Understanding Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (excerpt)

‘At the end of the small hours…’

This expression recurs tirelessly throughout the poem. It serves as a metaphor announcing dawn after the long night of oppression endured by colonised peoples. It evokes the first moment of an awareness of change, marking the turning point between the past and the future now taking shape.

The language of rupture

‘Go away, I would say to him, police mug, cow mug, I hate the flunkeys of order and the cockchafers of hope…’

This command, which comes immediately after the observation of the new dawn, demonstrates that something radically different has begun. What should one expect from the morning that is beginning, if not a break with what only yesterday still laid down the law?

A break with what? First, with false politeness, apologies and purely formal civilities. With the poet, we notice that the rupture begins in the choice of words. If he used the language deemed ‘proper’—language subject to official rules and alone accepted as ‘normal’—he would contradict his project. Its success requires a break with polished bourgeois language and the adoption of the speech used among ordinary people: people who speak of what others think by referring to the shape of their ‘mug’. For the people, words come not only through the ‘mug’; ideas can also be seen in the face of the person speaking. Look at people’s faces as they speak and you will see the equivalence the poet establishes between the immanent and the apparent, the thing and its medium.

‘Police mug’, ‘cow mug’ and the flunkeys of order

Professional functions, too, are rendered in popular speech through familiar animal vocabulary or spontaneous onomatopoeia—ordinary forms of naming accessible to all. Hence the ‘cows’ and the ‘cops’. ‘Police mug’ refers to police officers; ‘cow mug’ to civil servants whom the poet perceives as symbols of the repression and oppression he wants brought to an end.

Alongside police officers and civil servants stand all those Césaire targets as ‘flunkeys of order’, another expression from popular language designating a social category just as harmful as the first two groups of agents of repression. The flunkeys of order serve the established order without regard for the injustices or suffering they may cause, and thereby help preserve it. Césaire is referring to all collaborators and docile subordinates who execute orders without questioning their legitimacy.

‘The cockchafers of hope’

Next comes another social category: ‘the cockchafers of hope’. The metaphor evokes insects emerging from their ‘dogmatic slumber’ in the fine season and symbolising the return of good weather after the heavy rains. Césaire uses it ironically to criticise those who embody a false promise of hope or change. They claim to bring improvements or solutions but merely perpetuate an oppressive status quo. They are ‘bad gris-gris’, another metaphor for a person or thing associated with something negative—just like the ‘monkling bug’.

The ‘monkling bug’

We know the bug as a harmful insect. ‘Monkling’ designates an insignificant, even contemptible individual. By joining the bug to the monkling, Césaire disparages the person in question by comparing them to a noxious and insignificant insect. The poetic expression conveys contempt for anyone regarded as harmful, pernicious or negligible—a nobody, in short, who must be got rid of.

Turning towards lost paradises

‘Then I would turn towards paradises lost for him and his kin, calmer than the face of a woman telling a lie, and there, rocked by the emanations of a thought never weary, I would nourish the wind, I would unlace the monsters, and I would hear rising from the other side of disaster a river of turtledoves and savannah clover that I carry forever in my depths, at the inverse height of the twentieth floor of the most insolent buildings, and, as a precaution against the putrefying force of twilight atmospheres, surveyed night and day by a sacred venereal sun.’

Rich in imagery and symbolism, this stanza describes the poet’s inner experience. Abandoning a present he rejects and against which he calls for revolt, he turns towards an ideal of a better life for himself and his people. Let us examine it in detail.

1. Recovering what colonisation destroyed

‘Then I would turn towards paradises lost for him and his kin’: the poet turns towards ideals in order to recover what colonisation caused to be lost. He seeks to restore the dignity and pride of his culture and identity.

2. Apparent calm and hidden anger

‘Calmer than the face of a woman telling a lie’: this comparison evokes the contrast between apparent tranquillity and concealed anger.

3. A thought that never tires

‘Rocked by the emanations of a thought never weary’: the poet is inspired by a constant, inexhaustible thought that guides his quest for renewal. It carries and encourages him.

4. Nourishing the wind and unlacing monsters

Nourishing the wind is a metaphor for spreading ideas and for their capacity to influence the course of events by attacking the forces of oppression. Unlacing the monsters symbolises the intellectual deconstruction of the foundations of oppression.

5. Beyond disaster

‘I would hear rising from the other side of disaster a river of turtledoves and savannah clover’: the poet expresses the idea that there is a beyond to suffering. The ‘river of turtledoves and clover’ symbolises primordial nature and the culture of origin.

6. Depth measured against insolent buildings

‘That I carry forever in my depths, at the inverse height of the twentieth floor of the most insolent buildings’: the poet’s vision is so deeply rooted within him that he measures its depth downwards against the upward height of the tallest skyscrapers.

7. Vigilance against corruption

‘As a precaution against the putrefying force of twilight atmospheres, surveyed night and day by a sacred venereal sun’: the poet draws attention to the vigilance required against corrupting influences and the darkness of society.

The hungry Antilles

‘At the end of the small hours budding with frail coves, the hungry Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dust of this town sinisterly stranded.’

This stanza, which many secondary-school pupils in Africa know by heart, deserves sustained attention. The poet paints a sombre picture of the consequences of colonisation, highlighting hunger, disease, alcoholism, poverty and environmental degradation. It reinforces the sense that struggle for change and redemption is necessary. Let us take the stanza piece by piece to appreciate its richness.

1. A fragile dawn confronted by hunger

‘At the end of the small hours budding with frail coves, the hungry Antilles’: the budding small hours evoke the hope of renewal confronted by the reality of a starving population. The ‘budding of frail coves’ refers to inlets or beaches, perhaps also to other fragile natural sources. The stanza stresses both the hope and the vulnerability of the places and their inhabitants.

2. The Antilles pitted with smallpox

Smallpox refers to the epidemics that strike the Antilles and leave deep scars and wounds on the skin and, by extension, on Antillean society.

3. The Antilles dynamited by alcohol

The phrase evokes the destructive consequences for public health of alcohol imported or produced locally by the colonisers. Alcohol production is a flourishing industry in the Antilles. Its effect is comparable to dynamite because of its explosive consequences for social life and public health.

4. Stranded in mud and dust

The Antilles are stranded in mud like caravels in the viscous silt of the Caribbean Sea. Dust obstructs vision when it does not simply prevent breathing. ‘Mud’ and ‘dust’ symbolise the material and moral degradation of the Antilles. The mud prevents any forward movement.