Aimé Césaire

By Ian Van Heusen

the manufactured other
autumn in this world necessary
leaves of many colors to death
to die in the slave to live
______________________________
todayCLOUD
-ed I will write a star
to pull UP
-rising the dream of midnight
moon Moses to pull the oceans

This is a bone poem pulling.
Toothbone gnawing time. Fistbone
a knocking rhythm on closed doors
& eyebone

Hollow
left behind of the flesh

Négre!
to enter the wordsee
the only word worth a damn
to not let this wordbone bury

in yards of graves of times of turnings
crowded with tearwater
your rite of passage had no rights
was a scream to child the black of Europe.
Coal black, coal of fuel and engine
the energy to wheel the mechanics of empire

just beneath the surface, buried in coal

Négre
a match thrown to show what energy is about!

explosion power identity

(a friend once noted how
an infant’s scream IS

so much larger than its body. Rediscover that exterior self)

Négrebone
the one carefully hidden
to birth the demand, the ritual of fire
burn from /declare

OPEN
warfare on Western Civilization.

______________________________

outside the word
does that exist?
what attraction
to the magnet north? frozen in its consistancy
to a stagnent doldrum? beneath a tropical heat
to a poem pulled from the memory of poem

is there no place without gravities
& the ritual is kinetic.

LabidoMOONmovING

awaken the talk from its polished dinner ware
to eat the meat with hands and teeth to bone.

Négre shouting fire to remember the pyrebone.
______________________________
(Now that you
are ALOUD
Known)
now voice aloud HISTORY the machinegun nest
by night Post Natal Guerrilla fighter
next passage into silence (to leave chains
Ambush empty is too fill them)
NOW THAT IS HAS BEEN HEARD IT MUST BE
It is not polite FELT
not about the skin, black or white, INTO THE METEPHORIC
the cerebrum of the depths of hatred
JUNGLE
sociology and all the minds battlefields
Quiet patient for to move incorrectly is to be buried

ACTIONS: digging, praying, looking to find
New song new sound new singer

Quiet

to not be a pacifist at action’s moment. Time, patience.
______________________________
excerpts from an interview with Aimé Césaire

“It was really a resistance to the politics of assimilation.”
“We didn’t know what Africa was.”
‘Therefore the best thing one could do with an African
was to assimilate him: the ideal was to turn him into
a Frenchman with black skin.”

“One day he told me that the judges hadn’t even realized
that his poems were written by a man of color. To put it in
other words, his poetry was so impersonal that it made
him proud. He was filled with pride by something I would
have considered a crushing condemnation.”

“Our struggle was a struggle against alienation. That struggle
gave birth to Negritude. Because Antilleans were ashamed of
being Negroes, they searched for all sorts of euphemisms for
Negro: they would say a man of color, a dark complexioned man,
and other idiocities like that.”

“Since there was shame about the word négre (French equivalent
of nigger), we chose the word négre.”
 

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