gil for collaborating with me on research and sharing primary
sources and insights from their research on Aimé Césaire; Odette Casamayor Cisneros
and Martin Tsang for organizing panels where I presented from this work and for their
responses to it; Ana Cairo Ballester, Isabel Castellanos, Victor Fowler Calzada, and
Lorenzo García Vega for providing key insights about Lydia Cabrera’s intellectual and
personal biography; Maria Moreno and Yu-jin Chang for confirming and enhancing
my understanding of Césaire’s use of “au bout de petit matin”; the Cuban Heritage
Collection at the University of Miami and especially Lesbia Varona for supporting my
research; the SDO Lam archive and especially Eskil Lam for research support.
2
The 1947 Brentanos edition, which consists of a different version of the “Cahier”
than both the 1939 Volontés edition and the 1947 Bordas edition in French, was trans-
lated by Yvan Goll and Lionel Abel. For studies of this textual evolution, see Gil (2011),
Laforge (2012), Verón Leble and Hale (2013), and Arnold and Gil (2013).

MLN 134 (2019): 1037–1058 © 2020 by Johns Hopkins University Press

1038 KATERINA GONZALEZ SELIGMANN

to the Native Land), featured a preface by French poet Benjamin

Péret, illustrations by Afro-Chinese-Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, and
a translation of Césaire’s poem by Lydia Cabrera, the Euro-Cuban
writer and scholar of Afro-diasporic religions and folklore in Cuba.3
Césaire had anticipated his text’s pertinence to Havana by including
the city along with other Caribbean locales in the first printing of the
poem for the Paris-based literary magazine Volontés in 1939 (“Cahier”
24).4 The Havana printing thus consolidated the poem’s presentation
of Martinique as translatable, or comparable, into other parts of the
Caribbean archipelago.
Although Césaire’s 1943 Cuban book is crucial to his development
as a pan-Caribbean poet, thinker, and politician, it has received very
little critical attention. Emily Maguire has written the only other criti-
cal essay devoted to the translation, and it has also received limited
attention in works by Lourdes Arencibia, Alex Gil, and Richard Watts.5
I am interested in the translation and its publishing history for two
related reasons: they are key to pan-Caribbean discourse in their “sym-
bolic articulation of a broader conceptualization of the Caribbean,”
and they enhance and challenge our understandings of the race and
gender politics of translations and their circulation (Martínez-San
Miguel, “Colonial and Mexican Archipelagoes” 156). Cabrera’s work
as Césaire’s first translator indicates that his poem did not merely
cross between or over languages and places in her translation. Her
translation of Césaire and its reception in Cuba offer great insight
into the poietic—or generative—function of both circulation and
translation in the conformation of geopolitical, historical, and social
imaginaries.6 As I argue in this essay, Cabrera’s translation of Césaire

3
The book itself is undated, and although Péret’s preface is dated for 1942, Lam’s
illustrations are dated 1943, and reviews of the book also date it for 1943.
4
The first edition of Césaire’s poem was published in the same issue of Volontés that
featured work by his collaborator L. S. Senghor from Senegal; by César Vallejo, Octavio
Paz, Pablo Neruda, and Miguel Otero Silva from Latin America; by Eugene Jolas from
the U.S.; and by Raymond Queneau from France. Queneau would go on to bring Cés-
aire’s work to Editions Gallimard for his first French book publication, as Alex Gil and
I found in our research at Editions Gallimard (Gil, “Breaking News: It was Queneau”).
5
Arnold, Verón Leblé and Hale, Laforge, and Noland also refer to the 1943 Cuban
publication without dedicating analysis to it. Jovic-Humphrey also analyzes its preface
by Benjamin Péret.
6
See Naoki Sakai’s definition of translation as “a poietic social practice that institutes
a relation at the site of incommensurability” and Brent Hayes Edwards’s dialogue with
that definition in his own offering of the importance of studying translation to “guage
the ensuing relation” (Sakai 75; Edwards, Practice 20). See also Pierre Bourdieu, “The
Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas” for a theoretical sketch of
the generative role of international textual circulation.
 M  L N 1039

effected another kind of crossing: her translation project crossed with

his poem, transforming it for its Cuban reception while contributing
to its production of a “trans-Caribbean zone.”
The area of literary-historical study opened up by a translation such
as this one may productively be considered a “trans-Caribbean zone,”
in dialogue with Emily Apter’s offering of the “translation zone” as “a
broad intellectual topography that is neither the property of a single
nation, nor an amorphous condition associated with postnationalism,
but rather a zone of critical engagement that connects the ‘l’ and the
‘n’ of transLation and transNation” (5). The translation and intra-
Caribbean circulation of Aimé Césaire’s most influential poem con-
stitute just such a critically engaged intellectual topography between a
colony (Martinique) and a neo-colonial nation (Cuba). Richard Watts
has indicated that the Cuban edition of Césaire’s poem “situates the
Cahier in the Caribbean” (101). Emily Maguire in turn suggests that
the collaborative publication of Césaire, Cabrera, and Lam connected
their “Pan-Caribbean avant-garde spirit” (126). I would add that Cés-
aire’s Cuban book fomented an—albeit contested—Cuban locus of
Caribbean regionalism and that Cabrera’s translation alters Césaire’s
construction of the Caribbean in meaningful ways.
“Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” has been central to fomenting
radical black consciousness in the Americas and in the world. In fact,
the role in the poem of the black consciousness project referred to
as “negritude” is its primary claim to fame. “Negritude” is Césaire’s
term for blackness that linguistically reworks its French devaluation
into a resistant formulation.7 Haitian poet René Depestre describes
“negritude” as a revolt of the spirit against the degradation and
“denaturalization of an entire category of people” (82).8
Less examined than the work of Césaire’s “Cahier” to poeticize and
promulgate a resistant, decolonizing, and healing black consciousness
has been its simultaneous and imbricated offering of a regional, Carib-
bean locus of enunciation: one that is as located in black subjectivity
as it is in a transnational Caribbean, including but not limited to the

