The Mouth of Calamities

In​ 2004, the political theorist Françoise Vergès decided to go to Martinique to interview Aimé Césaire, the poet, politician, anticolonialist and co-founder of the négritude movement. She was surprised to discover that most of her acquaintances in Paris hadn’t heard of him, or ‘thought he was dead’. This tells us something about the reputation of Césaire, who died in 2008 aged 94. His writings – poems, plays, political texts – are widely translated and read around the world. He was given a French state funeral and a plaque in the Panthéon. Streets and schools and stations are named after him in Martinique and mainland France. But he isn’t required reading in most French schools, and his plays are rarely staged. It’s tempting to agree with the literary scholar Mireille Rosello that the official commemoration was also a form of erasure.

Césaire can seem to be caught between worlds. For the politically minded, he is suspiciously literary and obscure. In literary circles he can appear too political – he was the only significant modernist figure to have a long and successful career as an elected official. Césaire was a strident critic of colonialism who didn’t support Martinican independence from France. He is the most well-known literary figure from Martinique, but he wrote only in French and had an ambivalent relationship with Creole (writing in Creole, he said, ‘is a bit like cutting yourself off from the rest of the world’). He was associated with communist and socialist politics and with African and Third World liberation, but he was also a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure who used arcane and impenetrable words in his poetry, and always dressed, undeterred by Martinique’s tropical climate, in a suit and tie.

What would it mean to see Césaire on his own terms? This would be to define him above all by his language. His writing, especially his poetry, is full of neologisms and obscure scientific and medical vocabulary. But it is also characterised by a use of propulsive metre, baffling images and joyfully declarative passages. Césaire’s view of the world centred on what he called ‘poetic knowledge’, which regarded imagination and instinct as more important than the cold rationalism of ‘scientific knowledge’. Everything he did he saw as poetry: ‘The creation of a road, a school, a nursery – that’s poetry!’ His writing combines earnestness with a rigorous anti-sentimentalism and a love of irony and confrontation. He was fascinated by technical terms, which he used to draw attention to the strangeness of words themselves. ‘Nothing ever frees but the obscurity of the word,’ he wrote in one of his late poems.

In Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, his most celebrated poem (John Berger and Anna Bostock’s reissued translation omits the first three words of the title), Césaire is unsparing about Martinique. The Antillean islands are ‘pitted with smallpox’ and ‘dynamited by alcohol’. His home town is ‘inert’ and impoverished, his house a ‘shack’, dark except for the gleaming cockroaches. As the poet David Constantine pointed out in a discussion with Berger, ‘for the bulk of the poem’ Césaire is ‘not celebrating his country, he’s saying what a shit, awful place it is’. He saw himself as facing up to the reality of his underdeveloped homeland from the perspective of interwar Paris, the colonial metropolis where he spent seven years as a high school and university student. The history of Martinique had to be addressed: the arrival of Europeans two thousand years after the speakers of an Arawakan language who came to be known as ‘Taino’ had made the island their home (the French Ministry of Culture’s website still claims that Christopher Columbus ‘discovered the island’); the suppression and expulsion of the island’s Indigenous population in the 17th century; the transfer of enslaved people from Africa to work on sugar cane and coffee plantations; the abolition of slavery in 1848.

All this had led to the slow and uneven ‘assimilation’ of the island into France’s political structure, generating a tense and uncertain relationship that operated on a psychic as well as a material level. Césaire’s view of Martinique was a product of his birth into the island’s small Black middle class, distinct from its mixed-race (Mulâtre) and White middle classes. His parents – Fernand, the manager of a sugar plantation, and Eléonore, a seamstress – saw education as a route to social mobility. Fernand subjected his children to a strict regime of supplementary classes in French at 6 a.m. and read Victor Hugo to them at night.

