from Return to my
Aime Cesaire (
my negritude is not a stone
nor deafness flung out against the clamor of the day
my negritude is not a white speck of dead water
on the dead eye of the earth
my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
It plunges into the red flesh
of the soil
it plunges into the blaxing
flesh of the sky
my negritude riddles with holes
the dense affliction of its worthy patience.
Heia for the royal Kailcedrate!
Heia for those who have never invented anything
those who have never explored anything
those who never tamed anything
those who give themselves up to the essence of all things
ignorant of surfaces but struck by the movement of all things
free of the desire to tame but familiar with the play of the
world
***
Upright now, my country and
I, hair in the wind, my
hand small in its enormous fist and our strength not
inside us but above in a voice that bores through the
night and its listeners like the sting of an apocalyptic
wasp. And the voice declares that for centuries
has stuffed us with lies and crammed us with plague,
for it is not true that:
the work of man is finished
we have nothing to do in the world
we are the parasites of the world
our job is to keep in step with the world.
The work of man is only just
beginning
It remains to him to conquer
at the four corners of his fervor every rigid
prohibition.
No race holds a monopoly of
beauty, intelligence and strength
there is room for all at the meeting-place of conquest
we know now
that the sun revolves round our earth illuminating the
plot
which we alone have selected
that every star falls at our command from the sky to the
earth
without limit or cease.
Now I see what the ordeal
means: my country is the
“spear
of the night” of my ancestral Bambaras. It shrinks
and its desparate blade
retracts if it is offered checken-
blodd, its temper
wants the blood of man, the fat of
man, the liver of man, the heart of man, and not the
blood of chickens.