7
See Natalie Melas, who explains, “the neologism négritude seizes the improper
colonial name nègre seeking to transvalue denigration and alienation” (569). See also
Christopher Miller’s “The (Revised) Birth of Negritude: Communist Revolution and
the ‘Immanent Negro’ in 1935” for an analysis of “negritude” the first time Césaire
published the idea prior to the 1939 publication of the “Cahier d’un retour au pays
natal,” in an issue of the Paris based journal he co-edited, L’étudiant noir (743–749).
8
Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own.
1040 KATERINA GONZALEZ SELIGMANN

poet’s home of Martinique.9 Although the poem’s transnational refer-

ences exceed the Caribbean and establish a host of possible solidarity
gestures with other locations, it explicitly hones in on an unnamed
Antillean island as its primary setting, naming other Caribbean loca-
tions along the way, including Havana and Guadeloupe (“Cahier,” 24,
32). Césaire also specifically references several Martinican locations,
such as the “rivière Capot,” “Trinité,” and “Grand-Rivière,” but his
references to other parts of the region, along with references to the
“Antilles” and the “archipelago,” give rise to a broader, Caribbeanist
reading of the poem (24, 25, 27, 32).10
The return highlighted in Césaire’s title and featured in the poem
is crucial to the role of revalorizing African heritage in the literary
construction of the Caribbean. Christopher Miller makes a compel-
ling case for reading the poem as an account of multiple returns and
escapes from the logic of the Middle Passage’s triangle. One such
escape from this logic is “to go to Africa by going to France . . . and
to come back to the Caribbean only in revolt, ‘standing and free’”
(96).11 For Miller, the poem navigates out of the slave trade’s imposed
triangle by going through it and defeating it en route, so that it is pos-
sible for the return to the Caribbean to be characterized by freedom.
The trans-Caribbean zone charted by Cabrera’s translation of Césaire
is illuminated by Walter Benjamin’s prescient metaphor for the social
and political stakes of the practice of translation:
Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one
another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another.
In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the
original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of
signification, thus making both the original and the translation recogniz-
able as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a
vessel. (80–81)

Césaire’s poem and Cabrera’s translation of it are both fragments of

a vessel that indeed come together to form “a greater language,” the
literary Caribbean brought into view by intertextual encounters such
as this one. Of course, the stakes of bringing together such fragments

9
In my use of “locus of enunciation,” I draw on Walter Mignolo’s use of the term
to examine the productive capacity of the location from which knowledge emanates.
10
Martínez-San Miguel also situates Césaire’s poem in a pan-Caribbean and archipelagic
context, suggesting that his poem offers a “Caribbean lyrical subject” (Coloniality 77).
11
Miller also argues that negritude, which “is often misrepresented these days as a
simplistic vision of a lost African paradise—was partially (but not entirely) an attempt to
renegotiate a triangle that appeared to be so powerful that it could never be imagined
out of existence” (French Atlantic 5).
 M  L N 1041

are particularly high in the imperial and post-slavery diaspora context

of the Caribbean. In his Nobel Lecture, Derek Walcott elucidates the
high stakes of such work in his definition of Antillean art as a “resto-
ration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archi-
pelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original
continent.” Although for most of Cabrera’s translation, she “lovingly
and in detail incorporates the original’s mode of signification,” in
key structuring sections of the poem she does not follow Césaire in
good Benjaminian fashion, reproducing instead of overcoming the
archipelago’s very fragmentation. In Cabrera’s translation, Césaire’s
text and its construction of the Caribbean is effectively crossed with her
distortions and disruptions.
Brent Edwards has proposed a model of “décalage” for understand-
ing the gaps in translation in the “workings of race in the cultures of
black internationalism” (Practice 14). As he explains, the “articulation
of diaspora in such a model would be inherently décalé, or disjointed,
by a host of factors” (14). In this model the connections established by
translating race in diaspora pass through disjunctures or disarticula-
tions (14–15). In dialogue with Edwards, Maguire has argued for this
translation as a work of “disarticulation: both a gesture of connection
and understanding, and an expression of nonequivalency and funda-
mental difference” (Maguire 127). In my own dialogue with Edwards
and Maguire, I probe the relations established at sites of divergence
or incommensurability in “Cabrera’s Césaire.” The translation reflects
incommensurabilities of race and gender between writer and translator,
between French and Spanish imperial projects, between Martinique
as a colony and Cuba as a post-colony under U.S. imperial pressure,
between the post-slavery status quo of each island. A thorough under-
standing of the relation between source and translated text would
illuminate the interstices of these relations that bear on the textual
production of the Caribbean. I argue that the translation evinces a
poetic solidarity with limits and complications that are instructive for
understanding the mode of production of intra-Caribbean textual
circulations.
Even the relation between writer and translator impinge on the
relations of Caribbean textual production that make the region read-
able. Césaire was a French-educated Afro-Martinican poet, teacher,
and politician. Cabrera was a French-educated Euro-Cuban writer and
ethnologist. Her writing career launched in 1936 when she published
her short story collection inspired by Afro-Cuban folk tales, primarily
1042 KATERINA GONZALEZ SELIGMANN