Césaire began writing Return to My Native Land on holiday on Yugoslavia’s Adriatic coast during the summer of 1935. He was 22. Earlier that year, he had published an essay in the journal L’Étudiant noir in which he railed against assimilation as a route towards emancipation: the self-hatred and cowardice at the heart of ‘assimilation’ would never, he wrote, lead to true freedom for Black people under colonial rule. In Return to My Native Land, Césaire coined the term ‘négritude’ – broadly, ‘Blackness’ or ‘Negroness’ – to refer to the self-confidence he advocated. He defined it through Hegelian negation: ‘my négritude is not a stone … my négritude is neither tower nor cathedral/it takes root in the red flesh of the soil.’ He finished the poem when he got back to Martinique and was ‘assaulted by a sea of impressions and images’, as well as despondency about the future of his homeland. It is written in the voice of an unnamed person debating whether to return to Martinique after a period away and has three parts: first, the narrator thinks about the island itself; he then reflects on Black and Caribbean identity, and its histories of racism and violence; and, finally, he comes to accept the burden of this history and resolves to return home. The poem appeared in 1939 in the avant-garde Paris literary journal Volontés, which also published Raymond Queneau, Henry Miller, Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda.

Return to My Native Land is often situated in the French literary tradition, and discussed in relation to Césaire’s major stylistic influences – Lautréamont, Claudel, Rimbaud, Apollinaire. But the poem is also part of a Caribbean lineage that goes back to the Haitian Baron de Vastey, whose book The Colonial System Unveiled (1814) is sometimes described as the first work of anticolonial theory, and the Trinidadian linguist John Jacob Thomas, whose polemic Froudacity was published in 1889. Vastey and Thomas analysed the racist – and specifically anti-Black – theories of their time, described their disastrous impact and offered their own writing as forms of resistance. Césaire’s poem did something similar, but with a modernist sensibility and a poetic register. He was particularly interested in the way harmful ideas about race are not only imposed from the outside but become part of one’s subjectivity, often giving rise to self-denial and self-loathing. He wanted to dismantle what had become known as ‘Bovarysme’, the desire among elite Antillean writers to imitate the French. In an interview with the Haitian writer René Depestre, he mocked ‘a poor little Martinican pharmacist’ who had won a French literary prize and had confessed to Césaire that he was delighted ‘the judges hadn’t even realised that his poems were written by a man of colour.’

Césaire’s major literary project was to replace these attempts at imitation and assimilation with Black self-assertion and pride. In Return to My Native Land, he reclaimed the word nègre, following the Senegalese communist and Pan-Africanist Lamine Senghor and the group of Black radicals associated with him in 1920s Paris (though Césaire didn’t acknowledge them) and the New Negro movement of the Harlem Renaissance. The version of the 1969 Berger and Bostock translation published by Penguin retranslates, or in some cases bleeps out, the original translation of nègre. The result is a strangely hybrid and in certain ways defanged text, which lies somewhere between the late 1960s and mid-2020s. One wonders what Césaire would have made of his words being replaced by dashes.

In contrast to those modernists who were able to project a certain distance and equanimity, Césaire’s anger is often palpable. ‘So much blood in my memory!’ says the narrator of Return to My Native Land. ‘In my memory are lagoons.’ But Césaire refuses to allow bitterness to linger. Two of the poem’s other translators, Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, describe its ‘exquisitely subtle blend of ferocity and tenderness’. ‘Let my heart preserve me from all hate,’ the narrator intones. He also draws back from some of the more celebratory aspects of racial self-pride, laughing at his own ‘former puerile fantasies./No, we’ve never been Amazons of the king of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor wise men in Timbuktu under Askia the Great.’ In one of its most lyrical passages, the poem becomes a hymn to

those who could harness neither steam nor electricity
those who explored neither the seas nor the sky
but knew in its most minute corners the land of suffering
those who have known voyages only through uprootings …
Eia for those who never invented anything
for those who never explored anything
for those who never conquered anything

