Ein Mensch, der schreit
Reading Poetry by: Aimé Césaire

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The event will be interpreted English–German.

Aimé Césaire (born 1913 in Basse-Pointe; died 2008 in Fort-de-France) was one of the greatest French-language poets of the 20th century. With his extensive body of work, he became one of the founders of the literary-intellectual movement Négritude, which emphasized the cultural identity of Black people and sharply condemned all forms of colonial oppression.

Particularly groundbreaking in this regard are his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939), a cross-genre text blending prose and poetry. It was followed by numerous other works, including Soleil cou coupé (1948), Discourse on Colonialism, A Season in the Congo, and a postcolonial adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Césaire once said that poetry, which for him came from the depths, even the primal grounds, had imposed itself upon him; he followed it along all paths and detours. The eruptive quality is the defining feature of all his texts — they stand in stark contrast to anything contemplative or picturesque. In Césaire’s work, nothing flows gently. His verses, sometimes of epic length, are powerful, richly orchestrated, and rhapsodic. Surrealism, in whose tradition Césaire stood, culminated for him in the ideal of “reconciling dream with action.” (In fact, he was also a committed politician: he served nearly six decades as mayor of Fort-de-France and was a member of the French National Assembly for almost as long.)

The memory of the speaker in his poems is “bathed in blood […] girded with corpses.” One feels the “burden of shame and a hundred years of lashes.” At one point he writes, “I abhor the domestics of order and the beetles of hope.” At another, “No race has a monopoly on beauty, intelligence, or strength.” Over the decades, Césaire refined his daring imagery, into which the “unyielding rain” lays its eggs. Anything seems possible here: naked monks descend from the Himalayas, primeval waters celebrate in magnetic loops the blooming of children’s shoes, and the extinct volcano Chimborazo devours the world. The sugarcane blazes, the mango tree bears its countless crescent moons, and the majestic banana tree stands in “psalmodizing daylight.” All of this is delivered to the insurgent rhythm of “Jitterbug, Lindy Hop, and Step,” through which the “chained curses” emanate from a ship’s hold. Readers are gifted with chants about the law of corals and the favor of the trade winds. And sometimes, in moments when the language almost entirely calms, there are descriptions like those of “the tender necks of animals, still trembling in repose.”

This year, a generous selection of Césaire’s work has been published by Matthes & Seitz under the title A Human Being Screaming, translated by Klaus Laabs, who has rendered Aimé Césaire’s verses into a fluid, lush German.

The event languages are English and French. Please note that interpretation is provided only from French into German, not from English into German. With the kind support of ECHOO Conference Interpreting.

In reading & conversation Jason Allen-Paisant, Ricardo Domeneck, James Noël

Moderation Asmus Trautsch