of Yoruba origin, Cuentos negros de Cuba (Black Cuban Tales) in Paris.12

Both Césaire and Cabrera “re-discovered” the Afro-Caribbean culture
of their upbringing while spending time in Europe and became
important cultural figures at home upon their respective “returns to
the native land.”13 While Césaire studied literature in Paris and con-
tinued to write verse throughout his life, Cabrera studied ethnology
in Paris and wrote tales inspired by her fieldwork with a poetic flair,
as well as trailblazing ethnographic volumes. She is credited for trac-
ing the ethnic roots of Cubans of African descent and for revealing
in her publications otherwise secret African religious and cultural
practices as they proliferated in Cuba. Her stories and essays were
published widely, including multiple appearances in one of the most
influential journals of Cuban high modernism, Orígenes. Soon after
the publication of his Cuban book, Césaire too included one of her
tales, “Bregantino, Bregantín” in Tropiques, the literary magazine he
co-edited in Martinique.14
Wifredo Lam was responsible for bringing the poem to Cuba after
meeting Césaire in Martinique on a stopover from France in 1941.15
During his Martinican sojourn, Lam witnessed a reading of the poem
by Césaire and was deeply moved (Benítez 5). Before Lam’s departure
to Cuba, Césaire dedicated a special edition copy of the poem pub-
lished in Volontés magazine to him. Césaire would go on to dedicate
poetry to Lam, and Lam would go on to continue illustrating Césaire’s
poetry and referring to Césaire’s work in his painting.16 Lam would
also go on to collaborate with Lydia Cabrera and work alongside her.17

12
This book was translated by French writer and translator of Cervantes and Miguel
Angel Asturias, Francis de Miomandre. French writer Paul Morand edited it. For a bio-
graphical study of Cabrera, see Rosario Hiriart. For comprehensive studies of Cabrera’s
work, see Emily Maguire’s Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography and
Flora González Mandri’s Guarding Cultural Memory.
13
Césaire in fact penned the first draft of the poem traveling in the Balkans with his
friend, Petar Guberina. See Anja Jovic-Humphrey for an analysis of this event and the
relationship between Césaire and Guberina.
14
I examine how Césaire in turn frames the pan-Caribbean significance of this tale
in Tropiques in “Governing Readability or How to Read Césaire’s Cabrera.”
15
Lam was on the same boat from Europe as André Breton and Claude Lévi-Strauss,
who after their three week stay in Martinique would go on to New York (Lévi-Strauss
26–31).
16
The first poem Césaire dedicated to Lam was “Simouns” (Simoons), included in
the 1946 Gallimard book, Les armes miraculeuses (Miraculous Weapons).
17
According to the anthropologist Isabel Castellanos who is the custodian of Lydia
Cabrera’s archive, Lam produced his famous painting “La junga” alongside Cabrera’s
writing of her opus, El Monte. The painting should have carried the same name, but
its transport to the Museum of Modern Art brought up the problem of translating “el
monte,” which continues to haunt critics and translators of Spanish-language Carib-
bean culture. The never-used term “la jungla” was easier to translate (Castellanos).
 M  L N 1043

It is very likely that the typescript of Césaire’s poem located in Lam’s

archive may be the one Cabrera used to translate it.18
Cabrera’s work was dedicated to preserving African traditions in
Cuban discourse. Maria Zambrano, the Spanish philosopher in exile
in Cuba during the 1940s and 50s, explained the way that Cabrera
re-located the relationship between African traditions and the island:
“the life and landscape of the island must have been imprinted onto
African tradition, a subtle weaving of influence so delicately captured
by the poetic knowledge that never ceases to assist Lydia Cabrera” (15).
Zambrano attests to the transformative nature of Cabrera’s “poetic
knowledge” by stressing that African culture is written on the island
in Cabrera’s work. Césaire also highly valued poetic knowledge and
defined its exercise as “splattering the object with all of its mobilized
riches” (“Poésie et connaissance” 170). This definition implies mobi-
lizing the associative logic of signification. For Césaire, the freedom
implied in this kind of poetic practice also requires abandoning one’s
work to the will of the universe: “Because in each true poem the poet
plays the game of the world, the true poet wishes to abandon the
word to all of its free associations, sure that this means to definitively
abandon it to the will of the universe” (164).19 When Césaire’s poem
was thus bequeathed onto Cabrera, she applied her own poetic knowl-
edge to it, altering the poem’s terrain of signification, giving rise to
new associations altogether.

Anaphora Distorted: From Dawn Obscure to Dying Dawn

The trans-Caribbean zone extended by Cabrera’s translation of Cés-
aire’s poem was structured by an image of a dying dawn she crosses into
the poem.20 Edwards identifies anaphora, or the repetition of words or
phrases at the beginning of two or more successive verses or clauses,
as the greatest legacy of the “Cahier.” Césaire’s use of anaphora is
powerful and influential because his “anaphora does not install regu-
larity, but instead introduces transformation and even contradiction”
(Edwards, “Syntax” 8). Anaphora (from Greek ana + phora) means “to

18
Eskil Lam found this typescript in his father’s archive while I conducted research
there. In 1942 Cabrera also published a profile on Lam and his painting (“Wifredo
Lam” 2).
19
I also examine Césaire’s essay in “Productions of Cultural Combat in Tropiques”
(501–503). The translation I use here is by Richardson and Fijalkowski.
20
There were only 300 editions of this special edition book published, so this trans-
lation likely did not travel far beyond the Cuban intelligentsia in its time, but it was
revived by Lourdes Arencibia’s 2007 expanded edition.
1044 KATERINA GONZALEZ SELIGMANN