Césaire’s view of Africa drew on his reading of the German explorer and anthropologist Leo Frobenius. Both Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Senegalese poet and statesman with whom he founded the négritude movement, were deeply influenced by Frobenius’s History of African Culture, which was published in 1933 and translated into French in 1936. (Senghor called Frobenius the ‘master’ whose work was imprinted on the minds of his devotees ‘like a form of tattooing’.) Frobenius’s expeditions across the African continent had led him to develop a theory about an ‘Ethiopian’ civilisation, based on land and plants, that contrasted with a ‘Hamitic’ civilisation based on animals. He insisted on the unique value of African cultures, but many of the tenets of European racial theory were present in his writing, if somewhat reconfigured. Similar criticisms were made of négritude itself. The philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe suggested that Senghor operated within the confines of a Western discourse about Africa; the historian Stephen Howe questioned whether négritude could ‘accurately be described as anticolonial’.

But it was ambivalence and openness to contradiction – a drawing back from the brink of essentialism – that characterised Césaire’s own view of négritude, which he always saw as ‘part of the left’. Edward Said found in it a ‘way beyond nativism’, because it showed that the intense experience of identity can coexist with a determination not to ‘give in to the rigidity and interdictions of self-imposed limitations that come with race, moment, or milieu’. Césaire’s literary style, with its brusque movements and quick reversals, resisted stagnancy. For Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘a Césaire poem explodes and whirls about itself like a rocket’. Césaire coined the term peléean, from the volcanic Mount Pelée, which overlooked his home town of Basse-Pointe, to capture the way his poetry emerged ‘from a long accumulation and a sudden explosion’. The volcano had erupted a decade before his birth, killing thirty thousand people – around 15 per cent of the island’s population.

The scholar​ A. James Arnold has characterised translating Césaire as a ‘schizophrenic exercise’. Challenges include his ‘exasperating’ Latin-inspired syntax and his liberal use of neologisms alongside ‘treacherous homonyms’. In Return to My Native Land perhaps more than any other work, Césaire combines erudition and simplicity in a formula that isn’t easy to replicate in English. There is a temptation to go with one or the other. Berger and Bostock tend to emphasise the flow of the poem and its powerful sense of movement. But in the process they sometimes simplify Césaire’s writing and iron out the peculiarity of some of his word choices, translating poreux as ‘open’ rather than ‘porous’, for example, or précipitation as ‘haste’ when what is actually meant is ‘precipitation’, as in rain. (They also delete some important lines from the poem.)

Césaire rewrote the poem on three separate occasions after its original publication. The final version, published in the journal Présence africaine in Paris in 1956, was long regarded as definitive. But in 2013 Arnold and Eshleman brought out a landmark translation of the 1939 edition, in parallel text with the original French. Arnold went as far as saying that the 1956 version had been ‘a step backwards’ because Césaire had toned down the poem’s spiritualism and sexuality, and inserted references to the Cold War and elements of socialist realism. It’s strange, in light of this reassessment, that Penguin has decided to reissue an old translation of the 1956 version.

The poem is often described as Surrealist, even though Césaire only encountered Surrealism for the first time when he met André Breton in Martinique in 1940, after its first edition had been published. He briefly experimented with automatic writing and was a lifelong proponent of Surrealism, but also said that the ‘extraordinary’ meeting with Breton had simply ‘confirmed the truth of what I had discovered on my own’. Surrealism was also central to the work of his wife, Suzanne. In the journal they published together in the early 1940s, Tropiques, which was censored by the Vichy authorities that ruled Martinique during the war, they brought together modernism, Surrealism and Marxism with an appreciation of African modes of thought. For Suzanne Césaire, Surrealism – ‘a permanent readiness for the Marvellous’ – was central to a radical anticolonialism that would ‘enable us to finally transcend the sordid antinomies of the present: whites/Blacks, Europeans/Africans, civilised/savages’. Her essays suggested ways in which a Caribbean identity could be forged in sync with the natural environment of the islands. Revolution would burst out of the ‘invisible vegetation of desires’ felt by poor and working-class Martinicans. Suzanne mocked the island’s landowners who hid in their mansions ‘behind their metallic spider-web curtains’ and ‘under the electric light, so like pale and entrapped moths’. The Césaires had six children before separating in 1963; after her remarkable contributions in Tropiques, Suzanne stopped publishing. She died in Paris in 1966. Her daughter Ina Césaire described her as a ‘militant mother hungry for freedom’, an ‘active feminist avant la lettre’.

