Cadastre was formed from elements of two earlier poetic collections: forty of the seventy-two poems published in Soleil cou coupé (1948; Beheaded Sun, 1983) and all ten of the poems in Corps perdu (1950; Disembodied, 1983)—the latter of which were illustrated with thirty-two engravings by Pablo Picasso. Increasingly conscious of the leadership role he was taking in Caribbean politics, poet Aimé Césaire revised his texts thoroughly to make them more accessible. He shortened many poems, removed obscure words and free-associative imagery, eliminated obscenity, and reduced the prominence of elitist elements that presented the poet as a visionary prophet or as a sacrificial victim whose death would help redeem his people. He also added references to the black struggle for freedom, opportunity, and justice in Africa and the United States.
Césaire was born to a middle-class family in Basse-Pointe, a small coastal town near the volcano Mont Pelé (which had erupted in 1902, destroying the city of Saint-Pierre), in the French overseas territory of Martinique, an island at the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea. He moved to the capital, Fort-de-France, in 1924. A brilliant student, Césaire was sent to the famous Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris in 1931 to prepare for admission to the elite teacher-training institution, l’École Normale Supérieure. In Paris, he befriended artist Pablo Picasso and many of the French Surrealist poets.
In 1934, Césaire and the French Guyanese poet Léon-Gontran Damas founded L’Étudiant noir (“the black student”), a newspaper that helped unite black people from France, Africa, North and South America, and the French island colonies in the international negritude movement. Along with Damas and Césaire, the third major leader of that movement was Léopold Senghor, who became a famous poet and served as the first president of the newly independent nation of Sénégal from 1961 until 1980. At the literary salon of sisters Paulette Nardal and Jane Nardal, Césaire, Damas, and Senghor met and were strongly influenced by the French-speaking poets of the Harlem Renaissance, notably Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen. The concluding chapter of McKay’s novel Banjo (1928) advocated restoring black people’s connections to their cultures of origin, thereby recovering a pride and self-respect crushed by centuries of slavery, prejudice, and white hatred.
Members of the negritude movement adopted one of two contrasting programs: either glorifying African precolonial history and values while accepting the benefits of assimilation to white European culture (a course favored by Senghor) or militantly denouncing white injustice and cruelty and insisting on black autonomy, equality, and civil rights within a white-dominated society (a course adopted by members of the Harlem Renaissance and by the Haitian Frantz Fanon). In the United States, black militancy split into separate tendencies that advocated either violent resistance (Malcolm X, before his trip to Africa) or peaceable advocacy and protest (Martin Luther King, Jr.).
A cadastre is an official, line-by-line record of the ownership of various pieces of land. For Césaire, a descendent of slaves displaced into the black diaspora, the title suggests the mental act of taking stock of one’s situation, to try to decide where one belongs. As is revealed by the gradual, fascinating development of Cadastre from two earlier poetic collections,...
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