bring back.” Bringing back—or returning—previously used words or

phrases, anaphora is the rhetorical device of return par excellence,
quite fitting for a poem that stages a return voyage home. Because
anaphora involves repeating words or phrases at the beginning of
successive verses or clauses, each time the repeated segment returns,
it attaches to new material, thus altering its meaning by altering its
context. Although Césaire utilizes anaphora throughout, one clause
in particular, “au bout du petit matin,” repeats for most of the poem,
serving to structure it. As Lourdes Arencibia indicates, the clause is
repeated so often that it functions as a leitmotif for the poem (83–4).
The anaphora shows up time and again to introduce a new angle on
the status of the island setting, the legacy of slavery, and a personal
confrontation with the history of racist colonial ideology. In Cabrera’s
Césaire this leitmotif appears both distorted and disrupted.
In the 1939 edition (the version Cabrera translated), Césaire inau-
gurates the poem with successive repetitions of “au bout du petit matin.”
A look at the first lines of the first five stanzas will demonstrate how
each iteration of its structuring anaphora introduces, more than an
emphatic reinforcement, a shift in perspective:
Au bout du petit matin bourgeonnant d’anses frêles les
Antilles qui ont faim,
At the end of first light burgeoning with frail coves the
hungry Antilles,
.................................................
Au bout du petit matin, l’éxtrême, trompeuse désolée
eschare sur la blessure des eaux;
At the end of first light, the extreme, deceptive desolate
eschar on the wound of the waters;
.................................................
Au bout du petit matin, cette ville plate—étalée, (“Cahier” 23–24)21 
At the end of first light, this town sprawled—flat, (Original 1939
Notebook 3)22

Most of the poem presumably takes place in that repeated time, “au
bout du petit matin.” Yet each time the repeated segment returns, it is

21
Cabrera’s Spanish introductory verses read: “Al morir el alba, de frágiles ensenadas re-
toñando, las Antillas ham-/brientas . . . Al morir el alba, la extrema engañadora, desolada pústula
sobre la he-/rida del agua . . . Al morir el alba, esta ciudad chata-expuesta . . . ” (Retorno 5).
22
I have adjusted the line breaks of Arnold and Eshelman’s edition throughout to
more closely approximate the 1939 edition of the poem. I have consulted the line
breaks in the typescript and manuscript of the poem housed at the Library of the
French National Assembly, courtesy of Alex Gil, and my copy of the typescript kept by
Wifredo Lam from the SDO Lam, and they both coincide with the 1939 Volontés version.
 M  L N 1045

met with a new clause that in turn introduces a new spatial location
to the temporal setting of the poem. Emulating the voyage home
enunciated in the poem’s title, each repetition indicates a traveling
perspective, one that is progressively closer and closer to the island,
culminating in a view of disembarking upon the voyager’s destina-
tion. It begins with a distant view of the Antilles as a hungry body;
then, moving closer, the island comes into view first as the eschar of
a wound, and finally, the town itself becomes visible, that unnamed
town that will go on to be the central location for various close-up
descriptions throughout the poem. The anaphora both unites each
of the scenes it introduces in time and differentiates between them
in scope, so that each recurrence marks the progressive movement
of return narrated in the poem.
The repeated clause “au bout du petit matin” is as sonorously sublime
a choice as it is difficult to translate. First of all, “bout” translates to
“end” but not “the end” of a time the way that “fin” clearly does. Its
primary meaning refers to the ends of continuous spaces or objects
(“Bout”). The use of “bout” in Césaire’s leitmotif anaphora, instead
of the more obvious choice of “fin,” therefore indicates the temporal
location in space (and not exactly in time) of the poem’s setting. But
this time on the end (which end?) of “petit matin,” is a more amorphous,
or uncertain, time than it would be if it had been expressed with “fin.”
“Bout” allows the temporal location of the poem to be as uncertainly
multiplicitous as its unnamed primary geographic location, suggest-
ing the poem may occur at any “end” of “petit matin.” “Bout” is also a
form of the verb, “bouillir,” to boil, indicating that this indeterminate
time is also boiling.23 As for the rest of the clause, although “petit
matin” is associated with dawn, the two are not interchangeable; the
continuous nature of “petit matin” engulfs the time of dawn without
directly referring to it. The “au bout du petit matin” clause marking the
poem’s time thus figures something like the precipice of a time that
is itself a continuous, intermediary point between night and day, or
the edge of an amorphous duration somewhere between a risen and
not yet risen sun.
Cabrera’s choice for translating “au bout du petit matin” is nowhere
near a good faith effort. She turns “au bout du petit matin” into “al morir
el alba” (at the dying of dawn, or as dawn dies). In so doing, Cabrera
shifts the temporality of most of the poem and intervenes poetically
into the trope of death that is also germane to the poem’s critique of
colonialism and slavery. Césaire’s anaphora hinges on a dawn at the

Yu-jin Chang suggested to me the pertinence of “bout” to “bouillir.”

23
1046 KATERINA GONZALEZ SELIGMANN

poem’s climax, and in Cabrera’s version of it, the temporal relation-

ship of the poem’s setting to its climactic daybreak becomes more
determinate.
Near the end of Césaire’s poem, the indeterminacy of “au bout
du petit matin” breaks into an image of dawn superimposed with the
destruction of a slave ship:
Je dis hurrah! La vielle négritude progressivement se cadavérise
l’horizon se défait, recule et s’élargit
et voici parmi des déchiquètements de nuages la fulgurance d’un signe
le négrier craque de toute part . . . (“Cahier” 48)
I say hurray! The old negritude progressively cadavers itself
the horizon breaks, recoils and expands
and through the shredding of clouds the flashing of a sign
the slave ship cracks from one end to the other . . . (Original 1939
Notebook 53)24

The passage stages three simultaneous moves in a catachresis, or a

mixing of metaphors, in which all elements of the mixture bear on
each other and produce something new among them. The old negrify-
ing negritude—that imposed “negritude” of slavery persisting beyond
slavery’s end, born from the négrier (negrero in Spanish), or slave ship,
becomes a cadaver as the horizon breaks.25 Where the sun would
break out of the horizon at sunrise, a cracking slave ship appears. The
broken-down ship figures the defeat of slavery and the racist, imposed
“negritude” left in its wake. This is the image “au bout du petit matin”
foreshadows again and again, where the horizon breaks and recedes,
giving way to the breakdown of slavery and its legacy. It is here that
Césaire’s poem culminates, in an image of defeating slavery.26
This climactic dawn merged with the destruction of a slave ship
relates ambiguously to the temporality of the rest of the poem. The