In 1950, Césaire published Discourse on Colonialism, one of the most forceful and bitterly ironic anticolonial texts ever written. In it he attacked the standard defences of European imperialism, mocking the ‘collective hypocrisy’ of those who claimed to see it as a godly, benevolent project. Like W.E.B. Du Bois, Césaire argued that fascism wasn’t new: it had been cultivated in the colonies before being imported ‘by a terrific boomerang effect’ to Europe. As evidence, Césaire presented racist texts by supposedly liberal Europeans, among them the psychoanalyst Dominique-Octave Mannoni, the literary critic Roger Caillois and the philologist Ernest Renan. Césaire’s trademark oscillation is a key feature of the Discourse on Colonialism. First he makes ‘a systematic defence of the societies destroyed by imperialism’, celebrating their communalism and co-operativeness, and mocking the European museums that ‘present for our admiration, duly labelled, their dead and scattered parts’. Then, in a striking reversal, he insists that he isn’t interested in ‘exoticism’. ‘It is not a dead society that we want to revive,’ but ‘a new society that we must create … a society rich with all the productive power of modern times.’

By the time the Discourse on Colonialism was published, Césaire had become a politician. In 1945 he was elected mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique; a year later he was elected as a Communist deputy to the French National Assembly, where he served until 1993. He was instrumental in passing the ‘departmentalisation law’ of 1946, which made Martinique, until then a French colony, an official department of the French Republic, alongside Guadeloupe, French Guiana and Réunion. In 1956 he broke with the Communist Party, writing a public letter to its leader, Maurice Thorez, in which he criticised the racism of its members. The ‘strengths’ of Black people around the world, he wrote, ‘can only wilt in organisations that are not their own: made for them, made by them, and adapted to ends that they alone can determine’. Césaire founded the Martinican Progressive Party (PPM) in 1958; more than six decades later, it remains the dominant force in Martinican politics. The PPM sought greater autonomy for Martinique within the French Republic, but rejected independence as likely further to impoverish the island’s inhabitants by depriving them of their claim on French metropolitan resources. Césaire kept writing poetry throughout this period: his final collection, Like a Misunderstanding of Salvation, was published in 1994, when he was 81. He retired as mayor of Fort-de-France in 2001, seven years before his death.

‘I love Martinique,’ Césaire told Depestre, ‘but it is an alienated land, while Haiti represented for me the heroic Antilles, the African Antilles.’ More than a thousand miles north-west of Martinique, Haiti was once Saint-Domingue, France’s most profitable colony, which produced almost half of the world’s sugar and coffee. It gained its independence a century before Césaire’s birth through an armed insurgency of its enslaved population. For Césaire, Haiti, the first postcolonial state, served as both example and warning: he said he was ‘haunted’ by its history. There were three major uprisings in Martinique before slavery was abolished in 1848, but the island remained trapped in a relationship with France. Haiti, by contrast, had seized its independence. Its example showed the tremendous capacity of subjugated people to reclaim their humanity and dignity. Yet it also showed that national independence was not an end in itself. Independence didn’t necessarily protect a country from the depredations of colonial violence or the webs of financial control that left postcolonial states weak and dependent.

