Aimé Césaire Speaks
It is known, throughout the African Diaspora, how our ancestors
communicate with us by way of ear-splitting sights and eye-blinding sounds. Their spirits touch our minds. We resist.
They punch harder. Ultimately, they baffle us into wisdom, defeating the
efforts of alien spirits to have us endlessly signify upon ourselves and
perform stupidities. Aimé Césaire speaks to us about the human climate of 2015.
His poetic masterpiece Cahier
d'un retour au pays natal (1938) may be more widely read than his political
masterpiece Discours sur le colonialism
(1955), but the latter is more crucial for understanding our spiritual
geopolitics than the former. Discourse on Colonialism is a corrective
for what Africa Renewal magazine (www.un.org/africarenewal) propagandizes about
colonialism and neo-colonialism. The United Nations still has just enough
civility to warn us that the contents of Africa
Renewal "do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or
the publication's supporting organizations."
If we read above and
below the lines of a paragraph from Discourse
on Colonialism , we smell damnation and wretchedness, the violent scent of
the human climate.
Because, after all,
we must resign ourselves to the inevitable and say to ourselves, once for all,
that the bourgeoisie is condemned to become every day more snarling, more
openly ferocious, more shameless, more summarily barbarous; that it is an
implacable law that every decadent class finds itself turned into a receptacle
into which there flow all the dirty waters of history; that it is a universal
law that before it disappears, every class must first disgrace itself
completely, on all fronts, and that it is with their heads buried in the
dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs.
Discourse on
Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972: 45.
Aimé Césaire speaks with authority about what is inevitable
in our global sewer system in 2015. What he says about class pertains equally
to continents, countries, and communities real and imagined. It is rather an obscene riddle that Donald
Trump and Bernie Sanders are truth-telling in the sewer and confirming what our
ancestors are communicating to us.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
August 13, 2015