24
Cabrera’s translation follows suit with: “Grito hurra! La vieja negrura progresivamente/
se cadaverisa /el horizonte se desvanece retrocede y se ensancha/ y he aquí entre las nubes despe-
dazadas el fulgor de un signo/ el negrero reviente por todas partes . . . ” (Retorno 26). Cabrera
translates “négritude” to “negrura,” the Spanish word for “blackness.” Much later, in her
essay, “Notas sobre Africa, la Negritud y la actual poesía Yoruba” (Notes on Africa,
negritude and contemporary Yoruba poetry), she would refer to negritude in Césaire
as “negritud,” a term that has more recently been adopted in Spanish to affirmatively
locate the Spanish-speaking African diaspora. Although “negrura” does not carry the
inventive, symbolic charge of Césaire’s neologism, it is the extant word for blackness
whose valence would depend on context.
25
In my use of “negrifying,” I draw on Paget Henry’s elaboration of this term.
26
About this stanza F. Abiola Irele explains, “It is as if the poet’s cry of triumph
produces a change of scene, to a dramatic presentation of an insurrection on board a
slave ship during the Middle Passage” (141).
 M  L N 1047

broken-down ship is a beacon that promises to usher in a new day,

but is the dawn it portrays in the past, present, or future of the rest of
the poem? Because “au bout du petit matin” is an indeterminate point
around dawn, Césaire’s poem withholds a direct answer to that ques-
tion. The result is that Césaire locates most of the “Cahier” ambigu-
ously around this dawn of the defeat of slavery—either before or after
it. The historical sense of that ambiguity would be that slavery proper
has ended but its legacy destructively lives on, its wounds festering, the
persisting racism it generated continuing to structure Caribbean life.
The poetic sense of that ambiguity would be that the poem exhumes
the cadaver of slavery in order to reformulate a future “negritude”
historically grounded in the resistance to slavery. The weight of slav-
ery’s legacy falls heavily on the poem, even if it takes place after the
end of slavery proper: if it is not clear whether the poem occurs in
the wake of slavery or before its true end—it is because both are true.
The force of the poeticized revolt/sunrise seems to suggest that the
future liberation from the legacy of slavery requires a similar kind of
action—destroying the infrastructure of slavery and producing out of
the wreckage something like a vessel for carrying free people.
Cabrera’s translation of the anaphora, “al morir el alba” (at the dying
of dawn) redirects the logic of the poem as it relates to its climactic
dawn—al morir indicates the occurrence of death. If dawn is the prom-
ise of day, the death of dawn would mean the foreclosure of that day,
the breaking of dawn’s promise. The setting and mood of Césaire’s
poem—the devastated landscape, the inertia, the scenes of death
and misery—suggest something similar to this foreclosure, but in his
text, the coming of a new day remains possible as an open question.
In her translation, however, Cabrera answers the question: the dawn
of this new day is dying. The poem thus undergoes a distortion-in-
transformation, or an anamorphosis, when she translates it. Cabrera
effectively crosses an image into Césaire’s poem, refracting his poetic
apparatus for its Cuban addressees. Although, as Naoki Sakai explains,
translators cannot be held responsible for what they say in translations,
since, as translators, they are not allowed to make meaning in the text,
Cabrera alters Césaire’s signifying field enough to modify the poem’s
construction of the Caribbean (74).27 Although Cabrera’s solution to
the problem of translating the poem’s structuring anaphora is elegant

27
As Efraín Kristal’s work has demonstrated, Jorge Luis Borges also significantly
transformed the texts he translated. In his own essay on translation, Borges himself
rejected the ideal of translation in favor of the vast and productive histories of actual,
un-ideal translations.
1048 KATERINA GONZALEZ SELIGMANN

and resourceful, it exacerbates the pessimism in Césaire’s text, one he

mediates ambivalently with futurism. The choice is purposive, and it
constitutes a subtle but meaningful poetic appropriation of Césaire’s
political interpretation of Caribbean coloniality, or the persisting racial
hierarchies constituted by empire and slavery.
The dying dawn of emancipation rendered in Cabrera’s Césaire may
be legible to a Cuban context in which the ideal of racial democracy
was fractured by persisting forms of racial discrimination and violence.
As Afro-Cuban poet and chronicler Nicolás Guillén explained as early
as 1929, in his article, “The White Man: This is the Problem,” racism
in Cuba during this period was “de facto and not de jure” (193). But
even that distinction is difficult to make, for as Guillén explains, the
law recognized “the equality of all Cubans,” but there remained in the
legacy of slavery a distinct division between black and white Cubans.
Slavery created, as Guillén argues, two distinct legal categories of
people, one of which—those of African descent—was subsumed
beneath the category of the “white dominators.” Even if Cubans had
been legislated to be equal before the law, these previously stipulated
legal categories persisted in many practices. Like Martinique at this
time, Cuba had not eradicated the power structures embedded in
plantation slavery when it was extinguished as a practice. The Cuba
Guillén portrays is one in which the racism born of slavery continued
to pervade life and interfere regularly with the life course of Cubans
of African descent.
Somewhere between changing laws and persisting discriminatory
practices, the dawn of emancipation may very well have appeared to
Cabrera to be dying in Cuba.28 Guillén’s chronicle was part of a series
of editorials he wrote about problems facing black and mixed race
Cubans for the Cuban newspaper, Diario de la Marina, between 1928
and 1930. This series of chronicles plunge through and re-write the
view upheld by white elites that black Cubans were to blame for the
difference between racial groups in post-slavery Cuba. While Guillén’s
critiques elucidate the nuances of Cuban racism during this period,
they also indicate an active and anti-racist black public sphere.
In “The White Conquest,” Guillén explains the perspective prevalent
among the white elite that racism was a black problem: “Some educated
whites, referring to black aspirations in Cuba, smile with benevolence