In the 1960s, the decade of national independence in Africa, Césaire wrote three plays – The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963), A Season in the Congo (1966) and A Tempest (1969) – that grappled with the question of freedom from colonialism. The first two were set in the early years of the Haitian and Congolese states. The third reimagined The Tempest as a conflict between Ariel and Caliban, each seeking liberation from Prospero by different means. Césaire’s first attempt to depict anticolonialism on stage had come decades earlier. In 1943, when he was living in Martinique under Vichy rule, he wrote a play about the Haitian Revolution, … … And the Dogs Were Silent. It was published in radically revised form – as a closet drama or what Césaire called a ‘lyric oratorio’, meant to be read rather than performed – in 1946. The original version was discovered by the scholar Alex Gil fifteen years ago in a provincial archive in France. Gil’s superb translation adds a formidable new work to Césaire’s corpus.

The play centres on Toussaint Louverture, the leading figure of the Haitian Revolution. Mixing realism with Surrealism, it moves chronologically through the revolution. As in Return to My Native Land, some of its most moving passages recall the brutality of slavery in the Antilles:

They sold us like beasts, and counted our teeth … and tested our testicles, and examined the polish and finish of our skin, and felt us up and weighed us and double-checked, and hung the collar of servitude and insult on our tamed-beast necks.

Césaire makes Toussaint a tragic figure. Much like the narrator in Return to My Native Land, he is a man of messianic will leading a crowd that is often mute or recalcitrant. (‘My mouth will be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth,’ Césaire wrote in the earlier book, ‘my voice the freedom of those who break down in the prison holes of despair.’) In the final act of the play, Toussaint speaks to his son with almost overwhelming bitterness. When the boy was five months old, he says, ‘the master entered our hut’ and ‘felt your small brawny limbs, he was a very good master/he put his big fingers on your small face, full of dimples, to caress it; his blue eyes laughed, and his mouth teased you with sweet things; it will be a good piece, he said; a good piece like his father, he said looking at me.’ During the uprising, Toussaint killed his enslaver ‘with my own hands’: ‘I swung; the blood spurted. This is the only baptism I remember now.’

With passages like these, the play was never going to be published in 1943 (Césaire later said that it was ‘born under Vichy, written against Vichy’). In the revised version that appeared three years later, Gil explains, Césaire removed all overt references to the Haitian Revolution, transferring the action to ‘an expansive, surreal madhouse’. He also toned down some of the language: the phrase ‘Death to the whites!’, for instance, went from being a militant demand to ‘a ponderous ritualistic parody’. As with the Arnold and Eshleman edition of Return to My Native Land, the publication of the 1943 text troubles the idea that a final version replaces the ‘drafts’ that came before it.

‘Once again I come back to Césaire,’ Frantz Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks. ‘I wish that many Black intellectuals would turn to him for their inspiration.’ There has been much commentary about Césaire’s relationships with Fanon, his fellow Martinican, and Senghor, but these are sometimes misunderstood. Césaire and Senghor founded the négritude movement together, along with the French Guianese poet Léon-Gontran Damas, and Césaire often credited Senghor with having introduced him to African culture. But the friendship of these two poet-politicians shouldn’t occlude the differences between them. Senghor’s idea of négritude was more essentialist than Césaire’s, and his conception of colonialism far more positive (it’s impossible to imagine him writing a single sentence of Discourse on Colonialism). At the start of his political career he was a member not of the French Communist Party, like Césaire, but the SFIO, the precursor to the Socialist Party.

Fanon had a turbulent relationship to négritude, which he both praised and criticised for mystifying Black identity. But as the scholar Matthieu Renault has pointed out, Fanon’s main targets were figures like Senghor and the Senegalese editor Alioune Diop, while his references to Césaire were overwhelmingly favourable. In his recent biography of Fanon, Adam Shatz points out that ‘even in the wake of his critical gaze’ on négritude, Fanon ‘would continue to pay homage to Césaire’s influence’. Césaire, for his part, said that he ‘always considered Fanon my companion in thought’. There were, however, signs of a rupture. Towards the end of his life, Fanon reportedly told friends that he was disappointed by what he saw as Césaire’s feeble support for Algerian independence.

