Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"But the work of man is only just beginning 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 a place for all at the rendezvous of victory." --"Return to My Native Land" |
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Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939), translated as Notebook of a Return to the Native Land or Journal of a Homecoming, is a book-length poem by Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, considered his masterwork, that mixes poetry and prose to express his thoughts on the cultural identity of black Africans in a colonial setting.
History
After a rejection by a French publisher, Césaire submitted the manuscript of the poem to Georges Pellorson, director of the Parisian periodical Volontés, who published it in August 1939, just as Césaire was returning to Martinique to take up a post as a teacher. Cahier was subsequently published in an expanded version in 1947 by Editions Pierre Bordas, introduced with an essay by André Breton that had first appeared in 1943 in the New York-based review Hémisphêres under the title "Un grand poete noir". In his introduction Breton called the poem "nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our times." According to Bonnie Thomas, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal was a turning point in French Caribbean literature: "Césaire’s groundbreaking poem laid the foundations for a new literary style in which Caribbean writers came to reject the alienating gaze of the Other in favour of their own Caribbean interpretation of reality."