28
In her lecture, “Translating Culture: Lydia Cabrera’s Liminal Worlds,” Marial
Iglesias Utset noted that growing up in the mixed neighborhood of Centro Habana,
Lydia Cabrera grew up wealthy and in close proximity to many poor and working class
black Cubans.
 M  L N 1049

and drop a phrase that summarizes their position regarding people

of dark skin. ‘The problem of the black Cuban,’ they say, ‘is simply
cultural’” (191). Here, the cultural problem perceived is one that has
been foisted onto black Cubans (De la Fuente 34). In these articles,
Guillén transforms the notion that it is “lack of culture” that keeps
blacks from equal footing with whites in Cuba into a critique of the
racist culture that refuses to allow for black and white equality.
The dawn of legally stipulated equality in Cuba thus failed to usher
in the promise of lived equality. In the tradition exemplified by Cuban
independence leader José Martí, the denial of racism alongside its
denunciation persisted in the Euro-dominant public sphere. When
Martí proclaimed, “There is no racial hatred because there are no
races” in his famous text, “Our America” (1891), he attempted to
erase the history of racial differentiation and racism.29 Vera Kutzinski
understands Martí’s words as working to “soften the racial differences
and conflicts that threatened to divide Cuba,” but also notes that his
writings on racial difference were “at best problematic” and “at worst
hypocritical” (6). Indeed, Martí participated in a trend that has persisted
in Cuba perhaps until the present day: that is, to officially ignore the
extent of racism’s violence, allowing it to persist alongside a denial of
its existence. This persistence in denial most certainly inflects the intel-
lectual climate unto which Cabrera’s crossing of Césaire was received.30
In 1943, the state-sponsored Anuario de la cultura cubana (Yearbook
of Cuban Culture) included a review of the Retorno that was both posi-
tive and distancing. Gaston Baquero, the mixed race poet associated
with high modernism, reviewed Césaire’s poem as “Para todo amante
de la poesía contemporánea, este ‘Retorno al país natal’ de Aime Cesaire [sic]
constituye uno de los puertos indispensables de parada y admiración [For all
lovers of contemporary poetry, Aimé Césaire’s ‘Retorno al país natal’
constitutes an indispensable port at which to stop and admire the
view]” (282). He recommends the poem as an object to consume in
literary tourism, as if, instead of a poem from a neighboring island
with a comparable history and present, it was an “exotic” object from
a faraway place.

29
Although this may be Martí’s most famous refusal to acknowledge racial hatred on
the basis that biological concepts of race had been scientifically debunked by the end
of the nineteenth century, the view was reinforced in his other writings as well. See
also, for example, José Martí, “My Race.” José Buscaglia links this moment in Martí to
the notion that racial difference made the nation an impossibility (xi-xiii).
30
Alejandro De la Fuente also argues that United States control over Cuba supported
and fueled racist discourse and policies that co-existed with the Cuban state’s propaga-
tion of “racial democracy” (40–43).
1050 KATERINA GONZALEZ SELIGMANN

Baquero’s distancing of Césaire from the Cuban poetic geography

is reinforced in his review of a poem by Euro-Cuban writer Virgilio
Piñera, “La isla en peso” (“The weight of the island”) that was also
published in 1943. Piñera’s poem demonstrates a clear influence by
Aimé Césaire. Like Césaire’s “Cahier,” Piñera’s “La isla en peso” is set on
an unnamed but obviously Caribbean island. It critiques longstanding
colonial structures in Cuban society with a special emphasis on the role
of European conquest, slavery, and Catholicism in overdetermining
the taboos of Cuban sexuality. Piñera intertextually engages many of
Césaire’s motifs with a focus on the colonization of sexuality in Cuba.
Baquero’s review distances Piñera’s poem by likening its un-Cuban
location to that of Césaire’s poem. As he argues, Piñera’s poem is “en
desconexión absoluta con el tono cubano de expresión, es Isla de una antillanía
y una martiniquería que no nos expresan, que no nos pertenecen [absolutely
disconnected from the Cuban tone of expression, an Island of an Antil-
leanness and Martiniquery (Martiniquería) that do not express us, that
do not belong to us]” (278–9). Baquero, as official gatekeeper of the
Cuban literary field, resists a critical portrayal of Cuba assimilable to
Césaire’s portrayal of Martinique so much that he disqualifies Piñera’s
poem from the realm of Cuban literature. Even as it was distanced,
however, Piñera’s highly influential text confirms the link between the
two islands that Cabrera’s distorting translation also suggests. When
considering the migration and translation of Césaire’s poem to the
Cuban context, what emerges is a Cuban locus for Caribbean affilia-
tion, decolonization, and to some extent, black consciousness, even
if—or precisely because—that possibility was disavowed by official
critics like Baquero.