Later Martinican intellectuals were more willing to make a direct break with Césaire – most emphatically Raphaël Confiant, the novelist and co-founder of the créolité movement, which is often seen as a reaction to négritude. Confiant’s blistering book Aimé Césaire: une traversée paradoxale du siècle (1993) presented Martinique as ‘nothing more than an ersatz country’: unproductive, dependent on French largesse, its people suffering from the psychological impact of constant supplication. For all this, Césaire and his epigones bore ‘heavy responsibility’. He had constructed a mythical African Blackness as the basis of Martinican identity. Yet he had been unable to see that African culture and identity hadn’t simply endured in the Caribbean but been transformed by Creole culture and, in particular, by the Creole language. He was so consumed by France, his intellectual homeland, and Africa, his emotional homeland, that he missed the Creole Antillean culture that existed in Martinique, which fused different elements – African, Indigenous, European, Indian, Levantine – in a manner comparable only to the immigrant neighbourhoods of large Western cities.

By ignoring this in favour of idealisations of both France and Africa, Confiant argued, Césaire was renouncing his own childhood. Unlike any other major Martinican intellectual, he had grown up in the north of the island, which was home to many Tamil immigrants and their descendants. Césaire’s father had even learned rudimentary Tamil to communicate with the workers on the sugar plantation he managed. Césaire’s ‘da’, a nanny figure with great importance in Creole society, was Tamil. Yet he never referred to any of this in his work. Nor did he support the Indo-Martinican (and broader Indo-Caribbean) awakening of the 1970s and 1980s. His party’s fixation on négritude led to a ‘horror’ of Martinique’s ‘mixed, hybrid character’. Nowhere was this more evident than in his claim in the 1956 edition of Return to My Native Land that he identified with ‘the Hindu-man-of-Calcutta’. He preferred a distant, idealised India to the Indian Caribbean people he knew intimately. Césaire’s India was similar to his Africa: a distant, pure land free from the messiness of the actually existing Caribbean.

Confiant’s book wasn’t mere invective, but a commanding work of political theory and a sustained meditation on Antillean and Martinican identity. For that identity to develop fully, he argued, the figure of Césaire had to be dethroned. This meant explaining ‘the chasm that exists between the radicalism of the Discourse on Colonialism and the extreme moderation of the demands and political practice’ of Césaire, deputy for and mayor of Fort-de-France for half a century. It also meant confronting his political as well as his literary and linguistic elitism. The man who became styled as the ‘fundamental leader’ had a way with words and was a captivating speaker. Yet he also had a ‘messianic’ approach to the people, who were often mute and static in his writing, waiting to be represented. ‘Every political speech by Césaire,’ Confiant wrote, ‘in that magnificent French’ that sometimes made audience members ‘faint with admiration’, was, at the same time, ‘an order given to the Antillean people: to keep quiet’.

In an essay from 2018, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty similarly placed Césaire alongside other leaders – including Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Nehru and Nasser – who were ‘pedagogic in their relationship to their respective populations’. These figures were united by their commitment to modernisation and imagined an ‘energy-guzzling’ future to achieve it, which has made it harder to reclaim their visions today. But if Chakrabarty and Confiant have suggested reasons to move beyond Césaire, others have made claims for his relevance to the present. In Engagements with Aimé Césaire, Jason Allen-Paisant aims to show that Césaire’s work has relevance to questions of colonial legacies, the demise of capitalism and the Anthropocene. It ‘defines ecological sensibility without being overtly “environmental”’, Allen-Paisant writes, and can be located in a wider body of Brown and Black environmental thought that recentres knowledge away from a domineering anthropocentrism and gives agency to the non-human world. This reading focuses on Césaire’s poetry, taking seriously his idea of ‘poetic knowledge’, rather than his record as an elected official. Allen-Paisant argues that non-White thinkers, writing about nature from the perspective of the colonised, have long been preoccupied by what we now call the Anthropocene. Caribbean poets in particular have been attentive to ‘geology, land and the environment’ – increasingly so today in light of the cataclysmic effects rising sea levels will have on the islands. Allen-Paisant gives us a very different reading of Césaire from Chakrabarty and Confiant. Instead of trying to capture Césaire in a single take, it’s more useful to think about which elements of his work we want to recuperate, and why.