Anaphora Disrupted: Masculinity Interrupted

The translation’s forging of a trans-Caribbean zone was subject to
both Cabrera’s work on Césaire’s readability and on the fissures of the
Cuban context of reception. Her translation also crosses a subtle cri-
tique of gender dynamics into the poem through interruptions of the
same structuring anaphora. For most of the poem, Cabrera translates
Césaire’s anaphora with rhetorical compliance, consistently employ-
ing “al morir el alba.” In three instances she disrupts this regularity,
however, by substituting this clause with “al fin del amanecer,” or “at the
end of sunrise.”31 These disruptions of the anaphora occur precisely
31
This example is not the only anaphora that she disrupts in the poem; its disruption
is just the most egregious case.
 M  L N 1051

at moments when the poem’s male-identified narrator addresses or

invokes his masculinity. In the example that follows, Cabrera ruptures
the anaphora by introducing “al fin del amanecer” when the narrator
reflects on his state of being in gendered terms:
Au bout du petit matin,
la mâle soif et l’entêté désir,
me voici divisé des oasis fraîches de la fraternité . . . (“Cahier” 32)
At the end of first light,
the male thirst and the desire stubborn,
here I am, severed from the cool oases of brotherhood . . . (Original
1939 Notebook 19)
Al fin del amanecer,
una sed de macho y el testarudo deseo,
me dividen los frescos oasis de la fraternidad . . . (Retorno 12)32

Césaire’s “au bout du petit matin” marks the introduction of a new

scene using the same uncertain time that is the setting of the major-
ity of the poem. In his iteration of the anaphora, what follows are
verses connected to each other only through the space they share in
the stanza and the temporality it introduces. First, “male thirst” and
“obstinate desire” enter the scene, followed by a narrator who locates
himself as divided, or severed, from a brotherhood figured as “cool
oases.” Here, the “male thirst” and desire may or may not belong to
the lyric subject of the poem, but they are separate or alienated from
him. They may or may not enact his alienation from the fraternity that
follows. The narrator goes on to be overtaken by two images, one of
a “modest nothing” that pierces like splinters and one of an unstable
but arrogant horizon imprisoning him like a jailer (“Cahier” 32). F.
Abiola Irele reads the stanza overall as articulating “the desire for a
greater destiny, sharpened by [the narrator’s] confinement within the
narrow limits of his little island and by his acute sense of separation
from his own people . . . ” (69). Desire, entrapment, and isolation
converge on this stanza, but a gendered tension is also woven into
the images, one highlighted and amplified by Cabrera’s disruption
of the anaphora and translation choices (Retorno 12).
Cabrera also translates out much of the passage’s ambiguity. In
her version, “male thirst” and “obstinate desire” themselves divide
the narrator from the “oases of brotherhood.” Spanish by no means
necessitates her shift; it would have been simple for her to mirror the
32
Whereas the Arnold and Eschelman translation mirrors the indentation of Césaire’s
source text, Cabrera’s translation does not.
1052 KATERINA GONZALEZ SELIGMANN

French almost literally here. Furthermore, what in Césaire is a “mod-

est nothing” that “bristles” (rien pudique frise) becomes in Cabrera’s
Césaire an “immodest frieze” (impúdico friso) (“Cahier” 32; Retorno
12). In dialogue with the gender dynamics of Césaire’s poem, she
transforms the mobility of the bristles into the immobility of a frieze.
What remains a latent possibility in Césaire’s poem—that male thirst
and desire are causally linked to a failed brotherhood—becomes the
manifest meaning in Cabrera’s Césaire: male desire interrupts frater-
nité, which, even when it implies universal community, is the signifier
of unity between men. In her version, the arrogant “horizon jailer”
that shudders to end the stanza becomes inextricably linked to this
“male desire” at fault for the failure of fraternity. As if to clarify this
connection, she mistranslates “frise” with its false cognate “friso” and
turns Césaire’s proclaimed modesty into a frieze of immodesty.
Cabrera’s interruption of Césaire’s anaphora and subsequent licen-
tious translating crosses into the poem a manifest critique of mascu-
linity that otherwise remains latent. This is only one example of her
disrupting this anaphora, however. In two other instances, one in
which the narrator’s political desire is frustrated and another in which
he introduces a “virile prayer,” Cabrera inserts “the end of sunrise”
instead of “as dawn dies,” to introduce the passages, drawing special
attention to them and their gendered and sexualized images (Retorno
5, 22). Rupturing the anaphora and indicating an end point at these
moments, Cabrera’s translation at best draws attention to, and at worst
interrupts, the masculinism of Césaire’s poem.
Césaire’s gender politics have not gone unquestioned by critics. For
example, in the introduction to her English translation of the last ver-
sion of the “Cahier,” Mireille Rosello notes “the remarkable absence
of women” in it (36). Indeed, as she notes, the only working woman
described in the poem is the narrator’s mother who is portrayed pedal-
ing the night away at her “Singer” in order to feed her family (“Cahier”
29). The references to women in the first edition “Cahier” Cabrera
translated are few. As the town featured in the poem is introduced, it
is compared to two women: one is described in reference to “the lyri-
cal cadence of her buttocks,” a reference that Césaire notably excised
from the poem by the 1956 edition. The other, a peasant woman (une
paysanne) urinates standing, her legs spread apart (“Cahier” 24). Sev-
eral stanzas later, a woman appears to be floating in the river Capot,
but she swiftly disappears into refuse (“Cahier” 25).33 When Cabrera

33
Cabrera uses “playa Capot” [Capot beach] to translate “rivière.” The “mistake” is
curious for it is unlikely that Cabrera lacked this knowledge in French. A river does
 M  L N 1053

“ends sunrise” and interrupts the anaphora as the poem’s narrator

both asserts and doubts the force of his masculinity, perhaps she marks
these points for future reflection. Thus mutating the poem, Cabrera’s
interruptions and transgressions anticipate feminist critiques of the
masculinism in anticolonial Caribbean discourse.