The​ Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé said that she used to have a ‘quite severe’ view of Césaire, but had changed her mind when she realised that ‘the contradictions, the conflicts of Césaire are in fact the contradictions, the conflicts of the Antilles as a whole’ – a place where ‘we can give very harsh speeches about France’ and yet remain ‘attached to French values’. In the end, she said, ‘Césaire is someone who stayed’ and ‘clung to the island’. For ‘the real fight takes place inside the country.’ Condé’s point is an important one, and yet the French Antilles are not unique. They are part of Overseas France, a collection of thirteen small territories, far from Europe, retained for military and economic purposes after the end of France’s formal empire. They are overwhelmingly small islands or groups of islands: Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean; Réunion and Mayotte in the Indian Ocean; French Polynesia and New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Together they have a population of about 2.8 million people, making up around 4 per cent of the population of the French Republic (Martinique’s population is about 350,000). They almost all have long and violent histories of enslavement, forced labour and colonial authoritarianism. Their populations are organised into racial hierarchies, which usually include a powerful White settler minority.* They are the poorest regions in France: GDP per capita for France as a whole is around €39,000, but in Martinique it’s €27,000 and in French Guiana just €15,656. These small territories are mostly populated by Black, Brown and Indigenous people who face discrimination when they travel to the mainland. Yet compared to the countries nearest to them, mostly situated in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, they are islands of prosperity. As a result they have become pressure points between the global North and South, barricaded from and fearful of their neighbours.

Consider Mayotte, one of the four Comoros Islands. The Comoros voted in favour of independence in a 1974 referendum by 95 per cent to 5 per cent. But while the other three islands formed the Union of the Comoros, France seized Mayotte – the only one that hadn’t voted for independence – and vetoed a UN Security Council resolution affirming Comoros sovereignty over it. Today the seas around Mayotte are filled with the drowned bodies of Comorians who have died while trying to reach it (estimates, which are only available up to 2012, put the number who have drowned as high as fifty thousand). Mayotte is effectively a police state, which carries out industrial-scale deportations of Comorians: in 2019 alone, around 10 per cent of the island’s population was deported.

Then there is New Caledonia, more than ten thousand miles from Paris. In May, there was unrest over a planned electoral reform that would give the vote to its French settler population, thus reducing the influence of the Indigenous Kanak people. The French responded by imposing a state of emergency; then, in June, seven pro-independence activists were arrested and transferred to France. In July, Emmanuel Tjibaou, the son of an assassinated Kanak independence leader, was elected to the French National Assembly – the island’s first pro-independence representative in almost forty years.

How can colonised peoples free themselves from their self-appointed overlords? And what does freedom mean in a world whose rigid hierarchies have outlasted the formal structures of colonial rule? These were the fundamental questions that occupied Césaire. His writing – in particular his denunciation of the West in Discourse on Colonialism and his identification of Hitler as just one instance of a deep-rooted tendency towards exterminatory violence in European imperialism – has repeatedly been cited by those trying to find a language to describe the genocidal horrors being visited on Palestinians in Gaza by an Israeli state acting with extensive US and European support. Reading Césaire in the context of Palestine reminds us of the almost unendurable suffering that Western empires are willing to visit on the ‘human animals’ under their control, to quote the former Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant. Césaire was quite clear on this point. ‘Independence is not given, it is taken,’ he said in a speech in 1978. ‘It is torn away, it is paid for in blood and corpses. I ask you, is Martinique ready to pay that price?’