The Contours of Solidarity in Crossing

Many years later, in Cabrera’s “Notes on Africa, Negritude, and Con-
temporary Yoruba Poetry,” she hails Césaire’s “Cahier” as “the deep,
vigorous, spine-chilling cry of the African vindication heard around
the world” (478). In this reading, she imbues the poem itself with
a redemptive quality that acts on the history of the slave trade. Per-
haps she is reaching here: does the poem incite future redemptions
or is it a vindication itself? Her view emerges in the course of a text
denouncing the history of slavery in Hispanic history and its persistent
byproduct of denigrating African heritage in diaspora. She may not
have shared Césaire’s vision, but to a certain extent, we may assume
her solidarity with Césaire, and as such, it is worth considering her
translation’s disruptions and distortions as problems that bear on the
kind of agency enacted by the lived (though not ideal) practices of
both translation and solidarity.
It is crucial that the poem for the most part consists of Cabrera’s
total and loving poetic complicity with Césaire. In fact, as Alex Gil has
indicated, most of her “faithful” translation preserves even the syntax
of Césaire’s French (23). Usually, the closeness of the translation would
simply indicate a job well done, but in a translation, which, as we have
seen, contains pointed disruptions and distortions, “good” transla-
tion reveals something more. The translator’s linguistic-rhetorical
compliance in cases like this one suggests the kind of “surrender . . .
to the linguistic rhetoricity of the original text” with “larger political
consequences” that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls upon translators
to undertake (377). For Benjamin, the translator’s job is to traverse
between languages, carrying the language of the original as it is worked
upon by its author (80–81). Spivak in turn calls that work the original
text’s “linguistic rhetoricity,” identifying rhetoric, over logic, as the
would-be terrain of a translator’s focus. For Spivak, translating well
at the level of rhetoric constitutes an ethical achievement that fore-
grounds more than the reciprocity between languages: it also indicates

in fact empty onto a beach at Capot in Martinique, and a floating body in the river
would conceivably enter that beach.
1054 KATERINA GONZALEZ SELIGMANN

the possibility of reciprocity between writer and translator, a relation-

ship that the translator establishes by way of her work, which I would
like to call in the case at hand, her poetic solidarity (370–374). When
Cabrera surrenders to Césaire, or matches (to bring back Benjamin)
the rhetorical work of his language, she aligns poetically with him,
demonstrating her solidarity.
It is precisely because of the heightened stakes of Césaire’s poetic
refashioning of the history of slavery and racism, and because of
the role of gender in this process, that solidarity becomes a valuable
framework to interrogate for a translation such as this one. Cabrera’s
three disruptions of Césaire’s anaphora, calling the dawn’s end (fin)
at moments in which the speaker invokes masculinity, signal what we
might consider the limits of her solidarity with Césaire. She may be
infusing the poem with a proto-feminist critique of the masculinism
embedded in his emancipatory discourse. Ending the dawn at these
moments, however, she may also be limiting Césaire’s gendered
agency in the production of his critique. Solidarity, like translation,
has its limits.
The work of her distortion, on the other hand, seems to indicate
a different kind of solidarity move altogether. Instead of detracting
from Césaire’s uncertainly placed edge of dawn, in an appropriative
solidarity, Cabrera pushes his critique further, articulating a foreclosed
dawn. It is as if she says, either to Césaire or to her Cuban audience
through Césaire: Have no doubt; the promise of freedom in the dawn of
emancipation is not just uncertainly located—it is dying. This is the kind
of solidarity that pushes a critique forward and extends it, in this case,
to a new location. In her version of Césaire’s poem, the entreaty to
an ambivalently conceived liberation becomes, instead of the possibly
foreclosed dream of forging a new day, the project of reversing the
death of emancipation. Liberation from the colonial legacy of slavery
in Cabrera’s Césaire requires an even more potent move than it does
in Césaire’s rendition: un-dying the dawn, or un-doing the death—or
foreclosure—of dawn (itself the ultimate image of hope and renewal).
In other words, like the descent into the various levels of racist hell
performed by the poem, retrieving the dawn demands a momentous
plunge into all of the forces that would have it die.
Even in its nodes of divergence, Cabrera’s translation demonstrates
that Césaire’s critique of post-slavery racism in colonial Martinique
translates into the persisting racist climate of neo-colonial Cuba,
increasing by way of her crossing the readability of the Caribbean’s
existence as a location of shared pasts and horizons. C. L. R. James
 M  L N 1055

extends the Caribbeanist dimensions of Césaire’s “Cahier” in his take

on it in the 1963 appendix essay to his monumental work, The Black
Jacobins, “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro.” James cites from
Césaire’s poem extensively, but he draws attention to one passage in
particular as the “centre of the poem” (401). The passage is indeed
crucial, for it points to the kind of inclusivity Césaire’s poem invited:
et il reste à l’homme à conquérir toute interdiction immobilisée
aux coins de sa ferveur
et aucune race ne possède le monopole de la beauté, de l’in-
telligence, de la force
et il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête . . . (“Cahier” 46–47)
and it remains to man to conquer all
the violence entrenched in the recesses
of his passion
and no race possesses the monopoly of beauty,
of intelligence, of force, and there
is place for all at the rendezvous
of victory . . . (James 401)
y al hombre le queda por conquistar toda prohibición inmovilizada
en los rincones de su fervor
y ninguna raza posee el monopolio de la belleza,
de la inteligencia, de la fuerza
y hay espacio para todos en el lugar de reunión de la conquista . . . (Retorno
24)

In this passage Césaire points the way, and Cabrera closely follows,
towards undoing the old “negritude.” Césaire offers an alternative
conquest to the one that resulted in slavery and colonialism—the
conquest of all “immobilized prohibitions.” In Cabrera’s rendition, the
“immobilized prohibitions” or “immodest friezes” that exclude women
from masculinist liberation projects need also be conquered. Against
the thesis of black inferiority Césaire posits the thesis of black revolt,
figuring a new meeting place of conquest. Out of this ambivalent
space that is potent but not quite a “victory,” an intertextual Carib-
bean imaginary proliferates.
Emerson College

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